During Lent, I will be preaching on Sunday mornings from the readings assigned in the lectionary and connecting those Scripture passages to the five different parts of the catechism over the five Sundays of Lent. The first is the ten commandments; the second is the creed; the third is the Lord’s Prayer; the fourth is baptism and the fifth is Holy Communion. On Wednesday evenings, after our soup and sandwich supper, we’ll continue our study of the catechism with table talks during our evening worship, reading from Scripture and from the catechism that is printed at the back of the cranberry hymnal.
Today we begin at the beginning with Genesis and the story of Adam and Eve in Eden. The biblical story of Eden grew out of basic questions humans have:
Why do we suffer hardship?
Why does evil exist?
Why aren’t our souls at rest?
In its telling we’re reminded that God first created humans in and for relationship. We are not mistakes; we are fearfully and wonderfully made by a loving God; and, we are not objects created for selfish purposes; we are created with God-given purpose, to nurture life and do God’s work in the world.
These two attributes alone set apart the biblical story of creation from other ancient creation stories,
like the Mayan myth of how two gods, who wanted to preserve their legacy, created man first from mud, which crumbled, and then from wood. They found their creation was soulless and without loyalty, so they destroyed him;[ii]
another myth, in Babylonia, described how the greatest of their kings, named Marduk, created humankind to be slaves to the gods.[iii]
We also hear in Genesis how God set boundaries for humankind. Just as we teach a child to use crayons and markers on coloring pages and not carpets, or scissors to cut paper not hair, and to get drinks from the refrigerator and not from the cabinet under the sink, God establishes life-giving boundaries for us.
Eve had not yet been created when God instructed Adam not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But when the serpent confronts her, she knows it’s forbidden. The beast questions why God had given them such a commandment, and whether the consequences of eating from the tree would be as fateful as they had been told, offering a plausible alternative, and sowing doubt and mistrust into their relationship with their Creator. And with their confidence in God compromised, Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit.
Although they did not physically die then, in that moment, their relationship with the loving God who created them with God-given purpose withered and died.
The Eden story in Genesis illustrates how the root of sin is not one person’s actions or failures,
but the broken and damaged relationship with God.
And the brokenness didn’t end with Adam and Eve. It continues throughout the biblical narrative, as over and over, God’s people become distracted and forget God’s instructions; begin to question whether the boundaries are really needed; or think we know better than God.
When we meet Jesus in the wilderness in today’s Gospel, he has just come from his baptism by John where the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. 17 And a voice from heaven said, "This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased." (Matthew 3:16-17)
“Temptation reveals who we are and what we are to do.”[iv] In contrast to Adam and Eve, Jesus remembered his baptismal identity, an identity and belonging that empowered him as he faced temptations of pride, power and possession.
Like Adam and Eve, and later Jesus, we too face temptations to deny God, to doubt the relevance of God’s Word in our lives, and to question the promises God has given us and the boundaries that God has set.
Describing the Ten Commandments, that we hear in Exodus and again in the catechism, as God’s measuring lines; Luther wrote that they instruct us “what we are to do to make our whole life pleasing to God.”[v] Recognizing that faith is lived out in community, the first three commandments are about our relationship with God, and the remaining ones speak to our relationship with each other and with our neighbors.[vi]
In Luther’s explanation of the commandments, he establishes that the first commandment, “You shall have no other gods.” is the foundation for all the rest. He prefaces the explanation of each of the following commandments with the same words, “We are to love and fear God, so that…”
Believing that “anything on which your heart relies and depends is really your God” Luther taught that obeying this first commandment sends us straight to God to cling to Him alone in whatever temptations or circumstances we face. Then, remembering our own baptismal identity, we are empowered to act, recalling in whose image we are created and who has given us our purpose. That is the freedom we have in faith in Christ, who resists what we cannot.
Throughout this Lent, let us reflect on what our identity as baptized children of God and followers of Christ means as we respond to the temptations and false promises that the world offers.
Let us pray….[vii]
Loving Creator,
We are tempted in every way to give in to a world that tells us the way to fulfillment is power, and riches, and might.
In response, you sent Jesus, a humble, suffering servant who would eventually die on the cross, mistaken and misunderstood.
May we daily remember our baptism and your purpose for us when we are tempted or think we know better than You.
Help us make life-giving choices for ourselves and for the world which you so love.
Amen.
[i] Book of Concord. 400.
[ii] “Mesoamerican creation myths”, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_creation_myths#The_Maya_creation_of_the_world_myth
[iii] “Enûma Eliš”,Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/En%C3%BBma_Eli%C5%A1
[iv] Lent 1A, Lectionary Lab Live podcast.
[v] Book of Concord, 428.
[vi] XLII, Luther’s Table Talk.
[vii] Adapted from Faith Lens. http://blogs.elca.org/faithlens/
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