1st Sunday in Lent – Year A March 5, 2017
Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7 Romans 5:12-19 Matthew 4:1-11
You know what I wish? I wish that being a Christian was just about following the rules. Oh, I know, there are lots of Christians out there that will tell you there are plenty of rules to follow. There are specific theologies that must be believed… specific issues on which we need to be united… specific kinds of people that we must declare inside or outside of the faith… Oh, that it was so easy.
Now, let’s be clear. I am not saying that rules are important. Or necessary. In fact, rules and boundaries give our lives clarity and help us to meet expectations. They keep us healthy and safe. They keep us in community with one another.
But today’s lessons tell us that being in or out of the family of God is not just about following the rules. It’s about understanding the principles behind the rules, and sometimes being willing to see the rules in a new way when the Holy Spirit moves us to do so. And at it’s essential core, a life of faith is about living out the Greatest Commandments that Jesus spoke so often of… to love God with heart, soul, mind and strength and our neighbors as ourselves.
The Genesis reading is well known to all of us. I wouldn’t be surprised if your bible has a topic heading called The Fall. Now let’s be clear – scripture didn’t come to us with paragraph headings. In fact, the concept of the actions of Adam and Eve in this passage are a fall from grace into sin is a Christian theology. Volumes have been written over the last 2000 years about how their actions affect all who follow them. But this week I encountered a commentary on this story which has made me think about this story – and the relationship between sin and faith in a whole new way.
Stanley Hauerwas has been thinking about Christian ethics since he was a Texas farm boy in the 1960’s. He has studied all of the great Christian teachers throughout history and taught generations of Christian teachers and preachers in the last 40 years. Recently, he had a profound realization when preparing to preach on this Genesis text. Eve did what many of us do. She reframed the story to fit her narrative.
What does that mean? In the story, God told Adam and Eve that they could not eat from the tree in the middle of the garden – everything else was fair game. But when the serpent asked her about the tree, Eve added something… she said that God has forbidden them to even touch the fruit, or they would die. It’s a little disconcerting to know that the serpent replied correctly - touching the fruit would not kill them. And by exploiting Eve’s new version of the story, the serpent convinced her to eat the fruit – because it was good – and to share it with Adam. And they did not die. But it did change their lives forever, and death became a new preoccupation in their lives and passed down to us.[i]
So, what if the original sin was not disobedience but instead was legalism – a preoccupation with making faith something difficult to accomplish instead of seeing it as a way of being in relationship with God? Does that change the way we see both sin and faith? Does it make a difference in the way we live? Does it change who is in and who is out of the Kingdom of God? And what does it mean for how we react to temptation?
If we look forward to Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness, we encounter some interesting things.
First, Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness… He was not abandoned there. The wilderness was not a place devoid of God’s presence. In fact, it was a place where Jesus was able to become finely tuned to what relationship with God was all about. And despite our assumption that he would be weakened by his time away from the comforts and pleasures of the world, it feels like it actually gave him the fuel he needed to combat the rational arguments that Satan provides.
The reason that this feels important to me right now is because I think we have the tendency of thinking that trouble or change or feeling out of control is a place where we are outside of God’s control. But more and more I realize that it’s in those places where we get to choose to trust God. It’s in the wilderness that we learn more about who God is AND we learn more about who we are. In an increasingly uncertain world, I am sure that this is a good thing.
Second, in this story of Jesus in the wilderness, we get to see Jesus experiencing some of the same temptations we confront in our lives.[ii] Understanding how Jesus reacted to his situation can help us figure out how we should respond. Through Jesus:
* We are called to refuse to use power to make our needs more important than the needs of others. The first temptation presented to Jesus was to see if he would put his own needs first. Jesus had been without food and drink for 40 days (which in bible-speak is a really long time). Think about the Israelites wandering in the wilderness for 40 years. It didn’t take long for them to use up whatever provisions they took for themselves. And so, God provided manna, to be collected for their daily needs. If they tried to secret away extra, it spoiled so that they couldn’t eat. It was an exercise in learning to trust God to provide what we need. It’s one of the hardest lessons we have to learn: our own survival does not outweigh the call to follow and trust that God will meet our true needs.
* We are called to refuse to test God or use God’s power in direct opposition of the way it was intended. Imagine being offered the power to do and have whatever you want. The second temptation tested Jesus’ willingness to use the power he had to become the kind of Messiah that the Jews were expecting…not just powerful, but also willing to use that power to serve his own spiritual and political needs. Even craftier, Satan used the words of Psalm 91 to “prove” that this was what God intended for the Messiah. Instead, Jesus refused to give into the power that was rightfully his. Using scripture in rebuttal, he reminds us that we are not to put God to the test. This one is very hard, because testing boundaries is what helps us grow. But it’s also important to realize that there are consequences that may not be experienced until much later.
* We are called to refuse use God’s power to gain power for ourselves. Satan’s last temptation was to try to coax Jesus into raising up an army to enter into the wars and conflicts of the day. But Jesus refused, knowing power can corrupt even before we realize it is happening. This one is especially hard because the world is conflict driven. Our lives are often defined by wars, conflicts, police actions and revolutions. It even seems that peace can hardly settle in before new conflicts arise and the world order is one again rearranged. And if there is not conflict around us, we might be tempted to start one, just to assert our superiority. Every day, this temptation feels close to home, as we worry about our current needs and what our lives will look like in the future. [iii]
Jesus gives us a model for facing the temptations we face very day. Our resistance requires us to understand who God is, who God has called us to be, and how God calls us to live. The season of Lent offers us time to dive deeper than we might on ordinary days, exploring what it means to live out our baptismal promises. Our baptisms are not just defined by what we understand about Jesus, but also how we have become part of a bigger family – the Church – held accountable not just to God, but also to one another. Life in Christ is both/and, not either/or.[iv]
The passage from Romans teaches us that Jesus takes away sin’s power of us. We can’t resist it by ourselves. Adam and Eve’s bad choice – believing that they could be on the same level as God – touched everyone who came after them. But Jesus’ faithfulness to God’s promises for him and for the world gives us access to the kind of life that God always intended for us. The good news is this: the power of God in Christ is stronger than the power of Satan. The power of good always triumphs over the power of evil, even if we don’t see it at the moment, and the power of life—of resurrection—overturns the power of death and destruction every time.
Resisting temptation is not easy… in fact, it often brings us to places where we did not expect to be. But I am convinced that when our comfort and routine are stripped away, we experience the most growth. And when we stop listening to the voice that says, “You failed,” and listen instead to the one that says, “You were faithful,” we become the people God created us to be.[v] Our freedom comes in our relationship with Christ. This is not freedom to do whatever we want, is instead the desire and the will for joyful obedience to God, and satisfaction in living that life.[vi]
I close today reading from Romans 5:20-21, not included in today’s reading, but a fitting commentary on God’s promises, personified in Jesus.
All that passing laws against sin did was produce more lawbreakers. But sin didn’t, and doesn’t, have a chance in competition with the aggressive forgiveness we call grace. When it’s sin versus grace, grace wins hands down. All sin can do is threaten us with death, and that’s the end of it. Grace, because God is putting everything together again through the Messiah, invites us into life—a life that goes on and on and on, world without end. (The Message)
As we move through this season, let us recommit ourselves to grace, living out God’s mission to fight against the powers and principalities that would seek to destroy not just us, but this world and everything in it. Because God’s grace is everything and gives us all the tools we need to make the Kingdom of God real for everyone.
Peace, Deb
[i] Podcast: Crackers and Grape Juice, Lent 1, Year A – Teer Hardy and Stanley Hauerwas, February 27, 2017. http://crackersandgrapejuice.com/lent-1-lent-year-a-legalism-is-the-original-sin/
[ii] First Sunday in Lent | Renounce — Preaching Notes, Dawn Chesser
[iii] Charles Campbell, The Word before the Powers: An Ethic of Preaching. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002., 44-48
[v] Brian Lowery, We are called to be Faithful, Not Successful, Christianity Today, March 2017
[vi] James Howell, What can we say come March 5? Lent 1, http://jameshowellsweeklypreachingnotions.blogspot.com/
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