To the Test

Luke 4:1-13

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

9 March 2024

            “What we do as individuals and as a species in the coming decade may very well help to determine the ultimate destination of humanity as a whole for the rest of time!”  So declares Alvin Graylin in his book Our Next Reality on how artificial intelligence is going to reshape the world.  He even says that the next few decades “will likely be the most critical years in human history.”

            Now, one never knows exactly how to take a claim like this.  We humans have a tendency to always see the immediate time we are living in as the critical period.  I’m sure that’s how it felt when our grandparents were confronting fascism.  And I know it’s how folks talked about our fears of nuclear war in my childhood.  Climate change also makes our current age seem critical.

            But even if Alvin Graylin overstates the claim, other voices I listen to, more sober ones not involved in the tech industry, are beginning to make similar claims.  Just this week on his podcast, Ezra Klein, for instance, talked about the AI revolution likely coming now in 2-3 years.  He said, “I think we are on the cusp of an era in human history that is unlike any of the eras we have experienced before. And we’re not prepared in part because it’s not clear what it would mean to prepare.”

            If the next few years will be so critical to humanity, why?  What will make it so critical?  Here’s Alvin Graylin again—“The coming decades will bring about a dramatic change in what it will mean to be human, as well as our relationship with each other and the way society functions.”  Ah, yeah, that sounds pretty important.

            In other words, we are living through a time of testing, a time that raises fundamental questions about what it means to be human.

            Which is also what Jesus was doing.  Raising questions about what it means to be human. 

            Here’s Jesus scholar James Breech—“What Jesus conveys is an expanded sense of what it means to be a self.  There is a transformation onto a new level of being, where identity is constituted not by law but by awareness of another’s claims.”

            Our Lenten them is “The Lives of Others” (which is only tangentially a reference to the great German film by that name).  We’ll be exploring how Jesus invites us into a new mode of human being in which we live with open-ended stories that teach us how others permeate our lives.  The chancel decorations, for example, are a representation of the idea that the story never ends.  I’ll be unpacking all of those ideas in more detail over the next few Sundays.

            James Breech says that Jesus, both in the stories he told and in the story about him which we read in the Gospels, teaches us that there are no clearcut endings.  Breech writes, “in real life there never is a point at which the meaning of our experience becomes clear.”  So we can’t operate with certainty, human life is always in flux. 

            Which we can find unsettling, of course.  But into that discomfort comes Jesus who demonstrates that we really find our sense of self, how we truly understand our humanity and who we are in the ways our lives interact with others. 

            The new level of being human that Jesus invites us to is this expanded self where other’s claims upon us are what constitute who we are.

            And we see that here in the temptation story, which is the standard Gospel reading for the First Sunday of Lent.  The commentaries I read point out that this story is less about the temptations themselves and more about how Jesus responds.

            In each of these temptations Jesus is confronted with a decision about what kind of person he is going to be.  Each time Satan offers him a choice that’s really about what a good human life is.  And what God wants for us.

For instance, should Jesus focus upon alleviating immediate human suffering and turn stones into bread?  Notice that this isn’t a bad thing.  The temptations aren’t necessarily enticements to something bad.  They even show how our choices that include some goodness can distract us from who God desires us to be.

Should he gain earthly power so that he might fix all the problems of the world?  Should he compel God to act dramatically on his behalf, wowing people with spectacles?  This would be the Marvel Superhero version of the Jesus story.

No, God doesn’t want Jesus to operate in any of these ways.  Even though each of these paths seems easier.  What God wants is for Jesus to operate through the long, hard work of love.  In which we treat everyone with respect and mercy.  And, as we can see today, that work is on-going.  And as that work gets more difficult, we become tempted to take the easy routes of earthly power, grand spectacles, or fixing the immediate problems instead of the deeper issues.

The temptation story invites us to consider what type of persons are we going to be?

            So, maybe humanity will soon face a crisis of what it means to be human, brought on by artificial intelligence.  But we’ve already lived through a crisis that required us to face these very questions.

            This coming week marks the fifth anniversary of when everything shut down because of the Covid-19 pandemic.  Five years.  Really.  That moment is now moving into the historical past.  And we are still trying to understand what happened and its after effects upon us.

            This last week, the New York Times produced a sobering piece by David Wallace-Wells entitled “How Covid Remade America.”  In detail he described the multitude of ways that the pandemic has changed us.  He wrote, “We tell ourselves we’ve moved on and hardly talk about the disease or all the people who died or the way the trauma and tumult have transformed us. But Covid changed everything around us.”

            And he does not think it changed us for the better.  He summarizes, “America is a harsher place, more self-interested and nakedly transactional. We barely trust one another and are less sure that we owe our fellow Americans anything — let alone the rest of the world.”

            Here are some of the lasting effects he lists:

• It turned us into hyper-individualists. By locking us into our private spaces and viewing everyone else as a potential threat, we became solipsistic and our moral horizons shrank.
• This generated a new age of social Darwinism, in which surviving was viewed as a sign of merit. He writes, what “might have become an object lesson in human frailty and interdependence. Instead, we pointed fingers at one another, scapegoating so as to avoid acknowledging that the threat was beyond our control.”
• Another result he sees is that our faith in public health has been broken. And right now we are watching it being dismantled.
• He says it shattered our cities and disordered society. That year homicides jumped thirty percent.  Alcoholism increased.  As did homelessness.  And pedestrian deaths in traffic accidents. 
• It also destabilized and redrew our politics.
• He writes that world powers became more mercenary, turning inward to care for their own and reducing their commitments to helping people across the globe.
• He even thinks that the backlash to progressive ideas of race and gender flow from the Right’s anger at the behavioral restrictions imposed in 2020. Because that created a fight over what is virtuous behavior and what counts as merit in our society.
• He lists all sorts of other practical effects I haven’t gone into, such as effects on the workplace, education, etc.

After coming through the pandemic, you think we might be celebratory and triumphant, instead, he writes:

the world does not seem now more buoyant or full of hope, but abrasive and rapacious and shaped nearly everywhere by a barely suppressed rage. We have still not reckoned with all we have lost.

            Of course, it didn’t need to be this way.  Our social response to the pandemic could have been a moment of increased solidarity, and it truly was at the very beginning.  We could have come together to face our problems.  Celebrated our scientific and medical achievements.  Grown individually and as a society.  Learned better how to help each other, maybe even made radical changes to a more just and compassionate social order.  It could have been a moment of positive transformation to something better.  Something more like what Jesus modeled and God dreams for us.

            And I do think we viewed it that way here at First Central.  Part of our success in navigating that difficult time and the years of coming back together was because we viewed it as an opportunity for genuine spiritual and personal growth and the strengthening of community. 

            Humanity lived through a time of testing, when we were repeatedly faced with choices about what it means to be a human being and what type of person we are going to be.  Sadly, when we look around us five years later, we see how poorly humans as a whole failed the test.

            This week I looked again at a book that had been very helpful to our ministry here back in 2022—Doing Theology in Pandemics, edited by Zachary Moon.  One of the strongest pieces in that collection was by the great theologian Rita Nakashima Brock.  She wrote about how the pandemic was apocalyptic in the Biblical sense of unveiling truths.

            Brock wrote, “The habits, rituals, and meaning systems of life have been thrown into considerable chaos . . . as we have sought to hold some order and purpose to life, we may have felt our humanity, or our confidence in the humanity of others, slipping way.”

            She believes we all experienced moral injury.  Moral injury is a term that first appeared in treating the trauma of combat veterans.  The injury arises when we cannot integrate our experiences into our meaning-making systems.  The more empathetic, idealistic, service-oriented you are, the more vulnerable you are to moral injury.  She writes, “When chaos strikes and they cannot see how to do the right thing or doing the right thing is no longer possible, they can be devastated by relentless failure.”

            Side note.  Last Sunday the columnist David Brooks used the term moral injury to describe what he is feeling right now as he watches the nation he loves become more cruel.  That observation really resonated with me.

            According to Rita Nakashima Brock, what we experienced during the pandemic and what we learned about each other and our institutions, unmoored us from our previous understandings and left us feeling helpless about what to do.  She summarized her thoughts, “We experienced collective moral injury that upended our habits, our rituals, our national myths and illusions, and our ability to trust each other.”

            She was hopeful that from that experience we actually had “the best possibility in our lifetimes for deep social and political change.”  David Wallace-Wells’s piece in the Times suggests we missed the opportunity and failed the test.

            And, if you believe the AI folks, another test of our humanity is upon us.

            But, of course, the tests of our humanity arrive every day.  Are we kind to strangers we encounter?  Caught in traffic, does our rage overcome us?  Do we put down our phones and spend more time in genuine human connection?

            In her commentary on the story of Jesus’ temptation, Kimberly Van Driel writes, “The devil presents wants as needs, falsehoods as truths, distrust as faith.”

            These temptations confront us every day.

            But, there’s good news!  We can change!  We can decide to do something different.  To become something new.  As my colleague Jim Newby declares, “The most amazing thing about the human personality is that it can be changed, transformed, altered, and redirected.”

            Even better is that God promises to be with us through the transformation.

            So, what’s your response?  What kind of human being do you want to be? 

            Are you ready to trust in God and follow Jesus?  Are you ready to be transformed into a new mode of human being? 

            Because that’s what Lent and the journey to Holy Week and Easter invite us to, every year.  The opportunity to experience spiritual and personal transformation.  And it begins with examining ourselves, honestly.  Confessing our sins, admitting our failures, becoming aware of our brokenness.

            But don’t worry.  Jesus shows us the path to new life.  He invites us into a story that never ends, in which to achieve our full humanity, we must invest ourselves in the lives of others.