In the name of
God ☩ Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen.
In February, our own Dr. Trevor
Eppehimer led a fantastic Sunday school class on The Powers That Be. The premise of the book that inspired the class
is that there are real forces in this world that, though invisible, very much
impact societies and individuals. Think of getting swept up in something that
you’re not very interested in. I know this might make some of you think less of
me, but I’m just really not a soccer fan. But when the US team was playing well
in the last World Cup, I kind of got swept up in the fever. I watched them play
and cheered on the goals. Or think about the Olympics, how many of us
ordinarily care about curling? Well, that same thing is true for things like
selfishness, or retaliation, or fear. These forces are real and by
ignoring their reality we only make ourselves into unwitting slaves to them.
The
question then becomes, how do we resist such forces? In the session last week,
Trevor talked about how some people answer this question with a philosophy
known as “Christian realism.” This point of view says something like, “Look,
Jesus is our Savior, but maybe he’s not our best role model.” After all, none
of us are the Son of God; none of us are perfect. And Jesus didn’t have to
worry about the sorts of things that we do. He has disciples and benefactors to
take care of his needs, so he didn’t have to work. He didn’t have a spouse or
kids to be present to. He didn’t live in a democracy where he had to wrestle
with which candidate to vote for. So, the Christian realists say, we have to
make some concessions and adaptations to Jesus’ teaching for the modern world
where we do have to contend with a stock market, politics, careers, and
families.
It’s
the question that we all wrestle with – what impact should my faith have on my
life, and what impact should my life and opinions have on what sort of faith I
practice. And while it might sound obvious that the answer is not to say “Jesus
has little to do with the ethics of modern life,” the reality is that we are
all Christian realists. It’s been said that preachers generally are preaching
to themselves and letting other people hear the conversation. And, in this
case, that’s absolutely true. I’ll speak for myself, trusting that I’m not the
only one who struggles with this question.
The
things that I profess don’t often show up in my actions. When it comes to how I
use power, authority, and money, I make concessions all the time when it comes
to the example of Jesus. Whenever I get an earnings statement, I ask myself,
“And what did the industries which I find morally repugnant do this quarter to
finance my retirement?” This is really complicated stuff. The way of Jesus is
difficult, if not impossible, for us to follow. But we know he’s got the goods,
so we don’t want to walk away from Jesus altogether. So we make concessions and
become Christian realists who want to say there’s a difference between Jesus
and the real world.
As
we see in today’s readings from Genesis and Matthew, this is not a new
conversation. Satan was the first Christian realist. To be clear, Genesis
doesn’t actually refer to Satan, there’s a serpent, but for our purposes, we
can understand them to be one and the same. Satan actually is best thought of
not as an individual, but rather a role. That’s why at one point in the Gospel,
Jesus calls St. Peter “Satan,” because Satan isn’t a person, it’s a character
that any of us can play. The word “Satan” means someone who tempts, deceives,
sabotages, slanders, or leads astray, and the serpent does that and deserves
being called Satan.
What
the serpent does it to encourage God’s prohibition to be violated. Adam and Eve
were in the garden, they had every need taken care of, and they knew no evil.
But God does not withhold anything from Creation or rule as a dictator, so
there is an option available to them. There is a tree within the garden that is
for the knowledge of good and evil. Now, because Adam and Eve already knew God,
they knew about good. But they did not yet know anything about evil. Nor was
death a fact of life at this point. Everything existed within the peaceful rest
of God. The prohibition against eating from that tree was for their own good,
it was to protect them from the knowledge of evil and the resulting death. It’s
not so much about allowance, but rather caution, as when we tell a child to not
touch something hot. But the satanic serpent encourages them to violate this
prohibition.
And
the way this happens is through a perversion of permission. God had given every
tree in Creation to Adam and Eve except this one. God’s provision was wide. But
the serpent narrows that sense of abundance and says a version of “God is
keeping something from you.” Instead of resting in their abundant provision, he
perverts God’s wide permission to eat from all the other trees into a narrowing
restriction. This is how Christian realism works – we take the words of God and
twist them to make a meaning suited to our own purposes. Notice how it happens,
they end up talking about God instead of talking with God. It’s a reminder to
us of the dangers of doing theology or ethics too far away from the altar.
The
result is that the serpent gets Adam and Eve to neglect their vocation. God had
placed them in the garden to till and keep it. But this sacred vocation was
abandoned in their disobedience. It’s not so much that they are punished for
this transgression, rather, they get exactly what God told them they’d get –
knowledge of evil which leads to the experience of death. And so they are no
longer capable of tending and keeping God’s holy garden. This is how the Powers
work, they bind our hands, they distort our priorities so that it becomes
impossible to fully be obedient to God.
Even
if we choose to interpret the Creation story of Genesis in a mythic way, it
still describes the reality of the world in which we find ourselves. And ever
since this cataclysmic event, we have been dealing with the effects of Sin and Death
which come into the world through our disobedience, through our ethical
accommodations, through our susceptibility to Satan who leads us astray. You
can simply pick up a history book, a psychology textbook, read the rest of the
Bible, or look in the mirror and see that this is true.
When
Jesus encounters the devil in the wilderness, Satan is up to the old tricks of
trying to get someone to adopt a realist perspective and make a concession to
the covenant that God has given us. Notice that none of the temptations are
pure evil; in fact, they’re all rationally defensible. And that’s how we get
stuck, Sin often makes sense, or, we can make it make sense. We can adapt our
morals to make it seem like what we’re doing really is a good thing, even
though it is not.
The
first temptation is for Jesus, who has been fasting for forty days, to turn
some stones into bread. Seems fairly harmless, right? No victims, other than
the rocks. Clearly though, Jesus doesn’t need the food. So it’s a temptation
for comfort, for putting our trust in ourselves instead of God to provide, for
using our power just because we can. This is the realm of ego – we do things
that are unnecessary because it makes us feel powerful, or in control, or more
comfortable. And it’s so easy to excuse such actions by saying “I didn’t hurt
anyone.” This is one kind of Christian realism, we say that as long as we’re
not hurting anyone, we can do what we want. But there is great harm done
anytime we forget we are dependent on God.
Temptation
number two is about putting God to the test. “I don’t need to care for the
poor, God will take care of them.” Or sometimes it’s more nuanced, “I can’t
solve all of the problems of the world so I’ll just do what I think is best
instead of what God has told us to do.” Realism sets in anytime we abdicate
responsibility with the assumption that those aren’t our problems.
The
third temptation is most challenging – bow down to me and you’ll have all
authority. This is, of course, idolatry, but with a really good pay off. I can
easily argue why I’d want to take that offer. Sure, I’d commit idolatry and
deal with that, but when I’m in charge, I can then eliminate poverty, and war,
and famine, and disease. This is where Christian realism wreaks havoc. Idolatry
is the worst thing that any Jew, or Christian, can do.
The
problem with this offer is that if we bow down to the devil and gain all power,
no longer are obedient to God and all of that power will be abused. Once we are
corrupted by idolatry, we can do nothing good. It’s the law of unintended consequences
– we think we’re doing something good, but we just end up making it worse. It’s
because we’ve made concessions before we got started. It’s like trying to bake
bread with bad yeast; it’s just not going to work. Anytime we put our trust in
a politician, an ideology, a denomination, a technology, we’re going to lose
out. Over the course of human history, we’ve tried just about everything,
except really doing what God has told us to do – love God, love neighbor, love
yourself. We dismiss non-violence as a utopian ideal despite the fact that it’s
never really been tried. We say that eliminating poverty is just too hard, so
we don’t do it. We hold grudges, resentments, and correctness as if they were
our most valuable possessions instead of having reconciling conversations with
one another. We say that faith is a priority, but our lives say otherwise.
Satan encourages us to make compromises, to take shortcuts, to talk about what
God wants us to do instead of talking with God through sincere prayer,
Scripture reading, and discernment.
And
the result of these various temptations and our disobedience is that, as St.
Paul puts it, quoting Psalm 14, “There is no one who is good, not even one.”
Once we ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, we haven’t been able
to forget the evil. Yes, Jesus has defeated Sin and Death on the Cross, but we
still have that knowledge of evil and we choose it. St. Paul puts it so well
later in Romans, “For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate…
I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I
want, but the evil I do not want is what I do… So I find it to be a law that
when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand.” And this is where we
are stuck.
But
then St. Paul goes on to exclaim, “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me
from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”
Our only hope is Jesus Christ. None of us are going to be any better than Adam
or Eve in resisting temptation or ignoring Satan. We all make concessions in
our faith, we all do what we know we shouldn’t do, we are all disobedient. The
purpose of these texts from Genesis and Matthew aren’t to teach us how to
resist temptation, outsmart Satan, or be perfectly obedient. That’s just not
within our power.
But
it is within God’s. Jesus Christ is obedient. Jesus Christ did not make
accommodations to the faith, but rather said “Not my will, but thy will be
done” and then he showed his steadfast obedience, abundant grace, and amazing
love on the Cross. We have a God who knows us, who knows all of the ways in
which we are imperfect, who knows the desires of our hearts to do good, who
knows the mistakes that we make, and yet loves us all the same, who forgives us
for all our disobedience, who wants us to forgive others just as we have been
forgiven, who longs for us to talk more with God instead of about God. And then
God came to us in Jesus Christ so that we’d know it.
You
and I are going to mess up real soon. But God already forgives us. And this
forgiveness liberates us from trying to get it perfect. The gracious
forgiveness of God obliterates Christian realism because Christian realism is
built on the idea that we can “get it right.” But that’s ludicrous. We don’t
need to worry about getting it right or finding the perfect solution, because
we’re not going to get it perfect. Instead, we can strive to seek first the
Kingdom of God in all things, we can do our best to trust in God and love our
neighbor as ourselves, we can task the risk of love. And when we invariably
fall, God is mighty to save and has forgiven us already. Enjoy your
forgiveness.
