The 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 of Grace, 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.
The season of Lent has begun in the Church and so I want to talk to you a little bit about temptation and about sin! (It seems only right.) It’s not something we like to talk much about so much in The Episcopal Church. Temptation is what leads to sin and sin – well… a parishioner told me once that she doesn’t really like the word sin because it’s such a strong word. “Couldn’t we just use the word mistake?” she asked. But I don’t think “mistake” completely covers it.
If we asked people who are here today or are out and about on Newbury Street what “sin” is, we’d probably get quite 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, real or imagined. Maybe some would think of a breakdown of relationship between people, or between a people and God, which is a Biblical notion of sin. Some, like that parishioner I mentioned, 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 thing and establish some new and more realistic kind of moral code. [1] Sin, in my view is always a mistake, but a mistake is not always a sin.
Temptation is more closely related to sin than to mistake. And the reason temptation works so well is that it seems so good – so right – often so justified. (That seems to me to be especially true with institutional or communal sin.) But sin is never justified. Temptation is crafty and relentless. There’s a saying that opportunity may knock only once, but temptation leans on the doorbell. Ding dong ding dong ding dong ding dong. Temptation is relentless and it pokes at our weakness (we don’t even notice temptation in areas where we are not so weak). What is tempting to one person or community or institution is often not tempting to another – because we all have different strengths and weaknesses. And 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 grace, for mercy, for love (otherwise known as 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. Maybe Liz started reading and you thought, “oh I know that one…” Here are some things that I want you to hear that you might not already know. This story in Genesis is from the second creation story, and not the first. In this second creation story, 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 completely meaningless in 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 the dirtling’s companion, life, were free from knowing worry and pain, free from knowing shame and sorrow. They were also free from knowing joy and delight, free from knowing beauty and love. The whole narrative arc of the Bible is about the lengths to which God will go, moving heaven and earth, to free people. The dirtling and life had one job – to take care of the garden: to serve it and to protect it. 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 will eat eat, but from the tree of the knowledge of good and bad [which is another way to say ‘everything’], you will not eat or else you will die die.” This is interesting, since Genesis reports later on that the dirtling lived for 930 years. (Perhaps this was a punishment worse than death!) I’m poking fun because this is a story that has captured and consumed Christians for our entire history, 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 in his letters 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 being about 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 for sin doesn’t appear in Genesis until the story of Cain and Abel. The word is nowhere in this story. Disobeying God and hiding from God, whether because of pride or shame or indifference, isn’t described as sin in Genesis. The original sin, if there is one, seems to begin with sibling rivalry. Not only is sin not mentioned in this story, there is no mention of marriage, or of an apple. And to use this story to assert exclusively binary gender assignment or identity is completely ridiculous. Our Torah portion stops two verses short of a beautiful and important part of the story: that is, the part in which the dirtling and the companion hide from God and the voice of God comes looking. In verse nine, God says, “Where are you?” and it is God who makes clothing for them to replace their leafy loincloths. Although they seem to not have gained the knowledge that they needed God, the story teaches that they did need God. And whatever Paul thought about them, he writes in the very next verse after where our reading from Romans stops, 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 (which is what had happened in the story just before this part). Jesus was very very hungry. He was hurting. And he was probably feeling pretty feeble – pretty powerless. The tempter was playing on his weaknesses suggesting that if he was The Son of God, 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 didn’t need anyone else. He didn’t need anyone’s help and he didn’t need 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 that belief — as individuals – as a community or region – as a nation. It reminds me of the wonderful bumper sticker that says, “I love my country…but I think we should start seeing other people.” We could insert church, or parish, 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 God. God, through Jesus, needed help from others – Jesus needed prayers of others. We humans need God. God needs humans. And God needs us humans to need each other’s help and need each other’s prayers. 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. To those of you who do not believe in God, I suggest giving up not believing in God for Lent. Don’t worry — you can still not believe in God on Sundays, because Sundays don’t count in the 40 days of Lent!
This Lent, turn, turn more toward grace, toward mercy, toward love, that is, toward God and turn toward other people. Turn toward God who simply adores you and who will do whatever it takes to set you free – it’s true. Turn toward those who love you, and turn toward those from whom you can’t imagine getting help. It is my job as your spiritual doctor to recommend diet and exercise – and I’m recommending it again. Easter is coming and Lent is the time to get ready for it. Think of Lent as training for Easter, and start doing or stop doing whatever you need to be able to celebrate Easter more fully when it comes.