Drawn In: Hover

Chapter 4 of the Gospel of Luke begins, “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.”

For centuries, Christians have taken this scripture as a basis for their own spiritual practice of fasting in order to feel closer to God. I’m not particularly good at fasting, especially not from food. Neither my body nor my mind takes to it very well at all. But I can appreciate the idea that stepping back from something for a while might help us feel better, feel closer to God, and even feel ready for some new creative undertaking.

Over long years of practice, I have learned to love sitting in silent contemplative prayer as a means of stepping back from the torrent of my own thoughts. In the silence, I have learned to seek the presence of God that remains beyond those thoughts, like the presence of the clear blue sky behind the clouds. I have also known the renewal that comes just from resting from certain things, like how much difference a lunch break, a sabbath day, a week of vacation, or a whole summer off can make. And, since I’ve been a child, I’ve enjoyed the strange sensation of pushing my arms out to either side against a narrow door jamb as far and hard as I can for as long as I can until finally stepping out and letting my arms raise up effortlessly in sweet relief.

But Jesus didn’t just fast in today’s story. He was also tempted by the devil. Three times the devil tempted Jesus to throw off his human finitude and to use the ultimate cosmic power that was his birthright. Three times Jesus refused.

Today the world is still full of temptations for us to try to outrun our own human finitude. I often think there’s some arrogance and greed to our striving to pretend we’re anything we’re not, but I also know that pushing past our own human limits often comes from a place of noble intention.

The world is full of sorrow and heartbreak. We don’t have to look far in the news or down the block to find something we’d give anything to fix. Indeed, so many of us would very much like to fix everything.

Don’t misunderstand me. I do believe that when we work together we can do a lot of good. With God’s help, we can move mountains and do things once thought impossible. But we, personally, can’t do everything, as much as we may be tempted to believe and to act otherwise.

I’m still fond of those oft-quoted lines from last century’s Trappist Monk Thomas Merton’s book Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, in which he writes, “To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. The frenzy… neutralizes [our] work…” he continues. “It destroys the fruitfulness of [that]…work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.” 

I love and hate those lines of Merton wisdom because I find them both so freeing and so convicting. Maybe some of you do, too. Maybe that’s also why I was so taken with the story of Simone Biles from the last summer Olympics. In case you somehow missed it, the unmatched queen of gymnastics struggled uncharacteristically in her events in Tokyo and revealed that she was experiencing “the twisties,” a very dangerous condition that sometimes afflicts gymnasts and keeps them from accessing their highly refined sense of orientation to their bodies in space.  

What she did next shook the orientation of athletes to the long idolized code of honor in suffering. When Simone Biles pulled herself from events in the 2021 Olympics, rather than risk doing significant harm to herself, she told everyone watching, a different kind of story– a story in which even the gravity-defying greatest gymnast of all time can still respect her own human limitations.

Two years later and two weeks ago at the Now Centre in nearby Hoffman Estates, Biles came soaring back in her first competition after a significant hiatus from the sport. She even performed with success a fourth unprecedented move in women’s gymnastics that will forever bear her name once she successfully performs it in international competition. When interviewed, Biles was quick to credit her successful return to all the mental health support she sought and to the step back she took when she did.

I don’t know that anyone here is planning to make a run at competing in the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, but I do know that all of us are endowed by our Creator with our own creative spark. All of us here are creating something even now whether that is the art of a new floor routine to be performed on a world stage, the art of a carefully cultivated classroom, the art of a well-cared for relationship, the art of a well-lived life, or any other creative thing.

What greater joy and justice may we co-create with God when we allow ourselves to be drawn in not by the temptation of being everything to everyone but by doing well the few things that are ours to do?

What greater joy and justice may we co-create with God when we allow ourselves to step back for a moment and get some dearly needed perspective on our lives?  

Personally, I am too often not nearly as good as Jesus was in this story at knowing, naming, and respecting my limitations. And I know Merton’s not wrong about the violence part. Because more often than I’d like, my lack of limit-setting has caused harm to myself or others.

Maybe there’s something to that big pause Jesus took when he even let himself be tested some. Maybe we, too, can learn more to step back, to take a look at the big picture, and to get our priorities straight before doing, giving, or creating.

Maybe we could even think of this as a practice of holy “hovering” or taking a bird’s eye view before jumping into action.   

It is a dove after all in which the Holy Spirit descends in bodily form at Jesus' baptism in the chapter of Luke just before the one we read today, signifying Jesus’ identity as God’s divine child. Quickly then the story is interrupted by a long list of Jesus’ human heritage as if to underline the belief that Jesus is both human and divine at the same time.

We’re not Jesus, but I do think we’re also beloved children of God, infused with the divine spark of creativity unleashed on Creation by the Creator. We’re also so very clearly human, too.

If Jesus paused to take time with God and to know his own limitations before allowing himself to be drawn deeply to the work of loving people and setting the world more free, then there is no shame in our learning to pause humbly before God’s creative call, too.                 

Thank God it is so. Amen.