RCL Lent 1A
13 March 2011
Saint Faith’s Anglican Church
Vancouver BC
Focus Texts: Genesis 2.15-17; 3.1-7; Matthew 4.1-11
1) “For the First Time”
Frederick Buechner, the American novelist and theologian, tells the following story in his biography, The Sacred Journey.
In any case, of all the giants who held up my world, [Naya, my maternal grandmother,] was perhaps chief, and when I knew she was coming to Georgetown for a visit that day, I wanted to greet her properly. So what I did at the age of six was prepare her a feast. All I could find in the icebox that seemed suitable were some cold string beans that had seen better days with the butter on them long since gone to wax, and they were what I brought out to her in that fateful garden. I do not remember what she said then exactly, but it was an aside spoken to my parents or whatever grown-ups happened to be around to the effect that she did not usually eat much at three o’clock in the afternoon or whatever it was, let alone the cold string beans of another age, but that she would see what she could do for propriety’s sake. Whatever it was, she said it drily, wittily, the way she said everything, never dreaming for a moment that I would either hear or understand, but I did hear, and what I came to understand for the first time in my life, I suspect --- why else should I remember it? --- was that the people you love have two sides to them. One is the side they love you back with, and the other is the side that, even when they do not mean to, they can sting you with like a wasp. It was the first ominous scratching in the walls, the first telltale crack in the foundation of the one home which perhaps any child has when you come right down to it, and that is the people he loves. [The Sacred Journey as quoted in Buechner, Listening to Your Life, ed. George Connor, 11-12]
Perhaps only a few of us can remember such a moment in our lives clearly, but all of us have experienced that moment when innocence passes away and we become aware of the world as a place in which the good, the evil and the ambiguous, all exist in the same time and the same space.
2) The Loss of Innocence
There are many texts from the Scriptures that cause questions to arise in my mind. Today’s reading is one of them. Why, I ask myself, does God not want Adam and Eve to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and of evil? Would God not want them to know what is evil so that they may choose what is good? Does God want them to live in child-like innocence, playing in the sand box of the garden of Eden, gardening to their hearts’ desire and enjoying each other’s company?
It may well be that the answer to my question is “Yes”. The text suggests that God would have preferred Adam and Eve to continue in that innocence into which they were created and to remain, like Frederick Buechner before his fateful encounter with his grandmother, unaware of the two sides of those we love.
But children never remain children, even those dwelling in Eden. It is as if God is blind to the inevitable consequence of creating beings who share God’s freedom to act but who do not possess that steadfastness of character that keeps them on path of justice, covenant loyalty and humility. And so the woman sees a delightful tree, hears that it bestows wisdom and eats. And so the man takes the gift offered by the woman and eats. And relationships are altered, whether the relationship between God and human beings or the relationship between one human being to another. It is worth remembering, in a world where the subordination of women to men continues in many cultures and places, that Genesis tells us that the subordination of women to men is a consequence of human disobedience not an expression of the divine purpose in creation.
By eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the first couple leaves their innocence behind and faces a new world in which they and all their descendants come to know the reality of moral good and moral evil. “The forbidden tree offers an experience that is both pleasant and painful; it awakens those who partake of it to the higher knowledge and to the pain that both come with moral choice.” [The Jewish Study Bible]
3) Whom shall we serve?
In several ways Matthew’s account of the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness brings us back to the garden and the choice before Adam and Eve. While some readers and listeners seem to get lost in the details, the story itself comes down to a simple question: Will Jesus choose God or Satan?
For us hearing the story after two thousand years’ of its re-telling, the answer to this question is a foregone conclusion. But if Jesus is not free, really free to choose one path or the other, then there is no salvation, no hope for us to celebrate on Easter and reach for through our Lenten pilgrimage. What we witness in this story is that it is possible to choose God rather than Satan --- even if you are not the Son of God, the incarnate Word of the Holy One of Israel.
God’s word spoken to us in Genesis and Matthew is not a counsel of despair but a counsel of encouragement and hope. Although there are texts in the Scriptures which can lead to a certain fatalism, a belief that we have no control over the circumstances of our lives and choices, there are more texts which assert with clarion tones the truth that our choices matter. Perhaps the most famous of these comes from the prophet Micah:
[The Lord] has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? [Micah 6.6-8]
Words such as these and the words of prophets, apostles and evangelists call us to lay aside any thoughts of powerlessness or inevitability and to take our place in what some Jewish theologians call tikkun olam, ‘the repairing of the world’.
We who have been baptized are not only called to witness to the repairing of the world achieved through the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth but to be agents of that repairing and renewing mission of God made known in Christ.
My sisters and brothers, we live in a society that often waits upon the so-called ‘great’ or ‘influential’ or ‘powerful’ to act to bring about change. We are inundated with news reports that overwhelm us with stories about oppression, poverty, hunger and injustice throughout the world. We look at the numerous challenges to the well-being of people currently living in our metropolitan area, our province and our country. It is tempting in such a climate to pull the covers over our heads or to ‘mind our own business’, forgetting what Marley’s ghost says to Scrooge, ‘Business! Business! Mankind was my business!’
If the story of the tree of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil has any meaning, if there is any purpose of re-telling the story of the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness, then it is this: The genie is out of the bottle. Human beings may yearn for the illusory safety of lost innocence, but we have now joined God as moral agents. Just as surely as God’s purposes affect the creation, so too do ours.
The pilgrimage of Lent and the life-long pilgrimage of Christian faith is not about ‘care and anxious fear and worry’ but ‘to be led where God’s glory flashes’. [The Hymnal 1982, #145]. We are no longer in the garden, playing like children, but we have come into that maturity which makes us agents of God’s renewing and reconciling purposes. One version of the ancient Easter hymn, the Exsultet, speaks of that ‘blessed iniquity’ that merited ‘such a Saviour’. In other words, we arrive at Easter not bemoaning our human disobedience but rejoicing that, in Christ, we have become a new humanity, sharing in the divine life.
This Lent I invite you to look around you. Find one part of the garden of life God has given you to tend that is in need of repair or renewal and give yourself to that work. Find that cause, whether local or national or international, that arouses your passion and give yourself to that work. Let us all agree to give up saying “if only I were . . .” or “if only I had . . .”. Let us take on a new habit of saying, “What is my role in bringing about God’s purposes for x, y or z?” Let us all agree to set aside the notion that what we do, whoever we are, does not matter. It is too late to believe this. Such an attitude, my friends, is the counsel of those powers of darkness that work against God’s purposes, but we are not children of darkness but children of the light. In that light let us walk the path set before us. Amen.
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