The Reverend John E. McGinn, Rector
Saint John’s Episcopal Church
Sandwich, Massachusetts 02563
February 10, 2008
1 Lent
As we begin with the first
Sunday in Lent, I want to talk about temptation.
You are probably well aware
after listening to the readings this morning from Genesis, and especially from
the Gospel, that they talk clearly about temptation; and we all have our own
ways of dealing with temptation. Some of
us flee from it, others less wise, embrace it.
Now what do the scriptures
say about temptation? I think the most
famous of all is in the book of Genesis.
“Now the serpent was more crafty than any of
the wild animals the Lord God had made.
And he said to the woman, ‘Did God really say you must not eat from any
tree in the garden?’ And the woman said to the serpent, ‘We may eat fruit from
the trees in the garden, but God did say you must not eat fruit from the tree
that is in the middle of the garden. You
must not touch it or you will die. You
will not surely die,’ the serpent said to the woman, ‘for God knows that when
you eat of it your eyes will be open and you will be like God knowing good and
evil.’ And when the woman saw that the
fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye and also desirable
for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it.
And she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were open, and
they realized that they were naked, so they sewed fig leaves together and made
coverings for themselves.”
The serpent tempted Eve with
the forbidden fruit. I’m surprised it
wasn’t chocolate, aren’t you? In either
case the result would have been the same.
I want to begin here this
morning. There is something within the
human heart that is not quite right. And
that is the message, I think, of this ancient story from the Old Testament. Something within us is messed up. Who among us is without sin? We say things we do not mean to say. We do things we do not mean to do. Our relationships with those we love most are
sometimes strained. We live a veritable
paradox and yet our hearts long for more.
We are the most privileged and most protected people who ever lived, and
yet fears and worries haunt our dreams.
We have relegated gods with secondary position in our lives, and we
wonder why our lives are not more fulfilling.
Yes, there is something in the human heart that is not quite right.
Writer P. J. O’Rourke puts it
this way: “There is this horrible idea,
beginning with John Jacques Rousseau and still going strong in college
classrooms, that natural man is naturally good.
But anybody who has ever met a toddler knows this is nonsense. Those of you who are parents of toddlers know
what he is talking about. There is
something within us that is at the same time amazingly self-centered yet
potentially self-destructive; and it
seems to lie at the very core of our being.
You may remember the house in
northern Italy that had a mud floor. The
more the owner tried to scrub the floor clean, the worse it became. And that’s our story. No matter how many self-help books we read,
no matter how many good resolutions we make each New Year, there are flaws we
cannot eliminate.
Have you ever wondered how a
worm gets inside an apple? Perhaps you
think the worm burrows in from the outside.
But actually scientists have discovered that the worm comes from the
inside. How does it get there?
An insect lays an egg in the
apple blossom, and sometime later the worm hatches in the heart of the apple
then eats its way out. And that’s why
you cannot judge an apple has a worm in it by looking at its skin, anymore than
you can judge people by looking at their outward appearance.
The most deadly problems we
face originate not from the outside of us, but from within. As William Shakespeare so wisely put it in
his play Julius Caesar, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
but in ourselves.”
There is something in the
human heart that is not quite right.
Left unattended, that which is not quite right within us can destroy
us. Homes can be broken, hearts can be
shattered, bodies can be destroyed because we fail to
recognize the seriousness of that problem which the Bible calls ‘sin.’
Smoking
that first cigarette, sharing that first intimate conversation, slipping that
first dollar out of the cash register. Saying yes when we should have
said no. We used to call it ‘sin’ - now
we talk about our ‘mistakes.’ Yet any
time we sink below the level of our own Christian values we can hear the hiss
of the serpent, and danger lurks there.
A clergyman tells of a tragic
event that he heard about when he was in college. He spent his summers working on road crews in
western New York State. Many of the men
he was working with had been in rough places and had some unusual experiences.
One day as they sat in the
construction shed eating lunch, one of the men told of working far back in the
hills of Pennsylvania. As the men drove
their truck up and down the winding mountain road, they would often see a young
boy fishing by the side of a small lake.
On one day in particular day, as the men drove down to the small
back-woods town for lunch, they stopped to ask the youngster how the fish were
biting. He replied that the fish weren’t
biting at all, but the worms sure were.
The men in the work crew were
still laughing when they stopped at the local gas station and told the owner
what the boy had said. “The fish weren’t
biting at all, but the worms sure were.”
They were more than surprised when, after a moment’s thought, the gas
station owner got a panic-stricken look on his face, and he raced for his own
pickup and up into the hills.
Not long after, he came back
into town with the unconscious body of the boy at his side. The worms in his can, you see, were not worms
at all, but dozens of baby rattlesnakes that the boy had taken by mistake from
their nest. Since the boy had been bitten
on the hands and fingers many times, and since the venom of a baby rattlesnake
is every bit as poisonous as an adult, the young boy died soon thereafter.
How many little innocent sins
do we take up in our hands because we mistakenly think that they will serve a
purpose and can do us no harm? There is
something in human heart that is not quite right. Left unattended, that which is not quite
right within us can destroy us. And,
even worse, many of us are unwilling to take responsibility for our transgressions;
and since we refuse to take responsibility, we make the same mistakes time and
time again. We are like Adam blaming Eve
for their transgression, and Eve blaming the serpent.
Two men were watching a
television show, a western, and as the hero rode on horseback toward the edge
of the cliff, one man said, “I’ll bet you fifty dollars he goes over the cliff.” “You’re on,” said the other man. And the hero rode straight over the
cliff. Being a sportsman, the second
handed over the money. The first man
looked at it and said, “I feel guilty about winning this. I’ve seen this film before.” “So have I,” said his friend, “but I didn’t
think that cowboy would be stupid enough to make the same mistake again.”
The first step…the first step
in dealing with sin is to take responsibility for it. Quit doing the same stupid thing over and
over again.
A young woman wrote her
priest: “Four years ago I was dating a
man and became pregnant,” she said. “I
was devastated. I asked God, ’Why have
you allowed this to happen to me?’”
There is a woman who is not
quite ready to take responsibility for her actions. She didn’t take responsibility. This is always the first step in dealing with
transgression. Call it what it is: sin.
Not a mistake, not simply being human - it is a sin. It is the worm in the human heart burrowing
outward. Take responsibility for it, then take it to God.
Because we have quit calling sin by its proper name, we have separated
our misdeeds from the only source we have of real healing - the grace of
God.
Do you understand what I am
saying? The only way we can be healed
from sin is to call it by its real name - sin - and then confess it to the
Savior. Then let God remove its stain
from our hearts and souls.
Someone once compared what
Jesus has done for us to the scientific concept of black holes. A black hole was a heavenly phenomenon that
occurs when a star dies out and it collapses in on itself. As the star collapses, it becomes so dense
and the gravitational pull becomes so great that all material surrounding that
star, including light, gets sucked into the dense ball, and all that’s left is
a black hole in space.
Jesus, in a sense, as he hung
on the cross, became a black hole of sin.
Over the period of time the sin of all humanity, in all its ugliness,
was sucked into the very being of Jesus.
Sin became so dense, such a reality in Jesus, that he who knew no sin
became sin for the sake of all humanity.
And that, of course, is what
Lent is about. And that, of course, is
the only cure for sin. Let God take care
of it. There is something in the human
heart that is not quite right. That
something which we call sin can destroy us if we let it. Our only hope is to take responsibility for
our lives and to present them to Jesus.
Only Jesus can take away the sins of the world.
Amen