Readings for the second Sunday in Lent:
Genesis 12:1-4a
Romans 4:1-5, 13-17
John 3:1-17
Psalm 121
For this reason it depends on faith, in order that the promise may
rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the
adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham
(for he is the father of all of us, as it is written, "I have made you
the father of many nations") -- in the presence of the God in whom he
believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things
that do not exist. --Romans 4: 16,17
Jesus answered him, "Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above." John 3:3
I wonder whether God has been born again.
It sometimes seems like God changes between the Old and New Testaments, like there's been a kind of transformation, in which God gives up on a lot of the smiting and just settles in to being all about love. I wonder whether God could make a dead God alive again, or whether God could create Godself from nothing. I was really struck this week by the phrase in the Romans passage that says that God "gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist."
Nice work if you can get it. But it's kind of a weird thing to think about. For one thing, I, personally, have never seen a dead thing come to life. I can imagine some ways to interpret this that would make it feel true, but I wonder whether Paul was speaking in metaphorical terms. Like maybe about how Abram was old enough to be on his way out (or maybe in his delicacy, Paul is referencing fertility), but God brought him back to life. I suppose, if you want to be very direct, you could say that the "things that do not exist" could be referring to Abram's offspring.
But what I like thinking about more, was whether God could call Godself into existence. I wonder whether, in Jesus, God was born again.
I've read the John passage many times, but the translation on The Lectionary Page is the New Revised Standard Version, in which Jesus says, "no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above." It makes me wonder whether God has had an eye-opening experience in becoming incarnate. I wonder whether Jesus is referring to himself, effectively saying, "I thought I understood my creation before, but until I became one of you, I just didn't get the kingdom of God."
For a long time I've been uncomfortable with the idea that it was Jesus' suffering that redeemed us. It's so often framed in punitive terms that seem designed to keep people in line and feeling guilty. Plenty of Sunday school teachers and youth group leaders have told kids that every time they lie, they're pounding the nails into Jesus' hands. I'm just not that sure that such gruesome imagery is the best way to raise Kingdom people who are shining their lights for the world to see by.
Also, I'm very uncomfortable with a theology that romanticizes suffering. Plenty of women have been told to endure abusive marriages, because they should embrace their suffering as Jesus embraced his. It's the kind of thing that has me conceding a lot of points to my atheist friends who call the God of Christianity a sadist.
But what if we've gotten it a little bit wrong? What if Jesus needed to suffer, not to even out some cosmic teeter-totter onto which Sin and Eternal Life had plopped themselves down? What if there is a different reason that suffering is redemptive?
I think God could not enter the Kingdom of God without being born again as Jesus. There are many stories in the Old Testament that make God seem like a very moral psychopath--someone who will be merciful and just, but more from a place of principal than from a place of empathy. God speaks to people, overpowers them with insight, but mostly comes off as remote and somewhat detached.
I wonder whether Jesus needed to come to earth in order to know what it's like to feel powerless and vulnerable. What if suffering is important, not for the sake of suffering, but for the empathy it brings along with it? What if Jesus needed to be born from above, not to teach us what it's like to be human, but to learn what it's like to be human?
We have all had the experience of seeing tragedy happen to a friend. A child dies, or someone gets cancer, and you try to put yourself in your friend's place, but, for the most part, you just can't. For a lot of what happens in life, you can't know what it's like until you've been through it yourself. This is why we have ritualized things that we do for people--take them meals or write cards--because we want to do something, but we can't always use empathy to figure out what's best.
It's times like this when we find ourselves saying, "I just can't imagine..." And it's true, we can't imagine it. When the unthinkable happens, it's hard to put yourself in the position of the person it happened to. So people seek out others like them. A mother who has lost a child to cancer meets with another mother who has lost her child to cancer. A wife whose husband never comes home from deployment seeks solace with other military widows. No matter how much I love someone, I can't put myself in her situation until I've been someplace similar myself.
Maybe that's why Jesus existed--to help God to understand why we have so much trouble behaving ourselves. Maybe Jesus' life and death was necessary and redemptive not because it was a freely given sacrifice that fulfilled some kind of cosmic debt. Maybe Jesus' suffering is redemptive because, to get all Buddhist for a second, human existence is suffering. There was no way for Jesus to understand being human without experiencing suffering. Maybe God needed to be born again as a human in order to enter the Kingdom of God.
I like keeping that perspective in my head--Jesus chose suffering because it was necessary for empathy--because it helps me to understand suffering as holy in a new way. I'm still going to try to avoid the bad stuff as much as possible. But I'm also going to try to look at suffering differently, as holy. Not because suffering is holy in and of itself, but because it's a natural consequence of being engaged in the world.
After all, those who care the most are also those who suffer the most. And when we lose what we care the most about, we suffer so much more than when we lose something we were never that attached to in the first place.
When you avoid loving people, you don't suffer when you lose them. If you don't engage in the world, don't develop affection for people, don't hope for a better future for everyone, it's easier to avoid suffering. But when we, like Jesus, throw ourselves into our lives, getting involved with the world, rather than staying aloof and above it all, we will suffer a thousand small deaths. But from each of those deaths, God brings forth a new life in us. A life that connects us to the rest of humanity and helps us to see the kingdom of God.
Sunday, March 16, 2014
Sunday, March 9, 2014
"Eve, You're the Reason We Can't Have Nice Things."
Readings for the First Sunday in Lent
Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7 Romans 5:12-19 Matthew 4:1-11 Psalm 32
I'm going to copy the Genesis passage below, because I'll be referring to it. It's the story of Adam and Eve in the garden, which we're all familiar with. But, as with most things we think we're familiar with, we often "remember" parts of the story that aren't actually there.
Here's the passage:
The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. And the LORD God commanded the man, "You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die."
Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, "Did God say, `You shall not eat from any tree in the garden'?" The woman said to the serpent, "We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; but God said, `You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.'" But the serpent said to the woman, "You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.
Before I mention what struck me most about this passage when I read it this week, I have a confession to make. I broke Lent on Friday. When I got up Saturday morning, I realized two things: first, I totally didn't need to break my commitment--it wouldn't even have been hard to maintain. I just wanted the comfort of doing things the way I always did them. Second, I realized that it's a lot harder to do the thing you think God is calling you to do when you aren't all that sure that God is real.
Back when I was in high school, I knew what God expected of me, and I knew I was going to Heavan (at least I knew that most days), and I knew that God was my friend whom I could be with whenever I wanted, just by talking to Him in my head. There was a lot that I "knew." In some ways life was harder--I had high expectations to live up to, and I was always letting God down. But in some ways, life was easier, too, because when things are black and white, there's a lot of time to be saved by not mucking around in uncertainty and having to decide for oneself what's right and wrong. In some ways, I miss that.
On the other hand, there's something to be said for a God, no matter how abstracted and nebulous, that is big enough to encompass uncertainty and paradox, a God about whom any question can be asked without fearing that the whole construct of God will collapse around your feet. There's something to be said for a God that doesn't force you to deny reality as you are experiencing it.
I wonder which of those Gods is in the garden of Eden, though. Because when I was reading the passage this week, I noticed something: God never tells Eve not to eat from the tree in the middle of the garden. God tells Adam, and Adam tells Eve. So, if we understand living faithfully to be doing what we think God wants from us, Eve is living her faith based on heresay. (Small aside here: you can't spell heresay without heresy.)
In the passage anyway, God never takes Eve for a walk in the garden. Actually, he wouldn't have been able to--she wasn't even Eve yet. She was just a nameless form of Adam. I wonder whether either God or Adam considered her to have personhood.
So God didn't bother to give Future-Eve a little welcome to Eden tour, pointing out all the danger spots. He delegated. And in doing so, God is demanding a much more difficult thing of Eve than he is of Adam. God is asking for obedience without experience. And God is asking for obedience from a creature he doesn't seem to have a relationship with.
The more I think about it, the more pissed off I get, frankly. Eve is expected to keep a promise that Adam made to God. She wasn't there for the decision, and she doesn't even know for sure that Adam has his facts straight. The serpent is the only one who deals with her as an equal worthy of relationship. Everything the serpent tells her is true. The fruit won't kill her. It will show her the difference between good and evil. And you know what? For all the bromance that Adam and God have going, they haven't really been so great at showing Eve what's good (You exist for Adam's pleasure?!) or what's evil (Don't do the thing I'm afraid to do). What woman wouldn't want to buck that system?
And it's not like this only happens in the Bible. It's a common trope in stories throughout time. Whether it's Pandora's box, Blackbeard's locked door, or a tree in the garden, they're all the same. They're all symbols of things we're supposed to be afraid of, that men/gods drop in front of us and tell us to ignore. Always, the tension is the same: ignore what's right there or accept and ingest the truth. So, big surprise, at some point in each story, the woman picks truth. The women expose the hidden to the light. Then the authorities, that is, those invested in the status quo, get all shirty with the women and blame all of the world's evils on the skirts. Christ, Eve, everything was great until you came along.
Except everything wasn't great. Adam was lonely. And I suspect he was probably getting lonely again, because he still didn't have a true companion. I think it wasn't until Eve acted on her own and ate the fruit that she became a fully human person in her own right. And I think she surprised everyone--maybe even God--when she did. But just because she went off-script, that doesn't mean that what she did was wrong.
I mean, is Eden really where we want to be? Everything is taken care of for us in Eden. It's beautiful and peaceful. It's the place of the eternal now. No regret, no conflict. Any mother can understand why God would want to try to keep us in the garden, innocent and lovely, for as long as possible.
But there's a saying among writers that you have to be cruel to your characters. I recently heard one writer (quoting another) put it this way: "You have to stick you character up in a tree and then start throwing rocks at him." That's really hard to do with someone you've created and grown to love.
You have to, though, because if nothing bad ever happens to your characters, you're writing a really boring novel.
Without mistakes and conflict and loss, there are no stories, just names. Nobody dies in Eden, but does anybody grow? If the people aren't growing or changing, is it really that much of a paradise?
Eve needs a faith based on her experience, not on some law that she's heard about second hand. And I, for one, prefer Eve's way. I don't want to sit around eating the horticultural equivalent of bonbons all day, petting animals and being sexually available. I much prefer the life we've got, in which we have the opportunity to contribute to the good in the world, and fight the evil. Because the apple didn't just show evil to the innocents in Eden, it made them able to know what was good. Zeus gives Pandora the box because Prometheus already gave humans fire. You can't have one without the other.
Maybe Eden was always meant to be an estuary-- a protected place where Adam could practice being alive, until he was ready to go out and really do it. If God really didn't want Adam to eat from the tree, he could have stationed a guard there from the beginning. The tree is there, just like Pandora's box, and the key to Bluebeard's room. It's there, waiting until some woman has the courage to man up and confront the whole truth of life, the good and the bad. But when she does, she engages in it as an actor, not just as a child running naked through a garden, peeing on snakes and pulling the tails off of geckos because she doesn't know any better.
Eventually, we all need to set off into the wilderness. The wilderness is where the growth happens. Jesus knew that--he didn't run off to a garden of delights in order to prepare for his ministry. He went out to the wilderness, where God's providence is harder to find, but the lessons are there to be learned.
Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7 Romans 5:12-19 Matthew 4:1-11 Psalm 32
I'm going to copy the Genesis passage below, because I'll be referring to it. It's the story of Adam and Eve in the garden, which we're all familiar with. But, as with most things we think we're familiar with, we often "remember" parts of the story that aren't actually there.
Here's the passage:
The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. And the LORD God commanded the man, "You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die."
Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, "Did God say, `You shall not eat from any tree in the garden'?" The woman said to the serpent, "We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; but God said, `You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.'" But the serpent said to the woman, "You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.
Before I mention what struck me most about this passage when I read it this week, I have a confession to make. I broke Lent on Friday. When I got up Saturday morning, I realized two things: first, I totally didn't need to break my commitment--it wouldn't even have been hard to maintain. I just wanted the comfort of doing things the way I always did them. Second, I realized that it's a lot harder to do the thing you think God is calling you to do when you aren't all that sure that God is real.
Back when I was in high school, I knew what God expected of me, and I knew I was going to Heavan (at least I knew that most days), and I knew that God was my friend whom I could be with whenever I wanted, just by talking to Him in my head. There was a lot that I "knew." In some ways life was harder--I had high expectations to live up to, and I was always letting God down. But in some ways, life was easier, too, because when things are black and white, there's a lot of time to be saved by not mucking around in uncertainty and having to decide for oneself what's right and wrong. In some ways, I miss that.
On the other hand, there's something to be said for a God, no matter how abstracted and nebulous, that is big enough to encompass uncertainty and paradox, a God about whom any question can be asked without fearing that the whole construct of God will collapse around your feet. There's something to be said for a God that doesn't force you to deny reality as you are experiencing it.
I wonder which of those Gods is in the garden of Eden, though. Because when I was reading the passage this week, I noticed something: God never tells Eve not to eat from the tree in the middle of the garden. God tells Adam, and Adam tells Eve. So, if we understand living faithfully to be doing what we think God wants from us, Eve is living her faith based on heresay. (Small aside here: you can't spell heresay without heresy.)
In the passage anyway, God never takes Eve for a walk in the garden. Actually, he wouldn't have been able to--she wasn't even Eve yet. She was just a nameless form of Adam. I wonder whether either God or Adam considered her to have personhood.
So God didn't bother to give Future-Eve a little welcome to Eden tour, pointing out all the danger spots. He delegated. And in doing so, God is demanding a much more difficult thing of Eve than he is of Adam. God is asking for obedience without experience. And God is asking for obedience from a creature he doesn't seem to have a relationship with.
The more I think about it, the more pissed off I get, frankly. Eve is expected to keep a promise that Adam made to God. She wasn't there for the decision, and she doesn't even know for sure that Adam has his facts straight. The serpent is the only one who deals with her as an equal worthy of relationship. Everything the serpent tells her is true. The fruit won't kill her. It will show her the difference between good and evil. And you know what? For all the bromance that Adam and God have going, they haven't really been so great at showing Eve what's good (You exist for Adam's pleasure?!) or what's evil (Don't do the thing I'm afraid to do). What woman wouldn't want to buck that system?
And it's not like this only happens in the Bible. It's a common trope in stories throughout time. Whether it's Pandora's box, Blackbeard's locked door, or a tree in the garden, they're all the same. They're all symbols of things we're supposed to be afraid of, that men/gods drop in front of us and tell us to ignore. Always, the tension is the same: ignore what's right there or accept and ingest the truth. So, big surprise, at some point in each story, the woman picks truth. The women expose the hidden to the light. Then the authorities, that is, those invested in the status quo, get all shirty with the women and blame all of the world's evils on the skirts. Christ, Eve, everything was great until you came along.
Except everything wasn't great. Adam was lonely. And I suspect he was probably getting lonely again, because he still didn't have a true companion. I think it wasn't until Eve acted on her own and ate the fruit that she became a fully human person in her own right. And I think she surprised everyone--maybe even God--when she did. But just because she went off-script, that doesn't mean that what she did was wrong.
I mean, is Eden really where we want to be? Everything is taken care of for us in Eden. It's beautiful and peaceful. It's the place of the eternal now. No regret, no conflict. Any mother can understand why God would want to try to keep us in the garden, innocent and lovely, for as long as possible.
But there's a saying among writers that you have to be cruel to your characters. I recently heard one writer (quoting another) put it this way: "You have to stick you character up in a tree and then start throwing rocks at him." That's really hard to do with someone you've created and grown to love.
You have to, though, because if nothing bad ever happens to your characters, you're writing a really boring novel.
Without mistakes and conflict and loss, there are no stories, just names. Nobody dies in Eden, but does anybody grow? If the people aren't growing or changing, is it really that much of a paradise?
Eve needs a faith based on her experience, not on some law that she's heard about second hand. And I, for one, prefer Eve's way. I don't want to sit around eating the horticultural equivalent of bonbons all day, petting animals and being sexually available. I much prefer the life we've got, in which we have the opportunity to contribute to the good in the world, and fight the evil. Because the apple didn't just show evil to the innocents in Eden, it made them able to know what was good. Zeus gives Pandora the box because Prometheus already gave humans fire. You can't have one without the other.
Maybe Eden was always meant to be an estuary-- a protected place where Adam could practice being alive, until he was ready to go out and really do it. If God really didn't want Adam to eat from the tree, he could have stationed a guard there from the beginning. The tree is there, just like Pandora's box, and the key to Bluebeard's room. It's there, waiting until some woman has the courage to man up and confront the whole truth of life, the good and the bad. But when she does, she engages in it as an actor, not just as a child running naked through a garden, peeing on snakes and pulling the tails off of geckos because she doesn't know any better.
Eventually, we all need to set off into the wilderness. The wilderness is where the growth happens. Jesus knew that--he didn't run off to a garden of delights in order to prepare for his ministry. He went out to the wilderness, where God's providence is harder to find, but the lessons are there to be learned.
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