February 10, 2008

February 10, 2008
Craige McKnight

Lent 1, Year A

RCL
To read the lessons for the day click here:

http://www.io.com/~kellywp/YearA/Lent/ALent1.html

Genesis 2:4b-9,15-17,25-3:7; Romans 5:12-19(20-21); Matthew 4:1-11; Psalm 51

As I was growing up in the church, balancing books had nothing to do with accounting, it was that uniquely Episcopalian trick of simultaneously holding an open Book of Common Prayer and an open Hymnal with an index finger marking either the next hymn or the next piece of service music without dropping either or losing your place. It was not always so. These lessons we have heard today were told and retold with remarkable accuracy and great detail for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years before ever being committed to hide or parchment. In those days before the creation of written language and actually for long after because for most of history, literacy was a luxury reserved for a tiny few, the evening’s entertainment was the community sitting around in a circle and telling the news or retelling the old stories, preserving the history and the culture through repetition. The communal nature of this story telling is what has allowed the history to retain a remarkable level of accuracy because the group was quick to shame the storyteller who ever got it wrong. In a sense, we have a vestigial oral tradition even today though it seems to be limited to the telling of family histories and jokes. Consider, when you hear an oft told joke you know immediately if the teller tells it correctly. Even if the details are unique to every story teller, the facts and the structure have to be the same every time or someone in the room will be quick to correct the error.

It is largely because of this oral tradition that in every culture, poetry came into being before straight narrative or prose. The earliest Greek literary efforts were epic poems, The Iliad and The Odyssey, both of which had probably existed for hundreds of years before being written down. Mesopotamia had The Gilgamesh and England produced Beowulf. Ask any actor. Shakespeare is easier to memorize than contemporary dialogue because he wrote in blank verse; no rhyme but metered in iambic pentameter.

”I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.

The evil that men do lives after them;

The good is oft interrèd with their bones.” ( Julius Caesar)

Following this thread, I would like to lead into today’s lessons from the Psalm. Indulge me, if you will in a brief digression stemming from my having been a lifelong lover and student of poetry. Scripture is full of verse, especially the Old Testament but it may not be apparent to the modern eye or ear. Poetry always has unique structure that sets it apart from other writing. For us, poetry usually is characterized by meter and rhyme.

“Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.” (Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening)

This is not the only poetic structure or archetype, though. A Japanese Haiku is always three lines of exactly seventeen syllables, five in the first, seven in the second and five in the final line. It must also have a reference to one of the seasons of the year.

Winter moonlight casts

Cold tree-shadows long and still …

My warm one moving (Shiki)

Early and Middle English poetry was characterized by alliteration, typically four alliterative sounds per line. Hear this example from J. R. R. Tolkien’s translation of Sir Gawain and The Green Knight.

“This king lay at Camelot at Christmas-tide

with many a lovely lord, lieges most noble,

indeed of the Table Round all those tried brethren,

amid merriment unmatched and mirth without care.”

Ancient Jewish poetry is characterized by a repetition of ideas, rhymed thought if you will. We are very nearly unique in the history of the world in sharing one common tongue and it seems as we go forward it may not always be so. Even the British Isles had the Gaels and the Celts and the Welsh stubbornly holding on to their own languages. Remember the ancient oral tradition had to take into account what in Jerusalem could amount to dozens of different languages and dialects being spoken in the villages around with most men knowing enough Greek to get by in the marketplace. The story that you heard in the market in Greek you retold to the home folks in your own language. If I take a beautifully rhymed and structured French chanson and translate it accurately into English, it probably won’t rhyme anymore. The psalms developed a structure of ideas so they did not have to rely on the vagaries of any one language to remain whole and lyrical.

Were we to scan this psalm for its structure, it would scan front to middle, then middle to back; A, B, C, D, E, F, F’. E’, D’, C’, B’, A’. Today’s Psalm 32 uses what is termed inverted parallelism.

Psalm 32 Page 624, BCP

Beati quorum

A 1

Happy are they whose transgressions are forgiven, *
and whose sin is put away! We are forgiven.

B 2

Happy are they to whom the LORD imputes no guilt, *
and in whose spirit there is no guile! We are guiltless.

C 3

While I held my tongue, my bones withered away, *
because of my groaning all day long. I made myself dumb.

D 4

For your hand was heavy upon me day and night; *
my moisture was dried up as in the heat of summer. God guides.

E 5

Then I acknowledged my sin to you, *
and did not conceal my guilt. I confess.

F 6

I said," I will confess my transgressions to the LORD." *
Then you forgave me the guilt of my sin. I am forgiven.

F’ 7

Therefore all the faithful will make their prayers to you in time of trouble; *
when the great waters overflow, they shall not reach them. We are preserved.

E’ 8

You are my hiding-place;
you preserve me from trouble; *
you surround me with shouts of deliverance. God delivers.

D’ 9

"I will instruct you and teach you in the way that you should go; *
I will guide you with my eye. God instructs.

C’ 10

Do not be like horse or mule, which have no understanding; *
who must be fitted with bit and bridle,
or else they will not stay near you." Don’t be a dumb animal.

B’ 11

Great are the tribulations of the wicked; *
but mercy embraces those who trust in the LORD. The wicked are guilty.

A’ 12

Be glad, you righteous, and rejoice in the LORD; *
shout for joy, all who are true of heart. We are righteous.

The forgiveness in verse one is balanced by the righteousness of verse twelve. The guiltlessness of verse two is answered by the tribulations of the wicked in verse eleven. I hold my tongue, become dumb, in verse three and am admonished not to be like a dumb animal in verse ten. God guides with a heavy hand in verse four and “instructs … in the way that you should go” in verse nine. I acknowledge my sin in verse five and am hidden, preserved and delivered in verse eight. And finally in verses six and seven we find the key to the lock, the heart of the poem. I confess my transgression and am forgiven. We the people of God make common supplication and God protects and preserves us. The structure makes it easier to memorize, to remember and every key element is reiterated to assure that the transmission remains accurate generation after generation.

That said, the elements of sin and forgiveness are the central themes to the rest of today’s lessons and central to the observance and discipline of Lent, our time of penitence and reflection leading up to the great feast of Easter. In Genesis, we hear again the story of man’s first sin; the prideful act of Adam whereby he alienated himself from God and doomed us all to have to seek God’s grace through Jesus. The first man and woman were created in a state of harmony and obedience to God. They were in God’s grace because that’s the way God meant for it to be. But they also had free will. And so the serpent, “more crafty than any other wild animal that the LORD God had made,” tempted the woman. At first she resisted. She remained dutiful and obedient. But craft will out. We salesmen types would say the serpent was a strong closer. And what was the irresistible argument? “You will be like God!”

Now we men have always been quick to gloss over the details and say, “See, it wasn’t my fault. She MADE me do it.” But that’s not how the story goes. “She also gave some to her husband, WHO WAS WITH HER (emphasis added), and he ate.” He wasn’t off inventing the plow while all this was going on. He was right there through the whole discussion and uttered not a peep. He left it to his wife to make the argument, offer the resistance. He even let her take the first bite just in case it didn’t taste good or in case God had meant quite literally, “You shall die.” Then their eyes were opened and they saw that they were naked. Well, hadn’t they always been naked? Yes, but in God’s grace, it was a good and natural and normal thing. Having separated themselves from God by their disobedience what was good has now become evil. The scholars of the Jerusalem Bible note that they have invented the offence of indecency. The note in The New Jerusalem Bible goes even further citing this as the first “arousal of lust, as first manifestation of disorder introduced into the harmony of creation.” Now my Gramma always took this whole story to mean that until that first sin, man was immortal and that when God says that eating of the fruit will make you die, he is inflicting mortality on mankind. While I would never argue that or any other point with her, I think the tellers of this creation story could as easily have meant that alienation from God’s grace amounts to a spiritual death leaving us incomplete and longing for the restoration of a not fully perceived wholeness that we can never fully know again.

Now fast forward a few thousand years and St. Paul is making note of this “Original Sin” in a letter to the Christians in Rome. He writes, “As sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned. … Yet death exercised dominion from Adam to Moses.” I am convinced that the reference to Moses and not someone or something more contemporary to Paul is very deliberate. Remember the long oral tradition. The folks who are receiving Paul’s letter aren’t just familiar with those Old Testament stories, they know them by heart. The survival of their culture required that they be told and retold over and over so that each new generation could steep in them and assume them as their OWN stories. Remember, by the time Paul is writing this letter; Jesus has lived and died and risen from the dead to ascend into heaven. The Christians in Rome don’t only know the traditional law and prophets, they also know the Jesus stories. They know that Jesus spent forty days fasting in the wilderness. They know that Moses before him fasted for forty days and forty nights before bringing the law. They know that Israel spent forty years in the wilderness. They understand the parallels between Jesus’ temptations and the temptations of the nation of Israel while it wandered in the wild. They understand on a very deep, profound level that Jesus is the embodiment of the nation of Israel, God’s Son and God made man. Paul invokes Moses to evoke in his audience a recollection of all the parallels and the theological importance of the parallels.

The first temptation was from hunger just as the Jews had been hungry when God fed them with manna in the wilderness. “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” The devil urges Jesus to turn stones to bread by his own power, without respect to God. Jesus even quotes the earlier text from Deuteronomy that, “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” Next, Jesus is urged to test God’s faithfulness by flinging himself from the parapet of the temple. “’He will command his angels concerning you,’ and ‘On their hands they will bear you up,’” Similarly, the nation of Israel had challenged God in the wilderness and defied the authority of Moses asking why they had been brought out of Egypt only to die in the desert. Again, Jesus quotes from Deuteronomy saying, “It is written, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’” Finally, the devil takes him to a high mountain from which he can see “all the kingdoms of the world” just as Moses before him had gone up to a high mountain. Moses came down from the high mountain with God’s law in the form of the Commandments and led Israel to the Promised Land.

Keep in mind, Israel had been held captive in Babylon. They had been conquered by Alexander the Great and the Macedonians only to have the Maccabees deliver them from that bondage ultimately into starvation and slavery in Egypt. Now Moses has them wandering for forty years in the wilderness. The Jews had been waiting for a Messiah. They weren’t entirely certain what that would look like but there were many who sincerely hoped that a Messiah might be a great warrior who could put some serious whomp on all the folks who had been whomping the Jews for all those years. This story isn’t just about the temptation of Jesus. A lot of the Jews wouldn’t have minded too much if the Messiah really was the kind of mighty king that the devil said he would make of Jesus if he would fall down and worship. Jesus knew, if some of the Jews didn’t, that his kingdom was not of the earth. He knew where his road lay because he was fully God. He could be tempted because he was fully man. Because he was fully man, he not only knew our weaknesses, he experienced them. You know how it ends. Jesus commands, “Away with you, Satan! for it is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’” And you know how it ends, with a triumphal ride into Jerusalem on a borrowed ass through palm strewn streets. You know how it ends, with betrayal, and arrest, and public humiliation, with torture and torment and crucifixion as a common criminal in the company of other petty criminals. Some kingdom! Some Messiah!

But let’s get back to St. Paul and his astonishing message of hope. Sin and death came into our lives through one man, Adam, his deed so black that even a newborn is no longer innocent but from birth in need of God’s redemption and saving grace. Some translations are more lyrical and understandable than others. For this passage, I prefer the New Jerusalem Bible, “He prefigured the One who was to come.” So Jesus is the new Adam. And as Adam brought us into sin, so one man, Jesus brings us out again. Jesus isn’t just like Adam, Adam only “prefigured” Jesus. St. Paul writes, “But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died through one man’s trespass, much more surely have the grace of God and the free gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many. And the free gift is not like the effect of the one man’s sin. For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brings justification.” What an odd word to choose. Let’s back up just a bit to the beginning of this chapter so that we are clear on what Paul means by justification. He starts this chapter with a pretty adamant statement. “We are justified by faith, we are at peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” It’s free. We don’t have to earn it. We don’t have to deserve it. We only have to believe it. Adam stiffed us with the bill for our mortality. Jesus just picked up the tab.

So, as David Stenner, our Vicar at St. Francis Mission in Fortuna used to say, “Happy Lent!” You can give something up for Lent to help you remember what was given up on our behalf. But you don’t have to. That’s the message of this First Sunday in Lent. The bill’s already been paid. All you have to do is believe, have faith. “We are justified by faith.” But admit it, sometimes that is harder than it seems. And that’s why it is good to use Lent to help us remember; to help us get ready; to make us more worthy of the incredible gift of Easter. Happy Lent!