Self-examination

So we have come to the beginning of Lent, the beginning of our 40 days of renewal and preparation for Easter. Over this season we have the opportunity to deepen our connection with God and one another, to really focus ourselves in a new way. Here at St Francis we’ll continue our journey through the Bible with our Thursday Bible studies, and we’ve made other resources available – links for daily meditation emails and information about charitable giving is in our weekly email as well as on our website. But our main focus together will be on developing our spiritual disciplines, practices that root us and ground us in our faith. Each Sunday I will preach about a different spiritual practice from our tradition and provide a how-to takeaway that you can use during the week. I invite you to try each one at least three times during the week, a little homework that I think will pay off for you and for our community. I’ll be available for checking in together the following Sunday at coffee hour, a place to ask questions and compare notes on how it went for you. This is an offering, not a have-to. But I encourage you to try. (All of these practices will also be linked on our website.)

The first practice is something called the Prayer of Examen, a way of praying that looks back over the day to see what has happened in our walk with God. Created by Ignatius of Loyola for his fellow Jesuits to use, it’s a process of reviewing our day in God’s presence, to begin to know ourselves better in our walk with God – the good parts, but also the temptations and where we fall short. Because all of us have those temptations, ways we struggle to keep our faith and trust in God.

We just heard the story of Jesus and his temptations, a reminder that every human being has to deal with such things. He is led into the desert wilderness for forty days and forty nights. He goes willingly, to prepare himself for his ministry, fasting and praying, vulnerable to the elements and forces. The temptations he faces will continue to plague him throughout his ministry. But through prayer and scripture, focusing his entire being on God and God’s will for him, Jesus is able to resist those temptations, pursue his ministry, save the world. A fitting inspiration for us to know our own temptations too.

Now, to be clear, this is not funny, sexy temptation, temptation doing a tango with a rose in its teeth and a tray of chocolates. This temptation Jesus meets is serious: the temptation to forget who he is, and whose he is. It’s the same temptation we face.

The Christian writer Henri Nouwen wrote a meditation on Jesus’ temptations, a talk he gave to clergy that was then turned into a little book, In the Name of Jesus. Nouwen said that the three temptations Jesus faces are the temptation to be relevant, the temptation to be spectacular, and the temptation to be powerful – things that every Christian must confront as well. We are always tempted to go along with the world and not with God, and to forget who we are in the process.

The first temptation is relevance – the devil suggests Jesus turn stones into bread. Do something useful, something everybody needs. Be productive, make something, prove your worth by contributing to the needs of the world. We get drawn into this with our capitalist mindset: instead of beginning with discerning God’s call to us, we let our decisions of career and jobs, our decisions of how we spend our time, even our decisions about ministry at church, be ruled by the god of productivity. Don’t just be there, do something! And so we are distracted from the nourishment we need, the foundation of our call from God. We might do the right things, but for the wrong reasons, and we lose ourselves in the process.

The second temptation is being spectacular. The devil tells Jesus to throw himself down from a high place and get God’s attention. We all crave attention. Draw a big crowd, be special. Burnish up your persona online, be liked, be praised. At its worst, this is narcissism – where we truly feel we will cease to exist without the constant affirmation of other people. In some form, we are all susceptible to it, and maybe especially in the age of social media. We are always aware of being regarded, hoping to be regarded, trying to be regarded, and to impress others who regard us. We forget who God created us to be, and try instead to be what we think others will like and applaud.

The third temptation is to power. Jesus is tempted by the devil to amass power over the whole world, if only he will worship the devil instead of God. For us, this temptation may be a true grasping after power, money, connections, influence in the world. But the temptation may also be that within us that seeks control in our lives, trying to ensure security and safety. A temptation that is rooted in fear. We try to hide the vulnerable parts of ourselves, the parts that aren’t sure or that need love and comfort. We fail to see that God’s mercy and love has more room to act when we acknowledge our own brokenness and need. We want to wall all this out with our shellacked selves.

Jesus says in response to these temptations from the devil, ‘You must worship the Lord your God and serve God alone.’ When our focus is on all these other things – what others think of us, whether we look successful and productive and efficient in the eyes of the world, whether we have more than other people – then our focus is not on God, the root and source of our being, in whose image we are made.

In the 12 steps of AA, the fourth step tells followers to make a ‘searching and fearless moral inventory’ of their lives – to go back through their lives and see where they have gone astray, where defects of character have damaged them and others – in short, where sin has had the upper hand. It is called a ‘searching’ inventory because it requires a full and careful look at ourselves to really see ourselves in all honesty. But it is also called a ‘fearless’ inventory – rather than being afraid of what we might see, or dominated by fear in our actions and lives, we claim fearlessness, realizing that things we had thought were huge and terrifying are not as bad in the light of day. As the Big Book says, ‘as we persist, a brand-new kind of confidence is born, and the sense of relief at finally facing ourselves is indescribable.’ I’ve often thought the 12 steps are something every one of us should follow through.

And that is what the Prayer of Examen leads us through each day. We spend time asking ourselves in prayer where we were close to God and where we were far away; where we gave the most love and where we withheld it; where we felt most alive and where we were unaware. Fifteen minutes at the end of each day. As a daily practice, it trains our hearts to notice, tuning us to better pick up the frequencies of our own spirits. It guides us to end each day in God’s presence, and to make a regular, full, loving inventory. And so knowing ourselves better, we become more in tune each moment with our temptations, our choices, and our walk with God. We can align ourselves more and more closely with God’s desires for us, when we know all the ways we are tempted to wander off.

Jesus tells us, worship and serve God alone: focus on God. We take our brokenness and our failure and all the ways we don’t get it right and we turn to God, asking for forgiveness and a new start. We take our gifts and strengths and the little moments of beauty each day and we turn to God, saying thank you. And God tells us in response, you are my beloved. That is who you are. You belong to me. That is whose you are. And so every day we begin again from that place, rooted in love and the power of God. Every day, we live anew.