Obstacles to Grace: Envy

1 Samuel 18:5-9; James 3:13-18

March 30, 2011

Do you look good in green? Kermit the Frog does. The Irish, they of the “Emerald Isle,” love their green, especially on St. Patrick’s Day. Green is the color of environmental responsibility: Reuse, Reduce, Recycle. Kermit the Frog, St. Patrick’s Day, environmental responsibility. What’s not to love about green?

Unless green is the color of your complexion, and then you are not feeling well at all. Unless green is the color of the sky, and then we’re talking tornado time. Unless the grass of your neighbor’s lawn is greener than yours is, and then we’re talking envy. I love a green, green lawn all year long. That’s why at our house we still grow fescue instead of bermuda or zoysia, which would make a lot more sense in South Carolina. I want a green lawn all year long because I want the grass to be greener on my side of the fence. To envy—or to desire to be the object of envy—is an insidious and ugly obstacle to grace.

Frederick Buechner calls envy “the consuming desire to have everybody as unsuccessful as you are.” Dorothy Sayers says, “Envy is the great leveller. If it cannot level things up, it will level things down.” Let’s look at how envy works.

In the Old Testament book of 1 Samuel, King Saul and the young warrior David were allies in arms against the Philistines. Saul welcomed David into his own home, and in the service of Saul “David went out and was successful wherever Saul sent him; as a result, Saul set him over the army.” But one day, something changed in Saul. It happened, we are told, “when the women came out of all the towns of Israel, singing and dancing, to meet King Saul.” But when they met King Saul, listen to what they sang: “Saul has killed his thousands, and David his ten thousands.” Hmmm. That’s when the screw of envy turned in Saul. Saul became “very angry. . . . He said, ‘They have ascribed to David ten thousands, [but] to me they have ascribed [only] thousands. . . .’ So Saul eyed David from that day on.” “Saul eyed David” (1 Samuel 18:5-9).

On one level, envy is a sin of the eye. It is an optical and perceptual flaw by which we objectify others on account of what they have that we perceive ourselves to lack. On a deeper level though, envy is not in the eye at all. Envy is rooted in our deepest insecurity and discontent with ourselves. Envy is an expression of the most anxious place in our self and our self-image.

Consider this. Saul didn’t envy David for his shepherding or for his harp playing. He didn’t envy David on account of the love of his son Jonathan for David or on account of the love of his daughter Michal for David. He didn’t even envy David for his military exploits. Saul did fine with David’s success in love and war until the women began to sing; that’s what touched a nerve in Saul’s insecurity and wounded him in his most anxious place. The self-tormenting discontent that is envy always originates in the most insecure and anxious place in each of us.

Preachers don’t envy engineers for their analytical acumen, but another preacher’s deft turn of phrase and the ability to draw a congregation in turns a preacher green. Bankers don’t envy a violinist’s virtuosity. The recent collapse of financial institutions all over our country was driven not by greed as much as it was by the personal and professional insecurity of hollow men consumed by the thought that the other guy had a bigger . . . bank. The billion-dollar business of elective cosmetic surgery is predicated on women’s envy of the size of other women’s . . . lips. Where we are most vulnerable and insecure is where envy grows.

So where do we turn to be healed of our own evil eye?

First, get over it. The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. It’s a scientific fact. In an article published in 1983 titled “‘The Grass is always Greener’: An Ecological Analysis of an Old Aphorism,” James R. Pomerantz showed how optical and perceptual properties of the human eye make a mass of grass at a distance appear greener than grass nearby with its differentiated blades (Perception 12 [1983], 501-502). Of course their grass over there looks greener to you than your grass over here does. It’s an optical and perceptual fact. Don’t torment yourself because your distance from another person’s particulars makes their life look better than it really is up close. Get over it.

Second, no matter how green it is, sooner or later, “the grass withers, the flower fades” (Isaiah 40:8). Perhaps the saddest thing about the endless anguish and self-torment of envy is that it doesn’t even obsess over things that are lasting. There is nothing in the world to envy that does not fail, fall, wither, shrink, or sag sooner or later. Instead of envy, which leads to “disorder and wickedness of every kind,” James 3 says, we set our eyes on “the wisdom from above” that is everything that envy is not: it is “pure . . . peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace for those who make peace” instead of tormenting themselves and others with their envy (James 3:17-18). “Wisdom from above” is lasting; the grass, no matter how green, withers.

Third, stop counting. The most popularly prescribed antidote to envy is “Count your many blessings, name them one by one.” But the problem is that antidote assumes the very same thing that envy does: that your contentment and satisfaction are grounded in how much you have instead of in how good God is. Contrast that popular prescription with the discovery of the apostle Paul who says that at the very place of his greatest insecurity and anxiety—he called it “a thorn in the flesh”—he heard God say to him, “My grace is sufficient for you” (1 Corinthians 12:9). “My grace is sufficient for you.”

Envy is an obstacle to grace precisely because it denies the goodness of God that that fills our weakness with God’s strength and replaces our insecurity with God’s love when with the Psalmist our “eyes are ever toward the Lord” (Psalm 25:15) instead of roving about looking at whoever we see as having more or bigger or better than we.

The antithesis and the antidote to envy is not in adding up our blessings but in letting go of our insecurities and anxieties. It’s expressed in one of the most overlooked psalms in the entire Psalter, the quiet and unassuming Psalm 131. It’s overlooked because it runs counter to our cultural obsession with more, bigger, better. Psalm 131 reads, “O Lord, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me. But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother.” Satisfied, content, calmed, and quieted. “O Lord, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high.”

Satisfied, content, calmed, and quieted. Centered, not in how much you have but in how good God is.

Photo by Timo, used under license of Creative Commons.

This material is Copyrighted © 2011 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeff.rogers@firstbaptistgreenville.com.

An Old Testament Lenten Journey: Why Did You Bring Us Out?

Exodus 17:1-7 Third Sunday in Lent 2011

“Why?” More often than not, it is an unanswerable question: “Why?” From a three-year old’s incessant refrain, “Why?” “Why?” “Why?” to the more substantive and troubled inquiry of an adult: “Why?”

That's Rebekkah’s question in Genesis 25:22 during a difficult pregnancy: “If it is to be this way, why do I live?” I’ve heard a woman or two speak that way. It was Moses’s question to God in Numbers 11:11: “Why have you treated your servant so badly? Why have I not found favor in your sight, that you lay the burden of all this people on me?” That’s the perennial question of pastors and preachers when they go into their closet to pray. The prophet Jeremiah laments, “Why did I come forth from the womb to see toil and sorrow, and spend my days in shame?” (Jeremiah 20:18). I’ve heard that voice of depression and despair a time or two, have you? The Psalms are full of “Why?’s”. Why, O Lord, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?” That’s Psalm Ps 10:1. And then there’s the famous beginning of Psalm 22, that Jesus quotes from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?” More often than not, it is an unanswerable question: “Why?”

The Israelites ask, “Why?” in the wilderness in verse 3 of this morning’s Old Testament Lesson from the Revised Common Lectionary: “Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and our livestock by thirst?” This is not the only time the Israelites ask “Why?” on their journey in the wilderness. They ask it again in Numbers 11:20: “Why did we ever leave Egypt?” And in Numbers 14:3: “Why is the Lord bringing us into this land to fall by the sword?” And in Numbers 20:5: “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to this wretched place?”

Professors and preachers alike routinely ridicule and even condemn the Israelites on their journey when they ask “Why?” My friend and mentor, John Durham, in his commentary on Exodus, calls this passage a story of a “rebellion born of doubt” (WBC, Exodus, p. 232) as the Israelites engage in “doubting . . . what should be undoubtable” (p. 230): the presence and provision of God on their journey. A momentary exposure to thirst—a short-term shortfall—causes them to become disaffected and to grumble about Moses leadership and the Lord’s provision. So the name of the place is remembered in v 7 as “Massah (Testing) and Meribah (Dissatisfaction)” (p. 228). “Is the Lord present with us or not?” the Israelites ask when they get thirsty.

Durham says that to ask that question at all is scandalous. It is as though God’s mighty acts in Egypt had never occurred; as though the Israelites’ deliverance from bondage and slavery had not happened; as though their rescue at the sea was forgotten; as though their guidance in the wilderness by a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night had gone unnoticed; as though the manna—bread from heaven—that they were eating daily counted for nothing. It is as though the very fact that they were alive and free, they and their children and their livestock, were not in itself evidence enough that the Lord is present with them. A little thirst, a short-term shortfall, an anxiety or uncertainty or fear of any sort causes them—and us—to doubt the undoubtable: God’s presence and provision.

The larger biblical tradition remembers this incident of quarreling and complaining in the wilderness as a turning point—a breaking point of a sort—in the Lord’s relationship with Israel. Listen to the ancient call to worship in Psalm 95, part of which served as our opening sentences for worship here this morning: “O come, let us worship and bow down, let us kneel before the Lord our Maker! For the Lord is our God, and we are the people of God’s pasture, and the sheep of God’s hand. O that today you would listen to the Lord’s voice! Do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah, as on the day at Massah, in the wilderness, when your ancestors tested me, and put me to the proof, though they had seen my work. For forty years I loathed that generation and said, ‘They are a people whose hearts go astray, and they do not regard my ways.’ Therefore in my anger I swore, ‘They shall not enter my rest’” (Psalm 95:6-11). The shortfall may be short-term, the anxiety or uncertainty or fear may be passing; but the relational consequences of dissatisfaction and testing can be far-reaching, according to Psalm 95.

It is surely not a coincidence that Psalm 95:8 says, “Do not harden your hearts,” exactly the expression that was used repeatedly of the recalcitrant Pharaoh of Egypt in the book of Exodus whose “heart was hardened” again and again, and we all know how that turned out, in the words of the old spiritual: “Pharaoh’s army got drownded.” The consequences of hardness of heart are far-reaching. For forty years I loathed that complaining and grumbling generation and “Therefore in my anger I swore, ‘They shall not enter my rest,’” said the Lord.

They are easy targets, these Israelites, and so are you and I. Our grumbling and complaining are incessant, as are our disaffection toward our leaders and our doubting of God. To be sure, the priests in the Jerusalem temple in their call to worship in Psalm 95 want none of it; and so they instruct the people, “Do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah, as on the day at Massah, in the wilderness.” The priests know what is at stake here. After all, Psalm 106 says that Meribah was Moses’ downfall. Psalm 106 says that the people “angered the Lord at the waters of Meribah, and it went ill with Moses on their account; for they made his spirit bitter” (vv 32-33).

That’s a reflection of the Meribah story as it is told in the book of Numbers, where “The Lord spoke to Moses, saying:

Take the staff, and assemble the congregation, you and your brother Aaron, and command the rock before their eyes to yield its water. Thus you shall bring water out of the rock for them; thus you shall provide drink for the congregation and their livestock. So Moses took the staff from before the Lord, as he had commanded him. Moses and Aaron gathered the assembly together before the rock, and he said to them, ‘Listen, you rebels, shall we bring water for you out of this rock?’ Then Moses lifted up his hand and struck the rock twice with his staff; water came out abundantly, and the congregation and their livestock drank. But the Lord said to Moses and Aaron, ‘Because you did not trust in me, to show my holiness before the eyes of the Israelites, therefore you shall not bring this assembly into the land that I have given them.’ These are the waters of Meribah, where the people of Israel quarreled with the Lord, and by which he showed his holiness” (Numbers 20:7-13).

Instead of simply commanding the rock to yield its water to show God’s holiness, in a fit of anger, Moses berated the people and struck the rock, and in so doing ruptured his relationship with God. In this version of the Meribah story in Numbers, Aaron the brother of Moses and the ancestor of the priests in Jerusalem is also present and is also excluded from God’s rest on account of what happened there; and Aaron’s successors who are calling the people to worship in Psalm 95 want no part of that kind of trouble on their own time and place.

But let’s look again at what happens in Exodus 17:1-7. What typically gets overlooked by the priests and preachers and professors alike in their ridicule and condemnation of these Israelites is the very fact that in Exodus 17:1-7, in spite of their dissatisfaction and testing, in spite of their quarreling and complaining, in spite of their “doubting what should be undoubtable,” God still provides for the people. When the people complained against Moses, “Why did you put us in this situation of scarcity and discontent?” “Moses cried out to the Lord, ‘What shall I do with this people? They are almost ready to stone me.’ The Lord said to Moses, ‘Go on ahead of the people, and take some of the elders of Israel with you; take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile, and go. I will be standing there in front of you on the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and the water will come out of it, so that the people may drink’” (Exodus 17:4-6). What usually goes curiously unnoticed in this story is that God provides exactly what the people need and ask for. After all, v 1 says, “There was no water for the people to drink”; and v 3 says, “The people thirsted there for water.” And God responded to the people’s cry by giving them exactly what they asked for: water where there was no water. There is in Exodus 17:1-7 a legitimate situation of need; there is a short-term shortfall, a condition of scarcity.

According to the late Brevard Childs, a leading American Old Testament scholar of the twentieth century (who, by the way, was born in Columbia, S.C.), there is a pattern to this story that shows up throughout the wilderness journey of the Israelites. It is a pattern of need, of complaint, of intercession, and of God’s miraculous meeting of that need. That pattern expresses gospel in a nutshell: the Lord provides even for testy and unsatisfiable, quarreling and complaining and doubting people. And when we read this story, instead ridiculing and condemning those Israelites, we should all say together, “Thanks be to God!” “Thanks be to God!”

You see, a fascinating thing about God and about our journey with God is that our disaffection and discontent and doubt does not result in God’s abandonment of us on the journey. God still provides, as God provided in Exodus 17 at Meribah and Massah. What happens, though, is that by allowing ourselves to become over-reactive and to be overcome by our disaffection and discontent and doubt, consumed by anxiety and uncertainty and fear in the face of shortfalls and scarcities, we remove ourselves, we cut ourselves off from “God’s rest.” God had promised the Israelites rest, and they cut themselves off from it and Meribah and Massah.

Jesus calls us to reconnect to God this way: “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). Jesus calls us to quench our deepest thirst with the “living water” (John 4:10) this way: “those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water I will give them will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life” (John 4:14). Our Lenten journey is a coming to Christ in our weariness with our heavy burdens. Our Lenten journey is a coming to Christ in our deepest thirst. Our Lenten journey is a coming to Christ to lay down our disaffection and discontent and doubt, our anxiety and uncertainty and fear that makes us testy and unsatisfiable, quarreling and complaining.

So that even when we are beset by thirst, shortfall, scarcity, uncertainty, and fear, instead of arriving at “Massah (Discontent) and Meribah (Testing)” asking, “Why?” “Why?” “Why?” and asking, “Is the Lord present with us or not?” we arrive instead at a place where we sing, “Great is Thy faithfulness! Great is Thy faithfulness! Morning by morning new mercies I see; All I have needed Thy hand hath provided—“Great is Thy faithfulness,” Lord, unto me!”

Photo from St. Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh, England, by Lawrence OP, used under license of Creative Common.

This material is Copyrighted © 2011 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeff.rogers@firstbaptistgreenville.com.

An Old Testament Lenten Journey: To an Unknown Land

Genesis 12:1-4a
Second Sunday in Lent 2011

One day this past week, I realized that I was humming a familiar tune. It was a song from my childhood, long forgotten, but apparently long remembered also. Once I recognized the tune, I put with it the few words that I could remember: “From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli, we fight our country’s battles in the air, on land and sea.” I have no idea why I learned the United States Marine Corps hymn when I was a child.

The melody is taken, more or less, from an aria in a French comic opera, but it wasn’t the melody that brought it back to mind for me. It was the “shores of Tripoli” that triggered my memory. That’s a reference to the battle of Derne in 1805 during the First Barbary War, the first land battle that U.S. forces ever fought overseas. There were actually only 8 Marines and two navy midshipmen involved in leading a mercenary force of some 400 Arabs, Greeks, and Berbers in an operation that included a 500-mile march across the Libyan desert and a pretty remarkable exercise in interfaith management as the commanding officer worked to keep the Muslims and the Christians in his army on the same side in difficult circumstances.

More than 200 years later, American forces are once again on the shores of Tripoli. Someone will tell me that I’m wrong about that, but if the last fifty years of American military tactics are any indication, there are more American special forces personnel on the ground in Libya this morning than there were marines and midshipmen involved in the battle of Derne in 1805 that has been immortalized in the Marine Corps hymn.

Earthquake, tsunami, nuclear meltdown, the spread of radiation, and new hostilities in North Africa to go with operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. These are heavy times, befitting the season of Lent and the shadow of the cross. For some of us, though, the weight of the season is not grounded in foreign affairs or military actions or tectonic shifts or waves or particles. The weight of our season is closer to home in grief, in guilt, in loss, in illness, in uncertainty, in loneliness, in despair. Some of us don’t need international headlines to weigh us down; we’re carrying our own weight of the world on our shoulders, thank you very much. The words we’re singing aren’t the Marine Corps hymn but “The pathway is broken, the signs are unclear. I don’t know the reason you brought me here,” wherever here may be.

This morning’s Old Testament lesson from Genesis 12 is the second passage in our Old Testament Lenten journey. It marks the beginning of the journey of Abraham and Sarah to an unknown land. To understand the shape of their journey—and our own, we need to understand the place of Genesis 12:1-4 in the book of Genesis. The great German Old Testament scholar and Lutheran pastor Gerhard von Rad saw in the first 12 chapters of the book of Genesis an amazing pattern that he characterized as the increasing visible power of sin and the increasing hidden power of grace. The increasing visible power of sin and the increasing hidden power of grace.

Here’s what von Rad saw. In Genesis 3, you may recall from last week, the first man and the first woman violated the one limitation that God had put on them in creation. In Genesis 2, the Lord God said to the first human, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die” (Genesis 2:16-17). Von Rad points out that when the man and woman sin by violating the one and only commandment in creation (besides “be fruitful and multiply,” but that’s another story), God does not, according to Genesis 3, carry out the death sentence that was hanging over their heads but expels them from the garden instead. Sin entered in, but grace prevailed.

In Genesis 4, the sin in creation escalates to murder when Cain kills his younger brother Abel. But when Cain is sentenced by God to “be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth,” the killer of his brother cries out to God, “My punishment is greater than I can bear! Today you have driven me away from the soil, and I shall be hidden from your face; I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, and anyone who meets me may kill me.” The Lord’s response to Cain is an inexplicable act of grace. “Then the Lord said to [Cain], ‘Not so! Whoever kills Cain will suffer a sevenfold vengeance.’ And the Lord put a mark on Cain, so that no one who came upon him would kill him” (vv 13-15). Instead of allowing the threat of blood vengeance to run its course, the Lord God provided Cain with a protective mark so that no one would kill him. Why? Sin entered in, but grace prevailed.

You may also recall from last week that I said Genesis 6 begins with a strange little piece of ancient folklore about the cohabitation of “sons of God” and the daughters of humans that created a race of legendary hero-warriors (verses 1-4). This disruption of the created order was more than a moral God could stand, and so we read in Genesis 6:7, “the Lord said, ‘I will blot out from the earth the human beings I have created—people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.” But immediately after the divine determination to make an end of all flesh in a creation run amok, the very next verse reads, “But Noah found favor in the sight of the Lord.” So instead of making an end of all flesh, God provided for creation to begin again on the other side of the inundation. Why? Sin entered in, but grace prevailed.

By Genesis 11, the human beings are up to their old tricks and are attempting to become like God by building a temple tower that will reach into the heavens to secure their fame and their future. In Genesis 11:6, God looks out on the situation and says, “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them”—and that means they will have become like God. So the Lord says, “‘Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.’ So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore it was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.” Von Rad points out that finally in Genesis 11, for the first time in creation, God did exactly what God threatened to do in punishment. Destruction and confusion and scattering and alienation are the threat and the penalty, one and the same: “The Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.” This time, there is no amelioration, no grace.

Until the beginning of chapter 12, that is: the journey of Abraham and Sarah. “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. . . . and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12:1,3). The call of Abraham, the theological ancestor of Jews and Christians and Muslims alike, is God’s act of grace that expresses God’s intent that destruction and confusion and scattering and alienation are not God’s will for creation. God’s will for creation is always blessing (Genesis 1:28; 12:4).

Buried in Genesis 12:2 is a small and often overlooked turn of phrase that is at the heart of the journey of Abraham and Sarah. NRSV translates the end of verse 2 this way: “so that you will be a blessing.” But the final phrase in verse 2 is not a result clause at all, as it is usually translated. Instead, weheyeh beraka, as it reads in Hebrew, is an imperative; it’s a command. “As for you,” it says, “be a blessing.” That’s the journey of Abraham and Sarah: to “be a blessing.” Sin enters in, but grace prevails. “In you, all the families of the earth will be blessed.” That’s the journey of the church and of every member of it: “be a blessing.” The apostle Paul wrote, “If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise (Galatians 3:29): “In you, all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” That is your reason for being; that is our reason for being.

That is why whenever we are faced with the weight of the season or the weight of the world either one, when “The pathway is broken, the signs are unclear; I don’t know the reason why you brought me here,” still we sing, “I’m gonna walk through the valley if you want me to.” We don’t know where our journey will take us or when, but the shape of our journey is to “be a blessing.”

Thomas E. Murray, Jr., was a member of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission from 1950-1957. In 1954, Murray published an article titled “Don’t Leave Atomic Energy to the Experts” in a journal called The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. In that article, Murray argued that far too few people in the military, in politics, and in the general public fully understand the implications of nuclear science and technology. “Leaving it to the experts,” as he put it, portends what he called “a tragic price” (February 1954, p. 48). More than a half century later, experts and non-experts all over the world are scrambling to reassess the price of even peaceful uses of nuclear power. But listen to the conclusion of Murray’s article.

“After attending a large-scale nuclear explosion, one can never forget the sudden deafening angry roar of tortured nature as energy escapes, in a fraction of a millionth of a second, from its ancient confinement in matter. [Human beings] too have gigantic energies captive in their minds, needing only the compression of circumstances for release into the most varied forms of human activity. In its highest form, this release of energy joins with God’s grace. . . . What our world needs most now are architects of survival—those blessed peacemakers of the Sermon on the Mount. They exist—just as surely as that energy exists which when released produces the incredibly giant explosions that are now shaking the world” (p. 50).

When Murray calls us to “the gigantic energies . . . of human activity” that “joins with God’s grace,” he is singing Abraham and Sarah’s song singing God’s song: “In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” “Be a blessing!”


Photo of a Tripoli beach at sunset sunset by Faris Haider Al-Ftasy, used under license of Creative Commons.

This material is Copyrighted © 2011 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeff.rogers@firstbaptistgreenville.com.

An Old Testament Lenten Journey: Living with Knowledge

Genesis 2:15-17 and 3:1-7
First Sunday in Lent 2011

Have you ever had an “eye-opening experience”? The kind of experience I have in mind is this. Whether you wanted to or not, you came to know something that you didn’t really need to know. Your life would have been just fine without knowing it; but once you knew it, you couldn’t look at something or someone the same way ever again. Knowing this one thing changed everything. It changed everything about a person or a relationship or a marriage or a family or a workplace or a church or a community. You didn’t really need to know it, but now that you do, there’s no going back. This morning’s Old Testament lesson from the book of Genesis, the first passage in our “Old Testament Lenten journey” is about an “eye-opening experience.” Genesis 3:7 says, “then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew. . . .” They knew.

The story of Adam and Eve doesn’t give us any reason to think anything other than that the first man and the first woman were getting along just swimmingly in the garden of Eden. How could they not have been? They had the whole place to themselves: no in-laws, no outlaws, no laws at all, really, just some simple instructions. They were, no doubt, young and in love, and they were tilling and keeping the garden as they had been created to do without a care in the world. It was paradise, after all, sheer bliss.

“Ignorance is bliss,” they say. In one form or another, it’s an ancient proverb. The Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes or Qohelet as it is known in Hebrew says, “For in much wisdom is much vexation, and those who increase knowledge increase sorrow” (1:18). When I taught the book of Ecclesiastes in my classes at Furman, I would always tell my students that Ecclesiastes 1:18 was the basis of my understanding of my call as a professor: my job was to increase their vexation and their sorrow. And I was pretty good at that. It was the British poet Thomas Gray who in 1742 in a poem titled “On a Distant Prospect of Eton College” put the ancient proverb into the form we have known it in English ever since: “Where ignorance is bliss, ’Tis folly to be wise,” he wrote. “For in much wisdom is much vexation, and those who increase knowledge increase sorrow.”

The first eleven chapters of the book of Genesis are intended to tell us about the nature and meaning and structure of ourselves and of the world in which we live. We usually think of Genesis 1-2 as containing the stories of the creation of the world by God, but chapters 3-11 of the book of Genesis are every bit as much creation stories as Genesis 1-2 are. The creation of the physical world is recounted in the first two chapters of Genesis. And then the next nine chapters narrate the creation of the psychological and social and spiritual and linguistic and demographic world as the ancients new it and understood it to be.

In the beginning was bliss: a man and a woman, God, and a garden. That is, until in Genesis 3, the man and the woman became alienated from themselves and from each other and from God. They fashioned clothing to hide themselves from each other, literally and figuratively; and they even tried to hide from God. By the end of the chapter, they were expelled from the garden to eke out a hard-scrabble existence that was sometimes as much a curse as it is a blessing. Now, that’s more like the world we know than life in the garden of Eden. In Genesis 4, the arrival of the second generation of human beings brings with it violence and estrangement when Adam and Eve’s oldest son Cain murders his younger brother Abel with the result that Cain becomes a marked man and a fugitive for the rest of his life. Now, that’s more like the world we know than life in the garden of Eden.

Then, after a genealogical interlude in Genesis 5, Genesis 6 begins with a strange little piece of ancient folklore about the cohabitation of “sons of God” and the daughters of humans that created a race of legendary hero-warriors (verses 1-4). But more importantly, what was happening in creation created grief for God, according to Genesis 6:5-6, which says, “the Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that the inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry for having made humankind on the earth, and the Lord was grieved in heart.” Talk about “in much wisdom is much vexation, and those who increase knowledge increase sorrow”: God knows vexation; God knows sorrow.

So in chapters 6 through 9 we read of a great flood, as though it were the overwhelming waters of the tears of God in sorrow and grief over how badly psychological and social and spiritual creation was turning out. But even after a new beginning in chapter 9 with a brand new blessing from God and a covenant promise that God would never to do it again, creation is spoiled all over again by Noah’s propensity for drunkenness and the human propensity for enslavement and oppression of one human being by another. Now, that’s more like the world we know than life in the garden of Eden.

Genesis 10 is another genealogical interlude that explains how the human beings dispersed and diversified after the flood into their own lands, with their own language, by their families in their nations. It is only there in Genesis 10 that we finally arrive at a psychological and social and spiritual and linguistic and demographic world that looks anything like the world we live in: diverse peoples in their own lands, with their own language, by their families in their nations. In Genesis 11, the story of the infamous tower of Babel narrates the same development as the judgment of God rather than the multiplication of peoples, but the end result is the same: a world populated by human beings who are spread out and separated and alienated one from another by competing allegiances to land and language and family and nation.

How could it have all gone so wrong from something that started out so right: a man and a woman, God, and a garden? You see, the Lenten journey that we make from Ash Wednesday to Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday in remembrance of the journey to the cross and to the tomb and to the depths of hell that Jesus made began a long, long time ago. It began even in the beginning, as it were, when the goodness of God’s creation was spoiled by an eye-opening experience that changed everything.

And no matter how much you and I might like for things to go back to how they were before our eyes were opened and we knew whatever it is we know now that we wish we didn’t, there is no going back; there is only going forward, living with knowledge.

The younger of my two brothers tells the story of when he was a boy on a sunny afternoon on a back porch in suburban Wilmington, DE, when our quiet and unassuming grandfather explained to him how nuclear fission—the splitting of the atom—works. Then my grandfather drew a simple, clear diagram of an atomic bomb and explained how it worked, all of which was fascinating to my brother. It was only decades later, after my grandfather died, that we began to learn how it happened that this quiet and unassuming man had his eyes opened in the 1920s and the 1930s to atomic chemistry so that by the 1940s he was well prepared and well connected to participate in the one of the greatest advances in science—and warfare—in the twentieth century.

This morning, as the world watches anxiously at the likelihood that nuclear meltdown has already begun in reactors number one and three at the Tokyo Electric Power Company’s Fukushima Daiichi power plant, we are all reminded that human knowledge can be every bit as much a curse as it can be a blessing. On account of thousands of quiet and unassuming people like my grandfather, the Japanese are already more familiar with death by radiation than any other people on the face of the planet. Their history has taught them all too well how scientific advances and competing allegiances—their own and others’—to land and language and family and nation can turn beauty beastly, can turn life deathly, can turn good evil. That’s meltdown. Meltdown is what happens when heat builds up in our reactors, and we don’t cool it down before it releases toxic levels of radiation into the environment around us. We’ve all done it; we’ve all participated in it.

Yesterday afternoon, as Bev and I talked about the repercussions of this morning’s time change to Daylight Savings Time—“spring forward”—on our family, she said, “It’s going to put everybody out of whack.” “Yep,” I said, “it will. But what I’d like to know is when it was that everybody was ‘in whack.’ I must have missed it.” Creation is out of whack; persons are out of whack; families are out of whack; workplaces are out of whack; churches are out of whack; entire communities, economies and nations are out of whack. If the book of Genesis is any indication, it has been that way from early on in the beginning.

And that’s why every year the first stage on our Lenten journey is repentance. Repentance is recognition, confession, and redirection. The first step in repentance is the recognition that we are out of whack, that every one of us is Adam and Eve spoiling the garden for themselves and for everyone else. We have to recognize it for what it is before we can do anything about it. We are all out of whack. Recognition. The second step in repentance is confession, acknowledging to God that we have sinned against God and against others in things we have thought, in things we have said, and in things we have done, and in things we have failed to think and failed to say and failed to do. Confession. And the third step in repentance is redirection: getting back ‘in whack’ with God and neighbor and self. Redirection.

Recognition, confession, and redirection are at the heart of the Lord’s Supper that we share this morning. The vexation and grief that God experiences over creation and the sorrow and suffering that Christ experiences over us come down to this table, to the bread and the cup, in the form of mercy and forgiveness and love that are our only antidotes and our only sustenance for living with knowledge.

“All we like sheep have gone astray, But Christ would shepherd us alway; And for our sins in sorrow weep, Content to suffer for his sheep. Miserere nobis, Lord, have mercy” on us. Lord have mercy on us.


Photo from the Associated Press/NTV Japan via APTN.

This material is Copyrighted © 2011 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeff.rogers@firstbaptistgreenville.com.

Sing, Seek, Remember

1 Chronicles 16:7-13, 31-34
Transfiguration Sunday 2011


Later this morning, during the eleven o’clock hour, the Furman Singers under the direction of Dr. Hugh Floyd will fill this room with glorious music as they lead in worship in this place. And when they do, they will become the successors of “Asaph and his kindred,” as 1 Chronicles 16:7 identifies the singers in Jerusalem who were appointed by King David to lead ancient Israel in the praise and worship of God.

The connection between music and religion is probably as old as music and as old as religion. The book of Job suggests that music is as old as creation itself, as when God “laid the cornerstone” of “the foundation of the earth” and “the morning stars sang together” (Job 38:7). In Genesis 4, there is an ancient folk genealogy of the descendents of Adam and Eve, one of whom is named “Jubal,” “the ancestor of all those who play the lyre and the pipe” (v 21). According to Genesis 4, that is also around the time that people began to call on the name of the Lord (v 26), so even in this ancient folk genealogy, music and religion are not too far apart.

From Genesis to Revelation, the verb “to sing” and the noun “song” occur nearly 250 times. Four of those nearly 250 times are in this morning’s Old Testament lesson from 1 Chronicles 16. The job of “singing praises to the Lord” belonged to Asaph and his kindred, according to verse 7. “Sing” to the Lord, and “Sing praises” to God, says verse 9. And “the trees of the forest sing for joy before the Lord,” says verse 33. It’s a singing-full chapter, actually. “Sing to the Lord, all the earth,” says v 23; and verses 41-42 point out that that those who were chosen and appointed “to render thanks to the Lord. . . . had with them trumpets and cymbals for the music, and instruments for sacred song.” There were harps and lyres also, according to verse 5. There was a whole lot of music going on in the worship that David appointed in Jerusalem.

Not everyone is enamored with music in worship, however. Back in August of 2001, members of the First Baptist diaconate gathered in the Fellowship Hall for an ice-cream social and to share their “Hopes and Dreams” for this congregation. One person at the table at which I was sitting talked about his hopes and dreams for the music ministry at First Baptist, because that was the most important part of the church to him; it was the music that drew him here and the music that kept him here, he said. Three or four persons later, around the table, it was another deacon’s time to speak, and this one said something like this: “You mentioned the music. I have to tell you that if we only sang two verses of two hymns every Sunday morning, and that’s all the music there was, that would be more than enough music for me.” Ah, the “perspectival diversity” of the congregation of First Baptist Greenville! What some of us are most passionate about, others of us can do without entirely!

Listen to what the great Christian thinker and writer C.S. Lewis said about going to church and singing hymns. “My own experience is that when I first became a Christian . . . I thought that I could do it on my own, by retiring to my rooms and reading theology, and I wouldn’t go to the churches and Gospel Halls; and then later I found that it was the only way of flying your flag; and, of course, I found that this meant being a target. It is extraordinary how inconvenient to your family it becomes for you to get up early to go to Church. It doesn’t matter so much if you get up early for anything else, but if you get up early to go to Church it’s very selfish of you and you upset the house. If there is anything in the teaching of the New Testament which is in the nature of a command, it is that you are obliged to take the Sacrament, and you can’t do it without going to Church. I disliked very much their hymns, which I considered to be fifth-rate poems set to sixth-rate music. But as I went on I saw the great merit of it. I came up against different people of quite different outlooks and different education, and then gradually my conceit just began peeling off. I realized that the hymns (which were just sixth-rate music) were, nevertheless, being sung with devotion and benefit by an old saint in elastic-side boots in the opposite pew, and then you realize that you aren’t fit to clean those boots. It gets you out of your solitary conceit” (God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, pp. 61-62).

Lewis never changed his opinion of the literary and musical qualities of church music—he always went to the earliest Sunday morning service at the Anglican church he attended in Oxford in order to avoid the music of the later services. But he admits that he came to recognize “the devotion and benefit” of those “fifth-rate poems set to sixth-rate music.” (By the way, if you stay for 11:00 worship this morning, you will hear the Furman Singers offer first-rate poems by e.e. cummings and John Donne and Christina Rosetti set to first-rate music. C. S. Lewis never had it that good where he went to church in Oxford.) It was in the music that Lewis detested that he discovered the devotion of the “old saint” whose boots he was not “fit to clean.” Music creates that kind of community. Music awakens that kind of harmony. Even for those of us who are not overly fond of it, music draws us out of the dissonance of our solitary conceits into the consonance of the body of Christ, the communion of saints, the cohort of foot-washers, one of another.

In verses 9-10 of 1 Chronicles 16, “singing” to the Lord is connected to “seeking” the strength and presence of the Lord. Many of you know Kyle Matthews’ song “Sing Down” about the Civil Rights-era march from Selma to Montgomery: “The men held hands just to keep from runnin’ as the buckshot whistled past their ears. They had no choice but to raise their voices so the marchin’ songs were all that they could hear. They tried to sing down the dark clouds, choke back the fear; tried to sing down their anger over all the lost years. Tried to sing down the one sound that was most loud and clear: the silence of good people ringing in their ears.” That’s a song about seeking strength and presence in singing that overcomes dissonance and danger by unifying people for whom being committed to a common cause made them a target.

Even for those of us who cannot or will not sing, the singing of the congregation and seeking the strength and presence of the Lord go hand-in-hand. So those of us who can sing and do sing are not singing for ourselves alone. We are singing also for those who cannot or will not, just as the old saint in elastic-side boots in the opposite pew was singing for C. S. Lewis when he could not or would not sing. Those who sing, sing for all for the strength and presence of the Lord.

Singing, seeking, and remembering, according to verse 12. Did you know that clinical studies of Alzheimer’s patients have shown that music can enhance memory recall and improve learning? Those studies have shown that music leads to positive changes in mood and emotional states in Alzheimer’s patients and increased awareness of self and others and the surrounding environment, which can be accompanied by increased emotional intimacy and social interaction with spouses and families and caregivers.

The esteemed neurologist and psychiatrist Dr. Oliver Sacks commented before a Senate Special Committee on Aging, “The power of music very remarkable. . . . One sees Parkinsonian patients unable to walk, but able to dance perfectly well or patients almost unable to talk, who are able to sing perfectly well.” The power of music is very remarkable, indeed. “The wife of a man with severe dementia said, “When I was encouraged by a music therapist to sing to my husband who had been lost in the fog of Alzheimer’s disease for so many years, he looked at me and seemed to recognize me. On the last day of his life, he opened his eyes and looked into mine when I sang his favorite hymn. I’ll always treasure that last moment we shared together. Music therapy gave me that memory, the gift I will never forget” (http://www.musictherapy.org/).

Our singing the praise of God and the glory of God and the works of God and the goodness of God and the steadfast love of God creates memories for the future the shape of which we do not yet know, and it re-calls memories of the past in the present that sustain us in God and with God. The power of music is very remarkable: singing, seeking, and remembering.


This material is Copyrighted © 2011 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeff.rogers@firstbaptistgreenville.com.