First Sunday in Lent
You’ve heard me before talk about my grandparent’s garden and what it meant to our family. My grandfather always invited us boys to help in the garden and although I’m sure initially we were flattered, it didn’t take long for us to figure out that working in a large one-acre garden wasn’t fun, it was work and it was hard work in the hot, humid summers in Arkansas with both the humidity and the temperature near a hundred. Although we were thankful for the fresh produce that the garden produced, we aspired to “store bought” food. It was a sign of affluence. When we sat down for a meal, and we had “store bought” bread, it wasn’t put out on a plate or platter. It was left in the bag at the head of the table where my grandfather sat with his elbow on top of the opened end of the bag. Years later my brother and I talked about this odd habit of my grandfather’s and we knew he wasn’t being miserly with the bread. He was glad to give you a piece when you asked, but there was this unspoken sense that he was protecting the store-bought bread as a sign of its extreme value.
Today though, most of us prefer something made from scratch, or vegetables from our own garden or at least someone’s garden. It’s as if we feel this insatiable call back to the garden where the world is simpler, purer, more vivid and full of flavor, where we can till the soil and produce our own food. Back to the garden but without the heat and humidity of my childhood or the mosquitoes, much less the snakes.
The lessons for this first Sunday in Lent begin in a garden and end in a desert. Humanity is placed in the Garden of Eden, the archetypal garden of all gardens. All the man and the woman had to do was till and keep the Garden and they could enjoy the produce, run naked, and walk with God in the evening. As they say, not bad work if you can get it. But then along came a snake, a talking snake to tempt them away from all the fruits and produce of the Garden to the one fruit that God said not to eat. There is nothing more human than their response; offer us
something that we can’t have and we’ll die trying to possess it. So they eat the fruit and “POW” the simplicity and innocence of their Eden experience is irretrievably lost, gone forever, and there’s nothing left to do but get some clothes on their backs and leave town. How sad a story, but a story that many of us have lived over and over again. The fatalistic human cycle of self-destruction seems to run in perpetuity and we seem helpless to save ourselves. And for some, the consequences are more than an unfulfilled or unhappy life but death itself. But lucky for us, that’s not the only story we have today.
Jesus is tempted, not in a garden, but in the wilderness. After forty days of fasting in the wild, Jesus is tempted by the devil. You go without eating for forty days and you’ll see the devil too. Jesus is famished so the devil tempts him with what in that situation makes perfect sense, “Jesus, take these stones that are just sitting here serving no obvious purpose, and turn them into food, so you can feed yourself. Yeah, that’s the ticket, Jesus, take care of yourself.” But even in the delirium of starvation Jesus knew that the real temptation wasn’t to take care of himself or even to practice a bit of hocus pocus magic transforming the rocks into a loaf of fresh bread, the temptation was to abandon his humanity by playing God. In the Genesis story Adam and Eve give in to that temptation and it did not end well, but here Jesus resists the temptation and doesn’t cross over the line drawn in the sand.
Barbara Brown Taylor says that “These days we seem to believe that crossing over the line is about doing things that make us less than admirable human beings. Lent comes along and we give up things that are bad for us and take on things that are good for us, as if the most serious temptation in life were to drink too much scotch or to eat too much fat...” But that’s not what these two stories are about. She doesn’t think these two stories are about “the temptation not to be a good human being...” but rather “they are about the temptation not to be a human being at all.” 1
I once heard a bishop say that most sin is rooted in a sin against creation, in our temptation to play God and recreate the world in our image. A person steals and is trying to create a world where whatever he is stealing belongs to him or he commits adultery and tries to recreate a world where this person is his spouse instead of someone else. Or he tries to recreate a world where someone doesn’t exist and commits murder. Sin is missing the mark of truth by believing the lie that we are in charge of the universe, that I am the creator and instead of accepting things as they really are, I live into the lie of recreating them how I want it.
Brown Taylor says that we are kin to both Adam and Jesus, “They’re both alive and well in us. And when the Adam in us is powerfully tempted to play God, the Jesus in us is more powerfully able to remain human, offering to keep us company on our side of the line and showing us that the way to discover (that) our Godlikeness is not to curse our human-sized life this side of Eden, where the Lord who made us from the dust of the earth offers to breathe life into us again and again.”2 Amen.
The Rev. Dennis Campbell
Interim Priest
