Sermons
10th Feb 2008 - Lent 1
The Lent book we are studying this year reminded me of one of my favourite cartoons. It is a drawing of the garden of Eden, with the wily serpent curled around the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, whispering to Eve ‘Play your cards right and I’ll get you onto page three of the Bible’. And on almost every Bible that is where you will find her, tempted by the fruit dangling from the tree and by all that it offers her and Adam, and beguiled by the serpent into that little slip which is the fall of mankind: the happy fault which starts the story off and which will necessitate the hero’s arrival towards the end. A second Eve will be needed to usher in the second Adam who can put everything right again. The expulsion from the garden of Eden sets in train the building of that other paradisal garden, the one where the rule of sin and death which entered the world at the fall, can be overthrown again.
Often when things go badly wrong we tend to think ‘if only’. If only the serpent hadn’t been so crafty, if only Eve had been a bit more stiff upper lip with that rotten snake etc etc. But we need to look a bit more closely at what actually tempts Eve, what her motives are, because in unpicking that a little bit we might learn to examine our own motives a little more closely and perhaps with a little more forgiveness for ourselves and for others when things do go wrong. And I hope it may also give us a few pointers into how we are to motivate ourselves in general as Christian people and in particular through these four weeks where as a church we are looking into how we support our life together here. The theme of this week’s display and prayer card is ‘Motives: why should support for the church be a priority’. That may seem rather a long way from Eden, but what the story of Adam and Eve teaches us is something about the universal patterning of human motivation, the answer to the question ‘why shouldn’t I?’.
The story of the fall is one that speaks of mankind having to grow into an uncomfortable maturity. In the first part of today’s Old Testament reading Adam is solitary and it is to Adam that God gives the beguiling command not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Anyone who has children will know that the strongest encouragement one can give them to any action is to forbid it, it gives the activity a sheen of glamour and interest, it conjures up the questions ‘why not?’, and ‘what if I try it when they are not looking?’ and so on. There are some who would argue that this sense of the allure of the forbidden remains with us very strongly as adults and it is in subduing that sense of wanting to cross the forbidden line that we escape moral anarchy. So God doesn’t seem to know this creature Adam that he has just made very well, and not only does he point out the forbidden fruit, he goes on to create the companion for the man who will facilitate the transgression.
Admittedly Adam has to put up with God making all the animals first and having to give them names but once God really gets moving and makes the woman as Adam’s equal there is a dramatic change in relationship effected between God and the man. The animals were all very well but Adam is very pleased indeed with the new creation from his spare rib and in beginning to have eyes only for her he begins to take his eyes off God. And Eve’s motives for taking the fruit are both reasonable and mixed – an excellent illustration of the motives of succeeding generations of mankind. Eve sees the tree is good for food, a delight to the eyes, and capable of imparting wisdom; reasonable motives – food is a necessity, beauty is a delight and wisdom is to be treasured but also mixed motives; she is aware of the banning order, they already have enough food, and it is her pride that makes her seek a wisdom God had said is unnecessary and dangerous. The journey to maturation has begun. It is a journey that will lead to alienation from God, expulsion from the garden, a knowledge of mortality, and a loss of that infantile state of innocence that was happy with its own nakedness. But on the plus side Adam and Eve grow in knowledge of each other, they learn why their bodies fit together in such a satisfactory way, and they start to take up the role that each of us has to face as adults steering our way through the moral and theological minefields of what it means to be a creature loved by God and created in his image yet ever falling short of his purposes for us, tending always to feel a pull to feed our baser desires.
In the story of Adam and Eve we are shown that attaining any sort of maturity is going to come at a great price and will always be an unfinished project. We perhaps might characterise that maturity as having elements of common sense, appropriate judgement, awareness of the moral complexities of life, a consciousness of our own mortality and of the biological demands our reproductive systems urge us towards. But even if we manage some combination of those factors from time to time, actually our maturation process as humans can only go so far. We cannot really ever understand the deepest mysteries of our existence, the wonder of consciousness, the problems of evil and suffering, the quixotic ways in which life and death succeed upon one another. We grow up enough to regulate our activities and to regulate society successfully sometimes, but we are working with flawed material, as soon as one bit of the picture starts to look good another bit goes out of focus, we have occasional moral success at a personal and national level but it is short lived and life is lived with the constant knowledge that we are only as good as our last moral act. We know enough to contemplate our own death but not enough to prevent it.
So this situation we find ourselves in, between the paradisal garden in which Eve for mixed motives takes the forbidden fruit and the paradisal garden at the end of all things where the second Adam will be known in all his redeeming fullness, in this in-between time our duty as Christians is to trust in God and to give thanks to him for all the joy and fruitfulness that we experience in our lives. In the fleeting moment that is a human life we have somehow in the midst of all that there is to do place our trust and commitment in God and not ourselves, in his eternity and not our finitude. And that commitment to God needs to expressed not only in the way in which we worship and pray together and the ways in which we try to love one another and all those whom we meet, but that commitment and trust in God must also be expressed in a mature and generous support of one another in the practical matters of running the operation known as St Andrew’s, Fulham Fields. We alone are responsible for keeping alive the message of God’s love in this place, for heating and lighting this building, for paying our bills, for making sure we are not a burden to other churches by supporting ministry through the diocese. In all our financial thinking we have to adopt a mature reflective prayerful attitude. An attitude that is realistic about what is needed to promote the gospel in this place, and an attitude which is serious about making a sacrificial commitment to supporting those needs. Our motives then are ones of thankfulness for the gifts that God enables us to enjoy and of delight and duty in furthering the work of the gospel in this place. If we are flourishing financially as individuals that is the result of using the talents and capabilities that God has given us. But we are not just individuals here, we are one body, so each of us must consider how our own commitment to the one body is calculated. In the next few weeks we will be looking at a lot of the practical matters surrounding funding what is a rapidly growing church with an ever–expanding range of activities but today from the point of view of motives I would encourage you to ponder on the word commitment. If you are committed to the truth of the gospel, you should make that commitment clear in how you support the church. If you are committed to the activities and ethos of this church and these people all around you then you need to express that commitment financially. Between the garden of Eden and the garden of Heaven we live our lives ever seeking to gain a little maturity in the midst of all our sinful possessive desires, one of the practical ways in which we can battle those sinful possessive desires is by making sure we have taken the practical steps needed to offer sacrificial financial support to the church. If your financial support of the church isn’t hurting your wallet a bit, it is time to think again