We are not God

There was a time when I lived in a 900 sq ft trailer with three roommates. And, we didn’t have a dishwasher. Washing dishes became this challenge to see how many dirty dishes you could stack up on the counter. Then, when it was your turn to wash the dishes, you wouldn’t want to prevent your roommates the opportunity of putting all of the nice clean dishes away, so you would wash the dishes and produce an equally impressive stack on the other side of the counter.

I remember washing the dishes one night—I was building a real work of art—and I turned to my roommates and said: “I AM GOD!”

Ironic. Surely God would have a much more efficient way of washing dishes? God would just wave a magic wand and they’d be done! God wouldn’t waste time on the business of mere mortals!

In our gospel reading today, Jesus is led by the Spirit in the wilderness. He meets the devil there and is tempted for forty days. Fun fact: Jesus is tempted for 40 days in the wilderness; the people of God in the days of the Hebrew, Old Testament scriptures, they live in exile for forty years; and there are forty days in this season of Lent in the church calendar. Some beautiful parallels (but you knew that already ;) )!

Jesus is in the wilderness for forty days. The devil comes to him with three temptations:

1. “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.”
2. “To you I will give their glory and all this authority . . . . If you . . . will worship me, it will all be yours.”
3. “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 a stone.’”

3 temptations: want for nothing; total power and authority; be invincible to pain and suffering, even death.

Imagine the irony of the devil tempting Jesus to become God. It reminds me of a passage in the Bible, the letter to the Philippians. The writer is speaking to these people who are surrounded by temptations of world power and wealth. The writer says to them,

Have the same mindset as Christ Jesus who being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his advantage; rather, he made himself nothing, by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness . . . and he became obedient to death, even death upon a cross. . . . [For this reason] God exalted him to the highest place . . . .

This is what it looks like to want for nothing; this is what power and authority looks like. Imagine love so great, imagine care for humanity so awesome that though being invincible to pain and suffering, even death, God in human form chooses it anyway—God in human form chooses to “waste time” on the business of mere mortals. If even Jesus resists when tempted to use his God-power, how much more ought we to resist the temptations of this world to want for nothing; to have total power and authority; to become invincible to pain and suffering, even death?

There are some very live examples in our world today. “We are not God”: this is the resistance cry of people of faith around the world as we pray for and stand in solidarity with the people of Ukraine. It is the antidote to leaders who beat their chests from ivory towers, shouting, “I am God!” 

“We are not God” is the resistance cry we are called to make in our everyday lives—even in times and places where there is no immediate threat to our physical safety. I am thinking of those everyday ways we acknowledge our own mortality and ask for help with practical, basic needs. I am also thinking of something author Jenny Odell calls the attention economy. Here’s a quote from her book, How to do nothing: resisting the attention economy. I wonder what you think of this:

In a world where our value is determined by our productivity, many of us find our every last minute captured, optimized [sic], or appropriated as a financial resource by the technologies we use daily. . . every waking moment has become the time in which we make our living, and when we submit even our leisure for numerical evaluation via likes on Facebook and Instagram, constantly checking on its performance like one checks a stock, monitoring the ongoing development of our personal brand, time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on ‘nothing.’ . . . . Our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way. . . . I suggest that we reimagine #FOMO as #NOMO, the necessity of missing out . . . Let’s not forget that, in a time of increasing climate-related events, those who help you will likely not be your Twitter followers; they will be your neighbors [sic].

I should pause and say that there are some really thoughtful ways of engaging the attention economy. Just this past week some of the leadership from St Clement’s met with Phoebe and her team from Magnolia Communications to think about how we can use technology well—to plant St Clement’s in the heart of everything that goes around on the Internet and put ourselves out there as a doorway to another path, a doorway to a spiritual oasis, where you can take a break from the productivity driven lives so much of our culture (and things like housing prices!) put pressure on us to live.

There’s a really useful practice that we have in our Lenten toolbox that helps us resist the temptation to want to become God in our lives. The practice is called fasting. It’s commonly associated with food—giving up foods traditionally cooked for feasts (all of the rich and wonderful things we love to have at the table for big Christmas and Thanksgiving and Easter dinners)—giving up those foods for a time so that when it comes time to feast, there has been an intentional period of abstaining.

Fasting has historically been associated with food; I think it works really well with social media, too. For the next six weeks, for the season of Lent, I wonder what it would look like to fast from the attention economy? Maybe it’s setting aside your phone for one hour a day? Maybe it’s turning off the news and visiting with a neighbour who’s been feeling anxious about the situation in Ukraine? Maybe it’s buying your next book from a local bookstore instead of Amazon, even if it means waiting longer for it to come in the mail (maybe you even have to go somewhere to pick it up; maybe you'll meet people along the way?)? Maybe it’s surprising a family member (or yourself) by washing the dishes (and putting them away!). 

In Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness, we find out that God really does care about the business of mere mortals; God really does care about being human—the want for many things, least among them food and safety; the desire for power and authority; the wish that pain and suffering and even death were no more. Come, then, let us turn our attention this season to the One who carries these things with us and for us, as one of us. Amen.