Tempted and Fallen

The first reading today was about a man, and a woman and God.
The man and the woman don't have names –
later on, they are called Adam and Eve,
but at this stage they don't need names.
They are just Man and Woman.
They are the only Man and Woman that exist –
God hasn't made any more, yet –
so they don't need names.
Man can just go, “Oi, you!”
and Woman will know he's talking to her.

God has made the Man and the Woman, and put them in a garden,
where there is plenty of food to eat for the picking of it.
It's lovely and warm, so they don't need clothes,
and in fact they are so comfortable with themselves and with God that they don't want clothes.
There are animals to be cared for, and crops to be tended,
but the work is easy and pleasurable.
And all the fruit in the garden is theirs, except for one tree,
which God has told them is poisonous.
If they eat the fruit of this tree, God said, they'll die.

Well, so far, so good.
But at this point, enter another player.
The serpent.
Now, the Serpent is God's enemy,
but the Man and the Woman don't know that.
They think the Serpent is just another animal.
Now Serpent comes and chats to Woman.

“Nice pomegranate you've got there!”

“Mmm, yes,” says Woman.

“Look at that fruit on that tree over there, though,” says Serpent.
“That looks well tasty!”

“Yes, but it's poisonous!” explains Woman.
“God said that if we ate it, we'd die, so we're keeping well clear of it!”

“Oh rubbish!” says Serpent.
“God's stringing you a line!
It's not poisonous at all.
Thing is, if you eat it, you'll be just like God,
and know good and evil.
God doesn't want you to eat it,
because God doesn't want any rivals!
Go on, have a bite!
You won't regret it!”

So Woman has another look at the tree,
and sees that the fruit is red and ripe and smells tempting,
so she cautiously stretches out her hand and grabs the fruit,
and, ever so tentatively, takes a tiny bite.
Mmm, it is good!

So she calls to Man, “Oi, you!”

“Mm-hmmm,” calls Man, looking up from the game he was playing with his dogs.
“What is it?”

“Come and try this fruit,” says Woman,
and explains how the Serpent had said that God had been stringing them a line,
and how good the fruit tasted.
So Man decides to have a piece himself.

But it's coming on to evening,
and at evening, God usually comes and walks in the garden,
and Man and Woman usually come and share their day.
But tonight, somehow, they don't feel like chatting to God.
And those bodies, the bodies they'd enjoyed so much, suddenly feel like they want to be kept private.
They look at one another, and both retreat, silently, into the far depths of the garden, grabbing some fig leaves to make coverings for themselves.

Presently, God comes looking for them.
“What's up?
Why are you hiding?”

“Well,” goes Man, “I didn't want to face you, 'cos I was naked.”

“Naked?” says God.
“Naked?
Who told you you were naked?
You've been eating that fruit I told you was poisonous, haven't you?”

“Well, er, um.”
Man wriggles.
“It wasn't my fault.
That one, the Woman you gave me.
She said to eat it, so I did.
Wasn't my fault at all.
You can't blame me!”

So God looks at Woman, and says, “Is this true?
Did you give him the fruit?”

Woman goes scarlet.
“Well, it was Serpent.
He said you, well, that the fruit wasn't poisonous.”

But, of course, the fruit had been poisonous
It wasn't that it gave Man and Woman a tummyache or the runs;
it poisoned their whole relationship with God.
They couldn't stay in God's garden any more.
Serpent was going to have to crawl on his belly from now on,
and everyone, almost, would be afraid of him.
Woman was going to have awful trouble having babies,
and Man was going to find making a living difficult.

But God did show them how to make warm clothes for themselves, and didn't abandon them forever,
even though, from that time forth, they weren't really comfortable with God.

Well, that's the story, then, that the Israelites used to explain why human beings find it so very difficult to be God's people and to do God's will.
And it shows how first the Woman and then the Man were tempted, and fell.

They fell.
But Jesus resisted temptation.
You may remember that he was baptised,
and there was the voice from heaven that said
“This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”
And then Jesus went off into the desert for six weeks or so,
to come to terms with exactly Who he was,
and to discover the exact nature of his divine powers.

It must have been so insidious, mustn't it?
"Are you really the Son of God?
Why don't you prove it by making these stones bread?
You're very hungry, aren't you?
If you're the Son of God, you can do anything you like, can't you?
Surely you can make these stones into bread?
But perhaps you aren't the Son of God, after all...."
And so it would have gone on and on and on.

But Jesus resisted.
The way the gospel-writers tell it,
you would think he just waved his hand and shook his head and said,
“No, man shall not live by bread alone!”
But that wouldn't have been temptation.
You know what it's like
when you're tempted to do something you ought not –
the longing can become more and more intense.
There are times when you think,
Hmm, that'd be nice, but then you think,
naaa, not right, and put it behind you;
but other times when you have to really, really struggle to put it behind you.
“If you are the Son of God....”

The view from the pinnacle of the Temple.
So high up.... by their standards,
like the top of the Canary Wharf tower would be to us.
"Go on then –
you're the Son of God, aren't you?
Throw yourself down –
your God will protect you!"
The temptation is to show off, to use his powers like magic.
Yes, God would have rescued him, but:
“Do not put the Lord your God to the test.”
That's not what it's about.
That would have been showing off.
That would have been misusing his divine powers for something rather spectacular.

Jesus was also tempted with riches and power beyond his wildest dreams –
at that, beyond our wildest dreams,
if only he would worship the enemy.
We can sympathise with this particular temptation;
I'm sure we all would love to be rich and powerful!
But for Jesus, it must have been particularly subtle –
it would help him do the work he'd been sent to do!
Could he fulfil his mission without riches and power?
What was being God's beloved son all about, anyway?
Would it be possible to spread the message that he was beginning to realise he had to spread
if he was going to spend his life in an obscure and dusty part of the Roman empire?
And again, after prayer and wrestling with it, he finds the answer:
“Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.”
Let the riches and power look after themselves;
the important thing was to serve God.
If that is right, the rest would follow.

You may remember that Jesus was similarly tempted on the Cross, he could have called down the legions from heaven to rescue him.
But he chose not to.
It wasn't about spectacular powers –
often, when Jesus did miracles,
he asked people not to tell anybody.
He didn't want to be spectacular.
He'd learnt that his mission was to the people of Israel,
probably even just the people of Galilee –
and the occasional outsider who needed him, like the Syro-Phoenician woman, or the Roman centurion –
and anything more than that was up to his heavenly Father.

And, obviously, if the "anything more" hadn't happened,
we wouldn't be here this evening!
But, at the time, that wasn't Jesus' business.
His business, as he told us, was to do the work of his Father in Heaven –
and that work, for now, was to be an itinerant preacher and healer,
but not trying deliberately to call attention to himself.

And a few years later, Jesus was crucified. It is, I think, far too complicated for us to ever know exactly what happened then, but it is safe to say that a change took place in the moral nature of the universe. St Paul expands on this idea in our second reading tonight.

Paul compares and contrasts what happened to the first Man, Adam, with what happened to Jesus, pointing out that sin came into the world through Adam, which poisoned humanity’s relationship with God, but through Jesus, we can receive the free gift of eternal life, and thus restore our relationship.

Of course, it’s never as easy as that in practice. You know that and I know that. Can we really live in a restored relationship with God? All the time? Twenty-four seven? Well, maybe you can, but I find it very difficult indeed!
We know we’re apt to screw things up in our relationship with God. Usually because we screw things up in our relationship with other people, but not always. Sometimes we just screw ourselves up! We don’t take the exercise we promised ourselves. We lounge around all day and don’t get on – so easy to do, I find, in lockdown, don’t you?

But the point is, Paul seems to think that we can live in a restored relationship with God. And so does John, when he reminds us that “Those who are children of God do not continue to sin, for God's very nature is in them; and because God is their Father, they cannot continue to sin.” He also, of course, reminds us that if and when we do sin, we need to confess our sins and we will be forgiven. We need to look at ourselves honestly, and admit not only what we did, said or thought, but that we are the kind of person who can do, say or think such things. And allow God not only to forgive us, but to help us grow so that we will stop being such people.

John Wesley very much believed Christian perfection was a thing.
He didn’t think he’d attained it, but he reckoned it was possible in this life.
He preached on it and it’s one of the sermons we local preachers are supposed to have read –
you can find it on-line easily enough.
Anyway, what he said about perfection was that it wasn’t about being ignorant, or mistaken, or ill or disabled, or not being tempted –
you could be any or all of those things and still be perfect.
Wesley reckons –
and by and large he reckons that the closer we continue with Jesus,
the less likely we are to sin.
I believe he didn’t consider that he’d got there himself, but he did know people who had.
He said even a baby Christian has been cleansed from sin,
and mature Christians who walk with Jesus will be freed from it, both outwardly and inwardly.
I hope he’s right....

But the point is, it’s not something we can do in our own strength; we have to allow God to do it for us and in us. The first Man and Woman listened to the serpent, and destroyed their – and our – relationship with God. Jesus was able to restore that relationship through the atonement. And because that relationship is restored, we can be indwelt by the Holy Spirit, and made whole again. Let’s do it! Amen.

Whenever you see a rainbow

There’s a song they used to sing in Girls’ Brigade, when my daughter was a member many years ago, and the chorus went,

“Whenever you see a rainbow

Whenever you see a rainbow,

Whenever you see a rainbow,

Remember God is love!”

We heard, in our first reading today, how God put a rainbow in the sky to remind everybody, including God, that the world would never again be utterly destroyed by floods. It’s a very early story, of course, one of those that is probably more nearly a legend than anything else. God had made the world, but the people were so sinful that God wanted to wipe out all life on earth and start again – it’s been done before, of course, just ask the dinosaurs! Anyway, God told Noah to build the ark, and take animals in it – either a breeding pair, or 7 of each species, depending on which account you go by. There are two that seem to have got a bit mixed up here! And, as you know, the rain came down – in torrents, according to the song I quoted earlier – and only Noah and his family were saved, plus the animals. And Noah sent out various birds to see whether the waters were going down, and when they did, the Ark eventually landed on the top of Mount Ararat, possibly in modern-day Turkey, and everybody went out to start all over again.

But people hadn’t changed – Noah drinks too much of the first wine he’s able to make, and falls asleep naked in his tent, and one of his sons mocks him rather than finding a convenient blanket. That didn’t happen until after the rainbow, though. First, when they land, Noah gives a sacrifice, which is pleasing to God, and God promises “As long as the world exists, there will be a time for planting and a time for harvest. There will always be cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night.” And then God places the rainbow in the sky as a sign of this promise.

The extraordinary thing about Noah’s flood is that almost every ancient culture has its flood story. They may be a folk memory of sea levels rising catastrophically after the end of the last Ice Age, when all the waters that had been bound up in the glaciers melted and many communities were submerged forever. There’s a theory that it’s a folk memory of the Black Sea being formed when the waters burst through the Bosphorus. I wonder, even, if there is not a folk memory of the Mediterranean basin being filled – we know that at certain times in history it has been empty. Or it’s possible that the flood myths came from people finding seashells and so on far inland. Nobody really knows, but we do know that in prehistoric times some areas that are now under water were dry land, and vice versa, as the world has changed. There is even a submerged country, known as Doggerland, in the North Sea, dating back as recently as ten thousand years ago, when Britain was joined to the Continent by more than an undersea tunnel!

Of course, there have been plenty of devastating floods since then, many even here in the UK. We have the Thames Flood Barrier which is supposed to be able to stop London being flooded, at least for the foreseeable future, but there have been floods in the West Country and in the North of England within the past few years. And only a couple of years ago the shops on Herne Hill were devastated by a burst water-main which flooded the road – you may even have seen it. And we no longer think God sends the floods – what sort of a monster would we be worshipping who sent floods and other tragedies, earthquakes or hurricanes and so on? We know that there are natural causes for these tragedies, even if we don’t quite understand some of them, and we also know that God is there in the middle of them with us.

Sometimes, I know, it is easy to wonder what God is thinking about not stopping these tragedies from happening. Even the Bible is full of attempts to work out why bad things happen to good people, right back to the book of Job, a couple of the Psalms, and, of course, Jonah. It’s probably something we will never know this side of heaven!

But we do know that God came down to live among us as a human being, and to share our experience! Our Gospel reading reminded us that Jesus came to John for baptism – not, of course, for forgiveness of sins, for he did not sin, but as a sign of his submission to God, and arguably that all should see that he had gone through the formalities. And after his baptism, and the announcement that he was God’s beloved son, he was sent into the wilderness for forty days. Mark doesn’t go into detail about the temptations to which he was subject, but we know from Matthew and Luke that basically he had to learn how not to use his divine powers. He wasn’t about making stones into bread, even though he later could, and did, provide food for a vast crowd. He wasn’t about throwing himself down from a high tower, and expecting God to save him. He wouldn’t even do that when he was nailed to the Cross. And he most certainly wasn’t about worshipping anything other than God!

So Jesus spent his forty days in the wilderness, and when he came out, John had been arrested for disturbing the powers-that-be one time too many, and so Jesus began his own ministry of preaching and teaching and healing the sick. Knowing, of course, that at any time he, too, could be arrested and put to death, which probably happened some two or three years later.

This season of Lent is the time of year when, among other things, we remember Jesus in the wilderness. It’s a time of preparation for Easter, a time when, perhaps, we focus a little more deeply on spiritual things. Perhaps you go to a Lent study group, or maybe you are planning to give something up for Lent – it might be chocolate, as a friend of mine does every year; it might be alcohol; it might be meat; it might even be social networking. But why? Why are you giving these things up, if you are?

When I was little, we were only allowed to give things up for Lent if we put the money we would otherwise have spent on them to a good cause. Which, since I found – and still find – it impossible to determine how much I might have spent on, say, chocolate, which I only buy irregularly anyway, since I found it impossible, I never gave anything up! And I am quite sure that, were I to give up social networking, I'd not spend the time in prayer or devotional reading, but faffing about playing computer games!

But self-discipline is a good thing. So we are told, and so it is, of course. But if it is all about you, all about me, that's not much good, is it? And, of course,it's all too easy to do things for all the wrong reasons. If we start complaining about how much we're missing chocolate, or booze, or whatever it might be, that's not the idea at all. The idea is to keep it totally to yourself, don't let anybody know unless you have to. Keep it between you and God.

I personally prefer to do something positive for Lent, like reading a devotional book, or finding something to be thankful for each day, or something. But whatever you do or don't do, the idea needs to be that it brings you closer to God. And if it doesn't do that, if it doesn't work if you keep it secret, then leave it.

The idea, basically, is that whatever we do or don’t do for Lent, it should be a reminder of God’s love for us, and, ideally, something that helps us to grow, spiritually. It shouldn’t be just about giving up something for the sake of it – that’s worthwhile if you give the amount you save to charity, of course, but does it help you spiritually? Does it remind you of God’s love? Does it remind you, even, of what Jesus went through – perhaps a small pinprick of discomfort when you’d really like to eat chocolate, or whatever, that reminds you, however dimly, of the agony that Jesus went through on the cross?

God placed the rainbow in the sky as a reminder to Noah – and to all of us who have come after him – that the world will not be destroyed. And, incidentally, as a reminder to God, too: “Whenever I cover the sky with clouds and the rainbow appears, I will remember my promise to you.”

The rainbow is a reminder of God’s covenant with us, and of God’s love to us. Noah wasn’t any better or any worse than anybody else at that time – he did believe God and obey God when he built the Ark, but he was still a sinner like you or me. He still got drunk as a skunk when he had the opportunity! But God still put that rainbow in the sky.

Whenever you see a rainbow – whether in the sky, or a flag, or a badge – whenever you see a rainbow, remember God is love. Amen.