Thankful Memorial, Chattanooga
March 1, 2020
Year A, Lent 1

Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7
Psalm 32
Romans 5:12-19
Matthew 4:1-11

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.    

On this first Sunday of Lent, we begin our journey through the wilderness with Christ towards Holy Week, a journey we take together at Thankful.  And I was reminded of how great a privilege it is for me to be priest and pastor in this community among you last Wednesday night at our Ash Wednesday service, when one by one, many of you who are here this morning came up to receive ashes and to be reminded that “you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” 

And I was moved especially by the couple of Thankful children who participated in that service, for if any of us is somewhat less mortally flawed than the rest, surely it is our children.  So how odd, really, that each of them should be imposed with ashes, too.  “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return,” I said to Penelope Ross and Belou and Leo Anderson, though, admittedly, Leo was having none of the actual ashes. 

The contrast between those ashes and the children’s youth and innocence was stunning, for how distant those little ones seem from death.  And many of us know this mysterious truth: that somehow, the path we all necessarily walk towards our death is also the path by which we gain knowledge and wisdom, so that the innocence of children seems the furthest thing from thoughts of mortality.

That link between wisdom – or what we might call the “knowledge of good and evil” – and death is nowhere more apparent than in the Jewish-Christian creation myth we hear from Genesis this morning.  In the beginning of the world, God tells the first human beings this truth, that eating of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil will ultimately cause their death. 

Still, Eve and that silent Adam who’s there by her side all along, desire that knowledge despite the dire consequence.   The serpent tells Eve, “you will not die,” but Eve hardly seems to believe him.  What motivates her choice is not a disbelief in God’s word about the mortal consequences of eating the fruit, but rather a recognition that “the tree was to be desired to make one wise.”  And so the two eat, and they discover the truth of it all: that they have gained in knowledge, but that such wisdom has also begun them on the journey that will lead to death. 

So what are we to make of all this?  Is wisdom such a bad thing?  Can we somehow prevent our own death by remaining ignorant or innocent as a babe, if we could somehow manage such a feat?  Can knowledge not give us some kind of freedom, some kind of life? 

Of course, to some extent, it can.  Knowledge and wisdom are not inherently evil.  After all, the tree in the garden of Eden was part of God’s “good” creation.  Its existence is no evil thing; its fruit was not inherently sinful.  And knowledge, we know, can have wonderfully positive effects on our lives.  It is to the wisest and most knowledgeable that we go for guidance when we encounter challenges: our parents and grandparents when we need advice about growing up or growing old, teachers when we want to learn a new skill, doctors and nurses when we get sick and need to be healed. 

But, ultimately, even their knowledge cannot give us any power over our own mortality.  All the knowledge of science cannot contradict the truth that “we are dust and to dust we shall return” nor can all the wisdom of the world offer us any real satisfying answer in the face of those dark ashes.

I was reminded of this fact some years ago when I read the online blog of a doctor in Texas whose patient, 4-year-old Cooper, had died after a life-long battle with a debilitating condition.  Cooper’s doctor wrote this:

“Independent of the circumstances, a child’s death is always brutally difficult to process.  It’s counterintuitive.  And facing Cooper’s parents for the first time after his passing was strangely difficult for me.  When he was alive I always had a plan.  Every sign, symptom, and problem had a systematic approach.  But when faced with the most inconceivable process, I found myself awkwardly at odds with how to handle the dialog.  In a hospital my calculated clinical role has a way of sheltering me from a parent’s reality.  At a funeral it’s different.”

All the clinical knowledge and scientific wisdom that a doctor knows could not, in the end, keep Cooper from death.  Ultimately, it could not even shield the doctor himself from confronting its reality.  Instead, the doctor learned the same truth that is at the heart of the Genesis story of the fall: knowledge cannot save us. 

Or, at least, not worldly knowledge.  On the first Sunday of Lent, we hear an account of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness.  Matthew’s version sounds similarly mythological to the Genesis story.  We can almost see Satan with a forked tail and red horns accosting Jesus.  And two of Satan’s three temptations begin in the same way: “If you are the Son of God…” he tells Jesus.  Satan wants to cast doubt on Jesus’ relationship with the Father.  That’s at the center of the final temptation, too, when Satan wants Jesus to worship that which is other than God.  But Jesus has come into this wilderness from his baptism, from that moment when the Spirit of God descended upon him and a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, the Beloved.”  And that knowledge does save Jesus from temptation.  It is not worldly wisdom or scientific knowledge; it’s not even knowledge about life in general.  It is simply the clearly-stated truth about Jesus’ relationship with the Father.  So, all of Satan’s attempts to cast that into doubt are in vain, because Jesus again and again comes back to the one priority of his life: being in relationship with God. 

The serpent in the garden with Adam and Eve, Satan in the wilderness with Jesus: these stories begin our journey of Lent together because they remind us that this is a journey towards death, towards Jesus’ death on the cross, towards our own deaths, sooner or later.  It is a journey in which we will gain in knowledge and wisdom of all kinds.  But, none of that will save us from the inevitable.  What will save us, ultimately, is the recognition, the firm, unshakable faith that we are God’s beloved children.  We will walk, with Jesus, through this journey towards Golgotha and the cross, but baptized into his death, we will find victory over it and, in Christ, we will find everlasting life.  Amen.