There Are Only Three Sins

Sermon

It’s a tiny bit arrogant (don’t you think) to announce via sermon title, “There are only three sins.” I mean—really? Like one knows this kind of thing. This sermon is not in defense of arrogance, although I understand that’s what all the cool kids are doing these days. But the three categories of sin are worth noting: thinking you are God (“We can eat this!”), failure to take responsibility for that (“Not me! I didn’t do it! She made me eat it!”), and thinking that, in your case, an exception has been made. Of the latter, see the Tempter inviting Jesus to jump, because surely gravity won’t apply for him. Illustrations of these sins show up in news headlines every day. Headlines, however, don’t always translate to our own embrace of familiarity with these sins. But consider how judgy we get over the neighborhood dog drama/noise or the imperative voice we adopt when projects need a kick start. “Who died and made you God?” doesn’t just show up in middle school corridors. Or consider how scarce we become when the home neat freak calls out, “All right! Who left the milk on the counter?” Not to mention my favorite campaign slogan from a mayoral election in Madison, Wisconsin, in the 1970s, later adopted by my late husband as his driving mantra: “Only obey the good laws.” Thinking you’re God, failure to accept responsibility for it, in my case an exception has been made.

Today’s Bible stories probably sound familiar. More than just what we read to open Lent annually, they are archetypal stories in literature and film, from East of Eden and Paradise Lost to The Grand Inquisitor. As archetypal stories, it’s no surprise that we hear their echoes in the daily news. You might have heard this week about the man formerly known as “Prince,” who had been obliged to drop that title and embrace the last name “Mountbatten-Windsor.” His arrest speaks volumes about the dangers of being taught from birth that an exception has been made in your case. We humans, it seems, have been hardwired to prefer gossip to blessings, and so we find ourselves titillated as we search for the photo of him miserably slouching in the back of a cop car. We’ve come to interpret this kind of story as Eve’s fault, but she blames the snake, and so it goes. It’s a mess of exceptionalism and failure to take responsibility, so who could blame us for vilifying the snake?

What is disquieting about Jesus’ temptation story is not really that he doesn’t say “yes” to the Tempter’s offers. The snake in Eden gets the happy couple to bite through planting suspicion not only that God lied to them, but that God actually has no intention of caring for them—witness the fact that something has been withheld from them! If God really loved them, wouldn’t God have given them carte blanche in the garden? No wonder Jesus didn’t succumb to temptation, he was God, for Pete’s sake, right?

James Talarico, now running for the Senate position from Texas, offered a different perspective. At a time when Christian nationalism paints Jesus as the victorious warrior, domineering the globe and smiting those who do not straighten up and fly right—at such a time as this, Talarico points out that the anti-Empire thing isn’t that “Jesus is God,” as in “no wonder he can defeat Satan!” What is radically mind-blowing (to me) is that “God is Jesus.” Ho. Ly.  Smokes. You remember Jesus. Born of an unwed mother, adopted by the man who married his mother in the pity gesture of a righteous man, refugee to Egypt, undocumented alien. What the Current Labeler in Washington calls a loser. This Jesus is nevertheless named my beloved Son by virtue of his baptism. What about our baptisms? Where does that leave us?

Right now, it leaves us at the front of Lent, a 40-day preparation period for Resurrection. In the early Church, Lent was the period during which people prepared to receive baptism on Easter morning. That tradition has been handed down to us in lectionary passages that focus on the implication of our baptisms. Here at Westminster, we’re reminding ourselves of our baptisms with the preaching theme of “Wade into Troubled Waters.” I like the notion of seeing our baptismal waters in the light of troubled waters. For one thing, there are Biblical stories about troubled waters being healing waters, but that’s a different sermon. Today, I’d like to invite you to hear that many mystics and spiritual teachers these days are speaking of a global Dark Night of the Soul. Far from its being a punishment, they say, Dark Night is an invitation to transformation, healing if you will. This Lent, perhaps the invitation is to welcome troubled waters as predecessor to new life. The gift of what we are living through right now is the recognition that rising tides lift all boats. We have been given the opportunity to not just “own” our values, but to examine and defend them. Healing, indeed.

The U.S. has been accused of harboring a sense of exceptionalism, and here’s Jesus facing the first two temptations to coast on the exceptionalism of his sonship. Since you are God’s son, and then contextualizing his last temptation so as to forget whose son he is. “Worship ME!” the Tempter purrs. It has always struck me as preposterous that power over all the nations in the world could be on offer, but apparently that is no longer foolish, what with the codependent dance of finance and tech with industry and self-indulgence morphing into the political arena.

The lunar new year has just been celebrated as we leave the Year of the Snake and welcome the Year of the Horse. I asked a Chinese American friend about the significance of the horse year. She told me that horse carries connotations of speed and vitality. Horses are said to have so much energy that they literally don’t know when to stop. Someone born in the Year of the Horse is characterized as brave, energetic, and a go-getter. Jesus may not have had horse energy, but the story tells us that he fasts 40 days and then he is able to hear and answer clearly: whether to eat or not to eat, to jump or not to jump, to worship God or not to. Which is what the couple in the garden were aiming for: being able to hear and see clearly. Their temptation was to short-circuit their journey, forgetting this isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon, this business of learning to trust God for the long haul. As opposed to the garden situation, Jesus had come to the place of trusting that God does care, does provide, not because he is exceptional, but because of who God is. It took 40 long days to get to that. “Forty” being Biblish for “the complete amount of time it takes for transformation.”

These days, stories about the long haul and doing the brave thing are what give me hope. As you might imagine, many of those stories come out of Minnesota, where my family of origin still resides and resists. My sister shared a blog with horrific firsthand details of detentions at the Whipple Federal Building there. This is a building named, ironically, after Bishop Henry Whipple, the first Episcopal bishop of Minnesota, known in the 19^th century to be an activist and advocate for the Lakota Sioux. Now that name has come to mean the place where, in the sub-zero Minnesota winter, arrested people are detained for days in overcrowded cells, without food, water, blankets, or beds. And then released, often in the middle of the night, with no jackets or cell phones and told to walk the seven miles home. When others learned of this, they started parking outside the building with their cars running to keep them warm in order to drive those just-released strangers home. Their back seats are piled with food, water, and warm jackets.

My mother might have characterized what they are doing as simply good manners. It was her rock-solid belief that good manners are the building block of civilization. The world would be a better place, according to her, if we made others feel welcome and could extend hospitality to anyone without drawing attention to oneself. These “good manners” might be what The New York Times writer Lauren Jackson had in mind when she wrote in her “Believing” column about the power of inconvenience. She had watched a BBC special about a couple in Wales who, one Christmas, got a knock on their door and opened it to a man with autism. They invited Ronnie in, made him a meal, and he stayed for 45 years. The couple helped him get a job, got up an hour early every day to drive him to it. He was in their family photos, at their dinner table with their kids. When he died, they planned his funeral. The inconvenience of that hospitality shaped their whole lives.

Kate Bowler says that during Lent “we ask God to show us the world as it is.” In other words, we ask to see clearly, that very thing Adam and Eve were after. The world we’re living in these days clearly is not what we thought it was or ought to be. It is harder, more startling, less polite. The two troubled-water stories that start this season depict humans thrown out of an untested existence by a suspicion that maybe God had lied. You never know, but to be on the safe side, don’t trust someone who doesn’t want to give you access to everything. By contrast, there’s a story of someone who has everything going on, who could have blasted the Tempter to kingdom come, had he chosen to do so, but instead of relying on Power Over, he stepped down and decided whom he trusted. For nourishment, to be loved and cared for. And more to the point, he decided to trust the One who received the service he had to offer. The Tempter whispers, “Trust yourself! God helps those who help themselves! Jump and prove you really believe! God doesn’t need your help, give me your service and then you’ll really be someone!”

Friends, the bad news is, we can’t save the world, no matter how much it grieves us, no matter how hard we try. But what if the troubled waters into which we’re invited this Lent, what if that wading in, is to just learn how to follow Jesus’ example and trust the God who trusts us. That is such a remarkable thought. Trust as a two-way relationship. The God who says to us over and over, “You are enough. You are loved. I have given you power.” Trust the Giver and find some good trouble to wade in. Which is really the summation of your Lenten invitation today.