TO WHOM TO LISTEN

I presided at a funeral this week for an old friend of mine who recently died suddenly.  In addition to the rest of his family, he left behind a twin brother – and I mean twin, as in the most identical of twins I’ve ever known.  I was friend to this man for decades, and I often wasn’t sure exactly which one of them I was talking to when we were all together at a social event or one of their family gatherings. His brother told me at the funeral that since the death, he’d spent a lot of time visiting his brother’s professional and business acquaintances explaining to them that his brother had died, and none of them could believe it because these two looked exactly the same.  Even after all these years I didn’t know my friend – until we started speaking to one another.  He and his brother had exactly the same sounding voice, so that didn’t help either.  We had to get into a meaningful conversation before I could know for sure whether this was my friend who knew me, with whom I shared a history and stories and other mutual friends – or whether it was his brother, whom I never knew nearly as well, and who didn’t know me well enough to be a bearer of my stories in the same way.  Unless I really listened, I had no way, literally, to know who I was talking with. 

In today’s gospel of Luke, Jesus is confronted by two distinct voices, which aren’t really the same at all, but which may surely sound like it sometimes.  If we aren’t careful in our listening to this gospel, it can appear that the Holy Spirit took Jesus up into the desert to tempt him.  But that’s not entirely true.  The Spirit did, in fact, take Jesus to the desert, but not in order to lead Jesus into doing the wrong thing, but, before God, the Spirit wished instead to give Jesus the opportunity to demonstrate that he could and would do the right thing.  It wasn’t, in fact, the Holy Spirit who he was being tempted by.  In fact, by the time they got to the desert, they had been joined by a third person, namely, the devil.  He is the tempter here.  But how could Jesus know which voice was which? After all, they both spoke to his heart of being from God; they could both quote the bible or remind Jesus of the things that God had said.  On the surface, it would have been very hard to recognize one voice from the other.  And that’s why Jesus needed to stay there for 40 days/nights – so that he’d become certain about who he was and who was who among those folks trying to talk to him.  Like my friend and his brother, what comes out of his mouth is necessary for me to hear closely before I can truly trust.  Because so often I can be so easily misled:  what is good can appear to be bad – like suffering – and what is bad can appear to be good – like flattery.  And sometimes people and things can claim to have my best interests at heart – like food in my hunger, or power in my weakness, or self-importance in my self-doubt.

And who gets to speak rightly to me about God, well that’s a gift that I can only bestow on another person, and unless it’s mine to give.  And that only comes as the fruit of a prolonged time spent both with those who wish to help me or those who wish to harm me.  The two can seem very much alike.

So who’s my friend, and who is someone who just looks like him?  And talks like him?  And who I’d be ready to trust immediately if I didn’t know any better?  Only sustained time in the desert can bring clarity and confidence that way. 

This gospel of Luke comes at the very beginning of Jesus’s life story; in fact, it’s the first thing that happens to him after his baptism.  There’s rarely an easy way for any of us to enter gently into the Kingdom of God and its life.  It was not easy for Jesus.  But it was absolutely necessary for him to decide early on just which voices belonged to which spirits.  They both are still out there today – looking for us; and our discernment is the same one as his had to be:  namely, to decide – assuming we want to – which spirit will lead us to God.  My friend and his brother were almost identical – almost.  But it required a very long period of time together – in fact, a lifetime, to sort it out.  And it may be that way for us as well. 

And so on this first Sunday of Lent, job #1 for us is our task of figuring out whose voice, whose spirit belongs to whom, and to test those spirits; and to allow ourselves to be tested by them, and better yet, to come to know the one whom we seek to serve.  So let us spend some time on our own in this Lenten desert, and then bring what we learn, bring it back to our worship, especially to our Eucharist.  With God’s grace we can, and we must, as our first act of setting out to stay with him.