Journey to the Passion: Tempted Hearts

Sunday, March 9, 2025 (Lent 1) – Deuteronomy 26:1-11, Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16, Romans 10:8b-13, Luke 4:1-13

Since I began serving Redeemer as interim minister in October of 2023, my approach to preaching has been a week-by-week endeavor. It’s pretty much all I could do to just keep juggling all the plates that I had in the air, balancing this job with my other half-time job as director of a nonprofit program.

But for this season of Lent, I want to take a different approach, to get a higher perspective on where we’re headed as we move toward Holy Week and Easter. When I look at the readings for each Sunday, it seems to me that each week focuses on various states of human hearts.

And so I’m seeing us for these 40 days as being on journeys to the Passion, ultimately reaching the Heart of Jesus.

We began this journey on Ash Wednesday, a day that we might describe as one of humble hearts. On Ash Wednesday, we humbly face our mortality and our failings. In the weeks to come, I expect to be talking about stubborn hearts, hungry hearts, resentful hearts, extravagant hearts, willing hearts, shared hearts, broken hearts, and then on Easter, to talk about loving hearts and the heart of Jesus.

Today, I want to talk about tempted hearts and the role of “Satan.”

It’s immediately after his baptism that Jesus is driven into the wilderness by the Spirit of God for 40 days, during which he doesn’t eat anything. In other words, he practices one of the spiritual disciplines that we’ll be talking about in this Lenten season – fasting.

In a sense, we can think of Jesus’ time in the wilderness as a kind of vision quest. In the Jordan River, he had just had a powerful experience of the Holy Spirit descending upon him and heard the voice of God identifying him as the Beloved. In that moment, Jesus is called to his true mission.

Then he goes into solitude in the desert to gain some clarity about what that really means.

Back in 2003, I was downsized out of a software marketing job at a time when I felt a strong pull toward a career in music. When I got the news, I believed it was my own divine call, and I spent the next few months in a period of discernment. During those weeks, I spent as much time in silence and solitude as I could. You’ll remember from Wednesday that Silence and Solitude are the practices we’re experimenting with this very week.

By the end of Jesus’ foodless sojourn in the desert, he was famished, and probably somewhat weak. No wonder he started having visions!

In his vision, we read that the Devil tempts Jesus to use his power as the Son of God for his own self-interest; to turn stones into bread, and to claim power not only over the earthly kingdoms, but also over the heavenly realm. But Jesus returns again and again to God as his center, seeking only to be true to God’s mission and God’s calling upon his heart.

Before we go any further, we need to better understand the word “satan” so it can open our minds to the ways in which human our hearts can be tempted away from God’s wholeness to self-interest and abusive power.

You see, the word in Hebrew that is translated either as Satan or the Devil is not a proper name; it’s a title. The Hebrew phrase hassatan means “the adversary” or the one who “stands against.” In the Hebrew tradition, it was not meant as a personification of an evil being.

In fact, in the book of Job, the satan is a member of God’s own divine council. The word satan is also used in the book of Numbers to describe the angel of God in the story of Balaam and his donkey who are headed in a direction that God doesn’t like. God’s angel appears as a satan or adversary armed with a sword to block Balaam’s way.

In fact, in our gospel reading, we’re told that the power or authority over all the kingdoms of the world has been given to hassatan by God.

You might remember that a few months back, I spoke of sin as the illusion of separation, and how this illusion of separation is necessary for there to be a world at all. We could not have a world of things if there were no boundaries between things. There has to be differentiation – light must be separated from darkness, the heavens from the earth, the land from the seas.

Separation is necessary. It is our original condition as embodied beings.

It’s in this sense that I understand the role of the adversary – the power that stands against. It’s the power of separation, the power that divides or differentiates things and people from each other. That’s the power within the world.

But – and here’s the important part – those divisions are only real in the world of form. In God’s sphere of the formless, in God’s kingdom, separation is an illusion. Because God is the center and circumference of everything, God is the All, the One, the Wholeness, the Undivided. That’s why Paul can tell us that ultimately nothing can separate us from the love of God.

Because ultimately, there is no such thing as separation.

Oh, but that separation is very real here in the embodied world and it is tempting. When we separate ourselves from others and see ourselves as not responsible for and to others, we can then tell ourselves that we’re better than they are, that we deserve more, that we’re saved or special and they’re not.

This is what religious purity codes are all about. To identify who is in and who is out.

The satan, the Adversary, wants us to believe that we’re special or that God loves only our group. The satan wants us centered in our small egos. That power of separation tries to tempt us toward division and power over others, verses luring us toward love, community, and power with others.

Centered in our egos of separation and power, we can be tempted to hoard our wealth and not share our first fruits in celebration of the goodness of God. We can be tempted to not trust in God with all our hearts and minds and instead trust in everything but the power and Love of God.

But if we are centered in God, then our tempted hearts can become believing and trusting hearts. There we won’t worship the satan, the spirit of separation. Worshipping the satan gets us earthly power. But worshipping the One, the All, the Undivided, the Wholeness, gives us real power – the power that heals division and sickness, feeds the hungry, and loves the neighbor and the enemy.

In Jesus’ name, may our hearts be tempted to only seek that power.