“And when he had finished every temptation,
the devil departed him for a time.”
The devil is known by many different names in scripture:
The evil one; Satan; the ancient serpent
or as we will hear later in today’s liturgy, the ancient tempter.
He has many different names but they all come back to
the same sort of prince of darkness.
The Holy Father, Pope Francis, refers to the devil quite readily
in a lot of his talks because he knows he is traveling around
and quite readily takes the attention of many people
although the people do not realize it.
Pope Francis calls him the Father of All Lies! It is very powerful.
It really captures the essence of what the devil does.
Fr. Henri Nouwen, Catholic priest, theologian, and great author,
in reflecting on this very scripture passage speaks of these lies.
Fr. Nouwen calls them “the foundational lies that he attacks Jesus with,”
and they are three-fold lies tempted in the desert for 40 days.
These are the foundation of all the other lies
that the devil tells us in our lives on an ongoing basis
albeit more subtle for us today.
And here they are:
We are what we do: “Change this stone into bread.”
We are what we have: “I should give you all the power and the glory.”
We are what other people say we are: “Throw yourself off the temple
and let everyone marvel at how the angels catch you and you are glorious and everyone will talk about you.”
Jesus refuses all three temptations
because he knows that he is the Son of God.
And because he is the Son of God,
he doesn’t need to do anything,
have anything else
or have anyone else to say anything
to realize that he is loved completely and wholly by his Father.
Because of that, Jesus knows that he is loved through and through.
And all his desire for the entirety of his life
is to do the Will of the Father.
And his whole life is defined by that.
That is what scripture and all of the New Testament is full of.
If we are honest with ourselves, we too are tempted
by those same three foundational temptations in our own life.
If we just break it open for a moment,
we will see they are the root of every other lie the devil will tell us
albeit even more subtle in our life today.
Let’s talk about the first one: We are what we do.
Our own language often betrays this.
The first question people will ask
after asking our name is “what do you do?”
Then we get caught up in comparing,
“Oh you do that? I do this.”
Then we start comparing what we do.
Then we start comparing how well we do it.
And then sort of a meritocracy starts to go on.
Whether we are a CEO or a doctor or a surgeon, or a janitor,
we tend to compare and evaluate
each other based upon what we do.
What I will now say is going to be hard to hear
but I want you to hear it:
There is nothing we can do that will make God love us any more.
And there is nothing we can do to make God love us any less.
Now I know that is hard to hear because we think to ourselves,
“Oh whoa, hold on.
Then why would I bother doing any good things?
Why not do whatever I want if that is the way it is?”
Here is the way to look at it; if a glass is full the it’s full.
You cannot pour anymore into it.
It doesn’t make any difference. It’s already full.
We are fully and completely loved by God
and there is nothing we can do to impress him any more
or have him love us any more
because if he did not love us completely, we would not even exist.
He loves every single one of us into life
and sustains us all the way through life.
And we just need to let that sink in and it is hard.
I get it. That is the truth.
There is nothing we can do to change it.
Now I do not want you to hear that we get to do anything we want.
Let me get into that later.
That is not what that means.
It means that we cannot merit God’s love.
We cannot earn our way to salvation.
It is a complete and absolute free gift of God’s grace.
The second one: We are what we have.
Isn’t all of secular society built on this?
The whole economic engine is to buy more and get more.
If you have a small house then you need a bigger one for all the stuff.
We have so much stuff, we need a bigger house again?
So we get a bigger house.
Or, we have a new car but we need a different car.
We compare different cars: foreign cars; new cars; Tesla’s
and the list goes on.
Then we look at the phones;
whatever number it is iPhone 12, 13, 14?
I don’t know. I lose tract. You know what I mean?
And all of those things are fine in and of themselves.
Not one is bad.
Unless we think that somehow we are better because we have it.
I’m better because I have a 13;
and you are not as good because you have a 10.
I remember like joking recently with one of my friends
as he pulled out an iPhone 4.
I looked at him and said, “Can I touch it?”
I was joking but I betrayed my language.
I caught myself. I started to mock him for having a little 4.
I went, “Oh that’s so quaint. Look at it.
It looks like a little thing in my hand. Look.”
I believed the Father of All Lies.
The same thing happens to us.
These things just do not define who we are.
When we are wearing a certain type of pants
or certain type of shoe that somehow that makes me better;
even just saying it out loud
sounds absurd but yet that is what the engine of our society
sort of goes on and it’s a lie.
It does not define us.
The last one is: We are what people say we are.
I live in Silicon Valley, and the whole of the social media
was built on this lie and they know it.
All of the social media are built on the vices.
We need a number of “likes” and number of “followers”
and we get caught up in that.
And it was deliberately built like that.
I know these people and they know what they did.
For example the founder of LinkedIn admitted
that he built the company on vice of vanity.
He built on vice because nobody follows the virtues.
Everyone will follow the vice.
That is easy to capture.
We just need to understand the lies that are built into us all the time.
And we just need to understand it.
Again, there is nothing bad about any of these
after all many are looking online right now with these platforms.
They are not bad things in themselves.
We cannot think it is what defines us.
And that is who we are.
That is the lie. Does that make sense?
There is a distinction:
It is not what we do that makes us better.
It does not.
You might think to yourself “Well great,
what are we meant to do about all that?
That’s great but how can you help?”
The Church has been fighting the devil for millennia.
And in that time, we have learned a thing or two about it.
And we have come up with sort of a cycle of
how to beat down the devil and the father of lies.
And one of the ways we do that is called “Lent.”
We do this every year and we roll out the same three things every year:
Prayer. Fasting. Almsgiving.
Why do we keep on doing it all the time?
Because it works.
That is why we do it.
We have been around for a while.
We know what works.
But the problem is that we forget that it works
because the devil wants us to not believe it.
He wants us to stay in the darkness and to believe his lies.
The reason why I am here is to start this Lenten journey
for us at St. Monica’s with a deepening of our prayer.
We are going on a mission, a retreat and I invite you to come
Monday night, Tuesday night and Wednesday night.
I am inviting you to come 7 to 8:30 each of those nights.
And I know what you are thinking, “Well, I’m too busy.”
That is the father of lies.
You are not too busy.
What are you busy about?
What you do?
What you have?
What other people say you have?
That is the lie.
You have a choice to come and
to go deeper into this retreat and deeper into prayer
so that you can break and shatter the darkness
that the father of lies has cast over you.
Come and live in freedom and in the Light.
That is what we are inviting you to do.
Here is just a snippet of what we are doing:
I call this “Cairns on the Second Mountain of Life.”
The Second Mountain of Life is a metaphor for being a disciple.
The First Mountain is living life for oneself.
The second mountain is one who lives a life for others.
That is what discipleship is about.
It is not about age.
But on this second mountain of life,
even on that, we can go off track.
But there are cairns, these markers that help us to get up the mountain.
Cairns are built by others for others.
It is not built for oneself.
These cairns on the Second Mountain are built by the Saints.
They are markers to help us stay on the trail
to get up the mountain, the Second Mountain.
They are not my cairns, they are the cairns of the Saints
who have gone before us.
Here are the five that I am going to do:
The first is self-awareness.
The second is humility.
The third is love.
The fourth is gratitude.
And the fifth is joy.
Now here is how you know if you need to go on this retreat.
Pope Francis goes on about it but let’s start with the last.
He talks about joy.
We should be joy-filled in our life as a disciple
on the Second Mountain, and what I mean by joy-filled is this;
I do not mean sort of an exuberance, happiness.
“Oh hello, how are you? I’m wonderful. I’m great! Thank you!”
I don’t mean that.
That is sort of plastic right?
I’m talking about a joy that exudes out of your being
before a word comes out; it shows and glows in your face.
That is the joy.
The joy of the gospel, knowing that you are alive.
If you are not feeling that every day
then you have to come back to the next cairn back
because we have gone off track.
We have to get back to gratitude.
It is very hard to be joyful if you are not grateful.
So you have to go back to grateful.
If you are not grateful in your life for all the things
that are going on in your life, good and bad.
And grateful to God for all the people he has put into your life.
And for the gifts that he has in your life.
You have to go back to the next cairn which is love.
And if you are not feeling the love of God,
loving you for just who you are right now
without having to do anything more,
if you are not experiencing that love in your heart,
you have to go back to the next cairn because we have gone off track.
We have to get back to humility
when we realize that I have made mistakes.
Yes, I’m a good person but I have also done bad things.
I have said things and done things I am not proud of
and I need God’s grace to stay on this trail of the Second Mountain.
And if we do not feel humble enough to say that
then we have to go back to the very first cairn
which is the trail head.
And that is self-awareness.
Am I even on the Second Mountain?
Or have I fooled myself into thinking that I am
and I am just still living on the First Mountain,
wandering around in a self-centered world,
thinking that I am somehow doing God’s work?
And I am doing nothing but serving myself?
My friends, I invite you to come to the Retreat;
to take these four and half hours over these next few days
and share the time with one another;
come to Church in person if you can.
If you cannot come in person, we have it on livestream.
And if you cannot do that because you have other commitments
that are beyond your ability to come
then I ask you to say a prayer for all who do come
that they may find their way to the Second Mountain again;
that they may find the right path and start to live life on fire again;
the fire of Christ Jesus and his Spirit in our hearts.
Come join us in prayer.
