A Time to Hold on, and a Time to Let go

A sermon, with readings from Luke 4:1-13, Romans 10:8b-13 and Deuteronomy 26:1-11

Don Friesen
February 21, 2010
Ottawa Mennonite Church

www.ottawamennonite.ca

The season of Lent is an opportunity to examine ourselves. It's necessary to do that on occasion, for the New Testament book of James says that "one is tempted by one's own desire, being lured and enticed by it; (and) then, when that desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin, and that sin, when it is fully grown, gives birth to death." (James 1:14-15) So it's a sobering season into which we now enter.

Many temptations are but twisted versions of legitimate desires. Rarely is one tempted to choose evil in its plainest form; more often than not we're tempted to do good, but a partial good, a short-term good, something that may only look good. That's why temptations are difficult; they provide a way to justify the poorer choice!

Jesus had a purpose in life, and his temptations were related to his purpose. The devil tempted Jesus with something that was already dear to him; for example, the opportunity to have an impact on the world. His temptations had to do with the wrong way to go about having an impact: the wrong use of power; the wrong way to gain popular acclaim; the wrong kind of partnership.

Life is full of ethical dilemmas, ethical choices, and it's often difficult to know what to do. It's not as if Jesus was being urged to do something blatantly evil when the Tempter encouraged him to do something dramatic! Get people's attention! Show people your power! Once you've got their attention, you can use it to accomplish a lot of good! After all, turning stones into bread is certainly compatible with things that Jesus did later, like providing food on one occasion for five thousand hungry people!

The second temptation also held some positive possibilities. The opportunity to have the authority of a world power! Wow! I have full confidence that Jesus would have put it to good use, using it, perhaps, to distribute wealth and resources more equitably. You want world peace? Done! Jesus, with the power to do it, could make it happen. Now!

The third temptation — the giant leap off a high building — seems a little dramatic, but sometimes you need to establish yourself in the public eye before you can get your idea on the public agenda!

Jesus' temptations represented ways for him to accomplish good things, but he knew that God did not approve of those ways. It's difficult to say, "No," to the merely good, however, if the best seems beyond reach. Jesus wrestled with these questions – for forty days!

A Time to Let Go

The Old Testament philosopher says that "for everything there is a season ... a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted, ...a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to throw away...." (Ecclesiastes 3:1-2, 6) On the surface his advice doesn't seem to help very much in making those tough, ethical decisions. When you hear the philosopher's a-time-for-this and a-time-for-that, together with his general advice that "all is vanity and a striving after wind" (1:14), you may get the impression that what we decide about things, one way or the other, doesn't matter very much!

On the other hand, the Old Testament philosopher had a deep wisdom about the rhythm of life and the rhythms of the Spirit, and although his words don't tell us exactly when to keep things, and at what exact time to throw them away, we know the wisdom of doing both. And one needs but a general knowledge of the seasons to know that there are times in which it is much better to plant than at other times – all of this quite obvious in Canada's climate – and we know by watching what we have planted when it is time to pluck up said plants.

We observe such a rhythm in our worship, and the season of Lent is a time to let go of those things which compromise our faith and weary our spirit. It's similar to the rhythm of life. In order for a child to learn to walk, the child must let go of the chair to which he or she is clinging. In order for a young adult to navigate the adult world, he or she must leave the security of home. It's often difficult for us to let go of established patterns, or the safety of the familiar. We struggle with this in one form or another throughout life.

When the armed forces began to use jet fighters, which were so much faster than their propeller-driven predecessors, they discovered a problem with pilot ejection. In case of an emergency seat ejection, all a pilot had to do was roll forward out of the seat, so that the parachute could open. Some pilots, however, kept a death grip on their seat handles in their reluctance to separate themselves from the last tangible piece of the jet that had, until then, been a safe place! The parachute was unable to open if the pilot remained in the seat! (Danny Cox and John Hoover, Seize the Day: 7 Steps to Achieving the Extraordinary in an Ordinary World, page 48-49)

I also came across a story of a family that met regularly with someone who communicates with the dead so that they could maintain contact with a family member who had died and who had been the central figure in the life of the family. When asked how long they had been doing this, they answered, "Twenty-nine years." The author of the story could hardly believe their reply! He said, "I sat next to them that afternoon – but twenty-nine years away." (James Carse, cited by Preston Moore)

Sometimes we need a little help letting go of things. In the case of the pilot ejection problem, the designers of the jet fighters added a two-inch webbed strap that attached to the front edge of the seat, ran under the pilot and behind him, and was attached to an electronic take-up reel behind the headrest. Two seconds after ejection, the electronic take-up reel immediately took up the slack, forced the pilot forward, thus allowing the parachute to open. Essentially the pilot was butt-snapped to safety!

Sometimes we too need a kick in the transmission to prompt us to let go of the things that are not in our spiritual best interests. The Scriptures are quite specific about what some of those things might be. The New Testament book of Galatians, for example, mentions a whole bunch of them, what a very modern translation calls "repetitive, loveless, cheap sex; a stinking accumulation of mental and emotional garbage; frenzied and joyless grabs for happiness; trinket gods; magic-show religion; paranoid loneliness; cutthroat competition; all-consuming-yet-never-satisfied wants; a brutal temper; an impotence to love or be loved; divided homes and divided lives; small-minded and lopsided pursuits; the vicious habit of depersonalizing everyone into a rival; uncontrolled and uncontrollable addictions; ugly parodies of community." (Galatians 5:19-21, The Message)

You can find some more things to let go in last Sunday's reading from 1 Corinthians 13: envy, boastfulness, arrogance, rudeness, irritability, and resentfulness. (1 Corinthians 13:4-5) There's no need to let go of bad habits we've never had, but each one of us knows we struggle with some of these.

A Time to Disengage

Lent calls us to a time of letting go – disengagement, if you like. It encourages us to disengage, at least emotionally, from the social and economic spheres of influence that shape us, in order to listen with less distraction to the Spirit of God, who gives us a different sense of who we are, a more profound sense of who we are and Whose we are.

T.S. Eliot, in one of his poems, prays that God will "teach us to care and not to care," and that God will "teach us to sit still". He writes:

"(I) pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself
I too much discuss
Too much explain...."

(T.S. Eliot, "Ash Wednesday")