Church on Morgan
August 9, 2015 | Luke 4:1-15
A reading from Luke 4, verses 1 through 15. Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness. Where for 40 days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing at all during those days. And when they were over, he was famished. The devil said to him, "If you are the Son of God, "command this stone to become a loaf of bread." Jesus answered him, "It is written, "one does not live by bread alone." Then the devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And the devil said to him, "To you, "I will give their glory in all this authority, "for it has been given over to me. "And I give it to anyone I please. "If you then will worship me, it will all be yours." Jesus answered him, "It is written, "Worship the Lord your God and serve only him." Then the devil took him to Jerusalem and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, "If you are the Son of God, "throw yourself down from here, for it is written, "he will command his angels concerning you to protect you. "And on their hands they will bear you up, "so that you will not dash your foot against the stone." Jesus answered him, "It is said, "Do not put the Lord your God to the test." When the devil had finished every test, he departed from him until an opportune time. Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Holy Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread throughout all the surrounding country. He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone. The word of the Lord. - Well, good morning, good to be with you guys. So if you're new here, my name's Justin. I am the campus pastor of Church on Morgan. It's a brand new faith community that is being started by Edenton Street, United Methodist Church, and we're really excited. We've been kind of meeting quietly, gathering some momentum, figuring out who we are and what it means to be this community together since February. And with some grace here, we should move into a brand new facility somewhere around the middle to the end of September, which we're really excited about. And that'll be right on the corner of Morgan and Blunt, which is why we're called Church on Morgan. But we have been in a summer series, our whole church has, not just Church on Morgan, but the sanctuary service at Edenton Street and the gathering service has all been in a summer sermon series called Beautiful Things, where we've been taking time to pay attention to God's good earth. And like the psalmist and even Paul and his letter to the Romans both say that creation actually speaks if we would listen and what it talks about is God. That when we stop and we listen to creation, we will learn things about who God is and who we are. It's part of why I think so many of us, when we get out in nature, have that sense that we're restored and renewed and refreshed. It's the great storybook of God that you're walking in. And so this morning, we're continuing in on that. And I wanna talk about the desert and what the deserts might have to teach us about God and ourselves. And the truth is the deserts come up in the scriptures again and again and again. They're all over the Old and New Testament. It's actually a pretty key feature people find themselves in in the story of God is they're regularly in the desert. But this one passage has been the one that's really grabbed my attention this week where it's Jesus right after he's baptized. Basically, this is how he begins his ministry for 30 years. You know, he's a carpenter, he's kind of hanging out. He's working with his friends. He's growing up, he's having that sort of experience. And about the time he turns 30, he's baptized by John the Baptist. There's this kind of supernatural event that takes place where a voice from heaven speaks over him. This is my son who I love and I'm well pleased. And immediately he begins his ministry. But actually before he begins teaching and healing and making his way all over that part of the world for three years, right after he's baptized, the first thing that happens is it says the spirit led him into the wilderness. It's actually the same word for desert. Other translations would say desert. So this is how Jesus begins his ministry. The very first thing that happens is he's led into the desert. And sometimes we read the scriptures and we just like, we turn our brains off and we're like, okay, sure, right. And but like people don't just wander into the desert, right? This isn't normal. I mean, maybe if we were to think about where we would imagine Jesus would have been led right off the bat, maybe, you know, okay, Jesus, it's time to get to work and to start the ministry that I've laid out for you. First things first go to the temple, right? But no, he isn't led to the temple. Or first things first, let's go and into the middle of the city and be with the poor. And that's where your ministry's gonna start. Right there at the poor, no, he's not led to the poor. Not even a mountaintop, right? Which is where we would, usually when we think about spiritual sort of high or awakening or, you know, we think of mountains. But Jesus isn't led to any of those places instead. He's led immediately into the desert. And this is not a normal thing, right? People don't just hang out in the desert. Even though the desert covers 1/3 of Earth's surface, landmass, 1/3 of the landmass on the planet is desert. Almost zero people live there to this day. And very, very few people will live there. Some people will visit there, they'll make their way through there, but almost no one lives in the desert. And yet that's the place where Jesus is led. And what's fascinating is it's not just Jesus. When you look at these sort of stories of the great saints of the church, almost all of them start their journey in a desert. Moses begins his ministry in the desert. In fact, he gets into some trouble. He actually kills someone and he immediately runs to the desert and not for 40 days like Jesus, but for 40 years he is by himself in the desert. Before God calls him and says I want you to come back and lead the people out of slavery. The people he then leads out of slavery, Israel, immediately goes into the desert for 40 years. Before they will fulfill their sort of role of being the promised sort of people of God and inherit the promised land to be assigned to the entire world of what God is like. Joseph, another great character in the scriptures, he too spends a number of years in the desert before he finds himself in a position of power, working for the king. And even Jesus right before Jesus, this scene right before this, Jesus is baptized by John the Baptist who were told comes out of the desert. It's like the scriptures are just full of all the great saints. They all find themselves walking out of a desert when they start their ministry. A place that nobody would go. So I've been thinking about that this week. And I've had a lot of time to think this week because I've had my first sort of bachelor week and as long as I can remember. I don't, it's like the stars all aligned and I don't know any dads out there if you've had this experience, but it's sort of crazy when my wife went away for a week and she took the kids with her, which is usually not the deal. And she's gone and the kids are gone and I've got five days and it's just me. And I could not have been more excited sort of on the front side, right? I just, I'm an introvert. I have totally fine with alone time. I'm like, this is gonna be fantastic. I had all kinds of plans. Super, super excited about my bachelor week. I'm telling all of my friends. This is gonna be epic, get ready. We're gonna have a throw down, you know, look out. And you know what's interesting is that, and don't tell my wife this. I think she's upstairs 'cause the record is, I had a great time, it was awesome. But the truth was, it was agonizing. It was just so difficult. You know, I'd normally fall asleep at nine or 10 o'clock. Most every night I didn't fall asleep till after midnight, right? There's this, I found myself as much as I'm like, well, everybody just be quiet, right? Around here so we can get some peace and quiet in my house. I found myself talking to my dog all week, right? Like I would come home and I immediately just start talking. I'm pacing, I'm doing chores. There's just this like anxiety, right? I feel like I've watched everything that's on Netflix and there's nothing left to watch. I've eaten everywhere I knew to eat. I just, there's just this anxiety. And I think this is what I realized is that we say that, you know, a lot of times that we say that we love kind of being alone. But we really don't, right? Not in the fullest sense of being alone. We don't really enjoy that. We may like kind of a day at the spa or go watch a movie by myself or a moment here or there. But when was the last time that you were completely alone? And what I mean by completely alone is when was the last time you were alone and you weren't reading a book or listening to music or watching a movie or tuning into a podcast or doing a task? When you weren't distracted at all, it was just you. You were alone, left alone with yourself. Can you, I mean, was it this week? Was it this month? Did it happen even this year? Was it, has there ever been a time in your life when you were completely alone? By yourself, no distractions, no sideways energy. The truth is that's an incredibly scary place to be. To be left alone with ourselves. We hate it. In fact, we use it as torture, right? Prisoners who sort of misbehave are sent to solitary confinement where you are left to be just with yourself and no other distractions at all. The truth is that we, as a people, we just, we would much rather live a life of distraction. We would much rather just drift along through life, consuming one distraction after another distraction. And we would prefer never to have to consider whether the things we think about and the things we say and the things we do are actually worth thinking about and doing and saying. This is why our favorite drug of choice these days are sleep aids, right? Because there's this moment for many of us when that opportunity presents itself every single night, when the TV finally goes off and the music's turned on, which half of us probably don't do that. We fall asleep with the TV on or the music on or talking to somebody next to us. But there's this moment that terrifies us when it all gets quiet and we're just left with ourselves. And so now we reach for Zequil or whatever it is to get us through that moment where we might actually have to consider whether the way we're living our lives or the things that are haunting us, let them catch up. So here's what I think the power of the desert is. Here's why I think when you look at the saints, you see that they all find themselves coming out of the desert. It's because the desert is literally, geographically, it is the place of solitude. In fact, the word desert just comes from the Latin from deserted. It's the place of being alone, of abandon. The desert is the place where it's quiet and there are no distractions. There's nothing to look at. There's no one to talk to. There's a you know when you're in the desert. And so we run from solitude. We run away. When I found myself in my house and it was quiet and the TV'd been watched and the music'd been listened to and there was nobody to talk to, I ran to the cell phone to call someone to Instagram something to do, you know, it's like that's what we do. And what's fascinating is that while we run away from solitude, that the great saints and the people that we love and admire the most tend to be people who ran towards it. They ran towards solitude. They ran towards the desert. They entered the desert. In fact, about the third or fourth century, there was this really impactful group of people in the Christian tradition. We call them the desert fathers and the desert mothers. And they have some beautiful writings, but basically what had happened was for the first three or 400 years of the Christian faith, it was illegal to be a Christian and folks were persecuted for it, right? And right around the fourth century, Constantine makes it the official religion of the empire and all of a sudden, it's like everybody's Christian and it's really comfortable and there's all sorts of distractions and there are these holy people who in the middle of all of the comfort said we have got to run for our lives. Basically, we are so distracted that we're losing track of our hearts. We don't know the kind of life we're living anymore because it's become too comfortable. And so they fled the city into the desert. That's why they're called the desert fathers and the desert mothers. They went on their own alone out into the desert to kind of follow this sort of pattern that they had seen with Moses and Jesus and the rest. They said this is where folks were refined and made whole and purified and given vision and ministry. And so they left the comforts of home and on their own, they ran to the desert. And sometimes the desert fathers and mothers, they get sort of this bad rap that they were running away from the world or they were escaping or whatever. But the truth is just the opposite. They stayed put when it was really challenging and difficult. They left when it got so comfortable that distractions terrified them. And the same thing that we are so scared of being alone, they were scared of being distracted. I mean, that was their great fear. They felt like the greater disaster in life was not that you would be left by yourself but that somehow you would never really know yourself. And so they ran to the desert in many ways to stop running from themselves. They lived in a world that had so many distractions. They realized they didn't know who they were anymore. They no longer had a sense of their heart. And so they ran to the desert. In fact, there's one of these desert fathers. He said that he has this famous kind of line that pops up in the literature again and again, but he would tell young people who had come to the desert and look for direction. What do I do? And his line was he would tell them to sit in your cell and your little like huddle, right? Like they had these little like spots where they would just live by themselves. He would said sit in your cell and it will teach you everything, right? It's the advice that Justin just turned off the TV and the music and don't do any tasks and just sit in that chair and it will teach you everything you need to know. There's this, and the thing that terrifies us the most is the thing they ran straight towards. These were not people who were escaping reality. They were fighting through it. They were fighting for it. And there's this great altarpiece that's in Germany. It was painted in kind of a Reformation era, but they've got this guy here whose hair is being pulled. His name's St. Anthony. He was probably the first desert father. And this was an artist's rendition of what his life looked like sitting in that cell by himself, right? I mean, this is what it feels like to sit with your thoughts, to get alone and recognize all the stuff that's sort of competing. And it was this image of, you know, basically the demons just sort of taking over. And there were some heroic people. What's funny is there were some like heroic cats, like there always is during this era who thought, you know, the desert's full of demons. I'm gonna go out there and I'm gonna take them on, right? And what the desert father said is what's so great about that is they get out in the desert and realize that all the demons were within them, right? This is sort of the experience of the desert that you go out there thinking you're ready to fight, something or take something on, and you realize that the greatest fight is for your own soul, for your own life, for your own sort of. And this is what it feels like to be tormented by our thoughts, our concerns, our brokenness, our worries, to sit in that cell and let it teach you. And the desert is the place where we go to find out the truth about ourselves, to really know ourselves. It's the place where we ultimately realize that we actually are the problem. The desert's where we go and find out that we really are the problem. So there's this quote that I've loved this week. It comes from a book called Where God Happens, Rowan Williams, who is the Bishop, or the Archbishop of Canterbury, not too long ago. Very influential guy, actually named my son's, middle name is after this guy, Rowan Williams, Levi Rowan. But he wrote this book about the desert fathers. And in here, he talks about when you flee to the desert and you face the reality of yourself what that's like and how it goes against everything that we would normally do. And so kind of comparing that, he says, you know, listen, if someone has offended or hurt me or accused me of something, pointed out something I'd rather not recognize, let me know if this rings true for you. The attractive way through it is to talk to someone else and to get that person to reassure me that I'm wonderful. And ideally that my critic is not even worth listening to. But this is as useful in the long term as drinking salt water. I mean, what a powerful image, right? That'll quench your thirst for a season, but it's actually just going to keep killing you. It's not going to do anything to the problem you have. I shall have to work very hard indeed at the silencing of the critical voice which can become an obsessional search for absolution or forgiveness. This is the heavy burden of self-justification. The desert fathers safely run from the company and comfort distractions that will make us feel better but will equally involve us in a lifetime's frustration. This is sort of the insight. This is why they ran to the desert. Is that it's better to know the truth about yourself than to live an entire life being distracted from that truth. That it's better to go through the pain to be a fighter who faces down the demons that are so real in your own life to see that, to know that, rather than live this life of distraction of just turning the TV on or turning the music on or when somebody accuses you of something and you know there's something to that, but you just go tell your friend who will tell you you're awesome, don't sweat it. That person's a punk, right? All of that is sort of the thing that we do that keeps us from living the kind of life that God intends. And so these desert fathers, they were more concerned about the character of their heart and their soul than they were with their own comfort and so they fled to the desert to stop running from themselves, to face it, the truth. And here's the second part about the desert, is it when you're there, not only do you learn the truth about yourself, but then and only then when you know the truth and the truth is this, that you're weak, that you're vulnerable, that you're broken, that you can't do this on your own, that you're not awesome. When you come face to face with that reality about yourself, it's only then that we can truly put our trust in God. This is what really pushed the desert fathers out and mothers. They went because they knew not only would they encounter a struggle, but they would encounter the living God. And they would encounter God on the other side of that recognition of their own brokenness. That the grace that we most desire long for in our lives, we can't even adequately ask for or hunger for until we realize our own brokenness. And that's what was so profound about these folks, is that when they would go and they would stare down the demons in their own cell and all their own brokenness and have to be faced with all of their stuff, it was then that they realized how much, in what great need they were of mercy and of God's grace. They would call out for it and they would for the first time often truly put their trust in Christ, realizing they couldn't do this on their own. And it's then that the desert fathers would say they began to realize that it was no longer them living, but Christ living in them, that they realized that they would come out of their cell and they no longer hated their neighbors and their enemies. They were no longer angry and greedy, that they had been transformed. That's the power of the desert, is that somehow it can take self-righteous people and turn them into compassionate individuals. When you recognize how broken you are and you reach out for grace and you experience that new life living inside of you, you walk away from that different. There's this great story about a desert father who everybody respected and a young girl who had become pregnant was brought to him, basically for judgment, right? And so they drag this young girl to her and she's probably only 10 or 11, I guess. And they say, look at what she's done, she's got pregnant, what should we do about all this? And he tells the men, of course, who had brought her that they need to go get some fine linens and they're like, I don't understand what is the fine linens for? And he said, well, basically look, there's a very good chance because of this girl's age that either she's gonna die or this baby's gonna die and she's so poor, she probably has nothing to even do a proper burial. The least you could do is help her out with that, right? And the idea was that the folks who had spent enough time in the cell when they saw other people, all they saw was compassion. And in fact, some of the folks, when they would talk about the desert fathers, they would say that they were so full of love and compassion they could no longer even see sin in other people, right? And this is sort of the great irony of kind of the Christian life, that the folks who are most aware of their own brokenness end up being the most loving and compassionate and gracious in the world. That was sort of the legacy of those who went to the desert is that if you ask them why they went to the desert, they would say it was because they were poor sinners in need of God's grace and they couldn't keep up the struggle in the real world, right? They were like, we're just weaker than everybody else. That's why we had to run to the desert 'cause we couldn't keep our integrity and character. We had a flee to protect our hearts. We're just the most broken sinners of the lot. But the irony is that everybody in the world looked at the desert mothers and fathers and said, they're the holiest people, the ones closest to God. They're our great intercessors. That's sort of what the Christian life I think looks like is that those of us who are most filled with love and compassion, we come to that place because we're most aware of our own brokenness. And so this morning, you know, so what's the takeaway, right? Like are we supposed to, do we need to go to the desert? Are we all supposed to take off by ourselves on this great pilgrimage, which, you know, the closest desert to North Carolina, I think it's like over 2,000 miles, somewhere off in East Texas? No, I don't think that's the point. But I do think there's a way in which we can fashion or create a desert for ourselves every day. We can choose, we can willfully choose, not to be people who escape ourselves and ignore and deny our brokenness, but we with great courage and conviction that God is love and grace, we enter into that quiet place. We find time every day to turn it all off and to sit there as uncomfortable as it is, believing that as we battle the thoughts and we have all the crazy ideas and we think all those things and we feel all those feels, right? That somehow in the middle of that, God will reach out to us and we'll reach out to God and receive new grace. When I read the stories of Moses and Joseph and John the Baptist and ultimately Jesus and I look at their lives and I say, I want my life to be like that. I want to love people more. I wanna have more compassion for others, be less self-righteous. I recognize that the way, the path there, it's through the desert, it's through time alone and the great challenge and the sort of invitation I leave with you is that so many of us, we would say we desperately want to be changed, but we refuse to enter the desert. We refuse to sit with ourselves too scared of what we might find and I wanna encourage you that it's worth doing to create some space in your life, in your day, in your week to shut it all down, to face down those demons and to experience the grace of God, new and fresh that we might be made more like him. I offer that in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Let me pray. God, we're terrified of being left alone with ourselves. We know that all is not well in our hearts. We know deep down that we're broken people. We'd much rather be distracted. We'd much rather surround ourselves with friends who will tell us we're wonderful. We'd much rather turn on the music or another TV show, find five more tasks to do than to sit down and be quiet, pay attention to who we are, learn the truth about ourselves so that we might truly reach out for you and experience grace. We know that you're calling and inviting us all the time that we don't actually have to go to a physical desert to experience that, but we thank you that you gave us the deserts. It's a beautiful place that reminds us that solitude is a gift, that it's great to be alone with you. We pray you'd give us greater conviction to weave that into our lives. This day and this week that we might be remade. What a disaster it would be if we spent our whole lives avoiding the truth about us and never experiencing the grace that you offer. We thank you God, we love you. It's in your name we pray, amen. [BLANK_AUDIO]