Lent 1A, 26 Feb. 2023. The Very Rev. Pamela L. Werntz
- Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7. You will not die.
- Romans 5:12-21. But where sin increased, grace abounded all the more.
- Matthew 4:1-11. Away with you, Satan!
O God all gracious and all merciful, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.
We have just crossed the threshold into the season of Lent in the Church, for period of forty days, not including Sundays (hence our special reception after our service today)! The forty days are set aside for Christians to examine our estrangement from the grace and mercy of the Holy One and to return to right relationship with God and one another. Although each person is called on to do their own Lenten practice, as a congregation we come together for mutual support and encouragement as we go through a this period of intensified self-examination with a call to increased generosity in almsgiving, praying, fasting, and studying scripture.
This past week I was thinking about similar kinds of practices in Judaism and Islam. Blissfully stuck in my head has been the Bismillah prayer, which Muslims say to ask the Holy One to be present during a recitation or task that they are about to perform. Serving as a moral compass, it points them in the right direction. Bismillah al-Rahman al-Raheem; “O God all gracious and all merciful,” is said all the time. The lunar month of Ramadan is set aside by Muslims for deep reflection, prayer, and devotion, for practicing generosity, sacrifice, and self-control. For Jews, the eight Days of Awe between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur focus on repairing relationships with one another and with God. I wonder if perhaps Christians get a longer period because God knows we need extra help and extra time?
In his collection of Jewish stories, Seymour Rossel retells the tale of a young man who came to speak with his rabbi. [1] He began: “The time of repentance comes once a year, and usually this is no problem for me. I can think of something that I have done wrong in the past year and so I prepare myself to repent for my wrongdoing. But honestly, rabbi, this year I can remember nothing that I have done wrong. So I ask you, while others are repenting, what should I do?”
The rabbi replied, “You must do exactly as I say. Go down to the riverbed and choose a large stone and bring it to me.” The young man walked down to the riverbed and stared at the stones around him. He chose the largest stone he could carry, returned to the rabbi, and placed the stone on the table. The rabbi admired the stone. “You have done well,” he said. “Now, please take this stone and return it to the exact place where you found it. And this time, bring me ten pebbles.”
The young man did as he was instructed. He returned the large stone to its place on the riverbed and looked around for ten pebbles to bring back to the rabbi. He collected the pebbles, returned to the rabbi and placed them in a neat row on the table. The rabbi admired the ten pebbles. “You have done well,” he told the young man. “Now follow my instruction carefully. Take the ten pebbles back to the riverbed and place them each exactly where you found them.” “But rabbi,” the young man objected, “that is impossible! I searched up and down the river for these ten pebbles. I’ll never remember the exact location for each of them!” The rabbi nodded. “Now you have learned something about sin and repentance. When it comes to a large sin, none of us has trouble remembering exactly what we have done, where we have done it, and how to set it right. But all year long we do small things that are wrong; every one of us sins in small ways. These small sins are like your pebbles. It is difficult to know when and where you have committed them, who has been harmed by them, and how you can set them right. As the time of repentance comes each year, we ask forgiveness not only for the large sins that we can recall so well, but for all the little sins, too.” And we trust in the grace and mercy of God.
For Christians, it’s customary to include the Great Litany as our opening prayer on the first Sunday in Lent. It includes a comprehensive list of sins that can separate us from fully participating in the Love of God. It’s an expansion of Paul’s rhetorical question in his letter to the Jesus followers in Rome: Will hardship, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, or sword separate us from the Love of God? Paul says, “Not death nor life nor angels nor height nor depth nor anything else in all creation” is able to keep God’s Love from seeking us out, because that Love has already been poured into our hearts through the spirit of God.
If we asked people who are here today, or who are out and about on Newbury Street, what “sin” is, we’d probably get a variety of answers. I suspect many would say “something you’re not supposed to say or do.” People might talk about guilt or shame. Maybe some would think of a breakdown of relationship between people, or between a people and God, which is the Biblical notion of sin. Some might just say, “I don’t want to go there,” because the idea is so frightening and so difficult that it can be tempting to forget the whole idea.
Temptation is closely related to sin. The reason temptation works so well, is that it seems so good, so right, often so justified, which seems to me to be especially true with institutional or corporate sin. But sin is never justified. Temptation is crafty and relentless. I love the saying that opportunity may knock only once, but temptation leans on the doorbell: ding-dong, ding-dong, ding-dong. Temptation is relentless; it pokes at our weaknesses (we barely notice temptation in areas where we are not so weak). What is tempting to one person, community, or institution is often not tempting to another, because we all have different strengths and weaknesses. Yet there are two things that I believe we all have in common, no matter what our different strengths and weaknesses are: 1) a need for the grace and for mercy of God; and 2) a need for one another. Sin separates us from God and from one another.
Those two commonalities are highlighted in the readings we just heard (or maybe we didn’t really hear them). The story in Genesis, especially, is so familiar we might not have really heard it. When Mark Fernau started reading, maybe you thought, “Oh I know that one;” so let me remind you of some things. This story in Genesis is from the second creation story, and not the first. In this version, there is a creature called Dirtling, also known as Adam. The transliteration of the Hebrew name Adam is certainly a nice name, but it’s meaningless to our English ears because we don’t use the word adamah for dirt. God took adamah and made an adam; God took dirt and made a dirtling. [2] God saw that the dirtling was lonely, so God made a companion named chava, from the word chayim, which means life. The next time you hear a glass raised to life, L’Chayim, think of toasting our Eve.
So once upon a time, a dirtling and his companion Life, lived free from knowing worry and pain, shame and sorrow. They were also free from knowing joy and delight, beauty and love. The whole narrative arc of the Bible is about the lengths to which God, moving heaven and earth, will go to free people. The dirtling and life had one job, to take care of the garden: to serve and protect it; and they received one instruction from the Divine. A literal translation enhances the fairy-tale quality of the story: “From every tree of the garden you may eat, but from the tree of the knowledge of good and bad [which is another way to say everything], you may not eat, or else you will die.” This is interesting, since Genesis reports later on that the dirtling lived for 930 years (perhaps a punishment worse than death)! I’m poking fun because this is a story that for our entire history has captured and consumed Christians in a way that it never has for Jews. I’m trying to figure out how to get us out of the prison that the zealous convert, the Apostle Paul, seems to have built in the process of proclaiming that Jesus Christ was the Way.
I don’t read anything in the Gospels that suggests that humans are inherently, or born, bad. In fact, I read Jesus’ teachings as cultivating practices of compassionate and merciful behaviors toward other human beings, cultivating the essential good, in response to remembering that God is faithful, that God loves, indeed that God IS love. According to my Torah commentary, there is an ancient rabbinic teaching that without a mitzvah, a good or godly deed, a human being is truly naked. Doing mitzvot, good or godly deeds, is a way to clothe oneself with righteousness (with right relationship), which is the only clothing that matters. [3]
Although sin is mentioned nearly 2000 times in the Bible, the word sin doesn’t appear in Genesis until the story of Cain and Abel; the word is nowhere in the story we heard today. Disobeying God and hiding from God, whether because of pride, shame, or indifference, isn’t described as sin in Genesis. The original sin, if there were one, seems to begin with sibling rivalry. Not only is sin unmentioned in this story, there is no mention of marriage or of an apple. So to use this story to assert exclusively-binary gender identity or exclusively-hetero marriage is completely ridiculous. Our reading today stops two verses short of a beautiful and important part of the story: that is, the part in which the dirtling and his companion hide from God and in which the voice of God comes looking. In Verse 9, God says, “Where are you?” It is God who makes clothing for them to replace their leafy loincloths. Although they seem not to have gained the knowledge that they needed God, the story teaches that they did need God. Whatever Paul thought about them, in the very next verse after where our reading from Romans stops, he writes this beautiful diamond in the rough: “Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more.”
Our Gospel story seems to me to be about the temptation to not need other people. Jesus, alone in the wilderness was thinking and praying about what it was that God might want him to do now that he’d been baptized. Jesus was very hungry, hurting, and probably feeling pretty feeble, pretty powerless. The tempter was leaning on Jesus’ doorbell, playing on his weaknesses, suggesting that if he was all that, 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 didn’t need anyone’s help or anyone’s prayers, the tempter suggested. For me, this lesson is about the temptation to believe that anyone can go it alone. The sin is to act on the belief that we don’t need God or others — as individuals, as a community or region, as a nation.
Do you know what happens after this story of Jesus alone in the desert? He goes out to find help. He finds people who are not necessarily the most skilled when it comes to the work that he needs help with, but he finds a way to work with them; and they do indeed help him. The first humans needed God. God needed help from others, and Jesus needed the help of others. We humans need God; God needs humans; and God needs us to need each other’s help: it’s a hard message. I don’t know any of us who would like to be described as needy; and yet, that is what we all are.
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, especially the least-likely people. This Lent turn again toward grace, toward mercy, toward God, who simply adores you and who will do whatever it takes to set you free. Turn toward those who love you, and turn toward those from whom you can’t imagine getting help. Easter is coming, and Lent is the time to get ready for it. Think of Lent as spring-training season for Easter, and start doing or stop doing whatever you need to be able to celebrate Easter more fully when it comes.
- Seymour Rossel, The Essential Jewish Stories, 2nd ed. (Dallas: Rossel Books, 2018), p. 371-2.
- Earthling is another possible translation. Adam also can be translated human, humankind, or mortal, but the point is that Adam comes from Adamah (dirt or earth).
- The Torah: A Modern Commentary, W. Gunther Plaut, ed. (New York: Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1981), p. 38.