A sermon by Senior Minister John B. McCall, February 10, 2008
Genesis 2:15-3:7
Matthew 4:1-11
It’s like the Holy Grail, the eternal, impossible search… Some, I’m told, have even broken the Commandments, and committed several of the seven deadly sins to find it. What is this elusive object of desire? The perfect, no-fat, calorie-free cheesecake!
But it doesn’t exist. When God made cheesecake (I think it was the evening of the sixth day so it would be ready to eat on the day of rest) the calories came with it. “God saw that it was very good…” and very fattening.
In just the same way, you can’t lose weight without sweat, find faith without doubt, or enjoy freedom without responsibility. There’s no such thing as life without death… or death without new life. That’s the way the world is.
You don’t have to be a theologian to see that God’s created order is filled with choices, and that every choice has consequences. If you want perfect cheesecake you have to take the calories. And if you want non-fattening cheesecake it won’t taste perfect.
Keep this in mind as we look at the Creation story from Genesis, chapter 2. The author tells us what God intended, and confronts us with what we’ve actually done with God’s promise of Paradise. We recognize that God intended perfection, and then we look at the reality of what we have done – every living one of us.
God fashioned the heavens and the earth, had set apart the light from the dark, and the dry land from the sea. Then God said “let us make human¬kind in our own image.” And from the dirt (in Hebrew, “ha-adama”) God created the “earth creature,” (in Hebrew, “ha-Adam”). It’s a neuter word. This earth creature was neither male nor female but was certainly in the image of God. Only later, in Chapter 2, vs. 23, does God differentiate one from the other.
God looked at Creation and saw all that was good, according to plan. And then God saw loneliness and pronounced that not good. Each of us is radically alone in some ways. No one else can get inside our skin. Who else knows what it’s like for you to get up in the morning, stare in the mirror and ponder the day? No one else can bear the pains that are uniquely ours or ponder the joys that are yours alone. But God sees our desire to live in fellowship, in community.
Dag Hammarskjold, in his journal called Markings, observed: “What makes loneliness an anguish is not that I have no one to share my burden, but this: I have only my own burden to bear.” The pain of being completely alone is that the things we carry may be blown out of proportion. They become the heaviest burden in the world because we have no sense of balance as we carry our load.
God wasn’t trying to erase solitude. That’s different from loneliness. Being alone can be very good, very fruitful. Solitude is good, but being lonely is hard on the soul. Feeling isolated doesn’t serve God or us.
God saw the loneliness of the creature and created another as a companion. From that moment to this we all have to figure out how to balance our need for solitude and our need for fellowship, our aloneness and our connection.
The scripture readings for today also remind us that we have to balance between our freedom and destiny, between the things we choose and those that seem to choose us. The central theme of the creation story in Genesis is how God initiated and how our ances¬tors responded. Some would say Adam and Eve rebelled. Others read the story to say they simply asserted their independence. After all, God put the tempting fruit in easy reach and said, “don’t touch it!” They didn’t even have to get a step stool to reach it!
The story is timeless. We can swap fig-leaves for LL Bean fashions, and the Garden of Eden for our own little piece of Paradise. But the truth is the same. God said: “here’s the garden — take care of it and enjoy life. Everything you need is here — it’s all yours. Eat of any fruit except from the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil.”
What could be more tempting than that? “You may have anything, except…”? “Eat all the broccoli you want, but don’t touch the ice cream!” Low-hanging fruit always seems the sweetest. The serpent (representing the voice of the devil) only made it more attractive saying “there’s nothing wrong with eating the fruit of that tree. God is just jealous that you might figure out the meaning of life!”
Was that really the reason? Was (is) God jealous that we might get too smart? No. God’s concern is that we want our freedom without accepting our responsibility. We want everything we can lay our hands on and we want it now. But we don’t want the consequences. The consequence of disobeying God was that Adam and Eve and all their descendants had to leave the garden. They would have to work for their own well-being and they would die.
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Is this a true story? You bet – it paints us just the way we are. The CEO of a large energy company figures out how to cook the books and moves business losses into hidden accounts. Others in the corner office join in. You can never be too thin or too rich, so like the golden fruit hanging from the tree, the rules say “don’t touch it,” but who’ll ever know?
We all want our freedom. Are we ready for the responsibility? Innocence dies and can never be regained.
A sixteen-year-old girl realizes she is physically ready to have sexual relations. Her friends pressure her. Her parents were always too embarrassed to talk about sex and their own values. School just taught her the mechanics. What’s the right choice? No one will get hurt, will they?
We all want our freedom. Are we ready for the responsibility? Innocence dies and can never be regained.
There are many things right within our reach that are deadly to us. And we can’t blame God. You can have paradise, or you can have freedom. You can’t have both. You’ll never find the perfect cheesecake without the calories. Still, we’re so very good at rationalizing, turning reality to suit our own wants and desires.
One way to see that garden of Eden is its blissful innocence: no freedom and therefore no conse¬quences. We’ve all been there. We all began in a garden; conceived and carried in the womb, our every need was met.
• We were safe and secure.
• We were naked and not ashamed.
• Then we were pushed abruptly into a world that is cold and foreign.
We spend our whole lives getting kicked out of one garden after another… and wanting to create gardens if we can… some place or experience that’s safe and secure. We’re even willing to forsake our freedom for our safety. Look what has happened since 9/11. The government says the citizens say we’d rather be safe than free. Little by little we see others’ rights slipping away for the sake of our own security.
The world’s a dangerous place, all right.
Jesus went out into a wilderness something like that. Scripture says the Spirit led him. There were no witnesses so what we have in the Gospels is clearly from Jesus’ retelling of his experiences.
What a contrast to Eden it was! If God is in the lush Garden, no wonder Satan is in the wilderness. In the Garden everything was given – free and available. In the desert nothing was given. Living was rock-hard.
There he was tempted to use his freedom for personal gain and power. The temptation was a lot like Adam and Eve’s. Whether we call it the devil, or the dark side, or an evil spirit, we know that good and evil affect life. If we are as free as I believe we are, then we have the freedom to give in to temptation. Adam and Eve did. You and I do. Jesus did not.
Before I dress it up with theological talk, let me say simply: I believe God has given me free will. Within the bounds of my humanity, and the realities of the universe, I am free to make decisions, to choose how I will live.
I don’t believe in fate, or predestination. I reject the notion that we die “when our number is up,” or that God has chosen for us all the details of life. What would life be like if God had planned it all out?
It reminds me of the elderly Scottish Presbyterian woman, who firmly believed in predestination and who, after falling down, got up and said “thank God that’s over with!”
But if I want my freedom I will ultimately have to accept my responsibility. When I choose to act in ways that are self-centered and thoughtless of others, I know what I am doing. When I choose a short-cut, a compromise, a half-baked attempt at making life easy, I know it detracts not only from my sense of self, but subtracts from the humanity of the world.
We know we can’t control everything that happens to us. There are external events we simply can’t change and we still suffer the consequences. Others choose to act in ways that hurt us. Things happen that just as easily could have happened differently.
But thank God we keep a glimpse of Eden in our souls. As a Christian I believe that with the death of the body, the soul is released and gathered to God to dwell safely forever. As a Christian, I also believe it’s our responsibility to help others find a little bit of Eden, by breaking the soil and tending the gardens any way we can.
I remember hearing a poignant story on public radio, about a woman in central Los Angeles, a single mother with two preteens, who receives a public grant of $500 a month to be the gardener for other resi¬dents in the housing project. She pays $167 a month for funeral insurance for her chil¬dren, reasoning that even if she can’t give them much in life, she can assure a proper burial.
She assigns spaces and oversees the small spot of greenery in the midst of the wasteland of the inner city. She said she dreads the weekend, because of the drug dealers and pimps who come out. The slums squeeze out the vestiges of life — the grass is paved over, the trees are cut down.
In the interview she recalled having nurtured one cabbage plant that bore one head of cabbage. Children would come by each day to see it. They looked at it with a kind of reverence. In some small way she had given them a glimpse of Eden and they were free to savor it.
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It’s human nature to hope very deeply that we can always dwell on the sunny side. We still have memories of Eden in our DNA, don’t we? Though we can’t go back, we can go forward. Every page of scripture proclaims one message: God has said, “I will not abandon you.” Temptation tries to trick us into substituting something else for God. Some empty promise for the life-giving promise.
So, I believe there is another garden, on the far side of knowing, where the gate is wide open and all God’s redeemed are welcome. When we’ve laid our burden down, we will be truly free at last.
And there, my friends, we may find the perfect cheesecake that has no fat or calories. Or, more likely, we’ll find that we no longer have to watch our cholesterol or weight at all.
And that would be Paradise!