Preached to the Congregational Church in Exeter, U. C. C., on the first Sunday in Lent, February 17, 2002, by Michael L. C. Henderson, pastor.

Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7; Matthew 4:1-11

You will be like God.

                      –Genesis 3:5

     So said the serpent to the woman. This Gospel reading doesn't mention her name, but elsewhere she is called Eve, meaning "giver of life", which is interesting in light of her role in this story as a facilitator of death. In some way she is the giver of both life and death, then.

     The opening chapters of Genesis are full of things happening for the very first time, and you wonder what to make of how they happen. The serpent, for example, gets to ask the Bible's very first question, which produces the Bible's very first conversation, the one with Eve.

     And where was Adam during this cozy little fateful chat? Male theologians have made much over the centuries about Eve being the guiltier of the two, since it was she who allowed herself to be beguiled by the serpent, and she who then seduced Adam to follow suit, thus establishing the principle that women are inherently less pure and more evil than men. When you think about it, this is a funny way for the male half of the human race to try to get itself off the hook. The idea seems to be that a man can handle a snake, but a woman is too much for him!

     And besides, if you listen to the story carefully, it says right here in Genesis 3:6 that Adam was with her the whole time. He just couldn't think of anything to say. Typical masculine behavior if you ask me, and a lousy excuse for blaming the whole thing on women.

     Later on in the same chapter, after they finish sewing fig leaves into aprons — and by the way both of them do the sewing, not just the woman — comes that wonderful part where they hear the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, so they hide, and the Lord God like any smart parent immediately figures out what they've done, and Adam, caught red-handed, starts his whining: "The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, Lord," she made me do it! Like it's all God's fault for foisting a female on him. I once heard a minister do a wonderful thing: He took those words, "The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, Lord," and he used them as the first line of a poem that started out like a complaint but slowly turned into a hymn of thanksgiving, a love song about his wife. Reinstating God's original point in doing it.

     Adam, actually pronounced a-DAHM, according to Genesis 2:7 means a creature made from the dust of the ground, literally a groundling or an earthling!. But somebody pointed out, and I don't know why I never thought of it, that you can't make anything out of dust, dust can't be shaped into anything, it's just dust. First you have to turn it into clay by adding water to it, and in fact that's exactly what God does in Genesis 2:6: God makes water come up from the earth and soak the whole face of the ground, and then God makes this adam, this earthling.

     So God is working in a swamp here, God is getting down and dirty, and the fashioning of humankind resembles nothing so much as making mud pies. That sorta puts us in our place, doesn't it? God breathes life into the nostrils of a mud pie, but it's still mud. Still and always a swamp thing. You can take the thing out of the swamp, but you can't take the swamp out of the thing.

     Don't ask me to tell you if this is the way it "really happened". I'm not the least bit interested in using this pulpit to carry on the old science-versus-religion debate, or evolution, or creationism, or any of that stuff, and I hope you're grateful, because it's incredibly boring. What I want to ask, and what I want you to ask, is: What does this story tell us about human nature and life on this earth?

     Well, if it's telling us we're a swamp thing, then the message must have something to do with humility. Interesting word, humility. It's derived from the Latin word humilis, meaning "low", which in turn derives from humus, meaning "dirt". We still use "humus" to mean dirt.

     If you're a gardener, you love dirt. If you're not a gardener you should love it anyway, because it's your Mother. We're clumps and clods of earth, borrowed and re-arranged for a little while. Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return — those words don't just apply to people who happen to go to church on Ash Wednesday, they cover us too.

     What should we make of the fact that this is the way the Bible begins? There are actually two different creation stories, Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, but this one, Genesis 2, is actually a lot older in its origin than the other one. What can we conclude from that?

     I'd say God must think humility is a very big deal. Not modesty, not shyness, not timidity, but humility — the recognition of one's own limitations, the spirit that accepts what one is and doesn't claim or pretend or try to be something else.

     Which is where the serpent comes in, whispering: You shall be like God, and the swamp things jump for it hook, line and sinker. The jumping itself is emblematic of the mistake they're making: The propensity to grasp rather than receive infects their lives and ours, driving the way we shape all our institutions and social arrangements, creeping into all the tiny choices we make all day every day, setting us against each other, against ourselves, against God.

     But it doesn't have to be that way. God calls upon Jesus to show us that it doesn't have to be that way. Jesus goes out into the wilderness not because the Devil makes him do it, not because he feels like doing it, but because the Spirit of God leads him there. And Jesus undoes what the swamp things did by doing it right. Humility is possible, is still possible in spite of all the sorry history we've accumulated and all the momentum we've built up in the opposite direction. Jesus shows us how. All you have to do is refuse to be what you can't be anyway. The easiest thing imaginable until you try it.

     Religion is criticized for encouraging people to put on airs — calling themselves God's chosen people, imagining that they're the apple of God's eye, believing that they're the pinnacle of creation and the center of the universe. And religion can do all of that when it gets into the wrong hands. Satan can quote Scripture as well as any preacher.

     But that's the serpent's version of faith. God's version puts us in our place and says it's a pretty good place — a lot better than we give it credit for being.

     Here is Lent again, inviting us to take a good look at our lives and ask where we are headed, what is our agenda, who on earth we think we are. It's a journey to the Cross, as we all know. The Cross of Christ makes no sense in the Garden of Eden — who needs it there? — and the Cross is totally absurd if we can be like God. It makes sense only in the swamp. In the place where we actually live.

     After forty days of fasting, it says, Jesus is famished. Well, I guess so! Yet he will not allow Satan, whose name means the Adversary, to leverage his hunger into disloyalty to the truth. That is an act of will, strong will, incredible will. And will is what it's all about — not the knowledge of good and evil, which we all have, but the willingness to do the right thing, which is exactly what we most doubt about ourselves and each other.

     We have full bellies — but the truth is we're famished too. Starving for a way of life that works, for a way of framing reality that isn't loaded full of lies, for a way to declare our independence of the contempt and disrespect all around us and, yes, inside us.. Starving for a hope that does not disappoint and for a sense of direction that we can trust.

     Let's begin by owning that hunger of ours. Denying it gets us nowhere. Admitting it locates us squarely in the swamp, and it's the right place to begin the journey.

     Amen