Lent I
The Rev. Canon Mary Sulerud
William H. Willimon, theologian, writer and bishop in the United Methodist Church, once told this story about a student advisor by the name of Carlyle Marney. Marney loved to tell of being asked by a student in a dormitory discussion, “Where is the Garden of Eden?”
Marney responded, “220 Elm Street, Knoxville, Tennessee.”
“What?!” the students replied. “Isn’t it some place in Asia Minor?”
“No,” replied Marney, “for it was in Knoxville, Tennessee, as a child that my mother sent me to the store with a quarter to buy some milk and I took the quarter and bought candy and ate the whole lot before I got home. And when I got home I was so ashamed that I hid in the closet. It was there that she found me and asked, ‘Where are you?’ Then, ‘What have you done?’”
People are often surprised to learn that Lent does not begin with the drama of Ash Wednesday, only the Lenten fast does. This season of fasting, prayer and giving charitably, of reflecting on those ways in which we have refused to think and act as God’s beloved children actually begins on the First Sunday in Lent. It is there that we begin our journey with the ancient biblical stories of how we utterly damaged our relationship to God and how easy it is for us to miss the mark when it comes to God. (Missing the mark is one of the meanings of sin.)
Lent is an ancient word that literally means spring. Implicit in the very name of the season is the redemption and saving grace offered by God in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Amid the Scripture stories of how we get it wrong are significant Scripture stories of the ways in which Jesus is setting the world and us right.
This journey of forty days is not simply a pilgrimage to restore the personal morality of each of us. It is a communal walk of worship and prayer in which we learn that it is our nature to rebel, disobey and use our imaginations to project the worst case scenario about God’s intentions. The first lesson from the Bible on the First Sunday in Lent demonstrates this compellingly.
In the Book of Genesis we hear of the creation of humanity by God, tenderly and carefully. God even breathes God’s own life into the creature. Then the human creature is made into two distinct beings, a man and a woman and given a lush garden to till and enjoy. As stewards of this garden they are given a single command to obey, not to eat of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Far from being an outbreak of divine anti-intellectualism, this is a story about a relationship between the creator and the created. Even in paradise there are limits and boundaries in this relationship!
One day the woman has a conversation with s smooth-talking, subtle serpent who in a series of questions ever so slightly distorts God’s command. The conversation turns to one of suspicion of God’s motives, and attention turns from what the man and woman have to what they do not have.
A single taste and contented companionship becomes full of blame, innocence and knowledge become shameful awareness. The creation that is good and divinely sanctioned begins to unravel from there.
Each of us, like Adam and Eve and like Carlyle Marney, recapitulates this story of temptation and succumbing to it in our own lives. We are well disposed to sin, to miss the mark, to fall away from our relationship with God. In Lent we learn again that real temptations are as much about our strengths as they are about our weaknesses.
Our glory and our curse are to want to do the right thing really, really well, just like God. We often live at cross purposes with God and God’s wonderful intentions for us. The devil knows this, and so does God.
Temptation and brokenness, sin and death are not the end of our story.
God faced the cumulative force of our own sins and those of many others and responded with the unexpected gift of forgiveness, mercy and grace.
Whatever Adam and Eve did, whatever we do, the grace and power of God to forgive is greater. Adam and Eve are who we are and how we have become what we are.
Jesus Christ, by overcoming temptation, death and the grave, is who we are meant to be, who we are to become. In Jesus God gave us the remedy for all of our brokenness that we so desperately needed. In Christ we have the one who shared our temptations and knows them intimately and yet never yielded. In Christ we have the one who knows our death firsthand and who by God’s power overcame it through the resurrection.
To be human means intrinsically to belong to God. Nothing else about us is more challenging to the devil that can play to our strengths and our best moments.
The Lenten journey is the story of Jesus and the hope that through Christ we can resist temptations, and through God’s love we can become the treasured humanity God envisioned for a garden so long ago.