THE JOURNEYS OF LENT
ADAM AND EVE – BEGINNING WITH BIRTH
Scriptures:
Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7
Matthew 4:1-11
Lent is a journey. It is a trip through our spiritual lives. Some might even call it a pilgrimage, although I guess I’d rather save that term for a specialized passage to a particular site that enhances our spiritual self-reflections – say, to Lourdes or Taize or Iona. As I indicated in the Clarion, I’d like to spend these next five weeks of Lent with you sharing some stories of special Biblical people whose journeys may help inform our own.
A lifelong journey – which is what our Lenten journeys signify – begins at birth. And our symbolic spiritual birthplace is the Garden of Eden where God takes the raw materials that are human beings and begins the process of molding them – of molding us – into the kind of being God wants us to become. The season of Lent, then, is kind of like that molding process in miniature – a six-week opportunity to focus on what it is that God wants of our lives.
Now, I don’t know how each one of you feel about the story of Adam and Eve – that is, how literally you take it as being about two actual persons. But here’s my take on it, and if you disagree maybe we can talk about it at some length over coffee next door. These selections that were read from the second and third chapters of Genesis include some of the earliest writings in the Bible (the creation story in Chapter 1 was actually written centuries later), and the one who put these words onto parchment had heard these stories passed down for generations as part of the oral tradition. The story of the first ancestors was part of the mythos of the people. Now, a myth is not a negative thing. It is a story that may not be factual in its particulars, but it is truthful in that it represents an important insight into the relationship between God and God’s world. Adam and Eve and the Garden embody in their story the truth about what God wants human beings to be and to become. God hopes that their story will become our story.
“Wait a minute,” I can hear some of you starting to think right about now. “Do I really want this story to become my story?” After all, this is a story about sin and giving in to temptation and being thrown out of a very comfortable place to live – leading a life, as it were, filled with shame. Or is it? Perhaps as we continue along our Lenten journey we’ll find that this isn’t what this story is really all about.
Over the centuries theologians have turned this Garden of Eden story into a treatise called original sin. Our sinfulness as human beings, according to this way of thinking, comes from Adam and Eve’s pride (the Greek word is hubris) that makes them want to become like God, having knowledge of Good and Evil. Such a temptation to become as though you are God is what leads us to no longer reside in a Garden of Eden.
But doesn’t this contradict God’s purpose in creating us? That later creation story (even though it occurs earlier in the Bible) says that “God saw everything that God had made, and indeed it was very good.” (Gen. 1:31) “Everything” includes human beings – that means you and me. God’s intention in creation is to produce free human beings who can live without shame. That’s quite a different understanding of this story.
Here’s writer and spiritual director Andrea La Sonde Anastos’s take on God and the Garden:
“Have we been misunderstanding this whole event in the Garden for centuries?..... God had been at this creation thing for quite some time when God finally got to human beings. I’m wondering if that tree of the knowledge of good and evil wasn’t planted there to provide the catalyst for humankind to separate itself from God, so that we could become God’s beloved, irritating, challenging, and delightful ‘Other.’ Do we really think that God could not have dreamed up creatures who would be obedient and not eat from that tree, if that was what God really wanted?.....
“Isn’t the expulsion from the garden really a birth narrative? Aren’t we all expelled from the utopia of the womb into real life? We have to be. If we stayed in utero, we would die. We can only grow so far before we need wider horizons, air to breathe, solid food, and the stresses and strains of movement to develop our muscles (emotional, physical, psychological, spiritual).”
When we – each one of us – symbolically leave our Gardens of Eden we are exercising what God in creation has given us – our free will – which is just a fancy way of saying that we make choices (as I was saying to the kids before). And so enters temptation.
One of the rationales for the old practice of giving up something during Lent was in order to carry out the discipline of resisting temptation. If what we chose to give up was something like a favorite food or going to the blackjack table once a week, there would always be that temptation before us to give in to something that gives us pleasure. Now, it’s not bad to have a practice that helps us to focus on a disciplined life-style, but the problem with Lenten denials is that (1) they are usually something pretty minor and (2) they’re over with after six weeks. The kind of temptation Adam and Eve was facing involved making some life-altering choices.
But that’s what we are doing all the time, isn’t it? Our choices do affect our futures in ways both small and large. The key to a meaningful Lenten journey, therefore, is to focus on the choices we are continuously making and deciding whether (and if so, how) they are leading us to act as children of God.
Like children who become adults by separating from their parents, we, too, like Adam and Eve, must separate from God by leaving our symbolic Gardens of Eden – but then, like adult children who grow close to their parents, we must find our way back.
It’s interesting that the lectionary gives us the temptation story of Jesus from Matthew’s gospel to place alongside the Genesis story. At one level it would be easy to contrast these two stories and say that Adam and Eve were tested and found wanting, while Jesus resisted his tempter’s ploys. But that’s too simple. For one thing, Jesus is often referred to as the new Adam, and so he participates in all the human qualities that endear Adam to us. For another thing, facing the tempter is no easy task – Jesus begins by fasting for forty days, and by the end of that time he was exhausted. Moreover, this encounter takes its toll on him so that at the end, as our text says, “angels came and waited on him”. They were nourishing him as he needed time to recuperate. But once that recuperation was complete he leaves for Galilee to be about his mission of calling others to repentance.
The important aspect of Jesus’ temptation was not his resistance to those admittedly lovely inducements: “rule the world”? – not a bad gig if it’s offered to you – “become immortal” by not smashing yourself when you jump off a cliff? – hey, I wouldn’t mind having that neat little super-power. No, you can rather easily see that these did not seriously tempt Jesus to renounce God. The important aspects were that Jesus prepared himself and had the courage to confront his tempter. United Methodist pastor Christian Coon puts it this way:
“Jesus doesn’t race around calling out the devil so they can fight mano a mano; he waits and prepares, fasting and praying. He doesn’t procrastinate; he confronts the tempter. He doesn’t overanalyze the situation by thinking it to death; he uses the right amount of reason and faith to refute the devil. Intentional preparation and courageous confrontation are powerful tools. In the Christian faith, these are the Lenten disciplines that we can utilize when life’s tests are before us.”
Adam and Eve had tests put before them, and perhaps they did not prepare, and perhaps their confrontation of their tempter was less than courageous. But they were not failures. They took the choices that they were offered and eventually made of them a whole human race who now confront our own choices and tests. Recall that Jesus taught and teaches us to pray “Lead us not into temptation.” This doesn’t mean that we won’t be tempted or that we won’t have choices to make. What it does mean is that God’s will for us is to live as whole, free people – free of shame, free from guilt, free to be of service.
In C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia when the four Pevensie children visit that mythical land they are called by the creatures there – and eventually even by Aslan himself – Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve. This sounds a bit pretentious when you first hear it, but as the stories wend their way along you come to realize that this is exactly how human children – human beings – should be known by those who have not yet come into the Kingdom of God. The fact that we are Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve means that we were created to be the creatures God wants us to be. We are thus created in the image of Unmeasured Joy. We are created to be worthy companions of the Creator. There is nothing to be ashamed of.
Our goal in our Lenten journeys – or, at least, the goal I would hold out for you, if you are willing to accept it (in that old Mission Impossible line) – is to find the ways to live joyfully, shamelessly, as an embodiment of God’s holiness here on earth. To be a Son of Adam or a Daughter of Eve is to partake of the glory of God, as God intended for us. The communion of which we will partake in a few moments is a taste of that glory as well, and thus we can begin our Lenten journey savoring the feeling of God’s presence on our lips, in our hearts, and with our souls.
Nelson Mandela in his inaugural address quoted the poet Marianne Williamson, who said:
“We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and
fabulous?’
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God; . . .
We are born to make manifest the glory of God within us.” (A Return to
Love, New York: Harper Collins)
Amen.
Dave Pomeroy
First Congregational Church, United Church of Christ
Las Vegas, NV
February 10, 2008