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A Sermon for Lent I
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| 2/10/2008 |
Gen 2: 15-17, 3: 1-7; Rom 5: 12-19; Mt 4: 1-11; Ps 32
Adam and Eve in the garden, and Jesus in the desert. Wow. Lent seems to be a time of places.
Because we’re starting off with two of the most well-known “places” in the Bible. I mean, let’s face it – other than the mountaintop, where we were last week, where else are you gonna go? And these are two really rich places. Adam and Eve, temptation, apple, sin. Jesus, devil, desert.
There’ve been lots of great books and movies around these stories, and to let you know, I won’t reference those here – I’ll let you weave them in as they come to you. I’d rather that we just go straight into these places ourselves. But it’s understandable that artists have been so fascinated with them – this is juicy stuff, this temptation stuff, and it gets right down into our depths. And I know Lent is supposed to be about all this bare-bones, stripping down thing, but you know, really, it’s stripping down to get to the good stuff, the juicy stuff. So as part of our Lenten practice, let’s do a little stripping down of these stories to what’s underneath. Let’s start with Adam and Eve.
How many depictions of that have you seen of this part of the story – probably have no idea. Adam, Eve, temptation, sin, apple – usually with clear sexual overtones, and the idea that the woman is more at fault than the man. It’s like cultural candy at this point – toss back a Lenten Tic-Tac.
But let’s look closer – peel those layers back. Look through the passage – in your bulletins, or better yet, if you’ve got a Bible, pull it out. First, let’s get this out of the way – there ain’t no apple – “fruit” is a more fruitful word to use, it’ll get us past the round red thing. And then to go deeper, throughout this entire section – we never see the word “temptation.” We really don’t see anything about sexuality. And what about “sin”?… Nope, not there either.
In fact – and this is an aside, but one worth making – the first place in the Bible that the word “sin” appears is in the next chapter, when Cain kills Abel. When brother kills brother for the sake of power and security, security gained at someone else’s expense.
That’s sin. And that scares me. In this day and place, it really scares me that the first thing the Bible calls sin is nothing about man and woman and intimate relations. It’s about greed and gain. And it scares me. Because even though I haven’t killed anybody, I’m part of a system, now in 2008 Philly, America, the world, that relies on the inequality that leads to a lot of this kind of killing. And I don’t know that when I stand before the divine council, that I won’t be just as convicted as somebody who raised a knife, or a gun. It’s a really good question, how we’re part of a society that involves this kind of gain, as we look at the Millennial Development Goals, which you’ll hear more about today – how millions die in one way or another due to the ravages of poverty and lack of education and medical care, in a system where there is gain for so many of us.
It really changes the traditional picture of sin. And I’m not saying the Adam and Eve story isn’t also about sin; I think it is. It just takes us into the experience without giving us the convenience of a handle.
So let’s go back to the garden. The core thing seems to be this knowledge of good and evil – and whether it can be ours. Now, knowledge is great. This is not about anti-intellectualism, and it’s not about knowledge in the sense of insights or information or working to tell the good from the bad. We are absolutely called on an hourly basis to wrestle with that one, and lots of the time it’s even part of our jobs – the legal system, the church.
But this particular tree is more about a kind of ultimate view of all of creation, all of the extremes, which actually, we probably couldn’t bear anyway. And all we know about that view is three things: that it truly knows everything; that it’s at the center of everything; and that it is not ours for the taking.
Ok, those are three pretty important things. The ultimate knowledge, the center of everything, and what we cannot be, on our own. If you hadn’t quite gotten it – I know we’re doing a lot here – those three things are another way of describing God.
And I think that’s the central thing to hang onto here. I don’t mean the tree is God, exactly. But the tree, and its fruit – that’s why the word “apple” is misleading – the fruit, what is produced from this ultimate view, is about God, not us.
In other words, we don’t need information. We need God.
I don’t mean we’re not supposed to sort out the good and the bad, to give it our best shot. But it’s part of a process, not of our own authority, but of our relationship with God – who will guide us. What Adam and Eve help us live into, even in the physical feeling of biting into a piece of fruit, is the fact that: what’s at our center is supposed to be God. Not our own authority. What’s at our center, the center of our garden of innocence, is trusting relationship with God.
And this is what I think it all comes down to in the garden with Adam and Eve – and then in the desert with Jesus.
Because it was a similar kind of experience, only it goes a different way. Here, the devil – and whether it’s the snake or the devil or whatever, the basic idea is anything that pulls us away from God – here, the devil is asking Jesus to, in essence, play God. To save himself, to feed himself, to gain all these cool kingdoms. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But in this little exchange with the devil, it’s not about Jesus having these things, but about his having them by misusing his authority from God.
And that’s the tricky thing. The devil’s argument can sound perfectly legit. It’s all sensible, on some level. “You’re starving, Jesus. You have powers. Turn these rocks into bread.”
That sounds reasonable, right? We don’t know that the devil had red make-up and pointy ears and a pitchfork and a t-shirt saying “I am the evil twin.” We don’t know how ‘good’ this might have seemed. But in whatever the dynamic was out there in the desert, Jesus knew it wasn’t about his power – it was about his relationship with God.
And that is what ended up showing him, showing us, what was good and evil in that scene. The good took him toward relationship with God; the evil took him away from God – and that would have been to misuse his powers.
And there’s the other interesting thing about this experience of Jesus – this Jesus Scene, so to speak. That’s a plug for our Lenten series – you go into a scene with Jesus, and you come out different on the other side.
The other thing about this Jesus scene is that Jesus’ temptations are very specific. They are there for a reason.
It’s not just general temptation. It’s not the devil standing there, waving a Kit-Kat bar and saying, “Hey Jesus, it’s Lent – want some chocolate?” Jesus is about to launch a hugely frightening and challenging and glorious ministry – remember, at this point in the Gospel, he hasn’t even called his disciples yet, he’s just come up out of the waters of baptism and begun to experience who he is; no matter whether he knew who he was or not is a different question, but here he has to experience who he is.
In this huge and unknown ministry that lies before him, with his particular gifts, the Spirit is essentially showing him what is going to push and pull at him as a human being throughout the whole thing, from that moment straight up to the cross – remember, when he’s hanging on the cross, doesn’t someone say, “Come on, Jesus, save yourself”? The Spirit shows Jesus the things he will need to be aware of in himself as he goes forward.
And there’s help in that for us. There’s help in understanding better the things that tug at us, that can pull us off track. In each case, it’s unique, that combination of the things that can distort us or get us out of whack. Our temptations – the whole bunch that each of us has – is as unique to each of us as a thumbprint. And some of them go really deep; some are woven into the very chemistry of our bodies. So we can’t be glib about “just say no.” It’s hard – often a lifelong struggle. And we might have had bouts with our temptations that told us a lot about ourselves, and perhaps very painfully. As the collect says, “You know the weaknesses of each of us, God, so let each of us find you mighty to save.”
Oh yeah. Amen to that. God, I need you to be mighty, and save me in the things that pull uniquely at me. Because what pulls at me will always seem appealing at the time – and God, you may seem very quiet at the time.
And that’s the other thing about temptation. It’s the way it worked in these two hot-button stories. It’s a beautiful piece of fruit, right there for you. You can reach out and feel it and taste it – or, it’s remembering that it might hurt you. Which thing feels more present at that moment? The thing or the memory? And with Jesus – it’s even more so. Bread when you’re hungry, safety, kingdoms. Yeah, absolutely. I’d go for that. Especially when the option – remembering relationship with God – seems so quiet, so distant, so unimpressive at that moment.
There’s the rub, right? Turning down something that might seem to make human sense, for something that, lots of the time, may not feel all that clear to us at all.
But right there, that space – that’s the window of opportunity, that’s the invitation to go deeper in relationship with God. It’s what Jesus was showing us. He didn’t say “no” just for the sake of suffering. There is no Christian virtue in that. He said “no” for the sake of something better. He said “no” because he had a relationship with God that was more important to him. And though we can’t see God in this little scene, we can see Jesus pointing us toward God. And that is everything.
Adam and Eve pointed us toward our human nature. Jesus points us toward a mysterious and powerful relationship with the force of light and love that explodes the whole universe – what else could have gotten him through the desert?! And that’s why this story, handed down for centuries, is such a gift to us. Like Adam and Eve, it’s hard for us to always tell what’s appealing from what’s good. So we can go into Jesus’ scene with him, and feel him standing there beside us and saying, in essence, “Even though I’m hungry and threatened and scared, I choose to turn toward something else, something that holds so much mystery and awe and transformative power that I am going to crawl through the desert for it.
I know the things that will tug at me as I go – the temptations that are mine. I know them like they are old friends. But I know their limitations, and I know I want more.”
That’s the path that Jesus carves out for us. And it’s hard. But what it gives us is real beyond measure. Because we come to know ourselves better and better, which can sometimes feel like a blessing, and sometimes like a curse, but trust me, it’s a blessing.
And we come to know a God over our whole lives, step by step and temptation by temptation, who wishes for us, not rules, and not struggle, but life.
God bless each one of us on that journey.
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