As I heard the increasingly devastating news from Japan in the last two days, I felt relieved that our service would begin with the Great Litany.  It’s customary in our tradition to pray the litany at the beginning of Lent and also in times of disaster, or of ‘national anxiety’ as our prayer book rubric puts it.  Begging for God’s mercy for others and for ourselves is what we are doing when we pray the litany together.  Of course, together, we are also the agents of the very mercy of God we are praying for, so the Great Litany is a prayer to move ourselves off of our various dead centers to make response.  Whether it is catastrophe in Japan or in Haiti or whether it’s immense suffering from wars or starvation or disease, we are called to be agents of God’s mercy.  And we have the capacity to be agents of God’s mercy.  That means offering prayer and offering money for starters – just for starters.  We have a great capacity to pray and to send relief funds.  It also means compassion and creativity in building relationships across all kinds of distances.  And it means being changed in our hearts and our minds, which is what inevitably happens when we open ourselves up to respond to suffering.

Lent is a time that invites us to open ourselves up to respond to suffering – to turn around (which is what repent means) and face whatever calling we have turned our backs on.  We might do that through taking things on or giving things up, but as David Schlafer writes, it’s not about “If you start right now and work very hard, maybe you can get the mess of your life cleaned up by Easter!”  It’s not about a second chance on New Year’s resolutions.  It’s about time “to take a deep breath and a fresh look at the world God is relentlessly loving” (1) back into right-relationship.
I realize that it’s not so popular to talk about sin and repentance.  And to make matters worse, I don’t think that the lectionary ever dishes up three readings on one day that are more irritating to a community like Emmanuel Church.  Any one of these stories is likely to have made your brains seize right up:  Eve and Adam and the serpent in the Garden, the Apostle Paul on a riff about the sin of the world coming through Adam, and a fantastic story about Jesus in the wilderness being tempted by the devil.  Oy, oy, oy! Plenty of wrong has been done because of these passages:  wrong to women, wrong to Jews, wrong to hungry people just to name a few. 

Nevertheless, I want to apply the idea of a deep breath and a fresh look at the world God is relentlessly loving by examining these lessons to see if they might speak to us; to see if they might make a difference in the way we live our lives in the immediate near future, and by making a difference in the immediate future, change the world.  (That’s all.)

It seems to me that for a fresh look, it makes sense to change lenses.  What if we remove the doctrinal lenses of original sin or of atonement or of the inaccessible perfection of Jesus Christ, and retell the stories?  What if I told you the story from Genesis this way:  Once upon a time the Holy Name took the earthling and settled it down in a garden of delight to work the garden and to watch the garden.  The Holy Name said it would be good if the earthling did not know the difference between good and bad because the knowledge would kill the earthling so the Holy Name said to the earthling, “be careful what you eat so you don’t die.”  The story goes on to explain that the Holy Name understood that companionship was better than loneliness; that aloneness is an earthling’s primary helplessness, but our lectionary skips over that part. 

It also skips over a word play that gets lost in translation.  The earthlings, now differentiated in the text as man and woman, were both naked and were not at all ashamed. Arom – naked – is played against arum (here translated ‘crafty’ to describe the serpent) which means sensible.  Arom – naked, arum-- sensible.  Serpent can also be translated as omen or curse.  So the whole thing can mean the curse of sensible-ness.  I don’t know about you, but I have plenty of experience with the curse of the sensible.  This, then can be a story of the differences between carefree and clever.  This can also be a story of the price of growth and liberation that come from defiance and disobedience.  Is the price for wisdom worth it?  I say, “Of course it is.”

I think it’s worth mentioning that the greatest mistake in this story wasn’t eating the forbidden fruit.  The mistake in was trying to hide from God – trying to act like they didn’t need God’s help – first because they were too proud – and then because they were too ashamed.  And here’s something I bet you didn’t know.  Disobeying God and hiding from God because of pride or shame, isn’t described as sin in this story.  Although sin is mentioned nearly 2000 times in the Bible, it doesn’t appear until the story of Cain and Abel!  Sin actually begins with sibling rivalry!
What if I told you the story of our second reading today from Paul’s letter to the Church in Rome this way?  Put your bulletin papers down and don’t look at them.  Just listen to me.  Paul is making an argument which concludes right after our passage appointed for today ends.  He’s trying to say that yes, humans are a mess.  Really, the evidence of this is all around isn’t it?  And yet, Paul insists, no matter how much sin increases, there is always more grace.  According to Paul, God’s gift of grace trumps sin every time.  The gift is free and what’s more, it’s for everyone.  Grace is more powerful than even death on a cross.  Grace is what brings us back to right-relationship.  (Grace is what leads us home.)  Or as Annie Dillard puts it, “beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them.  The least we can do is try to be there.” (2)

What if I told you the story of Jesus in the wilderness this way?  Jesus gets baptized, according to Matthew, to make everything right.  On his way back out of the water of baptism, he has a powerful sense of God’s Spirit resting on him and a powerful sense that he is God’s beloved.  Right after that, that same Spirit led him to head into the wilderness where he fasted for 40 days and 40 nights – a complete quarantine -- before he moved into public ministry.  During this time he was tormented by the difficulty, his vulnerability, and powerlessness.  Tempted to live a life of ease, of security and of authority, he upholds listening for the voice of God, of trusting God’s faithfulness without testing it, and of serving rather than being served.   His responses to each tempting offer come from the Torah – from Deuteronomy – and the “major theme of Deuteronomy is the covenant … initiated by God’s unfathomable love for Israel.”(3)

“It is written, one does not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God,” Jesus says.  In his book, Paul among Jews and Gentiles, the late Krister Stendahl reminded us that Jesus never said this to a hungry person.  “When he was faced with hungry persons he fed them” by the thousands, according to all four Gospels.  “It was to Satan that he said, ‘[one] does not live by bread alone,’ speaking for and to himself.  The church, however, often quoted Jesus in the wrong direction – to the hungry, in defense of the well-fed.”

Likewise, “do not put the Lord your God to the test” and “Worship the Lord your God and serve only God,” are messages that Jesus quotes from the love story of the Torah.  He is saying them for and to himself as he wrestles with the voices trying to persuade him that his comfort, his safety and his own agency are what are being called for.  (He decides they’re not.)

The Gospel story seems to me to be about the temptation to not need other people. Think about it this way:  Jesus, alone in the wilderness is thinking about what it is that God wants him to do now that he’s been baptized.  Jesus was very very hungry.  He was hurting.  And he was probably feeling pretty powerless.  The tempter was playing on his weaknesses suggesting that if he was so beloved, he didn’t have to have someone bake bread for him, he didn’t have to feel pain, and he didn’t have to be weak.  He could get his own bread; he could be completely protected; he could be completely powerful.  He wouldn’t need anyone’s help, the tempter suggested.

The temptation is to believe that we can go it alone.  The sin is to act on that belief -- as individuals – as a community or region – as a nation.  I saw a wonderful bumper sticker the other day that said, “I love my country…but I think we should start seeing other people.”  We could insert church or town into the beginning of that saying as well.

Do you know what happens after this story of Jesus alone in the desert?  Jesus goes out to find help.  And the ones he finds are not necessarily the most skilled bunch of people when it comes to the work that Jesus needs help with – but Jesus finds a way to work with them – and they do indeed help Jesus.  The first humans needed each other and they needed God.  Jesus needed help from others. We humans need God.  And we humans need each other’s help.

If it’s your practice to give up something in Lent, try giving up the idea that you can manage without help from God and from other people.  If it’s your practice to take something on in Lent, try taking on the idea that you need help from God and from other people.  (If you don’t usually have a Lenten practice – try one on this year.)  This Lent, turn toward God and turn toward other people.  Turn toward God who simply adores you – it’s true.  Turn toward those who love you, and turn toward those from whom you can’t imagine getting help.  Repent!