"Detoxing Our Souls"
Beginning The Journey
Luke 4:1-13 (Detoxing Our Souls sermon series 2007)
First Sunday of Lent
February 25, 2007

Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the
wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing at all
during those days, and when they were over, he was famished. The devil said to him, “If
you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.” Jesus
answered him, “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone.’” Then the devil led him
up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And the devil said to
him, “To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me,
and I give it to anyone I please. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.” Jesus
answered him, “It is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’” Then the
devil took him to Jerusalem, and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to
him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written, ‘He will
command his angels concerning you, to protect you,’ and ‘On their hands they will bear
you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.’” Jesus answered him, “It is
said, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’” When the devil had finished every test,
he departed from him until an opportune time.

There is a haunting and painful scene in the movie THE SIXTH SENSE one that for me
was perhaps the most memorable and haunting of the whole movie.  For those of you
who haven’t seen the movie, the plot revolves around a boy who has been struggling
emotionally and the psychiatrist who is trying to help him.  During the movie, they
discover that this boy has a sixth sense—a sixth spiritual sense, really, that connects
him with those spirits in the afterlife who are struggling to have some sort of justice
done in this world, so that they can then go onto the next world.  Now, right here is
where I am going to reveal an important plot point, so if you haven’t seen it, this is the
place in the sermon where you put your hands over your ears and start humming softly
to yourself.  One of the spirits that is trying to contact this little boy is a young girl with a
drawn, stark face, who is terrifying him in efforts to reach out to him.  .  The psychiatrist
tells the boy to ask these spirits what they want from him rather than continuing his
present course of running in terror from them…and, so when he does this, rather than
scaring the boy, the little girl points him to a video tape from a hidden camera that this
little girl had positioned by her literal death bed, a video tape that is horrific to witness.  
The scene that is most haunting and painful, I think, is when that videotape reveals why
this little girl died—the video tape shows her mother, her sick, sad mother, putting
poison into her food, primarily, it seems, because of the attention she got as a mother
of a deathly ill child.  It’s haunting because all of us are horrified that a mother would do
such a thing to her child, especially for the incredibly selfish reason of trying to get
attention for herself.   No one expects to be poisoned, but certainly no one expects to
be poisoned by their own family, or by people they are supposed to be able to trust.  

But sometimes it happens, this poisoning of us by people that we love, and sometimes
by the larger culture in which we live.  And, of course, I don’t mean a literal poisoning,
and yet it is a poisoning that is perhaps more deadly than anything labeled with the
skull and cross bones, that universal symbol of poison.  Many of us have been fed
theological and emotional poisons for years by people who love us and care for us,
people who are our families and friends, people who honestly don’t know any better
because they themselves have spent years eating that the same spiritually poisoned
food that they’re giving to us or trying to give to us.  They—and a lot of us—don’t know
what spiritual food tastes like without the theological and emotional poisons—if arsenic
is all that we’ve known for seasoning, how are we to know the difference, really?  The
sad thing is that most of us go back to what we know, even if it is bad for us, and
because the spiritual and emotional poisons we’ve been fed are familiar to us, we keep
going back to that well that we know is killing us—you find that in families that have a
history of abuse, of all kinds.

But its not just the people we love that do the poisoning—its also the culture in which
we live, the family of humanity we find ourselves living amidst, the society that is also a
second set of parents to us.  We are fed by the television, by the things we read, by the
values we receive from a culture that seems to prize stuff more than humans, that
measures us by the stuff we gather beside us rather than the stuff that we give away to
others.  It’s the old sin of idolatry, really, the confusion between the creation and the
creator, and our inability to tell the difference between the two, and how it has led so
many of us astray, as we search for things, literally, “things,” to make us happy.  If I just
have more money, more land, more security, it will be OK—it give me what I want in my
life, right?  And if all this stuff can do that, it can root me in this world and provide me
safety I so want, and if it can do that, then surely it is worthy of my worship, my
allegiance, my wholehearted attention to the acquisition of yet more and more of this
stuff.  

Or maybe even church has poisoned us, our spiritual family, with its sometimes toxic
faith and beliefs…sometimes we’re fed what we’re told is “the” truth, and what we find
instead is a string of half-truths, if not out-right lies—truths that aren’t true for us, or not
true to our experience of ourselves or of God in this world.  Its hard for me to have
admit that on behalf of the church, because I am part of the institution that has
practiced that has sometimes practiced that dishonesty, but I think I need to say it,
because I too have been a victim of those half-truths, and sometimes outright lies,
because in my own life my experience didn’t match the prescription I was told to take.  
And yet, I stand here, sometimes poisoned, sometimes maybe poisoner, because I
know there is enough truth here, there is enough good food at the table, to make it
worth time and effort to journey together with others who may have some nutritious
food I would have never gotten without their presence beside me.  Still, we have to
acknowledge the deep wounds that even the church has inflicted on us, and say that
even this place of grace can be contaminated with the spiritual toxins.  

Jesus, in the passage that we are going to explore over the next 4 or 5 weeks, Jesus
knows what it means to be offered poison, what it means to be offered spiritual poison
that is disguised as food, disguised as something that is meant to give life, but actually
gives death, spiritually or emotionally, and sometimes even literally.  Jesus is in the
desert and Satan approaches him for a series of three temptations, temptations that will
be hard for Jesus to resist because he has been in the desert for forty days and he
was, as the Scriptures say, “famished”—forty days of no food are taking their toll and
the devil knows this.  And so Satan says to him, “Take this stone and make it into
bread—feed yourself, Jesus.  Prove to me and all the cosmic witnesses around us that
you are who you say you are, who you believe you are.”  And Jesus responds to the
devil by pointing out the not-so-obvious, I think.  “People don’t live by bread, food,
alone,” he says to Satan in response to the temptation to make bread out of stone, to
eat what was never meant to be eaten, to make life out of what is not life.

I think Jesus knew that if he took the devil up on his offer to make stone into bread, to
eat what was never meant to be eaten; he knew that the bread he tasted in his mouth
and on his tongue would turn to stone in his stomach.  I think Jesus knew the obvious—
that stones are not food, that it would become a poison in his stomach if took up the
devil on his offer to use his God-given power to make food out of stone.  It would have
bent him over in pain, this food that would have tasted so good on his tongue, but
would have become so heavy and painful in his stomach.  That is what spiritual poison
does to us—it offers an easy out that tastes sweet on the tongue, in the mouth, but
causes years and years of spiritual and emotional pain.  Jesus was being an offered an
easy out, something that would have put to rest his gnawing hunger—but it would have
killed him if he had chosen to take Satan up on his offer.  Spiritual poisons, spiritual
toxins, that we are offered as spiritual food, that look tasty and easy, will poison us in
the end, they will become rocks in our stomach no matter how good and how familiar
they may taste on our tongues.

So, what are spiritual poisons?  What are the spiritual toxins that some of us, many of
us, have been fed all our lives, sometimes by people that we love and care for, people
who love and care for us?  Well, they are different, I think, for everyone in this room.  
For some of us, they may be the toxins of self-hatred and guilt that seem to permeate
our lives, a sad gift from our parents or from our culture.  We were never good enough,
never smart enough, never made enough money, or some mistake in our lives is never
forgotten or forgiven, and we are haunted by that poison that says we’re always going
to be guilty, we’re always going to be failures, and there can be no redemption, nor
forgiveness for the mistakes we’ve made.  The toxin of guilt that we have been told is
food, the toxin of guilt that we have been told is a sign of what it means to be a good
Christian, sometimes rules our lives and the taste of that guilt is familiar, and now has
become such a part of our spiritual lives that we can’t imagine spiritual food without the
toxin of guilt, without a dusting of guilt, sprinkled on what seems like a tasty pastry.    

Or maybe our toxin is all about control, one of those poisons that Jesus was being
tempted by throughout this story—we must control ourselves perfectly, we must
manage perfectly—we must be perfect, but not only us, but everyone else in our lives,
and all of our lives, must be controlled, managed, and perfected.  We get to play God,
we actually take up Satan’s offer of control on the mountaintop, on top of the temple,
and we do what we what even God does not do, which is to manage and control every
little piece of our lives and OTHER people’s lives.  I mean, I understand this poison, and
I pull myself up to the bar too often to drink this poisoned cocktail—if I can just control
others, like I try to control myself, then surely I’ll be safe and secure.  All of it looks like
food or great drink, it has the texture of food and smoothness of drink, but all of these
things, they are full of toxins, they are empty and they leave us hungry for more, and so
we spend our lives piling up more ways to be fed in this world, spiritually and
emotionally, thinking somehow that it will stop the maddening hunger within our spirits.  
But, you know, we’re Christians, we weren’t meant to be safe and secure, the cross is
surely not about security, if it is about anything at all!  We were meant to take God up
on the wild and scandalous journey that God has called each of us on.  And that means
turning down the poison we know, the security we crave, for the real food, the real life,
that Christ is calling each of us to eat.

And the list of poisons that look and feel and taste like food can go on and on for most
of us.  You know your poison, so to speak, you know what feels comfortable to you,
what tastes like food, but what you also know is robbing you of life itself, that which is
slowly poisoning you from the inside out.  I know my poisons—and I have found myself
discovering more and more of those poisons as the years go by.  But Lent is that time
of the year when we get to see what poisons we’ve been dabbling in, what poisons are
robbing us of the Easter we will find only weeks from now on Resurrection Sunday.  You
and I, we are people, a wondrous and beautiful creation of God, truly destined for
goodness and grace, hope and peace—a people created for life.  We are NOT meant
to poison ourselves with the spiritual toxins that have been unknowingly and unwittingly
passed onto us as food by people that we love and people who love us, people who
didn’t know better in their own lives.  We are the people who must decide NOT to
mistake rocks for food, poison for nourishment, death for life.  We are people meant for
the bread of life, the bread of hope, the bread of joy, the One who will meet his death
on a cross, only to find life days away, bursting forth from a tomb.  But the work of
looking at our food pantries, of going through a spiritual detox over the next five weeks,
of discerning the difference between poison and food, the rocks from the bread, begins
now, during this season of Lent, so that we can be what God has truly meant for us to
be when our own Easter comes, when our own time of resurrection will be upon us.  
Amen and amen.