St. Paul’s United Church Sunday, February 20, 2011

Tempted – Rev. David Mundy

2 Samuel 11:1-5, 14-17 Mark 14:32-39

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Last week I was part of a dinner conversation which included one of our St. Paul’s members who is an educator working with public school children. Within her role she teaches these kids how to use the internet to access information for school projects. And at the same time she teaches them how to properly acknowledge their sources so they aren’t stealing other people’s ideas and research. She told us that this is a “tough sell.” For some of the children it seems next to impossible to grasp that they can’t simply pilfer the work of others and pass it off as their own.

Of course these are children living in the age of ready access to the internet, so it might not be surprising that they struggle to understand these ethical boundaries.

How about adults though? How about ministers –clergy? Do they understand what those boundaries are? Several years ago the Christian Century magazine ran a cover article on the growing incidence of ministers and priests using the sermons of colleagues, found on the internet, and passing them off as their own. The article was rather bluntly called Sermon Stealing.

I don’t know whether this surprises you, but it shocked me. I can honestly say that I have never taken material from the sermons of others, let alone use an entire sermon. Some of you may be thinking “please, go ahead, you need all the help you can get!” but I would prefer if you would keep that to yourself.

Since this article in 2007, there have been a number of reports of ministers getting caught in the act. One story shared with me was from a member of a search committee where they became suspicious that a candidate had submitted a sermon as an example of his work which just didn’t ring true. Someone on the committee Googled a phrase from the sermon and, sure enough, he had “borrowed” the sermon and tried to pass it off as his own. Another was a news report about a disgraced senior pastor in a large congregation who had been stealing sermons and was caught by one of his co-workers. When confronted by church leaders, he admitted his wrongdoing and resigned.

Busted! The internet is a wonderful tool in so many ways, and it is also the source of a multitude of nasty temptations. Apparently one minister who uses internet sermons admitted cheerfully that “it is like having a drug dealer on every corner.” Could Jesus have imagined the scope of our deceitfulness when he taught his disciples to pray “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil?”

Actually in the King James Version of the bible we find those words, while in the New Revised Standard Version it says “do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one.”

This is it folks, the final sermon in a series of six on the prayer of Jesus which we repeat virtually every Sunday, admittedly often without giving much thought to the phrases which we know “by heart” as the expression goes. If you recall from earlier on in the series, this prayer is also called the Our Father by our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters, and was known as the Abba Prayer, or the Daddy prayer, in the earliest days of the church.

This last phrase of the Lord’s Prayer, at least as the prayer is found in most ancient manuscripts, is an intriguing and essential one, as it deals with our trials and temptations.

We listened to two passages of scripture today which have to do with individuals who are faced with temptation, although there are very different outcomes.

King David, one of the great and greatly flawed characters of the Old Testament sees a beautiful woman one day as she is bathing in a courtyard below his palace. He decides that he has to have her, and why not? He is the king, with all the power that entails. It doesn’t matter that he is married and she is married. The affair with Bathsheba is only the beginning, of course. In his obsession, David orders that Bathsheba’s husband be sent to the front in battle where he is killed. Giving in to this temptation becomes one of the defining moments in David’s life.

Jesus is the focus of our gospel reading this morning. We could have listened to the story of Jesus’ temptations before the beginning of his ministry when he was pushed and shoved out into the desert by the Holy Spirit where it is the Evil One who tests Jesus with the prospect of power and glory and fame.

Instead we heard of how Jesus went through another test, in the final hours of his life. In the olive grove called the Garden of Gethsemane the temptation is to abandon his nonviolent mission, to slip away under the shadow of night and live for another day. This is also a defining moment for Jesus, who struggles in prayer, wondering if this cup can be taken from him. In the end his conversation with God convinces him to continue on the path he has followed so faithfully to that point.

What sort of temptations do we wrestle with from day to day? Sometimes, giving into our temptations seems rather paltry and tame in the bigger scheme of things. We have decided that we are going to give up sweets, but then we are at the end of our meal in the restaurant and the server asks if anyone wants dessert. When we pause indecisively for just a second, horns grow out of her head and she says “why don’t I just bring the dessert cart.” A month later we are standing on the scales in the bathroom saying “that can’t be right, they’re broken.”

There is the host of “white” lies we tell to make our days run more smoothly, and we often convince ourselves that these are “minor misrepresentations.” Yet we know that these supposed “little” lies can become whoppers – cabinet minister sized lies!

What is the dividing line between what we might like to think of as minor temptations and the “biggies?” There is a Chinese proverb that says “People do not trip on mountains, they stumble on stones.”

Then there are the more serious self-destructive temptations such as addictions in various forms. We might immediately think of drugs and alcohol which have huge potential to be destructive. We know that pornography has become a serious addiction as it is so easily accessed on the internet, and so is gambling. In his book Addiction and Grace Gerald May offers that human nature tends to be addictive, and so we can get “hooked” on just about anything: shopping, sports teams, food . . . Glee!

But perhaps the greatest tests are related to those aspects of our lives that are hardest to define. Rather than specific, identifiable temptations, such as the dessert cart, they are the events that unfold in the half-light where it is sometimes difficult to make out what is right and wrong. Along the way I have suggested to you that it would actually be easier if everything was sharply contrasted between right and wrong. Often it is a matter of right and “righter” and when we are out of touch with God, because we haven’t maintained the conversation of prayer, or because we are seduced by our hubris, our false pride, we succumb to temptations.

As a minister who often sits with people who are grappling with the mistakes they have made, and in my personal career as an accomplished sinner, I can say that people rarely set out to do wrong or to deceive or to hurt others. Something tells me that those ministers who stole sermons weren’t just lazy, at least not all of them. They probably convinced themselves that they were so busy helping others that they needed a little help themselves to do the best job possible for their congregations on Sunday mornings.

Perhaps the greatest temptation is to make the choices which lead us away from our relationship with Christ. Many people become enthusiastic about their faith for a time, and they become involved in the faith community and make promises. Then something happens. They get distracted by the busyness of life and that real stirring of the Holy Spirit gets pushed into the background.

The Good News is that we can come back again, and even as we come back to the Lord’s Prayer over and over again. And it is Good News that God will be our companion on that journey, always. Even though we may lose our way, God never does.

The phrases “lead us not into temptation” is puzzling because we have to ask why God would ever lead us in the wrong direction. Surely, though, this means that Gods is with us in all things, even the confusing moments and the times when we are really put to the test. This doesn’t mean that God is some lucky charm, because there is evil in this world and we do make mistakes. We are loved though, and forgiven, if we seek forgiveness in Christ, and we restored.

Perhaps you are in the midst of the most difficult trials and temptations of your life and you are feeling confused and overwhelmed. God is with you, and can give you strength and peace to sort through the confusion.

It may be that you feel that you have made choices that can never be forgiven, and that you will never be the person you hoped to be. That is not true, no matter what your circumstance or age. Sometimes people criticize Christianity and organized religion because they feel that it encourages guilt. Again, my experience is that many of us carry around a big bag of guilt that we place on our own shoulders. The message of the crucified and risen Christ is one of liberation and restoration.

All of us, every day, can humbly ask that God walk with us. In the letter to the church in Ephesus we discover these words: “Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his power. Put on the whole armour of God . . . ”

King David was a warrior who knew about armour, but in his arrogance he ended up being vulnerable. Jesus refused to go the way of violence, and did not want his disciples to physically resist those who would harm him, and in the end he humbly fulfilled what he always saw as his purpose.

Since we live in the internet age, perhaps we should paraphrase this for the twenty first century so that it says to “put up the full firewall of God” to protect us from our temptations and trials.

As we come to the end of this series of sermons on the Lord’s Prayer I hope and pray that we can agree with Dominic Crossan that this Jesus Prayer, the Abba Prayer, is also the Greatest Prayer for our daily lives as the people of Christ.