The wedges driven into life
Commentary
As a teenager I split a great deal of firewood. You upend a log of the right length, setting it on the ground or, better, on a tree stump. You take a steel wedge and, with the sledgehammer held in one hand, you tap it carefully into the end grain of the log. Then you step back, and take a full swing. And if you have planned it right, if you have aimed well enough and set the wedge in the end of the log properly, if your eye is good, you hit the wedge with a deep clang of metal on metal, and the two halves of the log go flying apart. If you're really good, the wedge is left sticking in the stump, having traveled completely through the log.
The wedge forces the log apart, overcoming the natural adhesion within the log, rending the fibers that have grown together over the years. It's a powerful image of forcibly dividing something, something that is one, something normally inseparable, something made to be together. Unfortunately, the image describes much of our life together: There are wedges in every human life and every human relationship that split them and drive them apart. There are wedges driven between human beings and the God who made them, the source of their being. There are wedges driven deeply between people and other people, even between people who love each other. And there are wedges, God help us, that are driven hard into our own hearts and lives, which separate us, in some strange way, from ourselves.
We see wedges on a macro scale, that are driven so deeply into a life and so deeply between peoples that a fairly obscure Saudi citizen and his followers living in Afghanistan would undertake to kill thousands of people in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington. We see regional wedges as ethnic differences in the former Yugoslavia and in parts of Africa that destroy people's lives and create a vast refugee class of people. We see wedges on a smaller scale, a daily scale, in the wounds that we deal each other and in the little tiffs that flare up between people, the little insecurities that come out of us in the cutting comments we make to people we work with or live with.
The wedges take various forms, and on one level they have various names: anger, hatred, bigotry, jealousy, envy, injustice, poverty. We could go on with the list. But at the root of it all, there is only one name for all the various wedges that force people apart. And that is sin.
God doesn't pretend that we can eliminate the wedges from our life. But God wants us to see them, to know the things that keep us apart from other people, and to deal with them.
The season of Lent is the time set aside in the church year to take a good, hard look at the wedges of life, the things that divide, that force us apart or force us away from those we love. It's the season to understand our brokenness, and our need.
And the Good News is that in Jesus Christ the wedges driven into life don't mean the end of us.
Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7
For those of us who have grown up in western culture, and particularly grown up in the church, this story is branded on our psyches, etched in our brains. It is a part of the cultural consciousness.
Remember that this is the second creation story, the J document in the four-source theory about the origins of the Pentateuch. J is generally acknowledged to be the oldest document in the Pentateuch. The designation J originally came from the word for God, Jahveh or Yahweh, a proper name for the Creator that is used in this section. (Later scholars have used the letters to describe the source of each of the sources: J for Judean, or the southern epic, and E for Ephraimic, or the northern epic.)
There is a charming innocence about the story, almost a childlike wonder to it that belies the profound truths that are so much a part of it. In its simple narrative, the story describes something basic and deep about human beings.
Yahweh God has made a man from the dust of the earth, and has planted a garden, with trees for food, as well as two other particular trees, the trees of life and the knowledge of good and evil. With that we come to the setup for the Fall, the first section, Genesis 2:15-17. Yahweh God puts the man in the garden to care for it, with but one proviso, a single restriction for this new garden and its new inhabitants. No other rules. This really isn't complicated, no need to memorize long lists of forbidden things. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil is completely off limits. Touch it and die, says God.
The intervening material is important. God saw the need for a helper for the man. Animals were made and named, but among all of them there was not a fit helper. The woman was made and was found to be a fit helper, and the general state of life and of the newly-made people is described in 2:25, "And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed." But the intervening material is excluded from the lectionary, because this, after all, is not about nature or animals or human dominion in the world or any of the other matters in the story. No, this is about the Fall, about disobedience, about sin, or, as John Milton began Paradise Lost, "Of man's first disobedience and the fruit of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste brought death into the world...."
The scene switches to the serpent, who here is simply another creature made by God. Crafty, yes, and with a slight suggestion of evil, but still not the same as Satan or the devil in later biblical writings. The serpent is much like the Adversary in Job, whose job it was to ask questions and raise issues. Yet his question was not an innocent question; it was definitely pointed and provocative. The woman was clear on the requirement about the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden; she recited the rule accurately. But the woman believed what the serpent said. And a case is certainly to be made that the serpent spoke the truth. Death comes into the picture, but not immediately, only later. And we read in 3:22 that even God acknowledges that the serpent was right -- the man had indeed become like God in knowing good from evil. Besides which, the woman sees, with a certain dramatic naivetÈ, that the fruit was good for food, it was beautiful to behold, and it made one wise. What could possibly be wrong with that? So they ate.
In verse 7 we see the result of the disobedience: they knew they were naked and they were ashamed. It was a precise reversal of the state of life described in 2:25, and therefore the exact opposite of what God had created them to be. That, orthodoxy holds, is what was introduced into the world. And the consequence of it continues for all humanity.
This is how the storytellers of the ancient Middle East described the plight of humanity. Simply put, disobedience -- sin -- goes very, very deep in us, and very, very early in our history. Life got out of whack, and we've been trying to put it back ever since.
Romans 5:12-19
It is through Paul that the Old Testament reading and the Gospel reading come together, as Paul's compares what has been wrought by two men on behalf of other human beings.
Thus in 5:12 we understand that the sin of Adam (and Eve) was the cause of death in the world. Paul makes the jump to say that because of that, and because we all sin, therefore we are all subject to death. It is a strange connection between the action of Adam and our destiny. For the last 2,000 years that connection has been called original sin.
From there Paul moves to the work of Jesus Christ, and the effect that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ has on subsequent human beings who have faith in him. It is the free gift of grace of Jesus Christ that brings justification instead of condemnation. Somehow, Paul seems to be saying in verse 17, the fact that Adam's sin had an effect -- death -- on later generations is the very thing that makes it possible for Christ to have an effect -- abundant grace and justification -- on later generations.
But in that we come to problems. Christian orthodoxy has acknowledged for 2,000 years that the actions of one person can have profound effects on the rest of subsequent humanity. That's hard for moderns to grasp or accept, even though we may affirm it every Sunday morning in a creed we say aloud. How do Adam's sin and Christ's grace span the eons to have an effect on us? Is it some sort of quantum effect? In the first case, it's important that we not be literalistic: we need to see Adam not as the first man, but as the representative man, the man that stands for all of us, in the story of separation and alienation that we all act out in our lives.
In the case of Christ, Paul is saying a great deal more about Jesus Christ than the gospels say. He is interpreting Christ as a new creation, a new Adam, a new first man. And through our relationship with him, we are recreated in his likeness, so that the trespass is deemed not to have an effect on us.
It's all hard to understand, no doubt about that. But underlying the strangeness of imputed sin from Adam and imputed righteousness from Christ lies the mystery of the wondrous grace of God in the face of our sin.
Matthew 4:1-11
Matthew's purpose in writing is clearer in some parts of the gospel than in others. In the story of the temptation, it is very clear. The 40 days and nights in the wilderness are a distinct reference to Israel's 40-year sojourn in the wilderness, which was a time of testing and purification. Matthew fully intends to make the connection. In all three synoptics, Jesus' time in the wilderness and his temptation by the devil follow shortly after his baptism. In Matthew they are in immediate juxtaposition, so we find that the statement the devil makes twice, "If you are the son of God ..." follows immediately on the heels of, and is contrasted with, 3:17, "This is my son...." This is almost certainly intentional on Matthew's part, and it means that we can understand Matthew to be saying something in the temptation story about what it means for Jesus to be the Son of God, about what kind of son he is to be.
One preliminary point: It is important for us to affirm that Jesus was really tempted. It has been suggested that in some way Jesus wasn't really tempted, that he was playacting because, after all, he was God. But to say that he was just pretending simply doesn't do justice to the reality of Jesus' humanity nor to the story. We must acknowledge the struggle within him, and if Jesus struggled, then how much more will we struggle?
The temptations follow a definite pattern: The tempter makes a suggestion or an offer, whereupon Jesus rebukes him with a quotation from Deuteronomy.
The temptations are (a) to provide, as a miracle worker, food for himself and, presumably, for the masses; (b) to make a showy proof of Jesus' sonship, a test, really, of God; and (c) to have power and prestige. The content of each of the temptations is not simply a random desire that Jesus might have had, although certainly those three things have been deep human desires for the entire history of the species. But there's more to it than that, because the temptations were a challenge to the relationship between Jesus and God, a challenge to the kind of son he would be. The thing that is common to all of the temptations is that they seek to set Jesus up as God, to do what the Letter to the Philippians praises him for not doing, counting himself equal with God (Philippians 2:6). The account is a very clear, and deliberate, parallel to the temptation in the Genesis passage, in which one of the enticements of the serpent was that Adam and Eve would be like God, knowing good and evil.
And the effect of each of the four temptations -- one in Genesis and three in Matthew -- would be the same: separation. It's very ironic, that when human beings try to be like God the result is invariably separation from God. Adam and Eve succumbed. Jesus didn't. Jesus recognized the temptations for what they were, things that would separate him from God, and he understood who he was and who God was. Is it enough just to see them? For most of us, unlike Jesus, recognizing the things that get in the way, that divide us and separate us, is never enough to get rid of them. But it's a start.
Application
Lent is the penitential season, the season to look inward and to take account of ourselves and of our lives. It is by long-standing church tradition the time to delve into our lives and see the sin that is there. That's getting harder and harder to do because, among other reasons, sin has been largely defined out of existence.
Some years ago, Karl Menninger, the patriarchal psychiatrist of the Menninger Foundation, saw it happening, and he raised the question in a book of the same name, Whatever Became of Sin? He first became aware of the disappearance on a national scale, in politics, noting that not since Eisenhower had a president spoken the word, or alluded to the concept of, sin. His answer to the question, briefly, is that sin has transmogrified into various other syndromes: sickness, crime, neurosis. They have all taken the place that sin used to have.
Transforming sin into all those other things may help us to feel better about ourselves, but it doesn't really deal with the issue, an issue that we see in the world interpersonally and internationally and everything in between. The issue is separation, division, the feelings and attitudes that force people apart from the love that God would have from us. The fundamental matter of life and of humanity, at all levels and degrees of relationship, is attraction and distance, closeness and alienation.
In Washington, D.C., a man pulls out a 9-millimeter semi-automatic pistol and shoots another man over a busted drug deal. That's sin, and it is fundamentally rending, of both lives and of the families of both men. It's a wedge driven into society. And it doesn't stop there, because then the murdered man's brother gets a gun and wants revenge.
A nation that has oppressive policies and laws toward the underclass within its borders, and keeps certain people down and in "their place." That's sin, and it separates and alienates and divides people from each other. That is a wedge, too. And then those who have been down rise up and destroy, broadening the rift.
The tight-lipped executive comes home from a hard day at the office where his boss harshly criticized the report he had written, so the man yells at the kids and snaps at his wife. That, too, is a wedge. And then the child gets hurt and kicks the dog.
On the playground a child sees a new toy that another child has and decides that he wants it, and without batting an eye, he grabs it. That's a wedge. And then the child whose toy was taken turns around and takes a toy from yet another child.
The wedge that is sin is ubiquitous and expanding. It begins early, it goes deep, it spreads abroad, both for us individually and for us as a species. That is the message of the story of the fall in Genesis. Whether the blame lies with the serpent or with Adam and Eve doesn't really matter. A wedge was slammed into the garden that God had created, and things were thrown awry -- the relationship between Adam and Eve, their relationship with God, and God's vision of how things were to be. Things were split, just like the log is split for firewood.
Frederick Buechner puts it this way, "The power of sin is centrifugal. When at work in a human life, it tends to push everything out toward the periphery. Bits and pieces go flying off until only the core is left. Eventually bits and pieces of the core itself go flying off until at the end nothing at all is left."
But however much the wedge is a part of life, however centrifugal the power of sin, it is never the final word. The problem with Adam and Eve was that they saw the fruit of the tree as food only, not as a splitting, rending wedge. In the temptations, Jesus saw the wedge that could have been driven into his life, which could have divided him from God and from what God had made him. He saw it for what it was and he resisted it, because he knew who he was. And that becomes beneficial for us who also find ourselves tempted.
What separates in life? It's a key question we need to answer. The first step is recognition, looking within and finding the wedges within our own lives that have separated us from others and from God. And finding the wedges that we have driven into others' lives. That's the Lenten task.
Alternative Applications
1) Matthew: What kind of life?
What are the principles of your life? As Jesus faced the temptations and dealt with them, he made decisions -- decisions about the kind of life he would lead, about who would be the governing power in his life, about the main principle of his life. It was to be a life not of striving to be God, even though he had a greater claim than anybody else, but striving to be in relationship with God. That makes all the difference in the world.
2) Genesis and Matthew: On temptation
The word "temptation" is quaint, and utterly trivial in our society. Let's face it, isn't the word most of the time used to refer to breaking a diet, eating that second piece of pie when you're trying to lose weight? But the testimony of both Genesis and Matthew is that temptation is real and deadly serious with grave consequences. The preacher might deal with the serious side of temptation in our world, say, the temptation for vengeance or for mind-numbing drugs or for easy sex or for countless other things. Those are real and they have consequences.
FIRST LESSON FOCUS
Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7
"Death spread to all ... because all ... sinned" (Romans 5:12). That is what our text for the morning is about -- the sin of us all. Our text from Genesis is not intended by its author to be the story of just one man named Adam. No. "Adam" is the Hebrew word for humankind, and the author of Genesis 2-3 intends to tell the story of us all. It is a profound portrayal of you and of me.
Our scene in Genesis 2, of course, is the Garden of Eden, that the Lord God has planted "in the East" for the benefit of Adam. All the beauty of that garden, its fruit and produce (v. 9), its life-giving water (v. 10), and its productive work (v. 15) have been given to Adam, in God's loving concern for him. Indeed, when the Lord God sees that "it is not good for the man to be alone" (v. 18), he even mercifully gives the man all the animals and birds and finally a companion to be his wife and to share his life and love, in a relationship of mutual helpfulness (vv. 18-25) -- there is no subordination of female to male in this story.
But one thing the Lord God does not give to us human beings in this story, namely, the rule over our own lives and therefore our own ability to define right and wrong. That fact is symbolized in our text by that forbidden tree in the midst of the garden (vv. 15-17). Adam is told that he may eat of the produce of every tree in the garden, but he must not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, "for in the day that you eat of it, you shall die" (v. 17). Now that does not mean that we should not apply our minds to scientific and technical and cultural knowledge -- ignorance is no virtue in the Christian faith. Rather it means that there are limitations on our human existence. We are not our own gods and goddesses. We are not free to define our own right and wrong, as so many are doing in our society. We are not self-made, autonomous rulers of our minds and souls and bodies. No. We are the creations and creatures of God, made in his image and always responsible to him for what we are and do. And we are not to deny that relationship or ever try to run our own lives in heedlessness of it. For as soon as we try to do without God, we will surely die. God is the Source and Fountain of all life on this earth, and apart from him we cannot live.
God's command to the man not to eat of the tree is another manifestation of the Lord's love for us, of course. It is a loving command, because the Lord God does not want us to die. He has only our welfare in view. He wants us to have good and abundant life, surrounded and sustained by his love. And so like a loving parent telling a child not to run out into the street, he tells us in this text, "Do not eat of the forbidden tree. Do not try to be your own deity."
In the story that follows verses 15-17, and after the creation of the woman to be the man's loving partner in verses 18-25, we find Genesis 3, which is our author's profound picture of you and of me, and of the way we all have walked in relation to our Creator.
The serpent in this story of Genesis 3 is not intended to be the devil. Rather he is a creature whom the Lord God has made and whose distinguishing characteristic is that he is more "subtle," more "crafty" than any other wild creature. The author therefore employs that craftiness just to tell his story about us, and the author's whole concern is to center the story on our responsibility to God.
In the story, the serpent engages the woman, Eve, in what Dietrich Bonhoeffer has called "the first conversation about God." That is, the serpent leads the woman, who was intimately made by the hands of God, to step outside of her relationship with the Lord and to discuss God as an object. And how often we do that, don't we? We make God an object "out there" to be discussed. We decide what he is like and if we can trust him. We even try to re-imagine him in some other image.
As a result, the serpent places before the woman three temptations. The first is to believe that God is not good. "Did God say, 'You shall not eat of any tree of the garden'?" (v. 1), that is, Won't God let you have all of that luscious fruit? Doesn't God want you to have what is good? Now Eve, like all of us religious souls, is very zealous to defend God, and so she exclaims, "Oh no. We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden; but God said, 'You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die' " (v. 3). Of course God never said that, did he? He never said, "Don't touch the tree." And so a little self-will has entered the picture. The woman has begun constructing her own little tinny moral code. You know how it goes. "If you want to be a Christian you must not do such and such." The door of independence from God has opened just a crack, and the serpent seizes the opportunity.
So the serpent poses the second temptation to the woman -- to believe that God is not serious. "You will not die," he says. In other words, God doesn't mean all of those commands he gives us. "You shall not kill, commit adultery, steal, bear false witness, covet." C'mon, God can't be serious. "If anyone would come after me, let him take up his cross and follow me." Naw. God doesn't mean that. God is not serious about what he says.
And then there is the third temptation -- to believe that God is jealous of his own status. "God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil" (v. 5). God is a jealous, green-eyed monster who is afraid to be challenged, because he really has no power to do you to death. Don't believe what God says. Eat what seems good to you!
And indeed, the forbidden fruit looks very good to the woman. It is "good for food" and "a delight to the eyes," and "desired to make one wise" (v. 6). So she takes of the fruit and eats. And there is our sin in a nutshell, isn't it? It looks like the right thing to do. None of us here this morning sets about deliberately to sin, at least not very often. We all want to be good Christians. We want to be faithful churchgoers. We want to do what is right. But an action looks like the right thing to do at the time. It looks like the "loving" thing to do, the "compassionate" deed, the proper course to take. In other words, we decide it is right; we construct our own right and wrong; we try to be our own god. But the difficulty is that it goes against the commandment of the One who is truly God.
The story doesn't end there, however. It continues with the phrase, "and she also gave to her husband, and he ate" (v. 6). And once again we are presented with a profound picture of the nature of our sin, this time of complicity. The man just goes along. He eats, doesn't he? And we just go along. Someone makes a racial slur, and we just stand there and don't say a word. We go along. Or someone commits a petty thievery, and we never object. We just go along. Or someone seriously injures a community, and we attribute it to human nature or the influence of drugs or alcohol, or to a bad home environment. We overlook sin and just go along, and thus we participate in the offense.
Our text for the morning ends with verse 7, but there follows in Genesis 3 an accounting of all the distortions that our sinfulness brings upon this earth -- the corruption of the natural world, the loss of joy and productivity in work, the introduction of pain, the awful domination of male over female, and finally the sentence of death and the loss of paradise.
But that terrible corruption is presaged in the one sentence of verse 7. The eyes of the man and woman are opened, and suddenly they are no longer one, enjoying the mutual companionship of marriage. Rather they realize that they are naked, and they try vainly to cover their nakedness. Now my ego stands over against your ego. Now suddenly we are cut off from oneness with other human beings, and the community that God has desired for his earth has become impossible. A terrible renting of the fabric of God's good creation has taken place because of our sin, and there is no one who can make it all whole again except the God who made it in the first place.
And that, you see, is the reason we have entered this season of Lent, that will take us toward the cross and finally to an empty tomb.
PREACHING THE PSALM
Psalm 32
This psalm belongs to the group of psalms designated by the Christian church for confession and absolution. In the Hebrew calendar, a sequence of services provided for the confession guilt, and there was both a guilt offering, for personal sin against God, and a sin offering, for sin against the community. Thus Psalm 32 reminds us that God forgives not only personal but also corporate sins. Obviously, this psalm is a highly appropriate one for the First Sunday of Lent.
Some preaching possibilities:
1) Originally, the Reformation leaders wanted to have confession and absolution in a special sacrament, in addition to baptism and the Eucharist. They settled on the latter two only, but Martin Luther said, "Whenever private confession leaves the church, the church will die." So though not made a sacrament, confession is just as important as those other means of grace.
A sermon could focus on the painful manifestations of unconfessed sin, especially using verses 3 and 4, compared to the lightened heart of those who unburden themselves to God, and receive forgiveness (vv. 1-2).
2) Note that this psalm begins with two beatitudes. Logically, they should come at the end of the psalm, after the acknowledgement of sin and God's granting of absolution (v. 5). But coming as they do at the beginning, together with additional expressions of joy in the final verse (v. 11), they serve to bracket the recognition of guilt and subsequent repentance with blessedness and joy. That can be a description of the Christian life -- one lived in the joy and blessing of God, but where, from time to time, the person becomes aware of a sin that has slipped in, and the means to deal with it that is readily available: confession and repentance. That done, the joy returns.
This dealing with the sins of Christians is surely what John had in mind when he wrote, "I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; and he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins ..." (1 John 2:1-2).
3) Paul quotes verses 1 and 2 of this psalm in Romans 4:7-8, introducing the verses by saying, "So also David speaks of the blessedness of those to whom God reckons righteousness apart from works." Indeed, the psalm reminds us that it is repentance, confession and forgiveness that put us in the right relationship with God. You could discuss the common, if unspoken, reliance on works as a hoped-for way to please God, and why it alone is not enough.
The wedge forces the log apart, overcoming the natural adhesion within the log, rending the fibers that have grown together over the years. It's a powerful image of forcibly dividing something, something that is one, something normally inseparable, something made to be together. Unfortunately, the image describes much of our life together: There are wedges in every human life and every human relationship that split them and drive them apart. There are wedges driven between human beings and the God who made them, the source of their being. There are wedges driven deeply between people and other people, even between people who love each other. And there are wedges, God help us, that are driven hard into our own hearts and lives, which separate us, in some strange way, from ourselves.
We see wedges on a macro scale, that are driven so deeply into a life and so deeply between peoples that a fairly obscure Saudi citizen and his followers living in Afghanistan would undertake to kill thousands of people in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington. We see regional wedges as ethnic differences in the former Yugoslavia and in parts of Africa that destroy people's lives and create a vast refugee class of people. We see wedges on a smaller scale, a daily scale, in the wounds that we deal each other and in the little tiffs that flare up between people, the little insecurities that come out of us in the cutting comments we make to people we work with or live with.
The wedges take various forms, and on one level they have various names: anger, hatred, bigotry, jealousy, envy, injustice, poverty. We could go on with the list. But at the root of it all, there is only one name for all the various wedges that force people apart. And that is sin.
God doesn't pretend that we can eliminate the wedges from our life. But God wants us to see them, to know the things that keep us apart from other people, and to deal with them.
The season of Lent is the time set aside in the church year to take a good, hard look at the wedges of life, the things that divide, that force us apart or force us away from those we love. It's the season to understand our brokenness, and our need.
And the Good News is that in Jesus Christ the wedges driven into life don't mean the end of us.
Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7
For those of us who have grown up in western culture, and particularly grown up in the church, this story is branded on our psyches, etched in our brains. It is a part of the cultural consciousness.
Remember that this is the second creation story, the J document in the four-source theory about the origins of the Pentateuch. J is generally acknowledged to be the oldest document in the Pentateuch. The designation J originally came from the word for God, Jahveh or Yahweh, a proper name for the Creator that is used in this section. (Later scholars have used the letters to describe the source of each of the sources: J for Judean, or the southern epic, and E for Ephraimic, or the northern epic.)
There is a charming innocence about the story, almost a childlike wonder to it that belies the profound truths that are so much a part of it. In its simple narrative, the story describes something basic and deep about human beings.
Yahweh God has made a man from the dust of the earth, and has planted a garden, with trees for food, as well as two other particular trees, the trees of life and the knowledge of good and evil. With that we come to the setup for the Fall, the first section, Genesis 2:15-17. Yahweh God puts the man in the garden to care for it, with but one proviso, a single restriction for this new garden and its new inhabitants. No other rules. This really isn't complicated, no need to memorize long lists of forbidden things. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil is completely off limits. Touch it and die, says God.
The intervening material is important. God saw the need for a helper for the man. Animals were made and named, but among all of them there was not a fit helper. The woman was made and was found to be a fit helper, and the general state of life and of the newly-made people is described in 2:25, "And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed." But the intervening material is excluded from the lectionary, because this, after all, is not about nature or animals or human dominion in the world or any of the other matters in the story. No, this is about the Fall, about disobedience, about sin, or, as John Milton began Paradise Lost, "Of man's first disobedience and the fruit of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste brought death into the world...."
The scene switches to the serpent, who here is simply another creature made by God. Crafty, yes, and with a slight suggestion of evil, but still not the same as Satan or the devil in later biblical writings. The serpent is much like the Adversary in Job, whose job it was to ask questions and raise issues. Yet his question was not an innocent question; it was definitely pointed and provocative. The woman was clear on the requirement about the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden; she recited the rule accurately. But the woman believed what the serpent said. And a case is certainly to be made that the serpent spoke the truth. Death comes into the picture, but not immediately, only later. And we read in 3:22 that even God acknowledges that the serpent was right -- the man had indeed become like God in knowing good from evil. Besides which, the woman sees, with a certain dramatic naivetÈ, that the fruit was good for food, it was beautiful to behold, and it made one wise. What could possibly be wrong with that? So they ate.
In verse 7 we see the result of the disobedience: they knew they were naked and they were ashamed. It was a precise reversal of the state of life described in 2:25, and therefore the exact opposite of what God had created them to be. That, orthodoxy holds, is what was introduced into the world. And the consequence of it continues for all humanity.
This is how the storytellers of the ancient Middle East described the plight of humanity. Simply put, disobedience -- sin -- goes very, very deep in us, and very, very early in our history. Life got out of whack, and we've been trying to put it back ever since.
Romans 5:12-19
It is through Paul that the Old Testament reading and the Gospel reading come together, as Paul's compares what has been wrought by two men on behalf of other human beings.
Thus in 5:12 we understand that the sin of Adam (and Eve) was the cause of death in the world. Paul makes the jump to say that because of that, and because we all sin, therefore we are all subject to death. It is a strange connection between the action of Adam and our destiny. For the last 2,000 years that connection has been called original sin.
From there Paul moves to the work of Jesus Christ, and the effect that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ has on subsequent human beings who have faith in him. It is the free gift of grace of Jesus Christ that brings justification instead of condemnation. Somehow, Paul seems to be saying in verse 17, the fact that Adam's sin had an effect -- death -- on later generations is the very thing that makes it possible for Christ to have an effect -- abundant grace and justification -- on later generations.
But in that we come to problems. Christian orthodoxy has acknowledged for 2,000 years that the actions of one person can have profound effects on the rest of subsequent humanity. That's hard for moderns to grasp or accept, even though we may affirm it every Sunday morning in a creed we say aloud. How do Adam's sin and Christ's grace span the eons to have an effect on us? Is it some sort of quantum effect? In the first case, it's important that we not be literalistic: we need to see Adam not as the first man, but as the representative man, the man that stands for all of us, in the story of separation and alienation that we all act out in our lives.
In the case of Christ, Paul is saying a great deal more about Jesus Christ than the gospels say. He is interpreting Christ as a new creation, a new Adam, a new first man. And through our relationship with him, we are recreated in his likeness, so that the trespass is deemed not to have an effect on us.
It's all hard to understand, no doubt about that. But underlying the strangeness of imputed sin from Adam and imputed righteousness from Christ lies the mystery of the wondrous grace of God in the face of our sin.
Matthew 4:1-11
Matthew's purpose in writing is clearer in some parts of the gospel than in others. In the story of the temptation, it is very clear. The 40 days and nights in the wilderness are a distinct reference to Israel's 40-year sojourn in the wilderness, which was a time of testing and purification. Matthew fully intends to make the connection. In all three synoptics, Jesus' time in the wilderness and his temptation by the devil follow shortly after his baptism. In Matthew they are in immediate juxtaposition, so we find that the statement the devil makes twice, "If you are the son of God ..." follows immediately on the heels of, and is contrasted with, 3:17, "This is my son...." This is almost certainly intentional on Matthew's part, and it means that we can understand Matthew to be saying something in the temptation story about what it means for Jesus to be the Son of God, about what kind of son he is to be.
One preliminary point: It is important for us to affirm that Jesus was really tempted. It has been suggested that in some way Jesus wasn't really tempted, that he was playacting because, after all, he was God. But to say that he was just pretending simply doesn't do justice to the reality of Jesus' humanity nor to the story. We must acknowledge the struggle within him, and if Jesus struggled, then how much more will we struggle?
The temptations follow a definite pattern: The tempter makes a suggestion or an offer, whereupon Jesus rebukes him with a quotation from Deuteronomy.
The temptations are (a) to provide, as a miracle worker, food for himself and, presumably, for the masses; (b) to make a showy proof of Jesus' sonship, a test, really, of God; and (c) to have power and prestige. The content of each of the temptations is not simply a random desire that Jesus might have had, although certainly those three things have been deep human desires for the entire history of the species. But there's more to it than that, because the temptations were a challenge to the relationship between Jesus and God, a challenge to the kind of son he would be. The thing that is common to all of the temptations is that they seek to set Jesus up as God, to do what the Letter to the Philippians praises him for not doing, counting himself equal with God (Philippians 2:6). The account is a very clear, and deliberate, parallel to the temptation in the Genesis passage, in which one of the enticements of the serpent was that Adam and Eve would be like God, knowing good and evil.
And the effect of each of the four temptations -- one in Genesis and three in Matthew -- would be the same: separation. It's very ironic, that when human beings try to be like God the result is invariably separation from God. Adam and Eve succumbed. Jesus didn't. Jesus recognized the temptations for what they were, things that would separate him from God, and he understood who he was and who God was. Is it enough just to see them? For most of us, unlike Jesus, recognizing the things that get in the way, that divide us and separate us, is never enough to get rid of them. But it's a start.
Application
Lent is the penitential season, the season to look inward and to take account of ourselves and of our lives. It is by long-standing church tradition the time to delve into our lives and see the sin that is there. That's getting harder and harder to do because, among other reasons, sin has been largely defined out of existence.
Some years ago, Karl Menninger, the patriarchal psychiatrist of the Menninger Foundation, saw it happening, and he raised the question in a book of the same name, Whatever Became of Sin? He first became aware of the disappearance on a national scale, in politics, noting that not since Eisenhower had a president spoken the word, or alluded to the concept of, sin. His answer to the question, briefly, is that sin has transmogrified into various other syndromes: sickness, crime, neurosis. They have all taken the place that sin used to have.
Transforming sin into all those other things may help us to feel better about ourselves, but it doesn't really deal with the issue, an issue that we see in the world interpersonally and internationally and everything in between. The issue is separation, division, the feelings and attitudes that force people apart from the love that God would have from us. The fundamental matter of life and of humanity, at all levels and degrees of relationship, is attraction and distance, closeness and alienation.
In Washington, D.C., a man pulls out a 9-millimeter semi-automatic pistol and shoots another man over a busted drug deal. That's sin, and it is fundamentally rending, of both lives and of the families of both men. It's a wedge driven into society. And it doesn't stop there, because then the murdered man's brother gets a gun and wants revenge.
A nation that has oppressive policies and laws toward the underclass within its borders, and keeps certain people down and in "their place." That's sin, and it separates and alienates and divides people from each other. That is a wedge, too. And then those who have been down rise up and destroy, broadening the rift.
The tight-lipped executive comes home from a hard day at the office where his boss harshly criticized the report he had written, so the man yells at the kids and snaps at his wife. That, too, is a wedge. And then the child gets hurt and kicks the dog.
On the playground a child sees a new toy that another child has and decides that he wants it, and without batting an eye, he grabs it. That's a wedge. And then the child whose toy was taken turns around and takes a toy from yet another child.
The wedge that is sin is ubiquitous and expanding. It begins early, it goes deep, it spreads abroad, both for us individually and for us as a species. That is the message of the story of the fall in Genesis. Whether the blame lies with the serpent or with Adam and Eve doesn't really matter. A wedge was slammed into the garden that God had created, and things were thrown awry -- the relationship between Adam and Eve, their relationship with God, and God's vision of how things were to be. Things were split, just like the log is split for firewood.
Frederick Buechner puts it this way, "The power of sin is centrifugal. When at work in a human life, it tends to push everything out toward the periphery. Bits and pieces go flying off until only the core is left. Eventually bits and pieces of the core itself go flying off until at the end nothing at all is left."
But however much the wedge is a part of life, however centrifugal the power of sin, it is never the final word. The problem with Adam and Eve was that they saw the fruit of the tree as food only, not as a splitting, rending wedge. In the temptations, Jesus saw the wedge that could have been driven into his life, which could have divided him from God and from what God had made him. He saw it for what it was and he resisted it, because he knew who he was. And that becomes beneficial for us who also find ourselves tempted.
What separates in life? It's a key question we need to answer. The first step is recognition, looking within and finding the wedges within our own lives that have separated us from others and from God. And finding the wedges that we have driven into others' lives. That's the Lenten task.
Alternative Applications
1) Matthew: What kind of life?
What are the principles of your life? As Jesus faced the temptations and dealt with them, he made decisions -- decisions about the kind of life he would lead, about who would be the governing power in his life, about the main principle of his life. It was to be a life not of striving to be God, even though he had a greater claim than anybody else, but striving to be in relationship with God. That makes all the difference in the world.
2) Genesis and Matthew: On temptation
The word "temptation" is quaint, and utterly trivial in our society. Let's face it, isn't the word most of the time used to refer to breaking a diet, eating that second piece of pie when you're trying to lose weight? But the testimony of both Genesis and Matthew is that temptation is real and deadly serious with grave consequences. The preacher might deal with the serious side of temptation in our world, say, the temptation for vengeance or for mind-numbing drugs or for easy sex or for countless other things. Those are real and they have consequences.
FIRST LESSON FOCUS
Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7
"Death spread to all ... because all ... sinned" (Romans 5:12). That is what our text for the morning is about -- the sin of us all. Our text from Genesis is not intended by its author to be the story of just one man named Adam. No. "Adam" is the Hebrew word for humankind, and the author of Genesis 2-3 intends to tell the story of us all. It is a profound portrayal of you and of me.
Our scene in Genesis 2, of course, is the Garden of Eden, that the Lord God has planted "in the East" for the benefit of Adam. All the beauty of that garden, its fruit and produce (v. 9), its life-giving water (v. 10), and its productive work (v. 15) have been given to Adam, in God's loving concern for him. Indeed, when the Lord God sees that "it is not good for the man to be alone" (v. 18), he even mercifully gives the man all the animals and birds and finally a companion to be his wife and to share his life and love, in a relationship of mutual helpfulness (vv. 18-25) -- there is no subordination of female to male in this story.
But one thing the Lord God does not give to us human beings in this story, namely, the rule over our own lives and therefore our own ability to define right and wrong. That fact is symbolized in our text by that forbidden tree in the midst of the garden (vv. 15-17). Adam is told that he may eat of the produce of every tree in the garden, but he must not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, "for in the day that you eat of it, you shall die" (v. 17). Now that does not mean that we should not apply our minds to scientific and technical and cultural knowledge -- ignorance is no virtue in the Christian faith. Rather it means that there are limitations on our human existence. We are not our own gods and goddesses. We are not free to define our own right and wrong, as so many are doing in our society. We are not self-made, autonomous rulers of our minds and souls and bodies. No. We are the creations and creatures of God, made in his image and always responsible to him for what we are and do. And we are not to deny that relationship or ever try to run our own lives in heedlessness of it. For as soon as we try to do without God, we will surely die. God is the Source and Fountain of all life on this earth, and apart from him we cannot live.
God's command to the man not to eat of the tree is another manifestation of the Lord's love for us, of course. It is a loving command, because the Lord God does not want us to die. He has only our welfare in view. He wants us to have good and abundant life, surrounded and sustained by his love. And so like a loving parent telling a child not to run out into the street, he tells us in this text, "Do not eat of the forbidden tree. Do not try to be your own deity."
In the story that follows verses 15-17, and after the creation of the woman to be the man's loving partner in verses 18-25, we find Genesis 3, which is our author's profound picture of you and of me, and of the way we all have walked in relation to our Creator.
The serpent in this story of Genesis 3 is not intended to be the devil. Rather he is a creature whom the Lord God has made and whose distinguishing characteristic is that he is more "subtle," more "crafty" than any other wild creature. The author therefore employs that craftiness just to tell his story about us, and the author's whole concern is to center the story on our responsibility to God.
In the story, the serpent engages the woman, Eve, in what Dietrich Bonhoeffer has called "the first conversation about God." That is, the serpent leads the woman, who was intimately made by the hands of God, to step outside of her relationship with the Lord and to discuss God as an object. And how often we do that, don't we? We make God an object "out there" to be discussed. We decide what he is like and if we can trust him. We even try to re-imagine him in some other image.
As a result, the serpent places before the woman three temptations. The first is to believe that God is not good. "Did God say, 'You shall not eat of any tree of the garden'?" (v. 1), that is, Won't God let you have all of that luscious fruit? Doesn't God want you to have what is good? Now Eve, like all of us religious souls, is very zealous to defend God, and so she exclaims, "Oh no. We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden; but God said, 'You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die' " (v. 3). Of course God never said that, did he? He never said, "Don't touch the tree." And so a little self-will has entered the picture. The woman has begun constructing her own little tinny moral code. You know how it goes. "If you want to be a Christian you must not do such and such." The door of independence from God has opened just a crack, and the serpent seizes the opportunity.
So the serpent poses the second temptation to the woman -- to believe that God is not serious. "You will not die," he says. In other words, God doesn't mean all of those commands he gives us. "You shall not kill, commit adultery, steal, bear false witness, covet." C'mon, God can't be serious. "If anyone would come after me, let him take up his cross and follow me." Naw. God doesn't mean that. God is not serious about what he says.
And then there is the third temptation -- to believe that God is jealous of his own status. "God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil" (v. 5). God is a jealous, green-eyed monster who is afraid to be challenged, because he really has no power to do you to death. Don't believe what God says. Eat what seems good to you!
And indeed, the forbidden fruit looks very good to the woman. It is "good for food" and "a delight to the eyes," and "desired to make one wise" (v. 6). So she takes of the fruit and eats. And there is our sin in a nutshell, isn't it? It looks like the right thing to do. None of us here this morning sets about deliberately to sin, at least not very often. We all want to be good Christians. We want to be faithful churchgoers. We want to do what is right. But an action looks like the right thing to do at the time. It looks like the "loving" thing to do, the "compassionate" deed, the proper course to take. In other words, we decide it is right; we construct our own right and wrong; we try to be our own god. But the difficulty is that it goes against the commandment of the One who is truly God.
The story doesn't end there, however. It continues with the phrase, "and she also gave to her husband, and he ate" (v. 6). And once again we are presented with a profound picture of the nature of our sin, this time of complicity. The man just goes along. He eats, doesn't he? And we just go along. Someone makes a racial slur, and we just stand there and don't say a word. We go along. Or someone commits a petty thievery, and we never object. We just go along. Or someone seriously injures a community, and we attribute it to human nature or the influence of drugs or alcohol, or to a bad home environment. We overlook sin and just go along, and thus we participate in the offense.
Our text for the morning ends with verse 7, but there follows in Genesis 3 an accounting of all the distortions that our sinfulness brings upon this earth -- the corruption of the natural world, the loss of joy and productivity in work, the introduction of pain, the awful domination of male over female, and finally the sentence of death and the loss of paradise.
But that terrible corruption is presaged in the one sentence of verse 7. The eyes of the man and woman are opened, and suddenly they are no longer one, enjoying the mutual companionship of marriage. Rather they realize that they are naked, and they try vainly to cover their nakedness. Now my ego stands over against your ego. Now suddenly we are cut off from oneness with other human beings, and the community that God has desired for his earth has become impossible. A terrible renting of the fabric of God's good creation has taken place because of our sin, and there is no one who can make it all whole again except the God who made it in the first place.
And that, you see, is the reason we have entered this season of Lent, that will take us toward the cross and finally to an empty tomb.
PREACHING THE PSALM
Psalm 32
This psalm belongs to the group of psalms designated by the Christian church for confession and absolution. In the Hebrew calendar, a sequence of services provided for the confession guilt, and there was both a guilt offering, for personal sin against God, and a sin offering, for sin against the community. Thus Psalm 32 reminds us that God forgives not only personal but also corporate sins. Obviously, this psalm is a highly appropriate one for the First Sunday of Lent.
Some preaching possibilities:
1) Originally, the Reformation leaders wanted to have confession and absolution in a special sacrament, in addition to baptism and the Eucharist. They settled on the latter two only, but Martin Luther said, "Whenever private confession leaves the church, the church will die." So though not made a sacrament, confession is just as important as those other means of grace.
A sermon could focus on the painful manifestations of unconfessed sin, especially using verses 3 and 4, compared to the lightened heart of those who unburden themselves to God, and receive forgiveness (vv. 1-2).
2) Note that this psalm begins with two beatitudes. Logically, they should come at the end of the psalm, after the acknowledgement of sin and God's granting of absolution (v. 5). But coming as they do at the beginning, together with additional expressions of joy in the final verse (v. 11), they serve to bracket the recognition of guilt and subsequent repentance with blessedness and joy. That can be a description of the Christian life -- one lived in the joy and blessing of God, but where, from time to time, the person becomes aware of a sin that has slipped in, and the means to deal with it that is readily available: confession and repentance. That done, the joy returns.
This dealing with the sins of Christians is surely what John had in mind when he wrote, "I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; and he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins ..." (1 John 2:1-2).
3) Paul quotes verses 1 and 2 of this psalm in Romans 4:7-8, introducing the verses by saying, "So also David speaks of the blessedness of those to whom God reckons righteousness apart from works." Indeed, the psalm reminds us that it is repentance, confession and forgiveness that put us in the right relationship with God. You could discuss the common, if unspoken, reliance on works as a hoped-for way to please God, and why it alone is not enough.
