‘A’   //   Lent 1   //   2-10-08   //   Celebration of Worship, Northside/St. Aidan’s

                                                     (combined Presbyterian/Episcopalian worship)

 

Scriptures     Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7   Romans 5:12-19

                                                      Psalm 32 (sung)                Matthew 4:1-11

On this first Sunday in Lent, O Lord, we confess that Oscar Wilde had it right: We can resist just about anything … anything, that is, except temptation!

 

How are we being tempted, O God, in our world today? How are we to name it for what it is?

 

And how are we to hear your word of grace and truth and love and justice through it all?

 

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable to you, O God: our rock, and our redeemer. Amen.

This arresting statement – more arresting, trust me, in its unaltered form – comes to us from an old friend of mine: a longtime recovering alcoholic and addict some of you may have read over the years named Anne Lamott.

 

“I felt like the piece of dung around which the world revolves.”¹ Or, as a cloud of Twelve Step witnesses past and present have put the condition more prosaically, “egomania coupled with an inferiority complex.”

 

Speaking of Twelve Step language: Our own Rachel Stivenson tells the story of the Al-Anon – i.e., the codependent friend or family member of an alcoholic – who, in the course of an accident, watches someone else’s life flashes before her eyes. That’s inferiority.

 

Contrast that attitude with the alcoholic who struts into a room, saying through his attitude alone: Don’t you know who I think I am?

 

In reality: All of us combine a bit of the codependent and the dependent in our lives. Often – too often – we live our lives out of a place of shame, often choosing to slather it with a few coats of grandiosity.

 

Such is the human condition. In whatever language. Perhaps the best of which is biblical.

 

So let’s get it over with. Let’s say the word together now, from atop holy hill, so that all of Ann Arbor can hear us: SIN … Once again: SIN … There! I knew you could!

Our first scripture reading today is about original sin – or so it’s often called. And just what is so original about it?

 

It’s original, because it’s the first narrative in our scriptures that addresses about what sin truly is: in all its grandiosity … in all its shame.

 

Now, it’s easy to discern the grandiosity – the godly pretension – in this story. It’s easy to discern in this story our desire to discern, at all times, the knowledge of good from evil. The striving not toward living out our own salvation, but toward becoming more divine. And with this godly pretension the convenient forgetting, in the words of Anatole France, that whoever would become an angel becomes a beast.²

 

It’s easy to see how the woman and the man – Eve and Adam of legend – fall prey to grandiosity, here. Fall prey … to their pride.

 

Centuries of dead white men, speaking in the context of a dead white men-oriented world, have faithfully hung their collective heads as they have written large one word in the theology books about sin. One word: Pride.

It is perhaps not as easy for us to see the shame in this story. It is perhaps not as easy for us to see how Eve, and then Adam, allowed themselves to be framed. How the woman let the serpent do the thinking for her – and then the man let the woman do the same.

 

Three temptations he faces in his desert wilderness – just as we all do. The three temptations of economics, religion, and politics.

 

·        “Change these stones to become loaves of bread.” – Economics.

·        “Throw yourself down (from the pinnacle of the temple.)” – Religion.

·        “All of these (kingdoms) I will give to you …” – Politics.

 

Do these things, the devil says, “If you are the Son of God” … or, acquire these kingdoms, “If you will fall down and worship me.”

 

Note the devil’s premises – the “ifs”. First: “If you are the Son of God …”  He uses this preface twice. Naturally, this is an appeal to Jesus’ pride – his messianic identity. At least, what others are beginning to call him.

 

And then – having failed twice with this premise – the devil takes the gloves off. No more references to who Jesus might consider himself to be. No – the devil turns the finger back his way: to his pride – his power – his pretense. “If you fall down and worship me … ”: Like the serpent with Eve and Adam, he will now do the thinking for Jesus. Or … so he thinks.

 

Friends: In a few moments, we will be asked to say together a typical Prayer of Confession taken – in this case – from the Presbyterian Book of Common Worship. As with similar prayers in the Episcopalian Book of Common Prayer, it’s beautifully composed – as far as it goes. For so many of these prayers convey – sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly – that we are really not that special, or even worthy… that we must always squirrel away our pride … that we must always guard against seeing ourselves as “pure” and “great”.

 

Certainly, our pride poses us problems. Certainly, we are tempted – though probably not as dramatically as Jesus – with a sense of economic ease, religious self-protection, and, especially in this major election year, political correctness. Certainly, as small churches with strongly prophetic and inclusive visions, we are as prone as more formal and seemingly doctrinaire faith communities to puff ourselves up with our “specialness” – to be, if you will, so inclusively driven we can become exclusive of those we perceive to be less inclusive.

 

Remember the devil’s opening salvos to Jesus: “If you are the Son of God …” I wonder if it isn’t easier for us not to claim our child of God identity with Jesus, to begin with? I wonder if it isn’t easier for us instead – forgetting that God doesn’t create junk, and feeling we are not worthy of God – to just give up and fall down and worship something else? Remember the devil to Jesus – Round 3: “If you will fall down and worship me …”

 

I wonder if we aren’t more prone to say “I did the wrong thing”, not because we may have done a wrong thing, but because deep down there’s a voice and void inside us that says, “I was born a wrong thing”?

 

How are we to serve those who feel such shame most of the time, if we don’t repent of that sense of worthlessness in ourselves, and claim God’s grace and our rightful inheritance as it was offered at our baptisms?

 

Let us listen to the singer Susan Drake, who challenges us to bring a word of Good News to the battered woman who may wander in to church one Sunday – for one hour – for one time:

 

Regardless: How difficult it is, in this manic world of Super Bowls and Super Tuesdays and superstores and super holiday celebrations, to nourish ourselves with the gentle leaven of Lent. How difficult it is, to follow in the desert footsteps of Jesus, and turn aside the dual temptations of becoming like God and rejecting God’s claim on us both.

 

The other day, I was visiting for the first time a woman in prison. She has been corresponding with me at Northside after she discovered us through a lesbian-supportive periodical.

 

Within a few minutes of sitting down with her and listening to her, I began to realize as never before just how powerfully her institutionalization was wearing her down. Having enjoyed the eloquence of her letters, I thought I’d buck her up a bit by affirming her as the very intelligent person she is.

 

Her response: “Thank you.”

 

And then it all came rushing back to me. That was the same response I gave to a psychiatrist when I was hospitalized for depression over 20 years ago. I remember this, because I remember the psychiatrist’s response to mine: “That wasn’t a compliment. That’s just the way you are.”

 

But it seemed like a compliment. For when you’ve been told by an institution that’s something’s wrong with you, over and over and over again, you thirst for such a reminder of what you’ve been given.

As with the woman inmate this past week and my institutionalized self two decades past: We may be shamed by circumstances that we feel denigrate our gifts. We may conversely be proud of our gifts as a cover for our shame. But whether we fall prey to the shame or its cover-all, pride: We are prone to lose sight of the source of our gift.

And when we lose sight of the source of our gift, it becomes no longer a gift, but a merit badge we feel we can either denigrate or arrogate – we can either deny or use to dominate. No longer does the gift emanate from the holy and utterly democratic mediocrity of God’s grace. Now it becomes, in our meddlesome hands, the crass meritocracy of entitlement.

 

 

¹This quotation actually represents a close paraphrase found in Lamott’s Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year (Anchor, 1993) – page number unknown. Also found, among other places, in http://abiggerboat.blogspot.com/2006/04/why-i-love-anne-lamott.html.

 

²As quoted by William Sloane Coffin, Jr., in Once to Every Man: A Memoir (NYC: Atheneum, 1977), p. 81.