In the name of God- Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
In
February, we heard from the Sermon on the Mount on Sundays, and one of the phrases
that Jesus uses in that address is “you have heard it said, but I say to you…” Today,
I’d like to borrow that strategy. On Ash Wednesday, as we worshiped, I was
struck by much of the language in the service. Today’s sermon was beginning to
take shape in my mind, and the words of the Ash Wednesday liturgy were jarring
to those thoughts. The words of that service are well founded in our theology
and cultural perspective. We prayed that we might “worthily lament our sins and
acknowledge our wretchedness;” Psalm 51 proclaimed that “Indeed, I have been
wicked from my birth, a sinner from my mother’s womb;” and the litany of
prayers confessed all sorts and conditions of our depraved state of being
sinners.
And
throughout Christian history, these sorts of thoughts have prevailed. Jonathan
Edwards preached of our need to turn from our terrible human nature and throw
ourselves at the feet of God in his famous Sinners
in the Hand of an Angry God sermon. St. Augustine is credited with advancing the doctrine of Original Sin, which pervades Western thought and it is built upon
the foundations that St. Paul laid in today’s epistle reading from Romans,
based on the myth we read today from Genesis. In short, we have been told that
if it were not for the grace of God, that we would all be doomed to burn in
Hell for all eternity because we are utterly worthless, undeserving, and evil
creatures. And because we are so unbelievably terrible at life, God had to come
to earth and die on a cross to make things right on the cosmic scale of
justice. We, therefore, must fully accept this grace and thereby gain our
salvation. That, in a nutshell, is likely what you have heard it said about
Christianity.
But I
say to you, maybe it’s not quite that simple. There is another side to that
coin of salvation. And that other truth
is also rooted in Genesis- “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it
was very good.” A few Sundays ago, we heard Jesus echo something about living
into this call to be good when he said “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly
Father is perfect.” Perhaps it might be possible to define ourselves not by our
wretched state, but by the first name that God gives us- “good.” But it all
depends on our outlook. Today’s readings from Genesis and Matthew present us
with two very different ways of understanding the world and our human nature.
First,
in Genesis, what we find is a theology of scarcity. You might say that the
serpent won, because even today, we tend to read this story and see God as the withholder
of gifts and the punisher. After all, why wouldn’t God let Adam and Eve eat of
that tree? Was God trying to keep them in the dark? Why would God tempt them
with something they couldn’t have? And why did God have to react so harshly to
their disobedience?
Let’s
review the narrative though, as there is more to it than that. First of all,
God clearly gives Adam and Eve a vocation- they are to keep and till the
Garden. Those words might be better translated as to serve and protect the
Garden. When we mistranslate their vocation as being in charge of the Garden,
we begin our exploration of this story on the wrong foot. It is not that Adam
and Eve are in charge of the Garden, but rather that they are put there to
serve it and protect it. Next, God is not restrictive, but rather permissive. God
says, “Do you see everything in this Garden? All the lush fruit? Have any of it
that you’d like. There’s just one tree that it would be best for you to avoid.”
There is a prohibition, but not a restriction.
But Adam and Eve, just like us, had
difficulty with it. They forgot that God had given them a holy task- to serve
and protect. They forgot that God had given them more than they could ever
need. And when the serpent comes to them, notice how God is portrayed: distant,
manipulative, and restrictive. But none of those adjectives actually describe
the reality of God. Instead, their theology of scarcity pushes them to believe the
serpent’s lies. God had provided for them an abundance of freedom and grace, an
abundance of purpose, and an abundance of food. But they couldn’t trust that
God would provide. It has been said “you can never get enough of the things
that you don’t really need.” Adam and Eve lived with scarcity as their primary
way of viewing the world. And so they succumbed to temptation.
Now let us consider Jesus. He had
just been baptized by John the Baptist in the Jordan River, so like Adam and
Eve, he had a sense of vocation. Just as they were given the task to serve and
protect, Jesus had been called the “beloved,” and living into that was his
task. And then he meets the Tempter. Jesus, though, was not in the lush Garden,
but instead in the barren desert. There was no food, little shelter, and true
scarcity all around him. And yet, Jesus is operating not out a theology of
scarcity, but of abundance. Jesus is tempted with the necessity of food, with
prestige, and with power. The Tempter comes to him and says “why don’t we share
in glory and power?” It’s essentially the same trick used on Adam and Eve- “You
won’t die if you eat that fruit or throw yourself off the Temple, you’ll just
be more like God.”
While Adam and Eve were willing to
compromise with this temptation, Jesus is not. Jesus knows that power should be
used to serve, not to exploit or enslave. Adam and Eve make a grab for the
power, and are not prepared to live with effects of that action. Jesus though,
wants no part of a relationship with the Tempter. He is resolved to use his
power only for the Kingdom of God, not the kingdoms of the self. Jesus trusts that,
even amidst the scarcity of the wilderness, that God provides an abundance.
More ink has been spilled on these
opening chapters of Genesis than perhaps any other part of the Bible. These
initial chapters speak to the human condition and set the tone for the rest of Judaism
and Christianity. In light of these two stories, we need to ask ourselves- when
it comes to our humanity, do we approach the topic with a theology of scarcity
or of abundance? What about the concept of the “Fall?” Are we fallen creatures
that are irredeemable save for the grace of God? Or are we perhaps not fallen
from perfection, but rather have we failed to fully develop into our humanity?
You might be able to guess where I’m going- you have heard it said that humans
are fallen beings, but I say to you that we haven’t yet lived fully into our
humanity. And part of what Jesus does is show us that way.
The sin of Adam and Eve wasn’t that
they were destined for failure or that they were overly curious, rather, it was
that they abandoned their vocation and calling. They forgot their identity as
being called “good.” They thought they were lacking, and so they pursued what
they didn’t need, rebelling against God in the process. But what if we could,
by following the example of Jesus and relying on his grace, choose not to fall
into temptation, but rather to live into the goodness that God destined us for?
Well, if you can believe that, you just might be a heretic.
In the 5th century, there
was a nasty debate between Augustine and Pelagius. If anyone ever got a bad
deal, it was Pelagius. He was called a heretic and was banned from Rome in 418.
He argued that humans were sacred at their core, and could approach holiness in
their lives. But this flew in the face of the arguments made by Augustine, who
saw the effects of Original Sin as pervasive in our lives. Using the words of
Paul, Augustine built upon the idea that “sin came into the world through one
man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have
sinned.” You might say that Pelagius was operating out of a theology of
abundance when it comes to grace, and Augustine was coming from scarcity.
But as history would have it,
Augustine won out. Pelagius’ argument was misrepresented as “we can achieve salvation
without Jesus,” which obviously sounds rather heretical. But that’s not at all
what Pelagius said. Instead, he interpreted Genesis differently than Augustine
did. They took different forks in the road, and though they both arrived at the
grace of God, Pelagius’ route was deemed to be wrong. What is interesting about
Pelagius is that we don’t actually know much at all about his arguments. Because
he was deemed a heretic, all of his writings were destroyed, and the only
quotes we have from him come from the writings of his opponents in their
refutation of him.
But in an ironic twist of history, we
actually do have a letter from Pelagius to Demetrias. It survived because for
centuries everyone attributed it to St. Jerome. Even Augustine himself quotes
this letter in one of his own writings, having no idea that it was his
adversary, Pelagius, that actually wrote it. In this letter, Pelagius writes “you
should measure the good of human nature by reference to its creator… it is he
who made all the works of and within the world good, exceeding good, how much more
excellent do you suppose that he has made humanity?” Doesn’t sound like heresy
to me.
Pelagius begins with our sacred
nature, not our Fallen nature; he begins with abundance, not scarcity. Pelagius
was unable and unwilling to accept the fact that Christ is completely foreign
to us; that sin somehow made us absolutely repugnant to God. In that letter he
points out that “before making humanity, God determines to fashion us in God’s
own image and likeness, showing what kind of creature God intends to make.” We
are made in the image of God, and that indeed is a very good thing. Pelagius
concedes that though we are sacred in nature, we are still wounded by sin, and
therefore need Christ to give us guidance and strength to return to this divine
nature. But that’s not how Augustine and the political leaders of the day saw
Pelagius.
They were trying to build an empire.
You might say that when Christianity associated itself with the Roman Empire
that we fell for the temptation offered to Jesus by the Tempter. We made a play
for power and prestige. And it’s far easier to build an empire when you have
something that people need. If people are innately bad, and salvation is only
to be found in the Church, and you can control the Church, well, then you can
control the people. But if people knew that they were holy, that they are not
wretched souls, then that subversive message might lead them to reject the
power of the Empire over them. They might realize that the power of God is
found not in the Pope, but in their own souls. As so as a threat to the Empire,
Pelagius became a heretic, and for the most part, his theology of abundance was
lost in Christian thought. Augustine’s emphasis on Original Sin has dominated
the conversation. Instead of Pelagius’ notion that we could journey toward the
wholeness that God intended for us in Creation with Christ as our guide, the
need for Christ’s blood sacrifice has been shoved down people’s throats.
There is one part of Christendom,
though, that has maintained the idea that we are sacred, not Fallen, and that
is Celtic Christianity. Pelagius was Irish, and greatly influenced the Celts and their spirituality which focuses on harmony with nature and grace over sin.
Perhaps the most well known modern Celtic theologian is J. Philip Newell. He
has an outstanding book called Christ of
the Celts where he discusses what Christianity might look like if we could
start where Pelagius did- out of a place of abundance, and not scarcity. He
writes “Pelagius’ emphasis on the essential goodness of humanity did not
involve a denial of the presence of evil and of its power over the human.
Rather, it implied that at the heart of humanity is the image and goodness of
God, a goodness that is obscured or covered over by the practice of wrongdoing
and evil.”
Both Adam and Eve and Jesus had
received their identity just before their temptations. Adam and Eve were called
“good” and Jesus was called “beloved.” For Adam and Eve though, this wasn’t
enough; they had trouble trusting God, and therefore acted with fear out of
their scarcity. However, Jesus knew there was an abundance of grace provided in
God, and was able to avoid temptation.
I don’t know how you will be
tempted, but I know you will be. I don’t know how the Tempter will try to sway
you, but I know it will be strong argument. If we are to face temptation, we
must deeply know in our souls that we are full of grace, that we are the beloved
of God, and trust in that abundance. As we embark on this season of Lent,
journeying toward the joys of Easter, may it be with an eye toward the grace that
exudes from our very nature, not on our wretched or fallen state. May we pick
up a strand of Christianity that has been lost, finding Pelagius not to be a
heretic, but a misunderstood prophet. May we know that we are good. May we work
toward refining that goodness, and share it with the world. Amen.
