GENESIS 9:8-17

PSALM 25:3-9

1 PETER 3:18-22

MARK 1:9-13

Sermon – 3/9/03

Three Temptations

Prayer: The Collect for the First Sunday in Lent (p. 218 BCP)

We are, indeed, assaulted by many temptations; this is part of our situation as humans. Jesus likewise was assaulted by temptations “as we are, yet did not sin”, as we are reminded by the Proper Preface to the Eucharistic Prayer in Lent and by the Gospel readings on the First Sunday in Lent, which are always about Jesus’ experience of being tempted by Satan in the wilderness.

Most of us, however, will never spend forty days in any wilderness, nor would we face the huge temptations Jesus faced, nor would we (I suspect) recognize Satan (or one of his disciples) when they came to tempt us, as Jesus recognized him.

I believe that many of the temptations we face are subtle, but still potentially deadly. Many temptations are not to do things that are always bad, but are temptations to treat things which are of secondary importance or value as though they were of primary importance or value while marginalizing those things which really are of primary importance.

Let me use an analogy. Gravel works perfectly adequately as a parking area. The back lot here is gravel. But if someone proposed to build a house—or a church—using gravel as the only foundation and floor, everyone would think that person was nuts. And if we had, say, spread gravel here instead of cement, and poured cement in the back parking lot, it would be clear that our problem was not a shortage of cement or a shortage of money but a shortage of common sense of spectacular—indeed disastrous-proportions.

Yet this is what we are all tempted to do all the time with our lives—make peripheral things central, make unstable things the “foundations” of our lives, and make what should be our foundations way out at the edge of our lives.

This came home to me in a vivid way at, of all places, Diocesan Convention eight days ago. It was in fact both the most spiritual and the most uplifting diocesan convention I’ve been to in my 18 years in this diocese, and one of the factors which made it so was the two dramatic presentations by Frank Runyeon.

Frank Runyeon is an actor who made his reputation (and money) as an actor in such major daytime TV series as “Days of Our Lives” and “General Hospital”, so he knows Hollywood—and Hollywood’s values—very well from the inside. He also got his B.A. from Princeton in Religion and has a degree from General Seminary, the Episcopal seminary in New York, and he is currently touring the country doing extremely vivid and compelling one-man shows which are dramatic presentations from the Gospels. We at Convention saw “The Gospel of Mark” and “The Sermon on the Mount.” Our delegates Bill Eldred, Barbara Sanfilippo and Stephanie Carr can share their impressions with you if they wish, and I bought one of his videotapes for small group use.

But what made an even bigger impression on me was his discourse, which he called “Hollywood vs. Faith”. He had just shared Christ’s beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount with us—“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” and so forth, and pointed out how counter-cultural they were then, and still are.

Is this important? Well, according to one study, if a student makes it to high school graduation, she or he has completed about 15,000 hours of classroom time—and the average American teen will also have watched 18,000 hours of TV in her/his 18 years.

Runyeon then shared with us “Hollywood’s beatitudes” which exemplify Hollywood’s values, which flood out to us over the TV and movies and infect both America and much of the world, to such an extent that they are so much part of our lives that we may take them as foundational for how we live.

Hollywood beatitude #1: “Happiness comes from buying things.” This is, in my opinion, the opening words of “the American Creed” in 2003. To secular religion, happiness can be bought and in fact has to be bought—again and again and again. Happiness is always available at the next cash register—and the next, and the next, or at the next toll-free catalogue number, or the next “secure web site” to make purchases. And after each purchase, the mirage moves to the next purchase site, because materialism is a drug which never satisfies.

Runyeon quoted some study which said that the average American today will watch or hear 500,000 commercials before they turn 18. All the commercials basically say “Your happiness depends on buying this product.” And some people let their kids see hundreds of hours of TV a year and bring them to church two or three times a year and wonder why they don’t become devout Christians! It’s because America is not a Christian nation; America is a materialistic nation. How many news stories have we heard or read, Runyeon pointed out, which talked about how last Christmas was “a bad Christmas”? What made it “bad”? Retail sales were “lower than expected”. That’s enough for the news media to hijack our sacred holy day and announce “how disappointing Christmas has been.”

Baloney. Lots of people had a great Christmas, and great or wonderful or not, it was Christ’s birthday, and there is never anything “bad” about that.

How can we be “in the world but not of the world” which has such values? Spend time with Jesus every day: read from a Gospel (use Forward Day by Day if you like), pray and listen to his guidance for you. His presence is priceless. Cultivate a hunger for Christ’s presence, not a hunger for the next cash register.

Now, notice neither Frank Runyeon nor I ever said money is bad. It isn’t. The Bible says that “the love of money is the root of all evil,” not money itself. Money is a necessary tool; but if we glorify the tool above the work of art that each of us is, made in God’s image, we’ve gone wrong. Putting money at the center of our lives is like using gravel to build a “foundation”: one rain storm and we find out what a bad idea that was.

“Hollywood beatitude #2”, Runyeon says, is especially (but not solely) tempting to girls and women. This bogus beatitude says, “Happiness comes from being sexy.”

Now, please note that I’m not saying sex is bad (it can be wonderful) or that trying to look your best is bad (that’s good.) Rather, trying to look and act like someone else’s ever-changing idea of “sexiness” is the road to anguish, sleepless nights and empty pocketbooks for millions of people.

Watching TV leads one to the conclusion that, especially for women, appearance is what matters and the appearance must be youth and slenderness. (Frank Runyeon told us that the TV camera adds 15 lbs. to a person’s appearance so that—in my words—people on TV who look slender are actually scrawny and people who look scrawny are actually emaciated.)

So what we have in this country is an epidemic of anorexia (especially among white teen-age girls) on the one hand, and an epidemic of obesity on the other. Something is seriously wrong in this, the richest country in the world.

Oh, and let’s not forget that watching TV and movies would lead a person to conclude that promiscuous pre-marital or extra-marital sex is “normal” in every sense of that term. Actually, it isn’t and is becoming less so—but TV and movies push people’s perceptions and their behavior to assume that, thus degrading themselves and others.

In reality, a well-grounded feeling of “sexiness” can only come first and foremost from within a person, and secondarily from the one other person, if any (that’s your spouse for married folks) whose opinion matters. The “look” that the editors of Cosmo, GQ, Teen People or whatever are pushing this month is not something to build a person’s life around!

The third “Hollywood beatitude” Frank Runyeon described as being particularly tempting to guys. This bogus beatitude is “Happiness comes from being #1.”

How much energy do we spend on one-upsmanship? I remember the thrill I got a few years ago when I, in my Honda Civic, passed a Porsche on the road. Of course, the Porsche was making a right turn at the time…but still I passed it. Whoopee. For years many people have put climbing up the corporate or bureaucratic ladder ahead of all other goals in life. Since 9/11, however, some people have been passing on promotions which involve relocations because the move would have been too negative for their family and personal life. The article in the Business Section of The Star Ledger which revealed this lambasted the trend, warning that this boded ill for the American economy if people were not always willing to put their jobs first in their lives.

Really?

Clearly, these are not just Hollywood’s bogus beatitudes, but those of many Americans who are using gravel for the foundations of their lives and urging us to do the same, urging us to construct our entire lives around buying things, trying to be “sexy” as this is defined this week, and “being #1”—which probably involves a lot of believing in bogus beatitudes #1 and #2. Hollywood values truly are good for “the back lot”—to park on occasionally, but not to build our personal altars on, not to be our collection of sacred texts, not to be the words we live on day by day.

Yet we are in that world, as are many people we see every day, but we need to resist the temptation to live by those values, or we will be washed away with the gravel when the rains come.

Instead, let us remember that we are priceless children of God, created by God in God’s image, that through our own fault we were imprisoned by our making the center of our lives what was peripheral, and that we are offered liberation by Christ’s self-sacrificing love. Therefore we all have limitless spiritual potential and each of us has unique other potential thanks to God, not thanks to anything we buy, what we look like or where we stand in what transient pecking order.

So let us resist the temptation of living by the bogus beatitudes, and instead live by the real ones, given us by the One who can really deliver blessing and true happiness.

(The Rev.) Francis A. Hubbard

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church