Sermon for Sunday, March 9, 2014 (Lent I) Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7 “Stupid Questions”

A few decades ago, when I was working in software engineering, I had a colleague named John. John was the master of what we might call the stupid question. Let me be clear: John was not a stupid person. But he was famous, or infamous, at staff meetings for offering a question that, on the face of it, seemed plain old dumb. Invariably, he posed one of these when we were going down a design track that was wrong. But John would never say we were wrong. He simply revealed our wrongness with a simple question which, when we answered it, made obvious that we were off in the hinterlands of wrong and our path would not take us to the desired solution. 

I wonder if the serpent in our story is another master of the stupid question.

We’re going to explore that serpent’s stupid question and its aftermath because I believe that because of this story, for millennia, Eve has gotten a bad rap. She’s portrayed either as a dumb bunny who is conned by a snake, or as a seductress who convinces her husband Adam to eat what they’re not supposed to eat so they can have something they’re not supposed to have. Something that God told them to stay away from, but something very, very attractive. She is then named as not only the mother of all humanity, but the first sinner. And in this season of Lent, when we are asked to reflect upon our own sins, we are often told that she is the prime sinner…her husband is merely a secondary player.

But it is more complicated than that, just as our stories of sin and redemption are more complicated than that. To make my case, let's look a little more closely at the text. 

There are some pieces missing in the story you heard in the reading from Genesis. We skip from God showing Adam the garden and issuing the first limiting instruction, that business about not eating from one of the trees, to the first transgression, the humans eating from that tree. That first limiting instruction is the first clue that we have that God is doing something interesting here – giving us the power to make a choice. To adhere to the instruction, or not…it’s our choice.  We also skip over the poetic tale of the creation of Eve in the wake of Adam’s loneliness – after all, you can’t have quite the same relationship with a cow or a platypus that you can have with another human partner – which stresses how humans are really different from the rest of God’s creation. That creation, of course, that we have been told is all good. All is good. God said so. Remember that – we’ll get back to that.

So after that skip, who's the first actor in this story?  It's the serpent...and the first thing the storyteller shares is how crafty the serpent is. You'll note that the serpent is not described as evil. The serpent is crafty. Clever. A part of creation, and creation is all good, right? In a way, we might even look at the serpent as admirable in its wit and strategic thinking...and then, as if to reinforce that notion, the serpent speaks. Heretofore, Adam has only spoken the names of the animals and has spoken in affirming the gift of Eve, calling her "bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh," rightly saying that she is not a different creature, but intimately related to him. Animals haven't spoken in the story, until this moment, this serpent.

Now we have a dialogue between this crafty serpent and the woman. Eve. It seems like she is alone. They talk:  the serpent says " did your creator say you can't eat from any of the trees?" Remember, Eve wasn’t there when God gave the instruction about what’s allowed and what’s not allowed. Eve doesn't seem particularly surprised that a serpent is talking to her, but she does seem intent on correcting the serpent. After all, he's said something that is wrong. Earlier we have heard that God filled the Garden of Eden with "every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil." And God had said they could eat of anything they wanted, EXCEPT for the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

So of course Eve wants to tell the serpent, that clever and crafty thing, that it is wrong. It is only one tree that is off-limits. But the interdiction is a strong one: not only is the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil off limits, if they disobey, they die. And she adds a detail – they are not only required to abstain from eating it, they can’t even touch it. We don’t know if that is what Adam told her, if she wants to more dramatically reinforce the point, or what, but she is pretty clear about what should happen.

The serpent proposes the seemingly stupid question “is it true you can’t eat anything off of these gorgeous trees?” It’s a stupid question because these humans have to eat SOMETHING, and the trees and the fruit on them are staring them both in the face. So she responds, “no, you dumb snake. Only one tree is forbidden.”

The stupid question. It's an old strategy, of course, setting someone up by saying something incorrect. It puts the listener into the position of having superior knowledge, and inclines them to instruct the one who has posed the false statement. 

My friend John used it to show how we were wrong in systems design, but often the crafty person who has set up the dialogue can twist the so-called smart one into a knot with a counter statement.

How does it work? The poser of the stupid question may have started off making you feel superior by feeding you a statement you know is false, then you've proven him wrong, but when he can add additional facts that start off supporting your claim but lead you astray, you have been turned. There is now doubt in your mind about your own intelligence.

And the serpent was all about creating doubt in the mind of Eve. Because doubts so very often lead us to bad choices, and we have been given the ability to make choices by our creator. So the serpent continues its conversaation with Eve. "Oh, THAT tree! Yes, I've heard about that tree. You're right, it has amazing power. But I’ll let you in on a little secret, and I only know this because I was here on the earth a bit before you were and I heard this from a reliable source - you won't die."

Eve: "We won't die?"  

 Serpent: "Nah. God only said that because he didn't want you to get the knowledge, because if you did, you'd be just like God."

Now Eve, who has been very proud of her knowledge of God's rules about the trees and the eating, is shaken. Did God lie to them about this, to keep all of the power? Did Adam give her bad information? Is she the only one who doesn’t know? Her world, her perfect Eden with her perfect mate, is no longer so perfect. And that tree looks gorgeous. The fruit looks luscious. And if you get the added benefit of knowledge that would make you smart like God, what is the harm in it?

Now we get to the interesting part. Where has Adam been through all of this? Adam has been silent through all this business with the serpent. You would assume that Adam and Eve would be together all the time. They are, after all, the only humans around, and they are flesh of each others' flesh and bones of each others' bones. Did Eve wander off from Adam in the garden? Or was Adam there all along, just watching? Wouldn’t he interrupt her when she corrects the serpent, and say “God didn’t say we couldn’t touch it. He just said we couldn’t eat it?” Wouldn’t he say, “Serpent, you’re off base here. We’ve got a good deal and we’re not going to mess it up?” But he says nothing. He simply sees his partner enjoying that fruit, and he decides he wants some, too.

Who’s the dumb bunny now? He makes the same choice that Eve does. The same stupid choice, because the seed of doubt has been planted in both of them by that stupid question. And they eat, and they see something they hadn’t seen before. They are naked. Whereas before it didn’t matter if they were made in the image of God, now they see that they are only partially so. They are human. Their difference from God makes them feel separate and afraid. Knowledge does that sometimes. They have gotten what they ate the fruit for, and what they have gotten isn’t at all what they expected.

Choice is at the heart of the problem for us. It would be so much easier if God had not made Adam and Eve like Godself…made in God’s own image, including the intelligence to choose. It would be so much simpler if there hadn’t been that tree and that serpent and that rule, all of which made Adam and Eve godlike in their ability to choose but not godlike in their ability to make the right choice. So they made the wrong choice. They did the one thing that God told them not to do. They sinned.

Here’s the heart of sin: we have the ability to use our brains to make choices, but time and time again, we let our own desires get in the way of making the right choices. We tend to want to blame someone for our transgressions. It was the serpent. It was my spouse. It was the stupid boss. It was the stupid question. But the question was not what caused the sin. 

It was our choice. The very gift we received – the ability to choose – is sometimes our undoing.

It isn’t Eve. It isn’t that we are born wired to sin. No. We choose to do what is not what we are supposed to do.  And that would be a mightily depressing situation except for one thing: God loves us. God loves us so much that we are forgiven. Forgiven over and over and over again. Sometimes we are punished for our bad choices, but we are always forgiven. Always.

In these weeks of Lent, we examine our lives and our hearts to see how we have been choosing. Have we been choosing in accordance with God’s love, with the beautiful creation God has given us? Or have we been choosing as if all we hear are the stupid questions, the questions that whisper “Why shouldn’t you be as smart as God? It doesn’t cost God anything. Why shouldn’t you take the lip gloss from the counter and slip it into your purse? The company builds in a certain amount of loss in their financial model. Why shouldn’t you cheat on your spouse? Everybody else does it.”

Stupid questions don’t necessarily lead to stupid choices. My buddy John proved that to me. But if we do not use the intelligence that God gave us to sort out what’s stupid and what’s not, we will continue to go down this path of wrong choices, wrong and painful things that turn us from the God who loves us so much that he keeps forgiving us. But wouldn’t it be better if God was not having to bail us out all the time? Think of the questions. Think of the choices. They are sometimes complicated. It may not always be evident what is the right path. But think of the love God shows to you, and the love you can give back to God, if you make the right choices. Pray for the wisdom to make them. Let this be the time you commit to that. 

Amen.

Sermon for Ash Wednesday, March 5, 2014 "Dust"

It’s easy to be distracted. FaceBook, the news, work problems, ferrying children to the soccer game or to the horse show, doctor’s appointments, chores, cooking…

You know how it goes. And somewhere in the midst of it, you think “Gee, I’ve completely forgotten about God.” So you put it on your calendar: Church. Sunday. 10:30 am. Or you say “I’m going to pray every night before I go to bed, just like my mama taught me.” Or you vow to spend some time reading Scripture daily…

…and then you do it once, maybe twice, and the distractions get in the way again, and the vow withers into a dry little mote of dust, and blows away.

Dust. Inconsquential. Ephemeral. Almost nonexistent, until it isn’t.

Ever get a piece of dust in your eye? Hurts like a son-of-a-gun, and it’s a bear to get it out.

Dust. Light as a feather, or even less, until you’ve got a whole house to clean, and you wield that duster like a sword, but by the time you’ve finished the whole house, your arm aches and your back hurts, and the danged dust bunnies under the bed have actually replicated between the time you cleaned under the bed ten minutes ago and this moment when you’ve gone back in the bedroom to look for the Advil.

Dust. Useless, annoying, troublesome, endless dust.

Ah, endless dust.

Dust, just like us.

Way back at the beginning, when God was fashioning the world, the method used to make a human – remember his name was Adam, that first one, which isn’t a name, it simply means human – was to take a handful of dirt  - which, in that weird and wonderful sort of wordplay we see in the Bible, is called Adamah in Hebrew. Then God squished it together and shaped it and pinch it and formed it until the adamah became an adam. I presume it was sort of damp, at least, otherwise it wouldn’t hold together. You couldn’t have a human without some moisture to hold the dust together.

And the corollary to that is that once the moisture dries up, the dirt, the adamah, returns to that featherlight dissipated dust.

The Adam, at some point, no longer lived. The humus that made the humanoid dried out and blew away, dust so light it could fly away to the four corners of the earth. The man began as dust, but at some point he died and became no longer Adam, no longer the protagonist of the first of the great primeval stories of relationship between Creator God and that which God created, simply…dust.

And this was the pattern that has continued to this present day in the year of our Lord 2014 in this church in this place. We were formed of the most basic of elements as a carbon-based life form, shaped by God in our mothers’ womb as the psalmist sings, and at some point, when our time of life on earth is done, we will return to the earth, to the dust. We will become dust in communion with all the other dust that is the raw material of the planet. We begin, as Adam did, as dust. We end, as Adam did, as dust.

And thus we have this rite of remembrance of how we all begin and end. In a bit, I will mark each of you with that dust – ashes – with a cross on your forehead and say “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.”

It is right to acknowledge what the beginning and our ending is. We are ephemeral as dust, impermanent, finite. But that limitation is also our strength – it forces us to focus on recreating and reinventing our relationship with our creator, because we don’t have forever to get it right. We only have now, however long our now is.

And if now is all we have, it is right to take forty days to strip away all the distractions that cause us to put God in a secondary position. It is right that we practice ways of restoring God to where our Creator belongs – at the center of our existence. It is right that we remember that our beginnings and our endings are too close to defer the work of prayer, of worship, of service, of study.

The ashes will fade in a few hours, or until you wash them before bed. They are dust, and dust is, after all, ephemeral. But remember the look of them on your forehead. Remember the feel of my finger as I mark the cross there. Remember that God is with you, and desires your love more than anything, and you cannot wait another moment to get back into the rhythm of conversation with your Creator.

You are dust. You were made of dust and at some point you will be no more than dust again. But in the meantime, however long you are here, remember who shaped you and formed you. Spend this Lenten season reaching out to your Creator and saying, “yes, I remember you.” Remember, and keep a holy Lent.

Amen.

Sermon for Sunday, March 2, 2014 Last Sunday After the Epiphany Exodus 24:12-18, Matthew 17:1-9 “Message On The Mountain”

All this talk of mountains! It makes me nervous. I’m afraid of heights, so the thought of climbing a mountain gives me the heeby-jeebies. I’ve gone up mountains occasionally – under duress – whether it was skiing in my younger days, or watching my kids snowboard, or hiking with my husband who is NOT afraid of heights, but mostly, I avoid mountains.

Here’s the odd thing, though. On occasion when I have gone up mountains, when I’ve stopped and caught my breath, the view is beautiful. Even though I am nervous, I appreciate what I’m seeing…as long as I don’t feel like I’m going to fall. It’s sad – I fear that I miss out on some gorgeous views of God’s beautiful creation because I only anticipate the anxiety and don’t think about the view.

I suspect there are other ways that I avoid mountaintop experiences. Maybe not actual physical mountains, but big challenges that frighten me a bit. Things that will take me out of my comfort zone. Choices that are uncommon, nonstandard, dizzy-making. And I expect you’ve had those experiences as well. And in avoiding those mountaintop experiences, we have lost opportunities for magnificent moments. All because we were afraid to take a risk.

But let me let you in on a little secret: it is alright to be afraid. It is alright to acknowledge that we are scared, that bad things might happen. But it is also worth it to take the risk and go up the mountain, because you may have the opportunity for joy. And it is an opportunity that will not be available to you at sea level, in your safe and ordinary world. You have to take the risk to be available for the transformative experience, even though you’re afraid. But it’s worth the risk.

When Moses went up the mountain at God’s instruction, I suspect he was at least a little bit afraid. He headed up there and the top of the mountain was covered in clouds – you couldn’t see a thing. For someone like me, who is terrified of making a misstep and falling, that would have been a deal-breaker right there. And once he got up in the clouds, “the glory of the Lord was like a devouring fire on the top of the mountain.” Scary. And Moses hung out there for 40 days and 40 nights. And then he came back down from that experience with the tablets on which were inscribed the ten commandments. Would God have made sure that God’s people knew what was expected of them if Moses hadn’t gone up the mountain? Probably…God always wants to make sure we know what is expected of us. But Moses brought back down not only the law, but the power of the Lord. His face shone with the light of God. He was transformed by the experience, and it informed his leadership of the sometimes stiff-necked people of Israel.

When Peter, James and John when up the mountain with Jesus, they had no idea what would happen there. They were fishermen. The likelihood that they had ever climbed a mountain before was very, very slim. I expect that they would have been uncomfortable at the prospect. But the Lord told them to come with him, so they went. And when they got up there, something very strange and unexpected happened. They didn’t look around at the great view from the top of the mountain, because there was something much more remarkable to view right in front of them. Jesus, shining liking a beacon, transformed, transfigured, and with him Moses and Elijah, both of whom were presumably perfectly comfortable with mountaintops after their own experiences. It was a remarkable sight, and at first they had no idea what to do with what they were seeing.

Think of it: imagine your boss says, we’re doing a team-building exercise, so you and I are going to climb a mountain. You go because it’s the boss, and you don’t want to look like a wuss in front of your colleagues, even though you are nervous about the climb because you’re out of shape. And you get to the top and suddenly it’s not only you all standing there, but Steve Jobs and Thomas Edison are standing there, too. How do you react? Do you think that someone snuck some magic mushroom juice into your water bottle? The disciples probably felt that way, too.

Peter, always the leader but not always the smartest of leaders, says, “Wow, boss, this is really cool. Let me pitch some tents for each of you.” He’s trying, bless him. He wants to offer hospitality because his mother raised him to be a generous host, and when you’re under stress, you revert to the behavior that is ingrained because you’ve been hearing about it for twenty or thirty years or more. But it’s really not necessary – they don’t need tents. At the next moment, they hear the voice of God, like James Earl Jones on steroids, saying “Jesus is my boy, and I’m proud of him. Pay attention to him!” No surprise that the disciples fall down on the ground. They are shocked, frightened, clueless as to how to respond to this moment…

…much as we are clueless when we have one of those mountaintop moments, one of those transformative experiences, and it is hard for us to remember exactly what happened once we get down to earth. All we know is that we have been witness to something we never expected, and we are transformed.

That’s second part of the challenge of climbing the mountain: not only do we not know what we will find when we get there, we have a hard time hanging on to it when we get back down to earth.

C.S. Lewis writes gives us an insight on this problem in his final book in the Narnia series, The Silver Chair. Aslan, the lion says “Here on the mountain I have spoken to you clearly. I will not often do so down in Narnia. Here on the mountain, the air is clear and your mind is clear; as you drop down into Narnia, the air will thicken. Take great care that it does not confuse your mind. And the signs which you have learned here will not look at all as you expect them to look, when you meet them there. That is why it is so important to know them by heart and pay no attention to appearance. Remember the signs and believe the signs. Nothing else matters."

Transformative experiences, mountaintop moments, usually have something that you can hang onto. Maybe it’s two stone tablets. Maybe it’s the quality of the light that shone around Jesus, or the magnificent boom of God’s voice. Maybe it’s the way your heart leapt when you saw the view from the mountain, or when you first looked into the eyes of your newborn child, or when you first heard an orchestra play “The Great Gates of Kiev” from Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition.” Take those signs, those memories that you can hang onto, so that when you come down off the mountain there is something to remind you, to link you to how it felt when you were forever changed. You may not remember all of it, but you will remember some of it, because you have been changed, and you need to keep going back to that well of memory to feel how you are different. And if it is an opportunity to be in the presence of God, you want to keep remembering.

But what about us? Unlike Moses, unlike Peter and James and John, we rarely get the opportunity to go up a mountain with the Lord, though, right?

But what if the three rounds of chemo is your mountain? What if rebuilding your life and risking looking for love again after a bitter divorce is your mountain? What if time in prison is your mountain? What if the fear that you are losing the ability to take care of yourself as you age is your mountain? What if trying for a new job is your mountain?

We don’t go up mountains expecting to see God shining bright as the sun. We go up the mountains hoping we can make it to the top, hoping that the view won’t be clouded over, hoping that we brought enough snacks to fuel us. But we get up there, and more often than not, something other than that which we expected awaits us there. God is there, welcoming us, embracing us, saying “you made it this far, you’ll complete the hike,” encouraging us and reminding us that we are recipients of his grace.

Climb the mountains that are risky. Climb the mountains that feel like a forced march that you didn’t sign up for. Climb the mountains that scare you. Climb the mountains that you never thought yourself capable of. Climb the mountains, and enjoy the view…the view of God, who has been walking with you the whole way.

Amen.