Garden and Desert

During the first weekend of Lent, I was privileged to share time with Trinity Church, Princeton, NJ. This is a very active and alive parish which had a great turn out for a prayer workshop on Friday evening, a Quiet Day on Saturday, and then, of course, Holy Eucharist on Sunday. This is my sermon for Lent I with that community. 

Garden and Desert

In the monastic tradition the images of both the garden and the desert play a strong role in our spirituality. And in today's reading, this first Sunday of Lent, we see why that is the case. Laid out before us are two of the great stories of Scripture, the first, from Genesis, is an attempt to explain the origin of both personal and communal sin. While the second, from the Gospel of Matthew is an attempt to explain how that sin, either personal or communal, can be defeated. And interestingly enough, the garden – where life is abundant and beautiful - is the location that enables sin, while the desert – where life is scarce and treacherous – is the location that enables the victory over the sin.

And this is what Lent is about I think. In a famous sermon for Ash Wednesday, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, perhaps the greatest monastic figure of the Middle Ages, begins his sermon with the sentence: “Today, beloved, we enter the holy season of Lent, a season of Christian warfare.”¹

Warfare? Really? That kind of language does not usually sit well with contemporary congregations. Certainly not of the Episcopalian stripe. And yet, it is commonly found in the literature and liturgies of Lent. There is sin to defeat, that sin is a grave enemy, and we must wage war against it. So what does this all mean? Well, I think by spending time with these two readings from Scripture, we might find a path into Lent that could open us further to the Lord.

Our first reading from the Book of Genesis has caused all sorts of problems from ancient times. One of the few things you could get any Christian to agree to is the fact that sin exists in the world. What almost no one agrees on is how that sin came to be in the world and from whence it came. In many cases, you could not even get Christians to agree on which behaviors or lack thereof are sins and which are not.

In our reading from Genesis, some people want to blame God for the “fall of man” because it was God who created a fruit of a tree that would be so tempting, it would be impossible for Adam and Eve to resist it. Others want to blame the snake, who came to be known as Satan for looking to destroy all that was good in the Garden of Eden and in the lives of Adam and Eve. Others still blame Eve, and by extension, all women, for the “fall of man” because, well, you know, women are just that way. And I've even read some others who want to blame Adam for just standing there and not reigning in his woman more and stopping her from going down a sinful path.

And I think any and all of that totally misses the point of the story. The intention of this very important story is clearly not to assign blame for the origin of sin. The purpose of the story is to acknowledge that sin is real and in what the causes of sin in our own lives and in our communal life might be. And I really believe that is what the total purpose of this story was. We have spent so much time over centuries upon centuries trying to make more of it that we have completely forgotten the point. Perhaps that's even been a way for us to avoid having to delve into the true point of the story, because the consequences of that story are massive. The central lie that the serpent tells Eve is that if she will just eat of the fruit of the tree she “will be like God.”

That is the sentence in Scripture that tells us everything we need to know about the origin of sin. Whomever it came from, this story in Genesis, is a way to help us understand the root cause of sin within any society. And that root cause is pride. The pride of equating ourselves with God. Thinking that the power we wield, or the money we have, or the weapons we wave about, makes us equal to God. That is sin on a profound level. It is so profound that it can rise to the level of pure evil.

This pride is what deceives us into choosing who lives and who dies and is acted out by spending enormous sums of money stockpiling weapons rather than feeding the hungry; or by allowing a tiny number of people to horde the vast majority of the wealth, rather than housing the homeless.

The first effect of the sin of pride after the fruit of the tree was eaten was Adam's and Eve's feeling of shame. Both Adam and Eve became aware of their own nakedness and hurried to cover it up. In other words, as soon as the sin of pride was committed, they knew that they were anything but God. The lies they listened to from the serpent had become their own lies and now they were caught in the act. Caught with their pants down, as it were. Completely exposed as the frauds they had become. The first sin recorded after the expulsion from Eden was the murder of Abel by the hand of his brother, Cain. Murdered by his brother. The sin of pride leads to total destruction. It represents the greatest threat to the spiritual life, and even to life itself.

But Christ shows us a way to respond to the temptations of the devil. But first it is important to remember that in the desert we are looking at a story of Jesus the man. Christ, having humbled himself by becoming human, is presented with three temptations, all of which were an attempt to appeal to his pride. And this is where the image of the desert becomes important. When we speak of the Incarnation – God becoming man – we often use the Greek word kenosis which mean a pouring out. A complete emptying of oneself. A total self-giving. That is what Christ did when he took on our humanity. He engaged in kenosis. Going into the wilds of the desert and fasting for forty days was a way to re-enact this pouring out in order to prepare himself for his public ministry.

In that preparation, Jesus prays and gives of himself totally to God, not as God's equal, but as God's son, as God's creation. As subject to God's will and direction. This total self-giving allows Jesus to resist the temptations of the devil no matter how difficult that forty day fast in the desert had become. It is this kenosis that will allow Jesus to heal the sick, proclaim the kingdom, resist the temptations of many followers to become a military messiah, and to ultimately resist the evil, in a non-violent way, of the Sanhedrin and of Pontius Pilate. To clench life from the jaws of death. To affirm a non-violent way of being that looked past the crucifixion and toward the resurrection.

And this is the paradox of the garden versus the desert. Everything we know of the way the world works teaches us that the garden should be the symbol of life. Abundant, perhaps overgrown, teeming with life it provides everything we need. It makes us comfortable, but that comfort seems to lead us into trouble and perhaps even to violence and death.

The desert, on the other hand, allows for that pouring out. That kenosis that each of us are called to. A pouring out of our need for power, our quest for success, our hording of money, our stockpiling of weapons. God calls us to at least attempt to imitate the example of Jesus. This Lent, I encourage you to give it a shot. What would it mean for you to practice kenosis in just one way. To pour yourself out in service to your neighbors? To this parish? To the poor of Princeton? Or, to pour yourself out in prayer to God? What would that mean? Or, ideally, what would it mean to do both? Service and prayer are the two great pillars of Lent. I encourage you to deepen your experience of both within the context of the desert of your own lives. AMEN.

1Bernard of Clairvaux. Sermon One for Lent. p. 24.