February 10, 2008
The First Sunday in Lent
Sermon: A Window to the World
Texts: Genesis 2: 15-17, 3: 1-7, Matthew 4: 1-11
This first Sunday in Lent is our opportunity to retell the story of God's love for us from the beginning. We do this with two themes.
The first is creation. God, in God's wisdom, created the heavens and the earth and it was very good. The words of the first chapters of the Bible set the stage for our window to the world. The prologue to understanding God is appreciating God's goodness in giving us this earth with its majesty and miracles.
I'll never forget the clear, warm, dark summer evenings when my mother insisted we haul out the blankets and quilts so we could lie on our backs on the front lawn to gaze up at the star studded nights. There was a great planetarium right outside our window and all we had to do was stop and look. Our hymn this morning, "Praise the Lord! Ye heavens adore Him" expresses this awe we feel when we look around us and appreciate the beauty of our natural world.
We can't read this story of Adam and Eve without knowing that the story was written to transcend human time boundaries. The word Adam in Hebrew means human being and the word Eve means life. The ancient Hebrew story of creation was not just a story that took place long ago and far away. The story was not just in a Middle Eastern garden.
The text is our context; it was written for here and now. It was written for those of us who walk the shores of the Great Lakes; plow the fields of Sheboygan County, or wake up to a few more inches of clean white snow on a brisk winter Wisconsin day. God created the heavens and the earth and it was very good.
This brings me to the second point of the sermon. It is the subject of sin, the heart of the study today. We ponder our human condition in this Season of Lent so that we can ask why we have sinned. We ask why we would deliberately choose to follow a way of life that takes us away from God to that which can possess and destroy us.
God has given us this good earth, placed us as care takers with God of all creation. Our work is sacred. Nature, God and humankind are in harmony in Genesis 1 and 2. In chapter 3 that which was very good gets spoiled and becomes that which is bad. The garden, Eden, the place of delight, became the wilderness.
What went wrong? Well, there was this wily serpent with a slippery question, two bites from forbidden fruit and shame for eating that which God strictly forbade. There were these protests of "don't fence me in," "nobody tells me what to do," and "it's a free country, isn't it?" Fortunately or unfortunately we know the answer for why we are in the wilderness.
Perhaps that is what Arthur Miller so wanted his readers and admirers to grasp in his writing. A few years ago, we remembered the great writer of the plays that influenced us over the years. Ed Siegel wrote in 2005, around February 10 when Arthur Miller died, "theatergoers have not turned to Mr. Miller as a historian of the American century but as a chronicler of the American soul: souls in torment (the brothers in "The Price") and souls on ice (Willy Loman in "Death of a Salesman"), but mostly souls in conflict (the Proctors in "The Crucible"), trying to do the right thing while weighted down with all the forces that would have them do the practical thing." (Boston Globe, 2-12-05, B5)
Arthur Miller captures some reality for us. We struggle with how we measure personal success and failure, we resonate with the difficulties that families have in their everyday life, we all hope in dismal situations that a ray of light will remain after darkness has closed in. Miller helped us hang on to the "ray of light" but let us be in touch with the personal struggles.
The Creation story in Genesis is a pull back to all our personal struggles. Miller brought it out for us in ways that were compelling in his writing on World War II, the Holocaust, McCarthyism, and consumerism in our day. As Miller's plays had that glow of redemption we hope we find as much in the ancient texts from our faith.
Do we hear this morning the Voice of God, our Maker, reminding us that paradise is freedom within God given limits? Do we hear the Voice of God reminding us that paradise is the blessing of co-partnering, co-creating with God? It is receiving life from God through "the window" of creation not looking at creation strictly from the consumer point of view. We have a responsibility, a part in the deciding how our lives will be shaped.
The struggle for Jesus apart in the wilderness was how to deal with human temptation to privatize religion, to use salvation for a personal gain. The devil in Greek, is diabolos, "the one who separates" you for your purpose, who distracts you, who singles you out, either for failing in faithfulness or to tempt you into failure. Jesus recognized the temptations for what they were, things that would separate him from God. The temptations became his window to the world so that he could have God's wisdom to make the right choices.
How grateful we are for that window to the world that helps us in our days of protest and struggle and obstinacies. I will always be grateful for the education I received many years ago by certain professors at my Southern Baptist seminary in Louisville Kentucky who taught me how to think about the church critically and the world progressively. Yes, I studied Hebrew, Greek, New Testament, the Hebrew Scripture, Pastoral Care and Counseling, Church Administration, Christian Education. All of these and the one that stands out for me this morning when I read Genesis and Matthew is the course in Christian ethics.
My Christian Ethics professor was Glen Stassen. People knew him because his father was former governor of Minnesota, Harold Stassen. Glen Stassen established his own following by making his students uncomfortable. He knew we were students who did not just drop out of the sky into his classroom. We had our biased histories and so he required that we learn about the nuclear arms race, that we study Joseph Fletcher's lifeboat ethics, and we read the book For Whites Only to claim and examine our racist attitudes. He gave us a window to see the world as we had never done before.
We went from naive goodness to responsibility and critical thinking about our faith. He taught us about a big world with many ways to think about the world. He taught us to ask how our Christian belief would translate into Christian practice. It was the best training any student could have had for leading churches to study, pray, think, and believe that our story is not about me or about you. Our story is a collective journey to see the world transformed the way we know God intends.
In paradise, we recognize the God-given gift to nurture our children and give them their communal stories that will shape their church life and public life. In paradise the poor meet the privileged so there is connection and recognition.
In paradise, the church in the world understands that the reign of God, like an early shoot from a hidden seed, like the glow of redemption at the rim of the pit, is breaking out in all the dark, anonymous corners of creation.
We must start where we are with our particular histories and backgrounds. We do not drop down where we are into this place and time without a past, a reference point, a history. So we shall, as Martin Luther King, Jr., suggested, have to repent in this generation, not so much for the evil deeds of the wicked people, but for the appalling silence of the good people.
Good people, people of God's good creation, let us remember that Lent can be a time when we are deeply formed in the image of Christ. Anticipate it; look forward to time away to look for that window to understand your world.
Maggie Ross writes, "No one can take you into the desert. You must find the path yourself. Plunge into your loneliness, your hunger, your thirst. In the desert you will be purified and tempted; God will speak to your heart and angels will come and minister to you." (Seasons of Death and Life)
As Thomas Merton said, "The cross, with which the ashes were traced upon us, is the sign of Christ's victory over death." We sing and celebrate all creation this day because it is our window to God; it is, indeed, God's kingdom not yet and even now. May it be so in our belonging to our eternal, loving God, our window on the world? Amen.
Labels: creation, lent
