When Emily spoke last week about not wanting to spend a season preaching on desire, I was right there with her. In other churches, that might not have been true; I’ve spent a lot of time thinking and writing on desire over the past decade-plus, in relation to modern culture and in relation to the Sermon on the Mount, and you’ll get a bit of that in a few minutes. As a matter of intellectual engagement, I’m comfortable with the subject area, and I think we have to be if we want our community and our culture to hear the gospel of Jesus Christ as good news. But the pesky little thing about this congregation is the long-ingrained expectation and understanding that merely intellectual engagement isn’t enough. No, if you’re going to preach here, you have to be willing to lay your soul on the line. A lot has changed in VSF over the decade we’ve been here, and the seven years or so I’ve been preaching here with some frequency, but that expectation hasn’t changed—in some small part because Tim Poyner ground it into me so thoroughly that I bring it with me into the pulpit whenever I open the Word with you of a Sunday.
And in the light of that expectation . . . yeah, when Emily was singing the melody, I was harmonizing right along on the bass line. I told Phil Whisler after the service last week my “truth about God,” as Jamie Winship would put it, is that God has spent most of a decade trolling me. God would trail opportunities in front of me until I couldn’t help myself but ask for them—and as soon as I started asking, he would slam the door. Maybe you think I’m making it up, or I’m being overdramatic, but here’s two things.
One, that pattern repeated over and over and over—I lost count of how many times.
Two, God sort of confirmed to me that that was what he was doing. There was an opening in a church in southern Oregon in 2017—I hadn’t even been through that cycle many times yet—which I knew immediately would never give me even a first look. I decided to ignore it to protect my heart. I heard God tell me to send them my stuff and pursue the opportunity. I told him no, I wouldn’t, it would be pointless, I was never going to be taken seriously there. God didn’t disagree, he just commanded me to open my heart to hope even knowing that hope would be quickly crushed. And so I did, and I was right: I never even received an acknowledgement of my e-mail. For some reason, I needed to make the deliberate, intentional choice to expose my heart in that way, to open myself wide to the hurt of being rejected unseen instead of avoiding it and protecting myself from it. I still don’t understand why . . . but that wasn’t the last time.
For the past ten years, my almost unbroken experience of asking God anything in prayer has been his refusal. I have more than once pulled Cazaril’s line from The Curse of Chalion—a novel I’ve quoted occasionally here; Cazaril is the main character and viewpoint character—that “I do not hate anyone enough to inflict the results of my prayers on them.” And yet, God has kept me praying; and whenever my capacity for hope has died, God has picked his time and brought it back to life. I’ve asked him many times to strip me of all earthly desires so I wouldn’t hurt anymore, but he’s always refused; and not only that, he has led me to the point where giving me everything I desire in this life would violate the basic laws of physics. Not only would I have to be in multiple places at once, so would a bunch of other people, and that’s just not on.
So . . . yeah. Dive into all that? Sign somebody else up, please. But, as I’ve quoted the late, great Rich Mullins before, “It don’t do to fight with God because he always wins.” And the truth is, if it’s critically important for us to grapple with the subject of desire if we’re to have any hope of saying anything meaningful to anybody—and it is—we have to face our own desire head-on, whatever the load of grief and hurt it may be trucking along with it. If we don’t, we will never understand either the world or ourselves.
That’s not really new, either; it’s probably always been true. I do think it’s truer now in Western culture than it has been in most places in the world for a millennium or two. President Eisenhower said in 1952, between his election to the White House and his inauguration, “our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is”; his sole concern was “it must be a religion with all men being created equal.” We’re seeing now where that understanding leads. Our civil religion is increasingly pagan, and at the head of the pantheon—like the Greeks with Zeus and Hera—stands a power couple, Desire and Identity. They get along much better than Zeus and Hera did, though, as they jointly uphold the central tenet of this civil religion: you are your desires.
The political enactment of that civil religion is what the theologian, political philosopher, and essayist R. R. Reno has called “the Empire of Desire.” Our governing elites, political, cultural, and intellectual, increasingly enshrine the primacy of identity and desire; the chief difference between the leaders of our two primary political tribes is who they side with when desires and identities clash, as they inevitably do. All other claims and arguments must bow to identity and desire. That said, this is only the most obvious way in which politics in Western culture is the politics of desire, in part because the desires we know we’re arguing about are only the most obvious ones. I referenced Lois McMaster Bujold’s novel The Curse of Chalion earlier; this is my other favorite of her books, her science-fiction novel Memory. This is Simon Illyan, the former head of Imperial Security, talking to the main character, Miles Vorkosigan:
[The first part of the scene is here]
“Money, power, sex . . . and elephants.” We argue about the first three ad nauseam; I think we need to be intentional about looking for the elephants in the culture, if you will. One big one is the desire for belonging. This has always been important, and there have always been misfits; I was one, all the way up until I started to find my people in high school and had friends to be a misfit with. Thing is, though, it’s a lot more threatening and precarious to be a misfit than it used to be. There were a lot more guardrails and handrails and support structures available 40 years ago than there are now—that’s a huge topic that has been explored by folks like Robert Putnam, Charles Murray, and R. R. Reno again. At the same time, our educational system has increasingly become about “getting a good job”—which is to say, it’s more and more a servant of the economy, the purpose of which is to prepare serfs for our major corporations.
That creates a situation in which a lot of people in this country, including a large percentage of our youth, see no realistic path to winning at life. Faced with that, a lot of them withdraw into dissipation, the pursuit of whatever source of cheap stimulation and pleasure seems best to them. Others respond by embracing another desire: the desire to be seen and heard. 250 years ago, even if it was limited to white male adult citizens, our political system was at least designed to ensure that all of them were seen and heard. The great political problem of our age is that our country has vastly outgrown that system and is now far too big for that to work. The predictable result is that people with money, power, and/or elite abilities get seen and heard while everyone else gets missed. Out of that “everyone else,” those who don’t accept it go looking for a remedy. That explains the meteoric and deeply weird political career of H. Ross Perot; and if Perot was the antitype, Donald J. Trump is the type. Pro-Trump or anti-Trump, we have to reckon with this reality: his political ascendancy is powered by the furious desire of millions of people screaming into the void, demanding to be seen.
If that sounds bleak to you, well, I’ve said more than once I don’t do hope wonderfully well. But you know what else was bleak? Life in Israel under the rule of Rome and the governance of their violent, amoral, ruthless, vicious, paranoid, and terrifyingly competent ally, Herod the Great. And yet it was there and then, in the blackest night, to a pair of exhausted, small-town, blue-collar migrants, that the hope of the world was born. I think I can safely say Herod the Great would make mincemeat of our entire ruling class, given half an opportunity; so if God could do that, then, we should not lose heart. We just need to change our perspective.
And so, by a long and wandering route, I’ve worked my way around to our Scripture this morning, Psalm 146, which I believe offers us the corrective and the curative for our situation. The root of the problem to which the psalmist speaks is that our love is corrupted and twisted by our desires. We put our hope in the fulfillment of our desires, and so we look to this world for that fulfillment. That leads us to put our trust in human beings who seem to have the power to make that fulfillment possible; and that, as the psalmist tells us, is profoundly misguided.
Now, let’s pause a minute here to unpack what I said about the problem. We have a useful diagnostic tool called the Seven Deadly Sins, which we might better think of as seven great roots of temptation. The list was codified in the sixth century by Pope Gregory the Great, but he didn’t invent it; he revised a list which was created by the fourth-century monk and theologian Evagrius Ponticus. The seven on which the pope settled are pride, envy, wrath, greed, gluttony, lust, and one which in English is usually called sloth. The interesting thing about these seven is they can all be characterised as sins of corrupted love, in one of three ways. First, there are the sins of distorted love, where love of self goes bad: these are pride, envy, and wrath. Second, there are the sins of disordered love, where we love the gifts above or instead of the giver: greed, gluttony, and lust. I think if you look around the landscape, you can see many ways in which these are driving people to put their trust in princes.
And what of the seventh? Well, that’s one of my besetting struggles with sin; it’s the sin of defective love. It can result in sloth, yes, not out of laziness but out of the sense that nothing is worth doing because none of it will matter anyway. It can also drive hyperactivity and workaholism out of a crawling need for stimulation and the desire to feel something, anything, that will make it worth the time and effort to breathe. It is the sin of not caring enough about anything; its ultimate expression is despair; and if you were here during COVID, you might remember I did a video on it: its name is acedia. I had to laugh when Emily brought it up last week, because this is an old and intimate enemy for me, and I know it well.
For us, at least, I think acedia might be the most important of these to grapple with because it shows us two important truths. One, being without desire would not be a good thing. Desire, like anger, is a driver that gives us the energy to change and to bring change; we need them, properly harnessed. They can do great damage when unleashed, but that doesn’t make them bad in themselves, it means we need to not make idols of them. Two, desire run rampant is ultimately self-consuming, because acedia is where you end up when your desires have burned out your love. If you’re free to do whatever you want, are you in control, or is want? True freedom is the freedom not to do what you want, because then you are making the decisions, not your desires; then you can choose to act in keeping with a deeper desire which is not urgent in the moment. You can choose to do what you know will be best. Without that freedom, you end up flogged to exhaustion, seeing no point in anything because nothing has satisfied you.
So we have these various directions in which our desires can corrupt our love, leading us to seek our good in the world around us, which causes us to put our trust in human leaders to bring about our good; and to that, Psalm 146 holds up a big sign reading STOP. Stop, don’t go there. Put not your trust in princes—why? Because they’re bad? No; some of them are good, as humans go. Don’t put your trust in the good ones either, because even they can’t save you. Even the best of them die, and all they create eventually dies.
And note, that warning is bracketed with this: “I will praise the Lord all my life; I will sing praise to my God as long as I live. . . . Blessed are those whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord their God.” Again, why? The rest of the psalm tells us. One, God’s faithfulness is not time-limited, he is faithful forever, because he’s the one who made all that is. That might seem an odd argument, but it means two things. First, God has the power to be faithful because he has the power to accomplish whatever he sets out to do, because he made all of it. Second, God has the will to be faithful because he made this world and he wants the work of his hands to be what he intended it to be, so he’s going to make it right. As such, he both can and will be faithful forever. Two, look at the specific forms this takes: God enacts justice for the exploited and oppressed; he protects the vulnerable and provides for those in need; and he heals the wounds this world inflicts. And three, again, God is faithful forever, because he does not die, and therefore his plans do not die, nor do they fail.
This underscores the point that for all the harm our unrestrained desires do and all the dark places to which they take us, desire is not the problem. The problem is the mangled and twisted reality of our world which distorts, disorders, and defiles our desires. We were created to desire the good, the true, and the beautiful; to expand on what I said a few moments ago, in this fallen world we need desire to drive us toward holiness just as we need anger to drive us toward justice. For all that both can drive us in exactly the wrong direction, we will not have the energy or the thirst for holiness or justice without them. The opposite of desire and anger both is not goodness in any form, it is indifference, and mark this well: those who are indifferent toward God are farther from God and harder to reach than those who are hostile to him.
Our desires don’t need to be repressed and condemned but healed and purified; as Kent Denlinger taught me to say, we need to move “from condemnation to curiosity.” As part of that, we need to be willing to learn that our true desires are not what we think they are, to discover that we don’t know what we want as well as we think we do, and to have our experience of our desires change. We need to submit them to God, not demand God submit to them; we need to lay them at his feet and let go, not because they are too great and powerful to bear but because they are too small and weak to serve their purpose. As C. S. Lewis has George MacDonald say in The Great Divorce, [104]
Ultimately, where do our desires truly point us? Where do we really want to go, at the truest level of our souls? To the mountain of our joy; to the city of our peace. You know, the way a lot of people and churches preach the Bible, you’d think it’s mostly about condemning sin and beating up on sinners, but that’s not true at all. As biting as the scriptural critique of human sin can be, that’s because sin destroys what is good, and the good is ultimately what Scripture is on about. Over and over, it gives a vibrant, expansive, abundant vision of human flourishing–and the flourishing of the whole world–almost beyond imagination. One example of many is another of the lectionary texts for this morning, Isaiah 35:
The desert and the parched land will be glad;
the wilderness will rejoice and blossom.
Like the crocus, 2 it will burst into bloom;
it will rejoice greatly and shout for joy.
The glory of Lebanon will be given to it,
the splendor of Carmel and Sharon;
they will see the glory of the Lord,
the splendor of our God.
3 Strengthen the feeble hands,
steady the knees that give way;
4 say to those with fearful hearts,
“Be strong, do not fear;
your God will come,
he will come with vengeance;
with divine retribution
he will come to save you.”
5 Then will the eyes of the blind be opened
and the ears of the deaf unstopped.
6 Then will the lame leap like a deer,
and the mute tongue shout for joy.
Water will gush forth in the wilderness
and streams in the desert.
7 The burning sand will become a pool,
the thirsty ground bubbling springs.
In the haunts where jackals once lay,
grass and reeds and papyrus will grow.
8 And a highway will be there;
it will be called the Way of Holiness;
it will be for those who walk on that Way.
The unclean will not journey on it;
wicked fools will not go about on it.
9 No lion will be there,
nor any ravenous beast;
they will not be found there.
But only the redeemed will walk there,
10 and those the Lord has rescued will return.
They will enter Zion with singing;
everlasting joy will crown their heads.
Gladness and joy will overtake them,
and sorrow and sighing will flee away.
We keep trying to scale Mount Zion and build the city of our peace on our own, and we can’t do it. We need to lay down our messianic politics and stop looking for political saviors; it cannot bear the weight, and no human politician can meet that expectation. Yes, there are issues in our politics which are serious and important, but we take it all too seriously because we think the whole weight of those issues rests on our shoulders. As a result, we lose perspective, we lose our sense of humor, we lose friends, and we lose community, undoing all we’re trying to do. We keep slipping into the belief that it’s on us to build the city of our peace, and it just isn’t. The psalmist says to us, “Put not your trust in human messiahs—they will inevitably fail and disappoint you”; and he reminds us that what we cannot do, God has done.
In this season of Advent, let us refocus our desires—or, rather, allow God to do so in us—and let us recalibrate our waiting. Let us give up the hope of finding a messiah in the ballot box and look instead to the one true Messiah, who has come and is coming again. How? First of all, above all, look to his table.
Here we see the physical remembrance of all Jesus did for us in his time on Earth: he came into this world to share our life with us, in all our joys and sorrows, pleasures and pains, hopes and fears; he died for us to pay in full the penalty for our sin; he rose again to conquer sin and death; and by his death, resurrection and ascension he has established a new and eternal covenant of grace and reconciliation so that we might be accepted by God and never forsaken.
Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.
Here we touch the physical reminder that Jesus gathers us to this Table by his Spirit—not just us here today, but all his people across the world and through all time—and that by his Spirit, though we cannot see him yet, he sits at the head of the table inviting us to come. He holds out the bread to us, saying, “Take and eat; this is my body given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”
Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.
Taste the physical representation of hope, a future promise made present reality in bread and wine. The kingdom of God is a feast, and for all who are his children, your places are already set at the table. Jesus offers us the cup, saying, “This is the new covenant in my blood, shed for you, shed for many, for the forgiveness of sins. As often as you drink it, remember me.” We do not see this yet in the flesh, only by faith, but the day is coming when he will gather us into his kingdom and we will see him face to face.
Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again. Come quickly, Lord Jesus.
Children of God, come to the Table of the Lord. Jesus is waiting. Come, for all things are now ready.
Photo © 2012 by Wikimedia user Shyamal. License: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported.
