The Fortunate Fall
Sermon by the Rev. David Anderson
Matthew 4:1-11
Matthew tells us that Jesus was “led by Spirit into the wilderness” for the three great temptations that ever mark the first Sunday of Lent. The Gospel of Mark, however, makes it more emphatic. Not, Jesus was “led,” but “immediately the Spirit drove him into the wilderness.”
There’s always a discussion about how God could do this. Jesus taught us to pray, “lead us not into temptation,” so what’s God doing? We don’t get driven into temptation because God is like any good parent: He won’t drive you anywhere you can get by yourself. But God does test us. Because we learn nothing in security and abundance; we grow only in adversity and hardship, in reversal and loss.
That’s why God leads us, drives us into the wilderness. Wilderness is the place where we have nothing, where everything we used to count on is gone. It’s the place we feel weak, where none of our coping techniques work anymore. Wilderness, I mean, is a psychic landscape. It’s a spiritual proving ground.
This is the dynamic at work here: once Jesus gets out in the wilderness—
and stays there for forty days and forty nights!—he’s broken down. That’s when he’s vulnerable to change, vulnerable to salvation. And I mean that paradox: “vulnerable to salvation.” Because, you see, we fall into salvation, we collapse in the arms of the Lord. We’re saved not by being invulnerably strong and smart and clever, not by pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, but by falling down…and finding—amazingly—that something, someone is lifting us up.
So the key is to fall down. And now you’re tuning out. You’re a seasoned American man or woman. You know that standing tall and strong and refusing to bow or bend is not only a mark of success, it’s a clear moral virtue. Which it sometimes is. But at some point it’s not a virtuous fortitude anymore. At some point it becomes a blind refusal to wake up, to listen, to recognize that we’ve reached that inevitable point in life where all our strivings are futile. We’re fighting the rescuer.
Parker Palmer, the author of so many great books on the spiritual life, writes about going to Outward Bound.* And they walked him to the edge of a cliff that dropped 110 feet. They tied a little line to his waist—a line that seemed to be sort of worn and unraveling in a few places, and they told him to start “rappelling” down that cliff. “Do what?” he said, hoping for a nice morning of instruction. And in true Outward Bound fashion, the instructor said, “Just do it.”
So he pushes off—drops four feet and just crashes into the rock face. The instructor looks over the edge and says, “Parker, I don’t think you’ve got the hang of this.” He says, “No kidding! Now what?” And the instructor says, “The only way to do this is to lean back as far as you can. You have to get your body at right angles to the cliff so that your weight is on your feet.”
Parker said, “I knew he was wrong, of course. I knew the trick was to hug the mountain, to stay as close to the rock face as I could. So I tried it again my way”—and slammed with bone-jarring force into the next ledge four feet down.
The instructor says, “Parker, it’s counterintuitive, I know, but lean out, lean free.” Palmer writes, “The next step was a very big one but I took it—and wonder of wonders, it worked. I leaned back into empty space, eyes fixed on the heavens in prayer, made tiny, tiny moves with my feet and started descending the rock face.”
That’s wilderness, when you’re crushed against that rock face and you’re holding on for dear life, and you know this is the best way, no matter what the voice from above is telling you.
When we’re in that wilderness . . . when the bottom falls out (or at least the bottom starts to sag like it’s going to go), when life whipsaws and we end up on our backs—a child gets sick (I got a Christmas email from an old friend back in Pennsylvania who told me that her young son-in-law, a man in his forties, was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma, and now what?) . . . . When we’re in that wilderness . . . when the money runs out, when depression descends like a fog, then we have a choice. We can stay with it, until we learn how to stop hugging this rock, until we learn how to lean out and look up, how to trust something beyond ourselves, or we can run.
You know, Jesus did not have to stay in the wilderness. The Spirit drove him there, but he knew how to find his way home. He could have said, “I’ve had enough of this. How stupid is this, to deprive myself of food and shelter and suffer out here? What kind of God would lead me here anyway?” And he could have wandered back into town and stopped at the pub for a few stiff drinks. “Enough of this wilderness stuff.” But he didn’t. He stayed with it until he broke through.
I got an email this week from someone who’s been going through a lot of wilderness, and the P.S. said, “Still adjusting to Life B.” And I wrote back and said, “Give thanks Life A is gone. Don’t spend the rest of your life trying to get that old ‘A’ life back. Have a good cry and say good-bye, and stay with Life B—that’s the only life that’s going to teach you anything, the only life that’s going to open your heart and grow your soul.”
Someone told me this week. Said, “I was living a spiritually heedless life, working like crazy, trying to live ‘the life,’ until someone I love got sick, and there was nothing I could do about it. And I fought it until finally I had to accept the fact that I couldn’t control this one. I was utterly powerless.” And went on to say just what you’d expect, actually: that’s where salvation came, that’s when peace descended. Doesn’t mean your problems go away, it just means you stop trying to be the Creator and—when it goes wrong—the Redeemer of your own life. You let Someone else do that, and you find out how good that feels, finally.
So, you may be four days in the wilderness on your way to forty and ready to head for town. Stay there, until the wilderness breaks you open.
You may be hanging on a cliff, hugging a rock face, or someone you love is. Lean back, look up, and fall.
* Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak, p.83-84.
