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.

Extravagance, revisited

 A rewrite of an old friend!

It seems a very long time since I was last able to give a party, or even to invite someone round for coffee – I keep dreaming I’ve been able to, and then wake up and find it was only a dream! I can’t even remember when I last gave a big party, although I’m sure I had a couple of lunch parties in 2019!

But one of the things about parties, or weddings, or any other big event that you’re hosting, is worrying whether you have enough food and drink – to the point that, very often, there is far too much! I do know we got it right when it came to buying the sparkling wine for our daughter’s wedding, all those years ago, but I also remember worrying lest we should, perhaps, have got another case…. As it turned out, there was plenty – we were even able to take a couple of bottles home with us!

But it seems to have been very far from the case for that poor host of the wedding at Cana we have just read about. As I understand it, back in the day wedding feasts lasted two or three days, and a host would expect to have enough food and drink to cater for the entire time. But something had gone badly wrong here. We don’t know what had happened, or why – only that it had. Such embarrassment – the party will be going on for awhile yet, but there is no wine.

But among the wedding guests were a very special family.
Mary, the carpenter's widow from Nazareth, and her sons.
Cana isn't very far from Nazareth, only about twelve miles,
but that's quite a good day's journey when you have to rely on your own two feet to get you there.
So it's probable that either the bride or the groom were related to Mary in some way,
especially as she seems to have been told about the disaster with the wine.

And then comes one of those turning-point moments in the Gospels.
Mary tells her eldest son, Jesus, that the wine has run out.

Now, as far as we can tell, Jesus is only just beginning to realise who he is.
John's gospel says that he has already been baptised by John the Baptist,
which implies that he has been out into the desert to wrestle with the implications of being the Messiah –
and the temptations which came with it,
and John also tells us that Simon Peter, Andrew and some of the others have started to be Jesus' disciples
and had come with him to the wedding.
But, in this version of the story, Jesus hasn't yet started to use his divine power to heal people and to perform miracles,
and he isn't quite sure that the time is right to do so.
So when his mother comes up and says “They have no wine,” his immediate reaction is to say, more or less, “Well, nothing I can do about it!
It isn't time yet!”

His mother, however, seems to have been ahead of Jesus for once, on this, and says to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you!”
And Jesus, who was always very close to God,
and who had learnt to listen to his Father all the time,
realises that, after all, his mother is right
and the time has come to start using the power God has given him.
So he tells the servants to fill those big jars with water –
an they pour out as the best wine anybody there has ever tasted.
As someone remarked, right at the fag-end of the wedding,
when people are beginning to go home and everybody has had more than enough to drink, anyway.

I don't suppose the bridegroom's family were sorry, though.
Those jars were huge –
they held about a hundred litres each, and there were six of them.
Do you realise just how much wine that was?
Six hundred litres –
about eight hundred standard bottles of wine!
Eight hundred.... you don't even see that many on the supermarket shelves, do you?
Eight hundred.... I should think Mary was a bit flabber-gasted.
And it was such good quality too.

Okay, so people drank rather more wine then than we do today, since there was no tea or coffee, poor them, and the water could be a bit iffy,
but even still, I should think eight hundred bottles would last them quite a while.
And at that stage of the wedding party, there's simply no way they could have needed that much.

But isn't that exactly like Jesus?
Isn't that typical of God?
We see it over and over and over again in the Scriptures.
The story of feeding the five thousand, for instance –
and one of the Gospel-writers points out that it was five thousand men, not counting the women and children –
well, in that story, Jesus didn't provide just barely enough lunch for everybody, quite the reverse –
there were twelve whole basketsful left over!
Far more than enough food –
all the disciples could have a basketful to take home to Mum.

Or what about when the disciples were fishing and he told them to cast their nets that-away?
The nets didn't just get a sensible catch of fish –
they were full and over-full, so that they almost ripped.

It's not just in the Bible either –
look at God's creation.
You've all seen pictures of the way the desert blooms when it rains –
look at those millions of flowers that nobody, for a very long time, ever knew were there except God.
Or look at how many millions and millions of sperm male animals produce to fertilise only a few embryos in the course of a lifetime.
Or where lots of embryos are produced, like fish, for instance, millions of them are eaten or otherwise perish long before adulthood.
And millions and millions of different plant and animal species, some of which are only now being discovered.

Or look at the stars!
All those millions upon millions of stars, many with planets, some with planets like our own that may even hold intelligent life.....
God is amazing, isn't He?
And just suppose we really are the only intelligent life in the Universe?
That says something else about God's extravagance in creating such an enormous Universe with only us in it!
Our God is truly amazing!

Scientists think that some of the so-called exoplanets they have been discovering lately might contain life, although whether or not that would be intelligent life is not clear, and probably never will be.

So how did God redeem such beings, assuming they needed redemption? We know that here, his most extravagant act of all was to come down and be born as a human baby – God, helpless, lying in a makeshift cradle fashioned from an animal feeding-trough. Having to learn all the things that human babies and children have to learn. Becoming just like us, one of us, knowing what it’s like to work for his living, what it’s like to be a condemned criminal and to die a shameful death!

But God, God who could only allow Moses the teeniest glimpse of his glory, or he would not have been able to survive it, and even then his face shone for hours afterwards, this God became a human being who could be captured and put to death.

You know, sometimes I think the main function of the church is to help us cope with God. Perhaps the church, quite unwittingly, limits God, or, like Moses, we’d not be able to handle it. St Paul prays that we might know “what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe, according to the working of his great power. God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come. And he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.”

The Church, which is His body. And yet we – we the Church – are so bad at being His body. We limit God. We tell God what to do. We tell God who God may love, and who is to be considered beyond the pale. We judge, we fail to forgive, we withhold, despite the fact that Jesus said “Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven; give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap; for the measure you give will be the measure you get back.”

And yet we still hold back from God. I don’t mean just money – although we do that, too, despite the promise that if we: “Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, so that there may be food in my house, and thus put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts; see if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you an overflowing blessing.”

But we hold back ourselves from God. We aren’t – well, I know I’m not, and I dare say I speak for you too – we aren’t really prepared to give ourselves whole-heartedly to God. After all, who knows what God won’t ask of us if we do? We might even have to give up our lives, as Jesus did! Or worse, perhaps God would say “No thank you!” Perhaps we would be asked to go on doing just exactly as we are doing – how disappointing!

But I wonder if it’s really about doing. Isn’t it more about being? Isn’t it more about being made into the person God created us to be? Isn’t it more about allowing God into us extravagantly, wholeheartedly…. I would say “completely”, but I don’t think that’s quite possible. God is simply too big, and we would be overwhelmed.

Nevertheless, Jesus came, he told us, so that we can have life, and have it abundantly!
Abundantly.
Can we let more of God into our lives, to be able to live more abundantly? It doesn’t feel possible in this time of pandemic, but maybe we could learn what abundant life in lockdown is?
Do you dare? Do I dare? Do we dare? Amen!