Genesis 2:4b-9,15-17,25-3:7
Romans 5:12-19(20-21)
Matthew 4:1-11
Psalm 51 or 51:1-13
In her book, Heart Whispers, the English priest Elizabeth Canham tells about a day when she was riding on the upper deck of a London bus. Ordinarily she didn't go up there, because smoking is allowed on the upper level, but that day the lower seats were full. She thought afterward that God must have wanted her up there that day, wanted her to see, high on a building, the words "Clutch Clinic." It took her a few beats to realize that it was advertising a car repair shop. Her first thought was that it was a place God might send us to, a kind of spa where we would learn how not to clutch. Spending time in God's Clutch Clinic, we could think about what we need to let go of, so that we can have open hands to receive the gifts God wants to give us. Could Lent, 2002, be a good time for all of us, or some of us, to go to the Clutch Clinic?
Adam and Eve in the Genesis story set us a bad example. This is a story about how not to live in a world full of God's gifts. Instead of going about with open hands and open hearts to receive all that God had to give them, they reached out and took-closed their hands and their teeth on-the one thing that wasn't good for them. There's a warning for all of us-Step One in the Clutch Clinic program: if you can't receive it as a gift, if you have to take it and cling to it, it's probably not good for you.
Jesus, in the other story, reverses the momentum, just as Paul says in that part of the letter to the Romans we heard read. Jesus had already spent 40 days in the Clutch Clinic, 40 days in the desert letting go of everything. The voice at his baptism had announced his mission, and if he had had any other plans or ambitions before that, he had to set them aside, say goodbye to them, during those 40 days.
It's a good thing he did, because no sooner was that time over than here comes the Satan-maybe wearing a snakeskin suit again, who knows?-and tries to get him to close his fists, to grasp and clutch and take things that are good, but not good for him, because they are not the gifts God is offering him.
Remember what the first story says about Eve-how she saw that the fruit of the tree was, first of all, good to eat? Here comes the first temptation for Jesus: food. "Hungry?" asks the Satan. "Just do a little magic with the stones here." Jesus is, we know, going to be able to multiply bread in the wilderness later on, but that is to feed other people, not himself. And it will be a gift received from God, not something he takes by his own effort. He will not clutch at any good thing, not even the humble necessity of bread. "Nothing doing," he says.
The second thing Eve thought about the fruit of the tree was that it looked good- "a delight to the eyes." I don't think it just means that it looked good to eat. It's about appearances-valuing things, or people, for the way they look instead of who or what they are. And especially about how we try to look, in our own eyes and those of others. We want to look good more than we want to be good. Just imagine: would you rather do something bad (oh, not bad bad, but just a little bit bad) that would make everyone think you were good, or would you rather do something good that would make everyone think you were evil? It's not an easy choice, and it's not as if it never happens. Jesus went about doing good, as the gospels tell us, and people called him evil, wicked, a sinner, a blasphemer, a traitor-and condemned him to death.
Satan has a different program in mind for Jesus' life: he wants him to try looking good instead of being good. He wants him to get up on the pinnacle of the Temple and throw himself down: "hey, everybody, look at me!" Satan wins either way: Jesus crashes, and that's that, or he gets a miracle all for himself, to make him look spectacular-and then he's not who he's called to be. But Jesus won't bite: "not on your life," he says.
Finally, in that first story, Eve saw that the fruit was desirable because it would make her wise. We'd all like to be wise-but her idea was that, as the serpent told her, this wisdom would make her "like God." And she reached out, she grasped for that power, she took it-and she gave some to Adam, who all this time is standing around with his teeth in his mouth-and he ate it, and all of a sudden they knew something new, all right: that they were naked and cold and miserable in a world God had made to be warm and sheltering for them. They had tried to take a higher place than belonged to them, and instead they fell down, right out of Paradise.
The Satan sets Jesus on a high place, too, and tempts him with power: the whole world can be his for just a teensy price-that he worship what is not God. All power on earth can be his-and that is a huge temptation indeed.
Wouldn't it be wonderful to have all power and be able to set the world right? No more war, no more hunger, no more hatred; justice everywhere . . . after all, Jesus had come to save the world. Wouldn't this make a good shortcut?
Probably some or most of you have seen the new movie of The Lord of the Rings. If you have, or if you've read the book, you know what it's about: POWER. The ring is key to holding power over the world, but for that very reason it is evil, and everyone who tries to use it, even if they are very good and mean to do good with it, is corrupted by it. Their only salvation is to renounce it-and the world's only salvation depends on its being destroyed.
Jesus knew that: he knew that he had come to serve, and not to be served. Jesus' story is the very opposite of Adam and Eve's story because, as Paul tells us in the letter to the Philippians, he did not count equality with God something to be grasped at. (How different from their grasping at the fruit so they could be like God!) Instead of filling himself, as they did, he emptied himself-instead of trying to be like God, he became not like but really and truly human, so that through him we can indeed, after all, become like God-if we will allow God to give us that gift instead of trying to take it for ourselves.
The thing is, you can't receive anything if your hands are full. That's why we need the Clutch Clinic. We need to open our clutching fingers and put down the things we are carrying to make room for God's gifts. What are those things that make our hands so full? Are they objects, or attitudes, or hopes or wishes or desires for things that we think we need in order to be safe, to be saved? Can we put them down, one at a time? Can we become poor so that God can make us rich?
I got a prescription for the Clutch Clinic a few weeks ago. I had been looking forward to being ordained in June with the other people who were in seminary with me last year. But instead I was told that I need to do some other things, to wait another six months. It was an awful blow. Letting go of that hope is as painful as having all my fingers broken to release their grip. I'll be spending Lent in the Clutch Clinic. But already I've started meeting the staff, and I think in the end they will prove to be gifts that God wouldn't have been able to give me if I'd kept my hands clutched on that one good gift.
And so I'm proposing a prescription for all of us for Lent 2002: 40 days in God's Clutch Clinic. Can we travel with Jesus the path of letting go so that when Easter comes we can join him in his exaltation? "Therefore God highly exalted him, and gave to him the name above every name." What name, and what glory will God give you, if your hands are empty to receive them?