Serpents and Tempters: Outer Signs of Inner Realities
February 26, 2023- Lent 1 RCL- Year A
Many multiples of three years ago, it was the first Sunday of Lent in Children’s Chapel. I had not gotten three sentences into the gospel story before I was interrupted. Miss Jane!! She said it with all the scandal a five-year-old can muster. Miss Jane. We don’t say that word here. They say that word at my grandma’s church. They say that word at grandma’s church a lot. But we don’t say that word here at OUR church. Yet there it is today in the Gospel, and the litany and the collect. That thing which apparently we must not name is face-to-face with Jesus; and with you and me.
The young girl was right. I want to skip over it. Speak of accusers, agents of the powers that be. Why is there this twinge of fear that I am summoning Beetlejuice or Voldemort or Rumplestiltskin? Why am I lured by silence when I know that evil and sin are as real as the ground beneath our feet? I can see that it is violent and sly and enmeshed all around us. Yet she was right. Many of us don’t like to say those names.
In the original Hebrew, satan is a verb that evolves into a noun, and then a name. The Hebrew verb means to “obstruct or oppose.” In the era when Jesus lived there were folktales, not Scripture, fantasy stories about angelic beings in heavenly courtroom dramas, with the one who challenges God’s sovereignty. This challenger is the Satan, the devil, The Oppose-r. In our lesson today they appear. Jesus weakened by the wilderness, is greeted by this Tempter, this devil. Their debate looks like ancient rabbinical duels. This devil dares Jesus to accept the way things work in this world, you are here man, go ahead, give in to the seduction, embrace the circus, the sideshow, the easy way out. Come on Jesus, everybody does it.
The fracture of Eden wasn’t birds and the bees or the advent of death. This gorgeous and monstrously misused text doesn’t say any of those things. What it does explore is how we are the glory of creation, and tragically, also the biggest problem that we know of. This story asks everyday questions, such as why are we troubled and shameful and anxious in the context of such beauty and love? As part of those children’s chapels we used a coloring page to tell the story. And every year when it came in, the tempter was drawn as human-y with a tail and horns. And I would very carefully white those extras out. That school mascot imagery is much later – it doesn’t belong in the text. And more importantly, I don’t know many people who would say out loud that their devils and satans and tempters are anything but human-y.
The serpent of our first lesson isn’t some alien demoness come to destroy paradise. The serpent is the monster inside of us, the part that wants things easy, undemanding, and self-serving. What if the serpent is an outer expression of the inner wrestling between sin and virtue,a sort of sacramental-y outer sign of an inner reality? What if the snake is our misused powers given flesh and eyes and teeth? What if this devil is Jesus’ inner argument between divine graciousness and human selfishness? If your inner struggle with sinfulness could be a creature in front of you, what would your greed demon look like? Or an apathy monster?
The church calendar runs in three year cycles, and so we are back at the lessons before everything changed in 2020. The pandemic was already raging in Asia and Europe, starting to alarm officials in West Coast cities here. As we look back – it exposed so many of our inner demons. Some of them lept up in front of us and we slayed them, others we gave a sloppy kiss and big hug and hurled them at the most vulnerable. Three years later I find it harder to tell the difference between lazy and exhaustion, between being angry just to feel the fire and being righteously angry at my allegiance with evil. Tempters, satans, serpents, sins, evil: are never just an isolated problem, they do not stay on the inside.
So – I invite you today to try burying an outer sign of your inner reality with our Lenten Blooming Cross. In the back of the nave is the cross with its boxes of sins and temptations: and there you will find these paper flowers. I invite you to take one, and drop it in a box on the cross. Think of them as seeds to be planted, as a way to put our sins and tempters, our turns away from God, into the ground, as a prayer that they can grow into the virtues they are intended to be.
We are both the promise and the problem of Creation. Eden and our loss of it isn’t about a place a long long time ago. It is about the current state of our lives and our world. We are still in the Garden, but the monsters and idols and devils we feed make this feel like a losing battle. The notion that we don’t say those words around here enough only deepens the power of the opposition. To live into the hope peace and compassion of Jesus we are called every year to walk honest solemn way of Lent. The summons of this season could be 2 questions. How will we face our satans and crafty devils? And how face-to-face with God, will we smash them into dust?