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.
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