Sermon - 1st Sunday in Lent (3/1/2020)
Gen. 3:1-13; Ps. 32; Mt. 4:1-11
Some of you may know the 1880 Russian novel The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. It’s very long, but deep and insightful on many levels. In the novel, one of the characters, a woman named Grushenka, tells a parable that she says she heard as a child. It goes like this:
“Once upon a time there was a peasant woman and a very wicked woman she was. And she died and did not leave a single good deed behind. The devils caught her and plunged her into the lake of fire. So her guardian angel stood and wondered what good deed of hers he could remember to tell to God; ‘She once pulled up an onion in her garden,’ said he, ‘and gave it to a beggar woman.’ And God answered: ‘You take that onion then, hold it out to her in the lake, and let her take hold and be pulled out. And if you can pull her out of the lake, let her come to Paradise, but if the onion breaks, then the woman must stay where she is.’ The angel ran to the woman and held out the onion to her. ‘Come,’ said he, ‘catch hold and I’ll pull you out.’ He began cautiously pulling her out. He had just about pulled her out, when the other sinners in the lake, seeing how she was being drawn out, began catching hold of her so as to be pulled out with her. But she began kicking them. ‘I’m to be pulled out, not you. It’s my onion, not yours.’ As soon as she said that, the onion broke. And the woman fell back into the lake and she is still there to this day.”
It's my onion, not yours. The gift of God is for me, not for you. That is where it all goes wrong. Ever since Adam and Eve, that has been the fundamental thing that human beings get wrong. God creates the whole world by the power of God’s word. God creates human beings in the image and likeness of God and invites human beings, men and women together, to share God’s work of caring for the earth and to be companions for one another. God creates for them everything that they need as a gift – but the serpent told them they could have more. Told them they could try to be more than what God gave them, that in fact they could be just like God. And that is the problem. Accepting the gift of God – the gift of life, the gift of the garden, the gift of the other human being, the gift of sufficient food – was not enough. Because receiving from God means being dependent on God, and wouldn’t it be better to be just like God, and be dependent on no one but yourself?
What happens when Adam and Eve make that choice? Several things. Shame, for one. Adam and Eve now are ashamed of their bodies, their being creatures made by God, and so are no longer able to be fully present even to one another. Another is blame. Eve blames the serpent, Adam blames Eve, the call to be responsible caretakers of God’s creation and one another is forgotten.
But I’m more struck by how God reacts. According to Genesis, God had the habit of taking an evening stroll through the Garden of Eden. Clearly that’s a metaphor – God is spirit, God does not literally go for a walk in the evening. But a metaphor for what? God is portrayed as enjoying the good world that God created, that God had a habit of coming into the world and being present to human beings in a direct, bodily, creaturely way. Which is why it was so unnecessary for human beings to try to be like God – God was already from the beginning becoming human for us, God was already in the habit of becoming like us, so much did God want to be with us.
And now God comes into the garden, but Adam and Eve are not there. They are hiding in the bushes. And God says to them: “Where are you?” I’ve come and made myself like you in order to be with you, to enjoy being with you, where are you? I love you the way you are, the way I made you, so much that I have come here to be with you as you are. Why did you not love the way that I made you? Why was that not good enough for you? Why did you want the gift just for yourself? Where are you?
In the beginning God made us as creatures; we wanted to be the Creator. In the beginning God freely gave us every good gift so that we would share it with others; we preferred to be rely on ourselves, and where has that gotten us? In the beginning God bridged the gap between creature and Creator by becoming like us, and walking with us in the cool of the evening breeze. But we decided to make it more complicated. We have learned to be ashamed of being who God made us to be, to hide ourselves from one another and even from ourselves. We have decided we’d rather not be one creature among many that owe their existence to a gracious and loving Creator, and instead tried to make ourselves the masters of our own lives, to convince ourselves that we are in charge. And in the process we break our connections with one another, with the earth, with God, and ultimately even with ourselves.
But here’s the thing – yes, human beings have made it all more complicated, but God is not deterred. From the beginning God wanted to come among us, to be like us, to seek us out and to be with us, because God liked us the way God made us and hoped we would like it too. But now God will need to do more in order to truly be with us – and the good news is that God does. The Bible is witness to the story of all that God has done in order to come and be with us, to be present to us, to restore the relationships that we have broken. And ultimately God does this by becoming fully one of us, fully human, in the human being called Jesus of Nazareth.
And when God fully becomes a human being, Jesus rejects every temptation to make it about himself. In the wilderness, Satan tells him he could use his considerable powers to feed himself, to become famous, to rule and control the world. But that is not what God made human beings for, and if Adam and Eve and human beings ever since have tried to be like God and failed, God is not going to fail at trying to be a human being. In Jesus God is going to do what human beings were always meant to do – to receive all of the gifts of God and to use them for the good of the whole creation.
The Scripture Jesus quotes to the devil makes this clear, although much of its clarity gets lost in translation. In Hebrew “Adam” can be a proper name, but it’s also a generic term that simply means “human being.” The verse from the law of Moses in Deuteronomy that Jesus quotes, “One does not live by bread alone” (Deut. 8:3), actually reads in Hebrew: The “adam” – the human being – does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. Human beings do not live by taking the bread they need for themselves – it’s my bread, not yours! Rather, human beings live by receiving the gifts of creation that are called forth by the Word of God, starting with the gift of human life itself.
In Jesus God continues to look for us, to come into our world and ask, “Where are you?” And there is nothing, no temptation, no crafty argument from Satan, no Scripture verse taken out of context, nothing that is going to stop Jesus from living a fully human existence, as it was meant to be lived from the beginning – that is how far God is willing to go to become like us, to get us to stop trying to be like God and simply to receive God’s good gifts and to share them in love. Not even the cross will deter Jesus from the divine pursuit of a fully human life. Nothing will entice God away from identifying with and becoming fully like the human beings that God loves. Even if we are ashamed of who God has made us to be, God is not. Even if we insist on pretending to be like God as we hide in the bushes from God and one another, God will never stop coming among us calling, “Where are you?”
Is Jesus a model for us in resisting temptation? Yes, of course. Should we try better to resist the temptation of trying to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps instead of receiving all that we need from God and sharing it with our fellow creatures? By all means. But if we think that we’re going to succeed where generations before us, all the way back to the beginning, have failed is one more way to fall for the temptation to think we’re something we’re not.
Instead, be amazed at the God who has always loved human beings exactly the way God made us to be, and who has from the beginning always wanted to come among us and share life with us, exactly as we are. Be astonished at how single-minded God is at becoming like us for our sakes, that God loves us so much that God rejects all temptations to stray from the mission of finding us and winning us back. Be in awe that God still comes into the world in tangible, creaturely ways saying, “Where are you? I am looking for you, I want to be with you, I made you as you are so that I could give you my love and so that you could have the joy of sharing my gifts with all whom I have created.”
Even here, even this morning, in the bread and the fruit of the vine that we share with one another, where Jesus has promised that we will always be able to find him – or, perhaps better, where he has promised that he will never stop finding us. Where he will find you, as you are, and offer to you the very presence of God in the most tangible and bodily and human way that God knows how – as a gift freely given and freely shared. Where he calls you to come out from hiding and rejoice in simply being who God made you to be, for your sake and for all the creation God loves.