The serpent uncoils on my ears this morning, inviting me to wander in God’s garden.
I wonder if church makes us better people.
I truly wonder about this.
This question arises, I suppose, out of my background as a therapist, a vocation that attempts to remedy human suffering by helping humans grow, helping them be better humans, helping them be who God created them to be. As a therapist I merely tried to help – I obviously did not accomplish the improvement myself, if it even happened. I would give people ideas, insights, and tools, but ultimately the best help I could give someone who wants to suffer less and both feel and act better was to listen with understanding and care. The relationship between client and therapist is always the best indication of how helpful therapy will be.
I have not seen a client in psychotherapy for nearly six years, but I find that I want my priestly vocation to help people get better, too. You can’t take the therapist out of me, it seems. (And I personally continue to go to therapy, under the assumption that the person I know who is most in need of improvement is myself.) I want church to be, well, therapeutic. I want this to be a laboratory where we work on ourselves, for the sake of our neighbors, and for the sake of one another. I suspect our relationships with one another will, like they do in therapy, determine much of the progress we might make at being better humans.
But formation in the Christian way doesn’t just make us kinder or healthier: it improves us into people who take better care of our neighborhoods, who heal the land around and underneath us, who radiate outward God’s transforming love. Again — I’ve said this twice now in just this half week — life with Christ is not a health kick. “Getting better” as Christ’s Body may break us before we grow, and it always will direct us beyond ourselves, often at our own cost. If it’s therapeutic, it’s a provocative, challenging course of therapy.
This brings me to God’s question which rings in my ears as the ultimate therapy question, an excellent question to ask when someone has tried to get better and perhaps failed, or when someone at the very least has moved – they clearly have developed and grown, for good or ill. God asks the question, and it sounds down the ages. This question eternally reverberates among the trees of God’s garden. If we quiet our minds and soothe our anxious hearts, we can hear God asking us this question, even now. God asks:
Where are you?
God first asks Adam, Ha Adahm, “the man,” where he is. This leads me to notice that when the serpent confronts Eve, Chava, Ha Isháh, “the woman,” Adam seems to be offstage, somewhere else, not there with her, let alone there for her. Where did he go? So if church is a place where we become better people, then those of us who are men could notice how we fail to show up, or do less than our share of the emotional labor, or (as in this conversation with God) we resist holding ourselves accountable for our part in a thing. “Where are you?” can be an uncomfortable challenge for men. Maybe that’s why God asks us first.
But it is asked of all of us. Here might be some contexts for the question in our own day, beginning with this Genesis text itself:
Even now, millennia after this story emerged in the ancient Near East, the human encounter with God in Genesis 3 is misappropriated to condemn women as the so-called “weaker sex,” or identify in women more than men the culpability everyone shares in the wrongdoing of all human beings, even when the responsibility for most of our atrocities may frequently lie with men.
Where are you? God asks us, regarding misogyny (and transphobia, and all the different ways sexism and gender politics damage human beings). Are we speaking and enacting a true and inspired anti-sexist interpretation of scripture, in all we say and do, in how we behave in the ethical arena, in all our words and choices and actions in a world so damaged by patriarchy?
Here’s another one, moving beyond Genesis but staying with the Bible: Even today, after decades of better biblical scholarship, many Christians compare Jesus — and with him, Christianity — favorably to the Jewish people and Judaism, ignoring the fact that Jesus of Nazareth was Jewish, and that his responses to the Accuser in the wilderness express the best virtues and insights of a faithful Jew of his time. His responses to the Accuser align him with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who walks in the garden at the time of the evening breeze. In all that he says and does in this wilderness encounter, Jesus carries within himself God’s fruitful garden into the wasteland of the Negev desert. All of this flows from a Jewish person in the Jewish tradition.
Where are you? God asks us, regarding the shameful legacy of antisemitism. Are we standing alongside our cousins in the faith, the Jewish people, and alongside all who are mistreated or attacked for their identity or beliefs, or their ethnicity or nationality or race? (And yes, this includes Palestinians.) Do we confess the historical atrocities committed in Christ’s name, and acknowledge how our own beloved faith can be distorted and weaponized? And do we actively resolve to do better, be better, and witness to the true Gospel of the One who came to bring peace and justice to the earth?
And here’s another one, closer to home. The housing crisis in Seattle has damaged this neighborhood very badly, forcing many of our neighbors into the vicious cycle of poverty, illness, and homelessness.
Where are you? God asks us, here on 15 Roy Street. Are we taking up the cause in ways small and large, sharing the load, translating our own prayers for those in need into prayerful actions? Even those of us who can’t directly take action on the street can share information, join the conversation, be informed voters, and encourage those who are better able to wear out their shoes.
And here’s one more, to bring everything together. God’s dominion dawns in a multitude of different ways. We can be stewards of our family relationships; we can build good friendships; we can be good neighbors and ministry partners; we can be prudent with our financial blessings, yet we can be generous, too; we can walk lightly on the earth; we can acknowledge those who lived on this land before us, and be good allies of their descendants who still live here; we can notice how we talk to one another, and to the stranger, and work on being better communicators, more faithful and kind companions. There are countless ways to grow and flourish in the dominion of God.
Where are you? God asks us, in light of all these good things. Are we interested in taking up this fruitful and life-giving work, even if it challenges and changes us? What might be one thing you want to do this Lent, to step more intentionally into God’s graceful dominion?
Many of these may sound daunting, and truthfully they are impossible when we attempt them alone. Always, always, always we are taught that our faith is communal, that we are in this together, that God’s question really is Where are y’all?
And take heart: we have food and drink to nourish and strengthen us for the work. This food is given to us by Christ himself, the New Ha Adahm, the New Human Person, the One who says Yes to God and becomes our forbear, our Savior, our friend. When Jesus finished responding to the Accuser, God’s messengers came and waited on him — “waited on him” is an English phrase for the ministry of diakonia, the root of the word “deacon,” which means ‘servant.’ The angels served Jesus. Jesus, in turn, is our great High Priest but also our Deacon, serving us a meal of his own self, which we take into ourselves, and depart from here as Christ’s Body in the world.
And so, finally, when God asks, “Where are y’all?”, we can reply, “Here we are. We are your people, fed and nourished by you, ready and willing to help each other and go out to be deacons in the world.”
And when we go out into this world, nourished and sent by Jesus, then we will find ourselves not in a wretched wasteland, but in a lush garden, trees laden with fruit that will feed all who hunger, and we will turn to find God walking alongside us at the time of the evening breeze.
***
Preached on the First Sunday in Lent (Year A), February 26, 2023, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.
Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-13 (verses added to the RCL pericope)
Psalm 32
Romans 5:12-19
Matthew 4:1-11