What can we say February 26? Lent 1

    Preaching in Lent: I always wonder, and feel sure I’m not off target in this, if clergy and church staff people care intensely about Lent, but our lay people are uninterested or vaguely aware. So we professionals fixate on it being Lent 1, while our people are thinking simply it’s another Sunday. Alas. And so our texts.

   Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7. What a way to begin Lent – with the beginning of humanity, and our fallenness, our brokenness. Jonathan Sacks eyed a “failure of leadership” here, which is primally the failure to take responsibility. Theologians extracted doctrines of original sin and more from this narrative – which is always how doctrine begins, isn’t it?

   Americans brag about their freedom, but we’re all just as habitually turned from God, and stuck in it, as Adam and Eve. Mark Twain: “I don’t know why Adam and Eve get so much credit; I could have done just as well as they did.” Lancelot du Lac, in Camelot: “Had I been made the partner of Eve, we’d be in Eden still” – and then in short order he’s in bed with Guinevere! 

And I love Doug Marlette’s old cartoon which always applies to the “holiness” party in every denomination, Adam and Eve smugly refusing the apple, declaring “No thanks, we’re Presbyterian.”

   So many wise commentaries have pondered this text. Walter Brueggemann points out that we are given a vocation (Till the garden) and a limitation (this 1 tree) – so we forsake the vocation by overstepping our limitations. Gerhard von Rad’s oldie points out that God’s command isn’t oppressive in the least, but it did “place before man the serious question of obedience.” He notices a defensiveness in the couple’s reply to God, adding “touch,” which wasn’t in the speech of the serpent, who “asserts that it knows God better than the woman in her believing obedience does, and so it causes her to step out of the circle of obedience and to judge God and his command as though from a neutral position” – which we all think we can do with great skill!

   Russ Reno’s fabulous Brazos commentary resorts to Aquinas: “God’s commandments do not only train us to realize our natural potential; they also train us for a supernatural end that exceeds our natural end.” God picking out this 1 tree seems arbitrary – and “this is as it must be. If God is to train the natural man toward the end of participating in the supernatural Sabbath rest, then his commandments must transcend our inner-worldly purposes, must exceed our capacity for understanding.” Boom. 

 Do you hear an echo of Bonhoeffer’s little gem, Creation and Fall? “Wherever man attacks the concrete Word of God with the weapon of a principle or an idea of God, there he has become the Lord of God”

   Romans 5:12-19 shows Paul taking a giant leap from the mythical narrative of Genesis toward Augustine’s fully developed doctrine of original sin. As an undergraduate, I wrote a ridiculously long paper on this passage – proving to me, in retrospect, that this is a text for a Bible study, not a sermon. 

 Michael Gorman (in his terrific new commentary) helps us to see where Augustine floundered; his Latin “in whom (in Adam) all sinned” misconstrued the Greek that’s “because all sinned” or “inasmuch as all sinned.” But isn’t it very American to delight in debunking original sin as valid? Twain’s comment above remains spot on. Gorman points to the intertestamental 2 Baruch 54:19: “Adam is not the cause, except only for himself, but each of us has become our own Adam” – which is spot on.

   Gorman on another detail in the text: “The future tense of 5:19 is a logical future – an expression of certainty about the effects of Christ’s obedience on people here and now.” Grace isn’t a kindly attitude on God’s part; it is a power effecting change.

   Genesis 3, Romans 5, and Augustine are in our long tradition of understanding what God is up to. The theological robustness in all this is nowhere better captured than in Michelangelo’s fresco on that Sistine chapel ceiling. We fixate on God’s finger creating Adam. But curled in God’s other arm we see a woman and a child, prefiguring not just Eve as the wife to come, but Mary as the new Eve, and the child as the Second Adam, already well arranged for by God at the moment of creating that First Adam.

   Matthew 4:1-11 is my usual preference for Lent 1, although I may stick with Genesis this year – or dare I pair the two? The wilderness is Eden ruined by the Fall. Jesus shuns the voice of the tempter; he doesn’t eat. Hugely important: in my The Beauty of the Word: the Challenge and Wonder of Preaching, I assess how so much preaching is about us, with moralistic takeaways. Preaching should first of all be about God. With this text, I moan when I hear a sermon asking “How can we overcome temptation the way Jesus did?” What Jesus did, we could never do. That’s the point. He’s our Savior, not our Exemplar (as Dean Robert Cushman put it so memorably in first year theology at Duke!).

   Popular movies have regularly touched on the perils hidden in plain sight in our text. The seizure of power, humorously explicated in the film Bruce Almighty, is contrasted with the determined giving up of power with the ring in The Lord of the Rings – an issue Tolkien parsed flawlessly. I bet churchgoers would join non-churchgoers in asking if the devil is real. In my Good Questions series in the Fall, we put out this 13 minute video of me exploring the question, including Merton’s thoughtful words on “the theology of the devil,” and how the devil most of all wants attention and credit, and also C.S. Lewis’s humorous but insightful vision of the demonic in daily life in Screwtape Letters.

   I like Pádraig Ó Tuama’s take on the devil’s “if.” It seems to question his identity, as in “if you are who you say you are.” But the Greek ei can as easily mean “since,” as in “because you are you, why don’t you do this?” “It wasn’t a challenge to Jesus’ identity, it was a challenge to his power. Suddenly, it isn’t a devil with cloven feet and fort. It is every day. It is the complication of every moment. Because I am capable? Do it.”

   He continues, declaring this “the story of humanity.” The 1^st temptation is simply to do what you can for your own good. Simple. The 2^nd he reads as a temptation to suicide. Just end it all. My church family has suffered 3 suicides in the past year and a half; our community has borne the suicides of 4 adolescents. Something huge and agonizing is in the air, and the church had best lead in talking about it, especially with our youth.

   I believe Chris E.W. Green's articulation of what is at stake in this narrative is spot on: "Jesus enters into our existence so completely, so unconditionally, that his reality and ours become mutually determinative. Thanks to that bond, what happens to us happens in him, and what happens in him happens to us." He points out how, for the Desert Fathers, "Jesus was baptized not to wash away his sins but to sanctify the waters; he was tempted not to prove his sinlessness but to hallow the wilderness." Indeed, Jesus suffered - yet "nothing from his birth to his death happened to him but what his Father wanted to happen differently for us." Go back and re-read all that, and slowly - if not for your sermon, then for the growth and understanding in your own soul!