And Lead Us INTO Temptation

Lead Us INTO Temptation

A Sermon to Countryside Church, Unitarian Universalist

March26, 2023

The Rev. Dr. C. Scot Giles

Want to Misbehave?

So…Can I tempt you to misbehave? It shouldn’t be too hard. In my experience Unitarian Universalists are pretty good at misbehaving. Just ask any minister.

Oscar Wilde, the famous writer, is quoted as having said that “the only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.” I guess that’s true. After all, if you do it, the temptation goes away.

But if you don’t give in, you will still feel the temptation and that’s something of a drag.

Religion is Big on Temptation.

But most organized religions are big on temptation. Oh, they don’t want to you take Oscar Wilde’s advice and give into it (and neither do I). Instead, they want you to feel guilty because you think giving into it might be fun. They’ll tell you that’s a bad thing.

I’ve shared with you before a snippet from my favorite routine by comedian George Carlin. But it bears repetition. He said…

“Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time!….But He loves you.”

Carlin is not making this up. The sort of Hellfire threat is exactly what a lot of preachers issue, and it is the fuel that allows some forms of religion to thrive.

The classic trope on this was the 1741 sermon by the Rev. Jonathan Edwards which kicked off the First Great Awakening Revival in the United States. His vision influenced the direction of American religion, and civil law, for hundreds of years.

It was his stern pronouncements that were behind the Blue Laws that forced stores to close on Sundays, that fueled laws against homosexuality or sexual freedom of any kind, that outlawed gambling (at least until the government figured out they could use that to make a buck, then it was okay), and it is what is behind a lot of the culture wars that we struggle with today.

Titled “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” Jonathan Edwards’s famous and influential 18th century sermon contained such soothing passages as…

“The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire ... you are ten thousand times so abominable in his eyes, as the most hateful and venomous serpent is in ours.”

Great stuff that. In the sense it was effective. But it is also, in my opinion, spiritually and psychologically abhorrent.

In its time Jonathan Edwards’s fear-filled vision of the human condition was very influential. It emphasized everything I regard as wrong about the Puritan heritage.

To my mind someone who behaves morally primarily because he or she is afraid of eternal punishment is not a moral person. If you need to be threatened before you behave well, you are not really good. You are simply a person who is afraid.

The Lord’s Prayer

Those of us who were raised in the Christian spiritual tradition learned something called The Lord’s Prayer, taken from the New Testament. It occurs in two places, Matthew 6:12 and Like 2:14.

I’ve always thought the prayer was somewhat ironic - because Jesus of Nazareth spoke it when asked to teach people how to pray. At that time, the standard was to pray only using formal prayers which were written down and/or memorized. Jesus basically said, “don’t do that” and instead composed a simple, heartfelt prayer on the spot. The implication is that he wanted his followers to also pray that way - from the heart, spontaneously and simply.

So of course the Christian church ignores that completely and everyone is taught to say the Lord’s Prayer from memory, rote, word-for-word; doing exactly what Jesus said not to do. Go figure.

In any case, one line of the prayer is “And lead us not into temptation." So what do we make of that?

To my mind that request is something of a cop out, and I suspect something of a mistranslation because I don’t think Jesus of Nazareth was naive.

The gutsy prayer would be something along the lines of “give me the courage to resist the temptation, when the opportunity to do wrong presents itself.”

That is, I know I’m going to be tempted to do bad or selfish things - therefore may I have the strength to rise above that and not give in. Gutsy. That is taking responsibility for my actions and the consequences of my actions.

But that’s not what the Lord’s Prayer says. The prayer isn’t for the strength to resist temptation. The prayer is that temptations not present themselves in the first place.

That’s like someone bragging they never cheat at cards because they don’t know how. Okay…I guess that’s a good thing, but if they ever learn how we’ll be having a heck of a poker game next Friday.

There isn’t much of a moral victory in hoping that the opportunity to do something wrong never manifests. A much weaker position.

But let’s be honest. Temptation is everywhere.

My Two-Year Rule

The word “temptation” means the desire to do something wrong or unwise. We’ve all felt that from time to time. So how do we deal with it?

The opposite of temptation is self-control. That’s when we know that we’re attracted to something that might be pleasurable, if only in the short term, but we do not give in because we look beyond the momentary satisfaction we might achieve, in favor of a larger view of ourselves.

It might be tempting to cheat at cards and have the fun of winning a hand. But, we don’t do it because we do not want to think of ourselves as a cheat, and we certainly don’t want others to think of us that way. So we exert self-control and play the cards honestly in order to preserve our reputation and long-term sense of self.

Many years ago I formulated a rule for myself about how to maintain self-control in difficult situations.

Basically, the idea is that when you are struggling with what you should do - being tempted to do something unwise (lose your temper, say something mean, etc.) instead of doing what might bring momentary pleasure, ask yourself how you will feel about this when you look back at it about two years in the future.

Ultimately, unless we have the misfortune of dementia, we take our memories with us into the future. We always can recall what we did or did not do.

Every significant memory you have will be one of two things. Either it will be an asset, because you will look back and be proud of what you did or resisted. Or, it will be a liability because you will look back and be ashamed of what you gave in to and did.

Now, all of us mess up from time to time, and self-compassion and self-forgiveness are important things. But, it’s far better not to do things that we need to self-sooth or forgive ourselves for in the first place.

So whenever I am in a position of not being sure what I should do about some issue or event, I ask myself how will I feel about this two years in the future. Will I be proud or will I be embarrassed?

The result is that I may keep my mouth shut when I would really like to put someone down. I may take a deep breath and not express anger. I may forego something that might be fun in the moment, but I know I would regret in the long-term. This simple rule has kept me out of a lot of trouble and enabled me to resist a lot of temptations.

When you are not sure what to do, do what you will be proud of, when you look back at the memory from the future. That will help keep you from temptation and will help you achieve moral victories in your life.

Your Shadow Self

Yet the philosophical and psychological theme of temptation is one that interests me, because I agree with those philosophers who have explored depth psychology. What they propose is that we find ourselves tempted by those things that resonate with the dark side of our personalities - a part most of us don’t want to believe exists.

There is a reason why something that might tempt me may not tempt you. We’re different people with different internal issues. While there are some common themes, we are as individual in what tempts us, as we are individuals as persons.

But here’s the thing to get. Here is the thing that keeps depth psychologists in business. The things that tempt you point to part of yourself that you might want to deny. And there is a tremendous amount of personal and spiritual growth that comes from looking at the part of ourselves that we may want to deny.

And knowing what tempts you, even if you resist it, is a good thing.

I can assure you that you do have a dark side. In some forms of psychoanalysis it is called the Shadow Self, or more simply, the Shadow.

You see you have two sorts of consciousness inside your cranium. The first is your conscious self. Mostly this is what you think of as you. But you also have an unconscious mind, sometimes called the subconscious mind.

As someone who is a hypnotist as well as a clergy person, the unconscious mind fascinates me. In fact, I believe your unconscious mind is the greatest goal achieving mechanism ever evolved. If it believes something, it will try to make it happen regardless of what you consciously wish. That is why learning how to manage your unconscious mind can pay benefits.

But our unconscious mind can be a trickster.

Ever say what you actually meant, instead of the more polite thing you intended to say? Sometimes this is called a “Freudian Slip,” although the technical term is “Parapraxis.”

When I was in Grad School for my Master’s Degree I had a meeting with the Head of the Philosophy Department. For a variety of reasons, some of which still make sense to me, I disliked that man. But only an idiot would say that.

So I shook his hand and intended to say, “I’m pleased to meet you.” Instead, I looked him right in the eye and said “I’m sorry to be here.” I didn’t even realize I’d said that until later when everyone told me what I jackass I was. My unconscious mind was not willing to fib. I said what I meant instead of what I wanted to say.

A Deeper Connection

There is even some reason to believe that the unconscious mind of one person is connected at an even deeper level to the minds of others. This is sometimes called a Collective Unconsciousness. At a fundamental level of the mind we are connected, and there are similarities that unite us and shape our view of the world.

This is why the scripture and mythology around the world tend to contain similar themes and plot lines.

In 1949 a philosopher named Joseph Campbell published a work of comparative mythology called The Hero With A Thousand Faces. In this masterful book Campbell showed the ancient stories from around the world, even those written thousands of years apart, share a fundamental structure. That structure recounts, in different ways, the journey of a person from ignorance to self-knowledge.

You can see this structure in the stories of Prometheus, Buddha, Moses, Mohammed and Jesus. You can see it in the ancient Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, written a thousand years before the first word in what would be our Old Testament was crafted.

Dr. Campbell argued, as have many other thinkers, that the immense similarities in all of these ancient stories can’t be accidental. They are far too similar. There has to be something upon which they are based. The thinking is that they are founded on common themes in a collective unconscious awareness that we all share, but only some come to know.

And in every one of these stories the person making the journey to a deeper self-awareness and wisdom has to confront an opponent. The opponent is imaged differently in different stores, but that opponent always turns out to be something inside of themselves. The mythological hero must face their own limitations, failures and mistakes. We must face part of ourselves that we’d like to deny exists. We must confront and somehow befriend our Shadow. The dark part of the mind that resides in us all and tempts us to do dark things.

What is really important about your unconscious mind is that it uses the things that tempt you to point to something we all need to pay attention to - that none of us are perfect. It does this to protect us from the spiritual danger of arrogance and the behavioral mistake of projecting our own inner darkness onto others because we can’t face it about ourselves.

In your imagination make a list of every good and praiseworthy trait you’d like to think you have. That you’re honest, kind, insightful, generous, and so on. That is your Aspirational Self. It’s who you’d like to be.

But we all fall short of that. We all mess up at times.

Next take every single one of those praiseworthy attributes and imagine someone who has the opposite. Who is deceptive, cruel, superficial and stingy (or whatever applies to you when you do this mental exercise). That is your Shadow Self. It is everything you try not to be.

As psychoanalyst Carl Jung put it in 1938:

“Unfortunately there can be no doubt that (people are), on the whole, less good than (they) imagine (themselves) or (want themselves) to be.  Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is” (Jung, 1938, Psychology and Religion, pronouns adjusted)

Your Shadow is an awareness the resides in your unconscious mind. It contains ideas about every path you did not take in life, it know every temptation you resisted and those you gave in to, and it knows why.

It is every part of yourself that you would like to deny. It is every fantasy you have entertained, even those you would be embarrassed to tell others, or that you might scoff at yourself. It is the primitive and uncivilized part of your nature. All of these things are your Shadow.

And we know the Shadow is there not just because it shows up in mythology, but because when we work with a troubled person we find that it is the Shadow Self which has broken through the defenses and manifested in an uncontrolled way. Most of us have had the experience of doing something other than what we wanted to do. Sometimes it’s something we desperately want to keep private.

It was precisely this reality that caused St. Paul to lament in the New Testament Book of Romans:

“I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate….For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” (Romans 7: 15 and 19, NRSV)

In fact depth psychologists believe the entire purpose of therapy is to help someone admit that their Shadow Side exists, and to find some mature and orderly way to deal with it.

If you do not, then you end up like Jonathan Edwards when he preached that hate-filled sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” What he was doing was projecting - and it is what everyone does who will not face the fact that they contain bad things as well as good. Instead of doing the inner work, they project the things about themselves they want to deny on others, and accuse them as a way of denying part of themselves. Often the things we object to in others are actually things we are tempted by ourselves, and our condemnation of others is a way of dealing with our own denial.

In my opinion we have a former President of this nation who does quite a bit of that.

You may desperately want to believe there is absolutely nothing wrong with you and that you never make mistakes. Heck, we’ve all met people who are so defensive they will never acknowledge they have done something wrong.

But if that is the claim you make you will never know inner peace and calm.

Your temptations point to your darker side. I’m not urging you to indulge that darker side, but know that it is there. In your mind you stand midway between the Aspirational Self and the Shadow Self.

Knowing that constitutes the place of mental and spiritual health, for it is the position of internal balance. You are neither in denial nor are you arrogant. It helps you understand the real, imperfect and wonderful person you are. We all contain good and bad, and balancing between them helps us find the light, and keeps us from arrogance and error.

And that’s my sermon.