Our girls, ages five and
seven, have just recently reached that stage in their lives where they like to
hear stories about what they were like when they were babies. To Melinda and
me, of course, that seems like just yesterday. We blinked our eyes and they
aged five years. To them, however, that was all “way back then,” before their
memory really started. Both girls are coming to understand and appreciate that these
stories we tell of their birth and earliest years are really part of their
story, not just something we’ve made up. Of course, from their perspective,
these stories can seem pretty fictitious---like the time one daughter, out of
curiosity, grabbed an inedible a part of a table decoration at her uncle’s
wedding rehearsal and swallowed it whole and then said “cheese” to the x-ray
technician in the emergency room when they tried to find it…or the way the
other daughter had acid reflux and cried almost non-stop through the first nine
weeks of her life unless someone cradled her just right.
They can’t remember those
things happening, of course, but they hear themselves in them. They’ll say,
often as we’re sitting at the supper table, “Tell me again, Daddy, Mommy, about when I was a
baby,” because they know their identity is somehow bound up in them, that we
can all see little bits of their personality are peeking out. One of them, for
example, will still eat just about anything you put in front of her, and the
other one loves to be cuddled.
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| Adam and Eve (Mabuse, c.1510) |
This is very similar to our
relationship with the stories we hear in the beginning of the Bible, which were
the same stories that the ancient Hebrews were told about their earliest years,
and the same stories that the apostle Paul’s people surely heard and
understood. The Scriptures, inspired by the Holy Spirit, have passed down
through the ages the stories that tell us what happened “way back when,” long
before any of us were born or could begin remembering. These stories seem
strange and peculiar from our perspective nowadays, and probably even from
Paul’s perspective almost 2000 years ago. After all, they involve special
trees, eating fruit with strange powers, and a talking snake! However, people
of faith read them and understand that, yes, this is our story. These are our
people.
The facts might not always
make sense to us, but there is great truth in what these stories communicate, and
they explain with great accuracy why things are the way they are. We hear them
and—although we were not there at the time, although it occurred long before
any of us existed—we can still acknowledge that this struggle between the first
humans and this force that works against God is part of our identity. That is, the
decision made by our earliest ancestors to succumb to the temptation and
swallow that off-limits table decoration has affected who I am and who we are
on a very basic level. They weren’t satisfied with simply being made in the
image of God. They wanted to put themselves in the place of God, and we’ve
known that desire ever since.
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| Adam and Eve (Titian c.1550) |
More than that, it has effected
who I am and who we are in a negative and permanent way. We were created to live in harmony with God
and with creation, to worship God around that tree of the knowledge of good and
evil—we can still sense that design now, even if we can’t fully behold it—but
somehow, very early on, things within creation went awry and humans bear the
guilt. Maybe it’s that sense of pride, maybe it’s some kind of rebellion, maybe
it’s disordered desire, maybe it’s not heeding God’s Word…no matter what it was
and when it happened, that original transgression has led to generations upon
generations of wrong decisions and self-centered behavior. Its power grips us
from within and taints everything we do. It’s like it is all we know, and
although we are often ashamed of it, sewing little makeshift fig leaves to
cover it up thinking no one will notice, we can’t seem to do anything about it.
It lingers and lingers, infecting all of our relationships, even our
relationship with ourselves. Yes, this is our story. We may quibble over the
science of it all, but there is no mistaking that this is us.
Sometime later in human
history something called the law came along. This, too, became part of our
story, and it happened so long ago that, as far as any of us can tell, it’s
always been there, too. The law was designed to help curb and contain some of
this sinister force that had been unleashed. It was supposed to institute guidelines
or guardrails between humans and other humans, and ultimately re-establish that
healthy boundary between creature and Creator. Different cultures had different
versions of the law, but one people, in particular, were entrusted with the
holiest, most righteous law, the law that was supposed to eventually unite all
the straying peoples under the sovereignty of one almighty and loving God.
This, too, went awry, because
all the law ended up doing was show us just how bad we really were. Our
sinfulness, as it turned out, had infected even what we were supposed to do
with the law, and we ended up using to exploit or exclude others. The
temptation to serve ourselves above all others could not—and still cannot—be
curbed by something as good as a set of laws. This, too, is our story. Yes, it
is depressing, but it’s the only one we’ve got.
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| Temptation of Christ (Rembrandt) |
The opportunity to eat something
tempting is presented, and this man doesn’t play God and satisfy himself. The
opportunity to put himself in the place of God is offered, and he rejects it outright.
The offer to possess all the things the Creator made is laid before him, and
this man still chooses to worship the Creator himself, instead. All of the
temptations which had infected God’s people from the very beginning are, in
some way, placed before him and he turns it all down. Even when the devil, that
voice of lying and selfishness and corruption, tries to use the law against
this man by quoting Scripture, this man is able to see through the testing.
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| Temptation of Christ (Duccio) |
The man will eventually leave
the wilderness of temptation, but his testing will continue. In fact, it will
only intensify from that point, culminating with his death on the cross. It is
there where this man will show just how faithful he is to God by allowing
himself to die rather than taste, once again, the rotten fruit of
self-preservation. It is on the cross where we will finally see the extent to
which that law was supposed to serve us by showing us love for one another. This
new story—a new, true story—has a powerful, incredible ending in which God
makes sure that the sin we feel so inclined to does not have the final say. When
this man rises on the third day it becomes clear that death will not rule human
destiny anymore. And because this man is Jesus of Nazareth, human born of a
woman, it is now our story too. His life
is our life. It abounds for the many. His grace becomes our grace, just as much
as Adam and Eve’s sin has become our sin.
When you think about it,
Christian faith involves a lot. It can be very mind-boggling when you consider,
for example, all the things the church does, the ministries undertaken daily by
those who bear Christ’s name throughout the world. Our community, for example, is
a place where quilts and pillowcase dresses are sewn for people in developing
nations. We donate and grow food for distribution to people in our own
neighborhood. Some of us play silly youth ministry games to help us build
community and break down barriers. People read books together, study the Bible,
make popsicle-stick crafts that somehow illustrate God’s love. We walk babies
down the aisle, we marry couples, we bury our dead. Christian faith and
ministry entails an awful lot, but at our core—the absolute essential basis of
our identity and mission—is remembering and re-telling this new story God has
given us in Christ Jesus. This is made real for each of us in the moment of our
baptism.
And each week, behind all the
work and ministry that goes on here or any other place of ministry, the most
important thing that happens is this exchange of stories, this re-telling of
what God has done with creation through his Son Jesus and to us in our baptism.
Each time we gather for worship, no matter what else that we think is
important, this is what’s really going on: we are having our awful, crooked,
broken life story—the one where we think it’s all we know and all we can be—re-claimed
and re-written by the new beautiful one God gives us, even though we’ve done
nothing to deserve it.
That’s the main thing: that we
gather around this book, around this bowl of water, and around this table…we
gather with the rest of our beautiful but flawed family and we say, “Tell us again,
daddy...tell us the story again of what it means to be your redeemed child.” And God says
to us: “It means a lot of fearsome and wonderful things, but mostly it means
you are to feed on the words that come from my mouth. And it also means that no
matter what…no matter how selfish and cranky you become because of what that
inner turmoil does to you…I will cradle you, always, in the embrace of the
cross.
And we, with hearts now
broken open, say, “That’s an amazing story. We’ll take it.”
Thanks be to God!
The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.
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