Deuteronomy 26:1-11
Psalm 91
Luke 4:1-13
Like Donny and Marie Osmond, pop singers from an earlier era and part of a band of entertaining siblings, I grew up a little bit country, a little bit rock and roll. My first concert was a long-forgotten country musician named Charlie Rich, and Dad listened to WCMS, the local country station. By the time I reached high school, I had moved to other regions of the radio dial, speeding way past pop and onto what is these days called album rock or classic rock, with a little Southern rock added to spice it up a bit, a musical alphabet from Allman Brothers to Zeppelin. There were exactly two FM stations to choose from for rock and rollers in my hometown, FM99 and K94. It was as if we had teams, and everyone knew which side you were on at 9:00pm, when one station played Free Bird and the other played Stairway to Heaven. Every. Single. Night. We took turns as we cleaned up at the Chief Petty Officer’s Club where I worked.
What you didn’t hear on either of those stations was the Grateful Dead. Despite their massive cult following, the Dead never cared that much about radio airplay, just as well as their jam-band style didn’t really work on a three minute single. Now if you had thirty minutes, they could give you a song… They finally did have a hit single with “Touch of Grey†in 1987. The song had been performed in concert since 1982, but had finally made it on to the album “In the Dark.â€
Grateful Dead fans are well known as Deadheads, following the band from concert to concert, each event a sort of pop-up Haight-Ashbury circa 1968. Longtime Deadheads were not particularly happy with the sudden influx of new fans in 1987, many of them decades younger. It was as if there was a limited supply of music, and the newcomers were going to use it all up, or that you had to have protested the Vietnam War and burned your draft card to qualify for a spot in the crowd, and we were just too darned young. We were still a couple of decades away from great rock bands selling Cadillacs and Viagra, something we couldn’t foresee even in ’87.
Dead songs often tell a story, hits like “Casey Jones,†“Sugar Magnolia,†and “Friend of the Devil,†the last seemingly made for this Sunday in the lectionary. If “Touch of Grey†tells a story, I don’t know what it is. With music by the late Jerry Garcia and words by Robert Hunter, it seems more like random musings on growing old. The title itself comes in twice, once in the pragmatic line “every silver lining’s got a touch of grey,†and again near the end when the vocalist sings “a touch of grey sort of suits you anyway.â€
Both lines are true. The world has a lot of grey, in silver linings, and in our hair if we are blessed to live long enough and still have that hair…
I’ve been thinking about greys in other ways as well recently, as one news headline after another inundates my consciousness. Sea levels may be rising slowly but my mind is already completely submerged. I’ve been thinking about Methodism and Michael Cohen and Micheal Jackson, about temptation in the desert and Satan and most of all about how we are to live in these times.
I remember so many stories where technology was going to save us, and more than a few where technology was going to destroy us, and it turns out, with or without technology, we are still human, globalized, awash in this tsunami of information, connected to cellular leashes which are sometimes cellular swords, but still human, always called to be more than we are and tempted to be less than God intends.
And here is Jesus in the desert, and evil is tricky, but it is still easy to spot. In the Western gospel, Jesus wears the white hat, a handsome cowboy straight from central casting with wavy light hair and blue eyes, while Satan is swarthy with beady eyes, for evil is always other.
Luke, in his temptation narrative, does not use the word Satan, which means the adversary, but instead uses the word Devil, and while they are interchangeable to us, and seem to have been used interchangeably during the biblical age, it is worth noting that in the Greek, Devil is “diabolos,†derived from verb “diaballo,†which means to throw people against one another through gossip and manipulation. The Devil, then, is understood as a slanderer who pits people against one another, who manufactures conflict in the community. The Devil does not do the evil, but instead convinces people to do evil to one another.
Sort of like Brexit. I remember being in the UK in the early ’90’s when everyone was in an uproar because European Union standardization of trade might change the size of a serving of beer, and what is life without a pint glass! And here were these Leavers, stirring up racists and nationalists against the Eastern European EU citizens who were doing most of the hardest jobs, these Leavers describing the EU as authoritarian, these devils, diabolos, who promised that everything would be okay, who pushed Brexit. These diabolos who divided and pitted people and nations against one another and never had a realistic plan for what would come next. And people got sucked in and it is a disaster.
The length of Jesus’ temptation is significant, for forty is one of the two most important biblical numbers, along with twelve. Forty is the number of days of rain that covers the planet, the number of years wandering in the desert, the number of days post-resurrection, the minimum age to join the Sanhedrin and many, many other things, days and years, that happen in scripture. It means, essentially, a really long time.
There is a historic basis for the story, a period of isolation and deprivation common among holy people of that age, one of several practices intended to cultivate we might call hallucinatory experience.
What the Devil offers, the temptations, are spiritual shortcuts, the easy and fast way. Someone who could turn a stone into bread could feed all of the desperate poor, and there were many starving in Galilee and Judea, as Rome drained this distant colony, forcing more and more people off of their land. Earthly power, the glory of kingdoms, would allow Jesus to overthrow that corrupt rule of Tiberius who controlled the empire from his private resort in Capri. Jumping from the pinnacle of the Temple with angelic rescue would establish Jesus as supernatural, giving him clear authority over the Scribes, the Pharisees, the Temple priests, who nit-picked over rules to insure that they got their own way, paragons of self-righteousness, always willing to wield the Law as a weapon to get their way.
There is no question that Luke and the other synoptic authors are telling the story of the temptation though the lens of their post-resurrection understanding of Jesus, trying to show that the sort of earthly power Jews expected from their Messiah was not what God had in mind, that it was the easy way out, that salvation was counter-intuitive, found in a man executed because an angry minority whipped up the mob. We can see that what the Hebrews wanted would have been just one more earthly kingdom and we know what happens to earthly kingdoms. How many promising revolutions, offering liberty, equality, hope, opportunity, end up in a reign of terror? Humans are humans, and the tempter, diabolos with a smile, fills us with fear and pits us against one another.
I’ve been thinking that temptation isn’t always so black and white, as easy as this tale of Jesus, who is, after all, God incarnate, at least in traditional Christian theology, and how for the rest of us there are so many greys. Thinking that we are likely to get in far more trouble with absolutism and black and white thinking. We know full well that someone can be mostly good but have done bad things, that someone can be mostly bad but do some good. We believe in repentance and redemption. I’ve been thinking about the terrible rift in the United Methodist Church, and the real treasure of Methodism, the work of climbing together in small groups, not dunked and done, but growing in faith and righteousness together, supporting one another, which means also having compassion, and we are in a time when forgiveness and compassion are in short supply.
I’ve been thinking about Michael Jackson and whether I must never listen to his music again, because he was an amazing performer, but I don’t want to contribute to the estate’s campaign to deny what we all knew was true all along. Can’t he be both things at the same time, a great performer and a horrific predator? After all, we’ve learned a thing or two in recent years about gifted artists and leaders who were also predators, about smoke and the presence of fire, Weinstein, McCarrick, and Cosby.
I’ve been thinking about the desert, cracked clay, no escape from a light that burns during the day, the thirst that takes over everything, the chill when that light is gone. I’ve been thinking about the intense glare of those who seek only to find fault in others, and how it is a miracle that anyone is willing to step up and try to lead, for only a sociopath could withstand this culture if constant criticism and sabotage, and sociopaths come with their own baggage, with moral bills way past due.
And here we are at Lent, and Jesus is gamely resisting temptation, but I am not the Christ and neither are you, and we stumble and mumble our way toward salvation on a good day, if we manage not to backslide.
That is assuming we still have a faith that has any standards at all, a faith that has an efficacy at all. Is there enough here to structure a life?
There is a journey before us, a road through Lent, through desert temptation, a road to Jerusalem, a road to death, and while there may be some white cowboy hats along the way, some black cowboy hats along the way, most of those hats are going to have a touch of grey. Look in the mirror. Yours too.
And the Lord heard our voices and saw our affliction. And that man who was transfigured on the mountain, this is my Son, this man who could become scared, could lose his temper, this man, showed us how to live with courage.
Lent is understood as a penitential season, but maybe what it really does is name the greys, name the deserts we all will face, reminds us that there are those who will manipulate us and pit us against one another, but that at the end of this journey, on the other side of that Cross, we will have passed through the limitations of this flesh to something that is more, that is love beyond the flesh. I am becoming, the name of our God, and our reality. What are you becoming? What will you become?
Oh well, a touch of grey kinda suits you anyway
And that was all I had to say and it’s alright
We will get by
We will get by
We will get by
We will survive