First Reflection 3/13/11
Genesis 2:15-17;3:1-7
Desire

The four lectionary readings for today seem to complement each other very well, therefore I thought I’d dip into all four of them with you this morning. 

Genesis tells us that there in the garden, the crafty serpent told Eve what she wanted to hear.  She could elevate herself, she could be like God.   Today the serpent would be telling her she could be young and smart and good looking, just like those actresses on Oscar night.  All it takes is the designer clothes, the vibrant hair coloring and certain rich emolients and she’s there!  Serpents abound in our culture. There is aTV ad for Value City Furniture airing now with the remarkable refrain, ’I want it all, and I want it now.’

The tree of knowledge wasn’t the problem in this story, nor was the serpent,  despite its ensuing bad press.  The problem was Eve’s humaness, matched by Adam’s humaness when he took a bite of the apple too.  The problem was human desire then and the problem is human desire today.

There is no end to the desires that arise in our hearts.  Three basic desires are to know everything, to be happy and to live forever.  Can you identify with wanting to know everything, be happy and live forever?  Of course you can, you’re human, like Eve.  Humans seem to believe that we are somehow limited and unfulfilled in our present state.  Believing we are incomplete, we seek those things and those people which will enable us to feel complete – new furniture, shiny hair, more knowledge.  We are driven by our desires.  ’I want it all, and I want it now.’

The problem with desires is twofold:

1.  Feeding desires only makes them grow.  There is no end to more clothes and more books and more money.  Satisfying a desire doesn’t make it go away, it only reinforces the pursuit of desires.  The pursuit becomes an endless rat race, and we are the rats.

2.  Pursuing human desires is placing ourselves before God.  That’s the message from the Garden of Eden.  As human beings, we would like to believe that our individual lives have some kind of higher meaning.  Yet, like Adam and Eve, we act as if there was little more significance to our existence than the ongoing satisfaction of personal desires.  This is a recipe for sorrow.  According to Aldous Huxley:

The divine eternal fullness of life can be gained only by those who have    deliberately lost the partial, separate life of craving and self-interest, of egocentric thinking, feeling, wishing and acting.
 

Second Reflection 3/13/11
Psalm 32
Trust

Adam and Eve have disobeyed God.  Sin and death have entered the world.  What do we do now?  This psalm is pretty clear about it.  We are to pray and ask for forgiveness for our sins.  “Forgive our debts” is the term used in the Lord’s Prayer.  Only God can forgive our sins, but God has shared this grace with Christ who, in turn, has shared it with the community of the faithful.

On Ash Wednesday we asked for forgiveness and pledged ourselves to 40 days of repentence.  Psalm 32 assures us that repentence is an act that changes our lives:

Many are the torments of the wicked,
but steadfast love surrounds those who trust in the Lord. 

According to the psalm, happiness follows a request for forgiveness.  All we have to do is screw up our courage and actually confess.  Of course the specific content of our confessions will not be news to God who already knows everything.  The value of confession is in acknowledging our failures to ourselves.  One of those desires we all have is to look good to others.  That way we think they will like us, and we all want to be liked.

Somehow we imagine that if we don’t even acknowledge our sins to ourselves, no one else will notice them.  If we admit no guilt, we can accept no forgiveness.  For our own sakes, we have to admit to things we would rather ignore.  For our community, we have to forgive people who really don’t deserve it.  When we do admit sin, we free ourselves from the burden of holding these things in, of pretending our failures don’t exist.  Our relief is so great according to the psalm, we “shout for joy.”

But having confessed, there then comes the hesitant question, will God forgive us?  Of course, God will forgive us.  In fact, God has already forgiven us.  To receive the joy of that forgiveness all we had to do was ask.  Rest assured this psalm is saying, those dark corners of your soul will lose their grip on you when the light of God’s love is shone on them.  Trust that there is no situation we can get into that God grace cannot get us out of.

Third Reflection 3/13/11
Romans 5:12-19
Sin

We are living in the midst of catastrophes.  The tsunami in Japan, the civil war in Libya, millions starving in Africa and billions in the world ignoring God’s call for peace and love.  In Paul’s words, “death is exercising dominion.”  But there is one man standing in the breach, Jesus.  His obedience, Paul says, is enough to save us all from our disobedience. 

Disobedience, or distancing ourselves from God and each other, can take many forms.  I’ve already mentioned desire. There is also trouble inflicted on others, perversions, addictions, and disobedience to God.  The whole list of wrongdoing is a long one reflecting the full range of creativity of which humans are capable.  Those I would like to dwell on for a moment here are sins of omission, not of commission.  Omission is not standing up for what is right.  Omission is silence in the presence of predujice.  Omission is shaking your head at the misfortunes of others and doing nothing about it. Omission is withholding yourself from your loved ones or from your God.

Sins of omission have a powerful negative effect on our health and well-being, physical, emotional and spiritual.  Remember the psalm reading, “While I kept silence, my body wasted away.”  The opposite of silent sin is life, if we speak up.

Jesus would not have been Jesus if he had kept silent.  Can we be his faithful followers and keep silent?  Not keeping silent is how we change the world for the better.  The world needs our love in the same way we need God’s love.  Jesus has shown us the way.

Fourth Reflection 3/13/11
Matthew 4:1-11
Faith

Many are the sleazy, few are the faithful.  By sleazy I mean the lazy, the self-centered, the two-faced.  We are all tempted, all the time, in one way or another to take the easier looking path.  Many feel some guilt about those decisions and so keep it to themselves.  Temptation is a lonely business.  All of us got to meet the devil alone.

That’s what happened to Jesus alone in the wilderness.  He was tempted to look powerful and significant, by changing stones into bread.  He was tempted to be a hero, to make himself the center of attention by jumping off a building.  He was tempted to be wealthy and idolized by becoming a king.

Jesus was tempted and so are we.  Jesus quoted Deuteronomy to the devil in response to the devil’s temptations.  ‘Worship the Lord your God and serve only him,’ Jesus said.  The problem is that temptation is always present and certain and real while God, too often, seems to us distant and uncertain and unreal.  The tendency, therefore, is to cave into the sure thing, the sin.  The truth is that we’ve never been separated from God.  We only think we have.

Faith in the presence of God is what is required to get us past the in-your-face character of temptation.  We need faith that God is bigger than evil.  We need faith that we are not separated from God.  We need faith that, having been made in the divine image, we are whole, that we can grow into a full and joyful humanity.

Desire, trust, sin and faith – the stuff of life.  There is only one God who embraces, embodies and enfolds everything.  We can never be outside of that God.  If our desires and sins are within, so is our trust and faith.  Let’s live as if we believed that were so.

Amen.