Sermon to Acworth Congregational Church (note: I deliver sermons and generally follow the script but add to the sermon with examples).

Today’s gospel is the Q tradition of the temptation stories in the wilderness that appear in Matthew and Luke. It is chosen to begin the church’s season of Lent, a time of testing and spiritual growth.  I want to present Jesus’ wilderness ordeals from Episcopal Bishop Steven Charleston, who is also a member of the Choctaw nation. He, like a number of American indigenous people, who have converted to Christianity but also carried over their religious culture Into Christianity. Bishop Charleston understands Jesus’ baptism experience as a vision quest wherein Jesus emerged from the waters of his baptism experience a visionary experience of Spirit as Mother Dove landing on him and hearing God affirming, “You are my beloved child, in whom I am well-pleased.”

Then Jesus is led by the Spirit into the wilderness, the place of dried bones and deep mystery. Here the wilderness expresses the fragility of life. Both modern and ancient seekers have experienced the wilderness as the terrain of the soul, a place of solitude between oneself and God. For indigenous peoples, natural places of solitude reveal identity and mission of your life. The Spirit leads Jesus into the wilderness to forge his future ministry of God’s kin-dom and test Jesus for his struggle against empire

The wilderness was a place of trial where Jesus would confront the central issues of empire and domination. It is easy to contextualize the Q temptations as counter-narratives of Jesus’ ministry of God’s reign as alternatives to the oppressive Roman Empire and the coopted Temple. The wilderness was outside of imperial rule; it was not taxable as land asset. The three ordeals depict the diabolical nature of imperial Roman rule, which is committed to an oppressive rule to benefit the elite and to stress Jesus’ resistance to the empire.

In his own vision quest, Steven Charleston struggled with his own Choctaw spiritual heritage of his tribe’s assimilation into colonizing Euro-American Christianity with his tribal spirituality, and the horrific tribal history of the forced relocation from Mississippi to Oklahoma– the “Trail of Tears.” The colonial decisions of President Andrew Jackson led to deaths of thousands of Choctaw children, men and women. Their burial customs involved burial of their bones in a common tribal grave. Many who died on the “Trail of Tears” were unable to bury the dead appropriately. This is the legacy of colonial empires.

Through an inner spiritual voice, Steven Charleston was instructed to read the Matthew’s Q tradition of the wilderness temptations of Jesus to understand his two spiritual paths that he was interweaving, his own Native American spirituality and the American legacy of colonial Christianity. He blends his vision quest with Jesus’ temptation experience in the wilderness.

This is a fruitful interpretative context to explore Jesus’ vision quest and American Christian empire. He notes how spiritual power can be transmitted through elements of nature. Matthew presents Jesus going out into a lonely wilderness “in the spirit of lament, open to being tested and tempted in his weakness.” He is attended by others—prayers of the Baptist and his disciples, the beasts, and spirits, angels and demons. Charleston notes that the purpose of a vision quest is spiritual challenge and transformation, but his Choctaw Christianity does not hold to Christian notions of original sin and demonic spirits.

The three challenges are struggles for choosing self over the needs of others—the heart of Jesus’ notion of God’s kin-dom as compassionate love of others, not the violence of the Roman Empire. Indigenous people pay attention to the Earth, for the details of surroundings are full of the echoes of divine love and harmony.

In the first challenge, Jesus looked down to the ground.

He pays attention to the stones around him in the desert. And in his hunger, he imagines the stones as loaves of bread on the desert floor. What did the stones have to teach him? Are they physical nourishment for him alone or spiritual nourishment of a different kind? (Charleston, Four Visions)

According to indigenous culture, stones are the “oldest of living things,” and Jesus listened to his eldest stone relatives who told him that they embodied the One. They were not there for him alone, but for all people. The stones led him back to spiritual balance from self to the needs of others, thus Jesus professed, “the people do not live by bread alone but every word that comes from the mouth of God.”

Charleston writes,

The vision of the stones establishes from outset of his quest that he will be true to the oldest principle of the Native covenant. He will be grounded in the faith of the One God. He will not let any sense of self lure him away from his calling to be one with the People. Spiritual unity will be maintained and, therefore, spiritual equilibrium.

The second challenge is the sky vision that takes place on a mountain top, where Jesus glanced downwards Charleston notes that for humans this is the expansive lure of ego-centeredness, and Jesus stood in a small circle at the top of the at the edge of the mount, connected to the limitless sky. The Devil asked him to throw himself off the edge so that God might save him through the angels, preventing him from falling down and smashing on the Earth. For Charleston, there is an alignment of Mother Earth, the human tribe, and God. The challenge here is not about right relationship with God but primarily right alignment between the Earth, humanity, and God. Jesus chose balanced alignment. This alignment is reflected in his prayer “your will be done on earth and heaven.” Earth reflects the heavens.

Finally, while humans imagine the sky as limitless, the third challenge examines that “everything out there is up for grabs…The open sky, the endless expanse of creation, becomes not an object of wonder, but an object of plunder.” Bishop Steven Charleston reflects that this sky vision reflects the European colonists and white supremacy under the guise of the Doctrine of Discovery) that envisioned the endless resources of the North American continent in terms of profit, Jesus decides a question: “Is the right relationship to all that there is a question of stewardship or of ownership? Which will it be?” Jesus chose kinship with the Earth. Charleston summarizes the choice of the third challenge:

We are not to insult God by claiming that we can use creation for our own purposes., much less for profit. We are not the masters of all we see. We cannot swallow the universe into the stomach of our greed. We do not need more. The ethic implicit in a culture that understands family as a vast matrix of kinship is an ethic of sharing. The sky vision shows Jesus the fundamental value of native life: it Is to be lived in a spirit of stewardship. Human beings are entrusted with everything that they see. They are responsible for it. They are to be in awe of it. They are to delight in it.(Charleston)

Jesus learned the wisdom of indigeneity of his Hebrew ancestors in the Sinai wilderness and many indigenous peoples’ lifeways: that we do not own the Spirit’s Earth, for Earth is an unconditional gift. Psalm 24:1 says “The earth belongs to the Lord and all that is in it, and those who live in it.” The Choctaw, as well as indigenous peoples of North America, claim that the Earth is the Spirit’s gift to us. The Hebrews and indigenous peoples share a revealed wisdom—that the Earth and all that dwells on the planet are an original divine gift.

Jesus experienced God’s wild grace in the wilderness as compassionate concern for life, with unexpected and expansive love, desiring wholeness and flourishing of Earth creatures, and ever-present to suffering and death. Jesus incarnated those wilderness values and wisdom into his kin-dom message and ministry. The wilderness challenges gave voice to Jesus’ pain, struggle, and emotional turmoil as he underwent in Gethsemane as he prepared to die at the hands of the Roman empire and colluded Temple priesthood. Jesus learned his kin-dom lifestyle and ministry in the wilderness. Similarly, a Christian animist website concludes, ”Jesus was a wilderness person. Wild places were where he went to find solitude, pray, grieve, rest, escape arrest and often to teach. Places energized by God’s free and feral Spirit. Being, ‘with the wild animals’, examples genuine ‘nature connection’, plus the biblical principle that truly spiritual people live in harmony with wild nature. Jesus’ wilderness spirituality always trusts God for provision and protection.” (Christian Animism, http://www.christiananimism.com/thinking-animism/jesus-and-wild-nature/