Prelude To The Passion

February 20, 2002

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Scripture: “A Garden Variety Kind of Trouble” Genesis 2:4b-9, 15-18, 24–3:7

I don’t believe I can tell you adequately how appreciative I am of the opportunity to participate in this Lenten series, and yet at the same time how that sense of appreciation is dogged by an equally vivid sense of CHALLENGE. Lenten preaching is the somberest of all preaching, I think—NOT morbid, now...I don’t mean that. I don’t mean gloomy, or black-edged. I don’t mean tinted with the dark hues of pessimism, for Lent, after all, is the road that ascends to the mountaintop breakthrough of God’s deliverance.

It’s the journey to the cosmic encounter of light and darkness, the encounter that changed everything. Darkness did its darndest...it’s worst...and it wasn’t enough.

The Lenten road leads to ultimate victory, and is therefore ultimately optimistic, but along the way it’s a somber trip. There are big issues involved, serious issues to be dealt with. The landscape is overhung with matters of heavy consequence and realistic dangers---matters of destiny, matters of life and death.

You don’t dare preach trivia during Lent...not that you ever should, in any season...but the Lenten season especially calls us to consider soberly, seriously, somberly WHO WE ARE, WHERE WE’RE GOING, AND HOW ENORMOUSLY INDEBTED WE ARE TO THE ONE WHO HAS ALREADY MADE THE TRIP FOR US AND FOR OUR SALVATION.

I think I see inspiration in the selection of the Lectionary readings for this year.... This is year A in the 3 year cycle of readings. I don’t always think the choices are inspired, though that probably tells more about me than it does about the selections. I don’t always feel compelled to follow the designated passages, but this year in the Old Testament selections for the middle weeks of Lent, there is a sequence of readings that strike me as remarkably pertinent for the Lenten unfolding.

Jesus was an Old Testament man, remember. He wouldn’t have called it that, of course. OLD Testament is what WE call it. The NEW Testament, what WE call the NEW Testament hadn’t yet appeared. HIS Bible was the Hebrew Scriptures. HE KNEW THOSE BOOKS, TREASURED THEM, was saturated in them. It comes through time and again in the Gospel accounts. Whether he was conscious as He was going along that He was the fulfillment of the Old Testament preparation, as the early Church came to claim about him, I don’t know, but it’s all of one piece, all one story, all one connected narrative.

You can’t appreciate the richness and fullness of the Gospel story without seeing it as coming out of prophetic preparation, a long series of foundational stepping stones. Jesus didn’t just bop into history like a rock out of a plate glass window. There is crucial rootage in that first two thirds of the Book.

The Old Testament readings for this year in the Lectionary help us grasp that rootage more firmly. They help us lay hold with greater sensitivity the richness and complexity of the Passion Story.

Two of the readings, the first two, come from Genesis, and both, not surprisingly, influenced Paul later when he was constructing his theology of how Jesus was the culmination of what God had started way back there.

There is a passage from Exodus, out in the Wilderness, describing those wandering Hebrew pilgrims in the desert, griping every step of the way...a kind of precursory Lenten journey, moving toward the Promised Land.

There is a passage from I Samuel, about the establishing of the monarchy--- background for a new kind of king, one whose Kingdom would not be of this world.

And then old Ezekiel’s strange story of life coming out of the cemetery. “Son of man, can these bones live? ”It’s about as close as the Old Testament comes to the Easter breakthrough...an intimation of Resurrection.

Read these passages in preparation for our weekly sessions. May I urge you with what Bishop Moore used to call “unbecoming earnestness” to do that? My hope is that it will make your Lenten pilgrimage more meaningful, and help us all to gain a greater sense of gratitude for the wonder and grandeur of our redemption.

So back to the beginning...to the very genesis of the story, if you will. WHY DID THERE HAVE TO BE A CALVARY? Why?

It’s so...gruesome. Was it really necessary? Couldn’t there have been some other way, some easier way, some less brutal way, some more “spiritual” way? Couldn’t God have brought his estranged pack of human beings back into line without the necessity of all that awful pounding, and pain, and blood?

Couldn’t there have been a way somehow to achieve the same degree of salvation with a lesser degree of sacrifice?

Well....yeah...I guess so. I guess He could have done it a different way, a more “humane” way.

Sure He could have. He could have done it differently if He had just been a little less rigorous about not overstepping the constraint he imposed on Himself when He implanted free will in people. That tied His hands. And He could have done it differently if He hadn’t taken to heart so seriously that old, ugly business of SIN...a word you don’t hear that much these days, but which, tragically, is still around.

To get a grip on it, you have to go back to the start, back to the Garden, back to the primeval Paradise at the dawn of human existence.

Christian theology came in time to see that the Cross of Calvary was where there merged three essential components---the unquenchable love of God, the complete obedience of Jesus, and the sordid hideousness of SIN.

Those were the forces that met headlong in cosmic conflict on the windswept hill of Calvary.

Sin is the villain, human sin...ingrained, pervasive, clutching, smothering, self-centered human sin. That’s the enemy, our enemy, God’s enemy.

Where does sin come from? What is its origin? How account for it? How did it get to be so insidious when things began so positively?

Well, those are questions the early stories of Genesis are an attempt to deal with. Don’t we still have to deal with them?

Something certainly has gone wrong...obviously. LOOK AT THE MESS WE’RE IN.

God made a good world...called it good when He made it... called the creation of human kind VERY good... out of the dust of the earth, but with his own breath bringing the “adam”, the “man” to life. What creative potential.

But now look at the chaos around us, they said, the shambles, the discordant convulsiveness that marks human existence. WHAT HAPPENED? Who can deny that something is out of kilter, and not just out there where we can put the blame on somebody else, but IN HERE, where we feel so painfully the estrangement from what we know we were meant to be, the sense of alienation from what Paul Tillich use to call “the source of our being”, the sense somehow of having lost God, with whom we were meant to have a relationship of abiding intimacy.

Well, those old Hebrews, way back there, knew what we still know, experienced what we still experience, SOMETHING’S GONE WRONG. They couldn’t explain it, they couldn’t scientifically or philosophically dissect it; it wasn’t in their nature to be scientific or philosophical---they were story tellers--- so they told these incomparable stories, so simple, in a way, yet so profoundly probing... about a man and a woman, in a pleasant garden, with everything provided, and only a minimum of restriction.... who get into trouble because they OVERREACH, because they overstep boundaries, because they carelessly and callously disregard instructions, because they choose to be indifferent to consequences, because they forget to whom they’re beholden because they put themselves in the center instead of GOD.

The result was what you see, what you still see. This is not a story of two people. It’s a story of people. It’s not history; it’s universal autobiography. Reading it is like looking into a mirror: “Just one time...what harm will it do?”

“Surely religion doesn’t apply here”

“The woman tempted me, and I did eat...”

“It’s her fault...no, it’s YOUR fault...You gave her to me.” Hah!

 We’re all in there, aren’t we...scape goating, buck passing, excuse making, special privilege loving rascals, who seem to have an almost limitless propensity for “blowing it”.

Remember Garrison Keillor’s line in his book Lake Wobegon Days? Writing about that fictional, but very human community, he says, “Left to their own devices, we Lake Wobegonians inevitably head straight for the small potatoes.”

The debacle in the Garden says, “Left to their own devices, we human beings somehow inevitably head straight for what looks best for Number ONE... and live with the light of self-concern focused clearly and brightly inward.”

Brilliant! If you want to call it inspired, I’m in no mood to argue. You can laugh all you want at these old primitive stories. They’re the ones who have the last laugh. They endure across the centuries with a peculiar power to peg us between the eyes and pin us to the mat.

It gets worse after this, with multiplying, crippling consequences. But here’s the Genesis of it, an unsophisticated, but profoundly incisive depiction---NOT explanation, but depiction of the human situation which, ultimately made Calvary necessary.

Now, let’s make a distinction. What we’re talking about here, what this ancient “MYTH” (in the technical sense—NOT untruth, but story that tells a truth)...what this ancient myth is talking about is SIN, without an “s, not “sins”, with an “s”. SIN and “sins” are two different things...related, but not interchangeable.

Sins have to do with actions...SIN has to do with attitude. Sins involve deeds...SIN involves relationship. Sins come out of sin, but sin is not just the sum total of sins.

Sins are things you do wrong, and you can make a list of them; you can catalog them, I suppose, if you’re into that sort of thing. The Roman Church has done it at various times in its history...put labels on sins according to their seriousness----

BIG sins...murder, adultery, blowing up twin towers... LITTLE sins...smoking behind the barn, gossiping about the neighbors, going to the movies on Sunday...well, that’s not much of a sin anymore, but I STILL REMEMBER the first time I did it. I shivered for weeks afterward beneath a blanketing fog of accusing guilt. The second time I went, the fog lifted a little earlier.

Sins, with an “s”, are actions with a negative moral value, and wouldn’t it be wonderful

if that were all SIN meant? If that were all it meant, we could stay away from it, we could renounce it, we could isolate ourselves from it, and even crow about our insularity, like the old mid-western college I read about that some years ago used to advertise in its catalog, “Our campus is located seven miles from any known form of sin.” It’s places like that that give real sin a bad name.

No, sin is not the composite of misdeeds. There’s something deeper and darker behind all that, and therein lies the rub. THE EPISODE IN THE GARDEN IS NOT A STORY ABOUT A DEITY WHO IS ANGRY BECAUSE PEOPLE ATE AN APPLE. IT’S A STORY ABOUT A DEITY WHO IS HURT, disappointed, infinitely saddened because His people try to live as though God didn’t exist at all.

Sin, without an “s”, is an inner thing, a condition, a tendency, a pre-disposition, an irresponsive attitude. It’s the shattering realization that all of us have proven ourselves unfaithful to God’s love.

One day this past year when I was filling in at the University United Methodist Church at the Wesley Foundation, a young woman made an appointment to come in, she said, to talk about her boyfriend, her ex-boyfriend, actually, and the termination of their relationship. She went on awhile, describing this and that aspect of what had happened... and how he had said this, and how he had done that, and I listened. Finally, she said, “You know, it’s not so much anything specific he did, not one particular thing you could put your finger on, I could take that. It’s really more what he didn’t do. There came a time when he just took me for granted, I guess. After a while, he never even thought of me.”

That’s it, you see. That’s really worse than misconduct. That’s the sin behind sins, and that’s what this old story is driving at, the Garden betrayal, our basic treason to God, our disloyalty, our hardness of heart, so that God can say about every one of us, Ol’ To m, ol’ Sam...Mary, Glen, Pete....he never even thought of Me.

The medieval mantra expressed it: “In Adam’s fall, we sinned all.” Yeah! It is more than history. Every one of us...EVERY ONE OF US, has made that betrayal.

We’ve turned our backs on God. We’ve become estranged from Him. We’ve put ourselves at the center, instead of Him. We are what someone has called “inveterate idolators”.

The tragedy, of course, is the ease with which this tendency, this “bent”, Mr. Wesley called it, this ingrained predisposition grows and hardens. After a while it numbs our sensitivity, it deadens our awareness of the encroachment of sin’s coils.

I almost wish sometimes---maybe not quite---but I almost wish sometimes we moderns felt the sting of sin, felt the sense of repulsion toward it some of our spiritual ancestors felt----.

Ol’ Martin Luther, flinging his ink bottle across the room at the Devil he thought he saw on the other side.... Teresa of Avila, weeping her eyes out in contrition.... Paul, crying out in burning passion: “The very evil I don’t want to do is exactly what I end up doing. Who shall deliver me from this body of death?”

For them sin was almost palpably real. You get the feeling they thought they could reach out and touch it. Hence the horror of their recoil. You almost envy them.

I think, for us, it’s more an emptiness, isn’t it, a sense of not having something we know we ought to have, a sense of cut-offness, somehow, a sense of the distance of God, which is not a bad definition of sin, I think, the distance of God.

If we think we’ve outgrown sin...if we think we’re too liberated to be shackled by the pain of remorse. We at least can’t deny the pervasiveness of a lack of meaning, of boredom, of aimlessness, of a sense of disparity between what we’ve achieved and what we know we ought to have achieved.

How does W.H. Auden put it in that quatrain from First September... “Faces along the bar cling to their average day. The lights must never go out, the music must always play, Lest we should see where we are, lost in a haunted wood; Children afraid of the dark, who have never been happy or good.”

The distance of God...the Garden, designed for cultivation, has lapsed into a haunted wood..... Maybe these old Hebrew story tellers were on to something.

May I share with you an excerpt from Kathleen Norris’ book DAKOTA? Nancy read it first and told me I’d better read it. One always listens to one’s spouse, if one knows what is good for one...Adam, of course, is the exception.

Mrs. Norris calls her book a “spiritual geography”, because she wrote it after moving out to her grandparents’ old homeplace in the bleak, wide-open, treeless plains of western South Dakota, and uses that landscape as the framework to tell her spiritual journey. It’s essentially a coming home to a recognition of timeless spiritual truths she now sees her parents and their parents knew in their way, but which she had to discover for herself, afresh, in her own life.

Even though a Protestant, she received enormous help from periodic sojourns in Roman Catholic monastery retreat  centers. She says in one place in the book:“I had thought that religion was a constraint that I have overcome by dint of reason, learning, artistic creativity, sexual liberation. Church was for kids, or grandmas, a small town phenomenon that one grew out of or left behind.....

Fortunately, a Benedictine friend provided one answer. “Sin in the Bible”, he told me, “is the failure to do concrete acts of love.” That’s something I can live with, a guide in my conversion. It’s also a better definition of sin that I learned as a child--sin as breaking rules.

Comprehensible, sensible sin is one of the unexpected gifts I’ve found in the monastic tradition. The 4th Century monks began to answer for me what the human potential movement of the late 20th Century never seems to address: If I’m O.K., and you’re O.K., and our friends (nice people like us, markedly middle class...) are O.K., then why is the world definitely NOT O.K.?

Blaming others wouldn’t do. Only when I began to see the world’s ills mirrored in myself did I begin to find an answer; only as I began to address that uncomfortable word sin, did I see that I was not being handed a load of needless guilt, so much as a useful tool for confronting the negative side of human behavior.”

End of quote. Does it speak to you as much as it does me?

Now, the Lenten tie-in... quickly. The human forces that put Jesus on the Cross may be quantitatively different from the attitudes we see depicted in the Garden (AND IN OURSELVES!), but they’re different only in degree, not kind. One of the scariest things about the whole gruesome business of Crucifixion from the human perspective is how hard it is to assign responsibility for what happened.

Who was accountable, ultimately? WHO DO YOU BLAME for sticking Jesus up on that killing tree? Who was the responsible figure?

Judas, who betrayed Him? Was HE the one chiefly to blame? Well, Judas never thought Jesus would allow Himself to be taken away by those coming to arrest Him. All that power, all that incredible might. Judas had seen what He could do. Are you kidding? Judas thought he was forcing His hand, putting Him in a corner where He would have to declare His messiahship. THEN watch the fireworks! You can’t really blame Judas....He thought he was making a patriotic contribution.

How about Caiaphas then? Well...Caiaphas had an institution to protect. Those of us who work for a religious institution understand how that kind of allegiance works. You don’t rock the boat when you’re on the inside...at least you don’t do it casually. And when he says, “It’s better for one man to die than that the people die”, that makes a kind of sense. You can’t blame him.

Surely Pilate didn’t understand what was going on. He never did understand. Not really. Talk about being out of the loop. His thing was keeping the lid on public unrest. That’s all Pilate knew. What’s so bad about law and order? You can’t blame him.

Well, then, WHO? Simon Peter, who denied Him, the others, who fled, the crowd, the multitude, stirred to a frenzy? IT’S MORE COMPLEX. There is no one person, or group, to whom you can point the finger and say, THERE’S THE RESPONSIBLE CULPRIT. It was a whole confluence of things, a whole converging web... actions of people looking out for their own interests, justifying their deeds, passing the buck, convincing themselves, no doubt sincerely, that what they were doing was right.

Where have we seen it before? THAT OLD MIRROR AGAIN. It’s what happens, what always happens, when the Garden variety of overreaching, stepping outside the boundaries, preserving your self-interests, putting yourself in the Center instead of God gets out of hand. It’s exactly why Calvary was necessary.

Remember the question the old Spiritual asks: “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” Oh, my...Sometimes it causes me to tremble.

Is it the last word? No, thank God, it’s not the last word. Thank God, a later and saving word was spoken out on that hill. That’s what constitutes our Gospel... something NOT of our doing, something big enough and loving enough to clean up the mess that IS of our doing.

But the recognition of the reality and insidiousness of sin is the FIRST WORD. Christians can never be shocked about life because they’ve looked deeply into their own hearts and seen with unblinking honesty the degradation of their own treason.

“Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner.”

 When you’re able to say that, and say it truly, He’s not far away.