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Before sin and grace are doctrines of the Church, they are experiences of life. In fact, the fact that sin and grace are experiences of life is the only reason they are doctrines. If sin and grace were merely doctrines to be learned and recited in a creed, and not realities of life that we experience, they would be of no good use at all. Doctrines are a shorthand we create in order to talk about our experience. Doctrine without experience is quite dead. This is the point of Carlyle Marney's wonderful response to a question once posed to him. Marney, the great Baptist preacher of the past century, was speaking about Adam and Eve one day, when someone asked him a question that totally missed the point of the reading from Genesis we just heard this morning. "Where was the Garden of Eden?" the man asked. "It's at 215 Elm Street, Knoxville, Tennessee," Marney replied. "Huh?" the man said. "I'm talking about the garden where Adam and Eve lived, the garden God banished them from in the Bible because they ate the forbidden fruit." "That's the same garden I'm talking about," said Marney. "It's at 215 Elm Street, Knoxville, Tennessee. I know that is its location, because that's where I lived when I was a little boy. One day I stole some money from my mother's purse and went down to the corner grocery store and bought some candy with it. And I brought the candy home, and I hid in the hall closet behind some long coats to eat my ill-gotten goods. And as I was eating the candy, I heard my mother walking down the hallway calling for me. 'Carlyle! Carlyle! Where are you?' she called. That's when I knew that the place where Adam and Eve live is in that closet at 215 Elm Street, Knoxville, Tennessee." Temptation, sin, and judgment - this was the experience of real life for young Carlyle, the real life experience of Carlyle and God in the hall closet, before it was a set of ideas or doctrines he later preached about. Carlyle was Adam, he knew, a fallen creature. Writing about his own experience, Rabbi Harold Kushner says (in How Good Do We Have to Be?) that that he believes the story of Adam and Eve is not a story of the origin of the sin of all mankind, but an inspiring, even liberating story "of what a wonderful, complicated, painful, and rewarding thing it is to be a human being," a story of the difference between human beings and all the other creatures God has made, a story of the birth of conscience, a story of how human beings came to both the necessity and the glory of having to make moral decisions. It is a story, Kushner says, of how we human beings became aware of the moral dimensions of the choices we make, and of how "the more authentically human we are, the more complicated our lives become," because of our freedom, which is also our necessity, to make moral decisions. "Could it be," Kushner asks, "that when God told Adam not to eat of the fruit of the forbidden tree, He gave not just a prohibition, but a warning, like the person telling a friend in line for a promotion, 'You know, if you get that job, you'll have more responsibility, [and] less time with your family. You'll have to make decisions that will hurt innocent people. Are you sure you want that?'" In other words, you can live outside the garden, but it's not going to be a piece of cake. You will now have to work by the sweat of your brow, not only to put food on the table, but also to decide what work to do. You'll have to work to plan for the future. And there will be pain, not only in the bearing of children, but in the rearing of them, pain in worrying about them when they learn to drive and stay out late, pain in seeing them through the anxieties of illness and school and the discovery of themselves and their vocations. There's a lot of responsibility in living outside the garden. But, Kushner asks, aren't things like work, vocation, parental responsibility as well as parental joy, a sense of mortality, and the knowledge of good and evil precisely what separate us from the animal kingdom? These things that come with living outside the garden - things like work, vocation, parental responsibility and joy, a sense of mortality, and the awareness that some things are right and others are wrong - aren't all these things the sources of the creativity that make us authentically human? Kushner suggests to me that God understood the psychology of the story of Brer Rabbit. You remember the story - how Brer Bear and Brer Fox were getting ready to boil Brer Rabbit for dinner. And how Brer Rabbit, looking for a way out of his predicament, saw the briar patch just beyond the kettle, and how Brer Rabbit was shrewd, how he knew that Brer Fox simply couldn't resist an opportunity to torment Brer Rabbit, even if it meant missing out on rabbit stew, and how Brer Rabbit was so shrewd that he knew how to outfox Brer Fox, because Brer Rabbit knew that while the briar patch looked menacing to Brer Fox, and like a wonderful opportunity to vex Brer Rabbit some more, the briar patch was, in fact, Brer Rabbit's natural element, his true home, so Brer Rabbit said, "Whatever you do, Brer Fox, please don't throw me into that briar patch!" "Might it be," Kushner asks, "that God knew that a life of freedom and responsibility is the true home of the man and the woman he had created and that God wanted Adam and Eve to eat the fruit [of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil]," because that is their true home as persons made in his own image? So God says, "Whatever you do, Adam and Eve, please don't eat the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil!" Might it be that God wanted Adam and Eve to eat the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, because, although "God knew it would make their lives painful and complicated, and [although] He winced at the pain they would be condemning themselves to, He didn't want to be the only One in the world who knew the difference between Good and Evil?" Could it be that God wanted some personal, moral companionship? Kushner says that the story of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden is God's way of telling us the story of our becoming aware of who we really are as persons, the story of our becoming aware that as human beings created in the image of God "there is more to life than eating and mating, that there are such things as Good and Evil," and that this knowledge is good. Outside the garden is where we discover what it is to be human beings, persons, not beasts. Outside the garden we discover that we can be sad as well as happy, sometimes at the same time, and that we can be conflicted as well as blessed, because we have entered a world where the choices that confront us have difficult moral dimensions, and where we will inevitably make mistakes. But this freedom to choose is an essential part of the process of how God made us in his own image. Inside the garden, we could, like other animals, be only useful and obedient, and maybe cute. Now, outside the garden, as persons who know the difference between Good and Evil and who know that we can choose the one or the other, we are able to choose the good for ourselves. And that makes it possible for us, like God himself, to be sad as well as happy, to know grief as well as joy, to be conflicted as well as blessed. St. Paul says that "everything is permissible for us, but not everything is beneficial." And that is the source of our conflictedness, the source of the joy and the sadness we can feel at the very same time. It is the knowledge that we have the freedom to do whatever we want, but that not everything we want is good for us. It is the awareness that we have the freedom to choose life and the awareness that some of the things we choose bring death. Kushner wonders what it would be like if God had locked us up in the garden and made it impossible for us to leave? Would we have been better off, having neither the desire nor the freedom to choose? Kushner doesn't think so. Neither do I. Because then, although we wouldn't have the freedom to choose what is evil, we wouldn't have the freedom to choose what is good either. We wouldn't experience sadness or grief, of course, but we wouldn't be able to experience blessedness or joy either. That's why Kushner suggests that we consider a different ending to the story of the Garden of Eden. What if? he asks. What if - instead of the ending to the story that we find in Genesis - what if the story had ended this way: So the woman saw that the tree was good to eat, and a delight to the eye. And the serpent said to her, "Eat of it, for when you eat of it, you will be as wise as God." But the woman said, "No! God has commanded us not to eat of it, and I will not disobey God." And God called to the man and the woman and said to them, "Because you have hearkened to My word and not disobeyed My command, I shall reward you greatly." To the man He said, "You will never have to work again. Spend all your days in idle contentment, with food growing all around you." To the woman He said, "You will bear children without pain. They will need nothing from you. Children will not cry when their parents die, and parents will not cry when their children die." To both of them, He said, "For the rest of your lives, you will have full bellies and contented smiles. You will never cry, and you will never laugh. You will never long for something you don't have, and you will never receive something you always wanted." And the man and the woman grew old together in the garden, eating daily from the Tree of Life and having many children. And the grass grew high around the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, until it disappeared from view, for there was no one to tend it. Would that ending be better? God knows what is good for us, and he knew it when he created us - that it is good for us to know both good and evil, and it is good for us to have the freedom to choose between them. That is an important part of what makes us more than cats, persons rather than beasts. God, in his wisdom, gives us the freedom to risk evil and death, because it is the only way God can give us the freedom to choose what is good. It is in freedom that evil and death are risked, because it is in freedom that obedience and goodness and grace and love are possible. And this is why the Spirit leads us, as He led Jesus, outside the garden. This is why the Spirit leads us out into to the wilderness, there to struggle, as Jesus struggled, with the gift of freedom that God has given us. But the Spirit does not lead us into the wilderness to despair: "Wretched man that I am!" as St. Paul cried out, "Who will rescue me from these choices, where I am doomed to make wrong ones?" The Spirit leads us into the wilderness of freedom with his support, his assistance, his succor. He leads us into the wilderness of life with the support of religion, with the assistance of his commandments. That's what God's commandments are; they are God's support, God's teaching, God's help for us in our freedom. God's commandments are the voice of God himself. Through them God says, "I will guide you through this minefield of difficult moral choices, sharing with you the insights and experiences of the greatest souls of the past...." And the Spirit also leads us into the wilderness of freedom with the benefit of grace. Not with the doctrine of grace, but with the experience of grace. In the wilderness of freedom, angels tend to our needs with God's response to our question: "Wretched man that I am, who will rescue me from these choices, where I am doomed to make wrong ones? Thanks be to God, through our Lord Jesus Christ! For through the grace of God we know that nothing can separate us from the love of Christ who shares our freedom in the wilderness, where he chose life and goodness for us, and chooses it still, offering us forgiveness and strength, his comfort, when we are troubled by the painful choices we have to make. Like Rabbi Kushner, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, invites us to consider the importance of our moral freedom. He notes that the way we use the word "temptation" these days trivializes the experience of our freedom. The word has become so diluted nowadays, he says, "that it is used mainly to prod others towards a bit of pardonable naughtiness. It's about cream cakes for people on diets, and not much more." "But this can't be adequate for an idea so central in the gospel records of Jesus," Williams adds. And he goes on to remind us that what Adam and Eve experienced in the Garden of Eden, and what Jesus experienced in the wilderness, was peirasmos. "In Greek a peirasmos is a test; the word is related to "empirical"[and therefore to "experience"].... A [peirasmos, a] 'temptation' is an experiment to find something out, and in the Bible that is the main force of the word. When we are subject to peirasmos we are being tested so that 'what we really are' [and 'who we really are'] is allowed to appear...." "The story of Jesus' temptation in the [wilderness] is not, on any possible reading, a catalogue of Jesus' being prodded to do a series of 'wrong things'; it is a frighteningly ironic little drama about how the Devil tries to find out who [Jesus] is." (In The Independent, March 8, 2003) And the Devil retires in frustration, Williams says, because the choices Jesus makes confound the Devil's doctrines. The choices Jesus makes confound the Devil's assumptions about how a Son of God should behave, and they reveal the Child of God Jesus chooses to be. Jesus chooses to be authentically human rather than to "play God," by "buzzing around in the air turning the desert into a gourmet bakery," as Barbara Brown Taylor puts it. Jesus chooses to live as we live, "to keep his feet on the ground and live with the ache in the pit of his stomach" that hunger and fatigue and the knowledge of good and evil inevitably bring. He chooses goodness over grandeur, passion over power. He chooses the wilderness of freedom and life. He chooses to be a Servant who suffers with those who suffer, because of his love for those who suffer. The freedom of Jesus in the wilderness - his peirasmos - is precisely the freedom, the peirasmos, that became available to us when we ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. It is the test of who we really are, and of who we really want to be. It's all God's fault in the first place, of course. He could have locked us up in the Garden. But he didn't, and that's that. There is no going back. And anyway, would we really want it any other way? So here is some homework for a Lent that is more than trivial: Do you want to know about sin and grace? Not the doctrines, but the realities? Then forget cream cakes and chocolate. Forget the creed. Instead, ask yourself these questions: What is your experience? What is the address of the Garden of Eden and of wilderness and temptation and judgment for you? What is your peirasmos, the test in your own life of who you really are? What are the choices your moral freedom make possible in your life, your choices for life and your choices for death? Ponder the benefits along with the risks. Weigh the joy and grace and love which peirasmos makes possible along with the difficulty and the pain and the agony. Then, in the wilderness of real life this Lent, ask yourself the question Jesus asked himself in this same wilderness: What kind of child of God do I want to be? In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. |