February 26, 2023

Lent 1

Epiphany, Winnipeg

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

“Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.” Fig leaves. Seriously? Anna Carter Florence is a professor who teaches preaching at Columbia Seminary, a Presbyterian seminary in Georgia. One day in her class they were going to be having a closer look at this story from Genesis, so she brought a bunch of fig leaves and some needles and thread and handed them out to the class and said, “Here, make yourself a loincloth out of these. Something to, you know, cover up with.” It soon became really clear, in the midst of a lot of raucous laughter, that you can’t make any kind of clothes out of fig leaves; they just can’t handle the whole needle and thread thing. They fall apart, they’re flimsy, and if anyone did manage to get something to hold together like one or two of her students did, the fact is that there’s just no way that a fig leaf Speedo will last once you start to take a step or two. Covering up just doesn’t really work in the long run, does it? I was at a friend’s place for dinner once and I was sitting at the only spot at the dining room table that had a view of the kitchen. When we were finished eating, the nine-year old son in the family very politely asked to be excused from the table, and as he walked through the kitchen on the way to his room he absentmindedly dragged his hand along the counter and knocked over a glass, and it broke into three or four really neat clean pieces. Right away he checked to make sure that his parents hadn’t seen, then he took the pieces and tried to fit them all together into something like a glass that would hold its shape there on the counter and it worked. He put them together, then backed away slowly from the counter. Stepping lightly. And now that he’d sewn the fig leaves together he walked down the hall to his room. Very quietly…to act like nothing’s wrong. It’s just a young person and a broken glass, but I know that I can see myself in the story, or in the story in the garden with the fig leaves. And I’m guessing that a lot of us can. I’ve done something wrong, and I know it might hurt someone, but I’ll just cover it up and hope nobody finds out. Countries do it. Corporations do it. National governing bodies of sports do it. Pastors do it. Churches do it. People do it. Cover up, put the broken pieces together and hope nobody sees. And somebody always sees. Mom walks into the kitchen and sees the glass on the table and there’s no way to hide those cracks. Or if the cracks are well hidden she picks it up and it falls apart anyway. Covering up just never works.

If we keep on reading this story from Genesis this is what happens next: God is out for a refreshing walk in the garden in the cool evening breeze, and the man and the woman with the fig leaves are hiding so God says, “So, um, where are you?” And the man says, “I was hiding.” God says, “Who told you you had something to hide? Did you eat something from that tree that I said you shouldn’t eat?” And what does the man say? “The woman made me do it.” And what does the woman say? “The snake made me do it.” And what does the snake say? Nothing much after all that. The story isn’t really so much about doing something bad; maybe it’s really all about blame and responsibility and owning up and growing up. Nobody just says, “Yah, I did that.” Nope - It’s the woman’s fault. It’s the snake’s fault. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s everybody’s fault but mine. And finally God says, “It’s time for these people to get out of the garden. We don’t want to see what line they cross next.” And they’re sent out to live in the world out there, with its hard work and the soil to tend and the bills to pay and the hurts to avoid and the hurts to heal; they’re sent out into the world where nations attack nations and the victims get blamed and maybe we all just try to cover up. God says “Your life is out there” – and I can imagine that God is also thinking something like this: “It’s a beautiful world and people can be so gracious and loving and fun, and nature is amazing and these people who can be so broken are still made in my image and I love them.” So God sends the couple out of the garden to the place of their grown up life, but before God does that? God makes real clothes for them out of animal skins and says, “Here, put these on. Those fig leaves just aren’t working out.” And they leave the garden to live life in the world. There’s another side to this whole story. I used to think that this pretty much summed it up: We try to cover up, and we don’t take responsibility for things. But it’s not like that for everybody. There are people – and maybe this is you – who instead are more likely to blame themselves for everything, and to take responsibility for the ways that they have been hurt or for the wrongs that someone else has done. Sometimes it sounds like “I can’t do anything right,” or “I deserved it when they said or did that thing that hurt me so deeply. I guess I did something that made them treat me like that.” Sometimes it might sound like “I’m a sinner so the faithful thing to do is to say that this is somehow my fault.” Or “I’m wrong again. Always wrong.”

Think back to the beginning of this story of Adam and Eve and the snake and the fig leaves and the garden and the trees. The way the story goes there’s this whole garden, this whole creation, everything there is for the good of everything there. There’s just one limit; one small limit in this perfect creation. God says “You can eat anything. Chocolate, cheese, dill pickle chips, grass, lettuce, peonies, garlic, grain, barley, hops, mushrooms, anything. Except for the fruit that grows on the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If you eat that, you die that day.” There is one limit built into creation: don’t eat that tree that will allow you to know good and evil. Because on that day we will begin to divide the world, the garden, the beauty of creation, into the good ones and the evil ones, or the us – the good - and the them – the evil, or us the right and them the wrong…or us the left and them the right. And we will judge and separate and divide ourselves and we just won’t be able to stop. Or we will take that knowledge of good and evil and just turn it against ourselves. And for so many people that just means “I’m bad. Nothing more.” “Don’t eat from that tree,” God says. It’s poison. It’ll kill you.

We know how the story goes from there. And we’re sent out into the world, where it’s not the perfect garden, but even so we’re still called to tend and care for it; to tend and care for it without dividing it into good and evil but instead figuring out together what’s gone wrong, how it went wrong, and what needs to happen to make it right again. And before we’re sent out? God says, “Those fig leaves aren’t working out. Here, put this on.” Maybe it’s animal skins, like the story in Genesis goes. Or maybe it’s a baptismal garment, and God says, “Here, put this on.” And we’re marked with the cross of Christ, bathed in water that always covers us, draped in a garment that says nothing about us being good or evil but instead says everything about how much we are loved and how much we are cared for by this God who knows what we’re trying to hide, but who keeps walking with us out of the garden and into this still blessed world.

It’s this still blessed world that Jesus walks into with us. We heard that story of his temptation in the wilderness: Forty days of hunger and thirst and blazing sun. The nagging voice of the tempter, who’s always trying to get Jesus to trust in power or comfort or ease instead of simply to trust in God and see what happens from there. Finally the devil gives up on all that and just goes away. And the punch line of the story is that we never hear that Jesus leaves the wilderness. He stays in the wilderness with us, in this life that we know, in whatever shape our lives take here. Is the world a broken wilderness? Jesus never leaves the wilderness. Is the world a garden with some flaws here and there? Jesus never leaves the garden. Do we hide and pretend, and keep on trying to sew some fig leaves together? Jesus won’t leave us behind. Does the nagging voice of the tempter keep telling you that you’re wrong again and always will be? Jesus won’t leave you behind, and while we’re on the subject, Jesus will tell you and me and all of us that the voice of the tempter is wrong. Whether we love this wilderness or fear this wilderness we are sent into, Jesus is here, and makes every wilderness a holy place. Wherever we are is our Lenten wilderness; a holy place where we stop and turn and see again that Jesus is at home with us here.

AMEN.