Lent 1 - On Being Human

What does it mean to you, that you are human?

Maybe it means that you were created. That’s a good place to start. There’s an ongoing debate that pits ‘new atheists’ Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins against the biblical witness that we are created creatures of God. At issue isn’t just the simplistic argument: does God exist; but a deeper one: if we are spontaneous organisms at the end of a long evolutionary path, then why bother being in community? Why bother coming together – for any reason – at all?

The funny part is that both arguments begin at the same place. Everything is created out of dust – something both science and faith can agree on. Coming out of Ash Wednesday, when we heard the words “remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return”, it can be good to realize that there’s at least one thing that isn’t worth fighting over.

But what comes after that? God creates the first human out of the dust of the ground; even the word, adamah, means ‘earthling’ or ‘mudling’. But once that creation is finished, what then? Well, the man is put into the garden, dependent upon the grace and goodness of God to provide. We remember that when we learn Luther’s explanation of the first commandment in the Small Catechism – “we are to fear, love, and trust God above all things.” That’s where I think we are today.

But it turns out that that is harder to do than we think. Even for those first people, who turn from God so readily. Because that’s something that we miss – the serpent doesn’t actually force them to do anything – all it does is put the merest shadow of a question in their minds – do we really trust God?

It is the temptation to be self-sufficient and self-determining that seduces the first humans, nothing else. Somehow, though they are part of God’s good creation, that willingness to turn from God is a part of who they are. Instead of doing what they were created to do – to fear, love, and trust God above all else – they change their focus instead to wanting to be like God.

They turn inwards, caring more about who they are than about whose they are.

And that first, innermost sin spreads like a virus throughout history and all of humanity. It comes to us in the pre-eminence of human agency in our society.

‘Human agency’ is probably the single most overemphasized concept in our society. Because of it, we are led to believe that we can choose everything we want, and that lack of choice infringes on our ‘rights’ as human beings. We can choose grocery stores, sales, music, lifestyles; choice is always presented as a guaranteed fact.

But really, we don’t want that agency to extend to the consequences of our choice. We just want that agency to be total freedom of the consequences of our choices – really, we want to be how we so popularly conceive of God: absolute power; no responsibility.

And that is endemic through our society. People smoke, yet blame tobacco companies when they get lung cancer; drink to stupidity, and blame the alcohol for the tragedy of the day. Every day people die in silly ways as a direct result of their own choices…yet the blame is spread around…and usually, it gets laid on God.

We don’t often realize that the agency we demand is the agency that God gives us – the freedom, not just to make choices, but the total freedom which includes the consequences of those choices.

Remember: the serpent simply asks Eve and Adam if they really, really trust God. Everything else is their actions. They don’t anticipate that their choice is going to result in putting themselves in direct opposition to God; they just want to be in control, to be “all that they can be.”

In the same way, St. Paul wrote to the church at Rome so many years later. In the excerpt from the epistle lesson for today, he really just tells them: you want your agency? You have it. But here’s the bad news. That means everything is up to you. And if your salvation is up to you, then you have no way out. Even if you’ve never heard of Christ. But, Paul points out, if sin spread through one person’s choice, then shouldn’t God’s choice remove it?

When we think about our ‘humanness’, isn’t it curious that we automatically start by trying to explain what makes us, in and of ourselves, human? We try to define ‘who’ we are, and forget all about whose we are.

A crucial part of the Christian journey is honesty, both with ourselves and with God. If we are not willing to be honest, to be vulnerable, then we will never find a relationship deeper than the most casual acquaintance. St. Paul knew that – throughout most of his letter to the Romans he keeps asking questions of himself:

Why do I sin?

Why do I fall short?

And you know, those are the same questions we ask ourselves. Nobody wakes up in the morning and thinks, “today, I’m going to make my friend feel miserable by gossiping about her. I’m going to sin, and I’m going to enjoy it.”

Even like we do now, Paul found that there was nothing he could do to avoid sin. And then, he realized that through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ we are pardoned and forgiven. If that is true – if, in fact, God acted in Jesus to pardon us without our permission – then our salvation rests not in who we are or what we do, but in whose we are. We are to fear, love, and trust God above all things.

So our spiritual journey then, does not become one of moving towards a goal that God has set for us in the future – as we often think – but rather in becoming more truly human, fully dependent upon God for all things. That is the example that Jesus shows in the wilderness, that strength is found in relationship with God.

The story of Jesus in the wilderness is a familiar one. Again, he’s in the desert for 40 days. The Holy Spirit leads him there after his baptism. And there, he meets the devil.

The devil tempts himself with Jesus’ power. The devil wants to see Jesus be independent – do it on his own, thereby committing the same mistake made in the Garden.

But Jesus refuses to establish his own worth and identity on his own terms, and remains in relationship with God. In short, he knows who he is by first remembering whose he is. He fulfills the first commandment, remembering to fear, love, and trust God above all things.

And that’s an interesting lesson. Because then the gospel lesson – and Lent itself – becomes less about resisting temptation, defying the devil, and growing spiritually, and becomes more about becoming aware of how insufficient our agency really is. That it is our belief that we can do things on our own that kills us – kills our relationships with others, and with God.

And now we think: C’mon…it’s not that bad. I don’t pretend to be God. But I can run my life without God. God is for Sunday…for funerals…for weddings…

But aren’t you just pretending you can dictate to God when God is allowed in your life? That, in fact, you are still trying to be God in God’s place?

The season of Lent reveals to us that Jesus did not come to show us how to be divine. He didn’t come to show that we could defeat the devil by proof-texting him into oblivion.

Instead, Jesus came in weakness to show us what it means to be truly human; to accept that we are created to be in relationship with God and with each other.

Through our baptism into Christ, God names and claims us as God’s own children, a gift that is given to us because God wants to give it.

Our human-ness may come from a realization that the Holy Spirit is always with us, and leads us to places that we may not like – that our agency is really only in our minds.

In Mark’s version of this wilderness story, Mark writes that the Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness, in the same way a swarm of bees can drive a herd of cattle into a thicket of brambles. These forty days of Lent, then, teach us not that God can be found through fasting or prayer – but that we might find ourselves in those disciplines, and the courage to live out our own baptismal covenant that calls us to return from our high and lofty places, and be led by the Spirit into our own wildernesses.

And I’ll point out that Jesus just had wilderness to contend with. We have 21^st century society, and given a choice between the two I’d probably take the wilderness. The bare wilderness of the desert is for Jesus – our wilderness is a wilderness of conflicting ideas, conflating principles, and increasingly nightmarish moral and ethical dilemmas that continually confront us.

But our human-ness and our connection to community comes with trusting the Spirit of God that leads us out of this place and into those wild places, bearing nothing but the promise of the gospel and the presence of Christ. The same Spirit leads us to be witnesses for our faith in word and deed even when that witnessing exposes us to the shame and ridicule of Christ on the cross.

And it is in our realization of our dependence upon God – God on the cross, God in the tomb, God raised eternally -- that we become, truly, human: created, chosen, baptized, and redeemed.

Let the people of God say amen.