Sermon: On not settling for knowledge alone

It hardly seems yesterday that we were celebrating the incarnation of Jesus Christ, in fact the season of the incarnation only ended on 2^nd February with the feast of the Presentation of Christ in the temple, and four days later, before we had time to catch our breath, it was Ash Wednesday. Last week the Dean told us that the last time Lent started this early was 1913 and it will not happen again until 2160, so this is a once in 247 year opportunity for all of us to be pulled up short by the juxtaposition of the joy and celebration of Christmas and Epiphany with the solemnity and discipline of Lent.

Sometimes I think of the church year as a rollercoaster ride and this year it seems a particularly good image. At times we are on a high with wonderful views, at other times we are grinding slowly uphill wondering if we'll ever enjoy the ride again. If Christmas is a ride on the crest of the rollercoaster, I suggest that Ash Wednesday is one of those days when we lose our stomach as we crash to ground and scream with terror. Perhaps we should scream at our sin a little more often?

Anyway, on this first Sunday in Lent we have a long uphill haul ahead of us until Palm Sunday, Holy Week and then the sudden joy of Easter day. The Collects for Ash Wednesday and today remind us that Lent requires us to take a health check on our sin and wretchedness, and to commit ourselves to a disciplined approach to life.

Genesis 1-11 is one of my favourite parts of the bible. I love the vivid stories which are crammed with theology about God and God's world. The church has lost too much sleep over whether we take them as literal history or not and completely missed the point that they are stories that embody profound theology that sets the scene for the rest of the biblical story.

So we have God setting the man in the Garden of Eden and telling him to till and keep it. The man can eat anything in the garden except from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. No explanation is given as to why this should be. Later the crafty serpent throws doubts into the woman's mind, "did God say, you shall not eat from any tree in the garden?" to which the answer should have been "no", because God did not say that. But it suits the serpent's purpose to make God's command seem harsher than it was, and the woman falls for it because in correcting the serpent's sweeping statement she adds that they may not even touch the tree, something else God had not said. And the serpent seizes the opportunity to cast aspersions on God's intentions: "You will not die, for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." Mean old God is lying to you, because he wants to keep you ignorance and stop you being like him.

And as we know, the woman sees that the tree is good for food, good to look at and to be desired to make her wise. So they eat. But Genesis tells us that what she gets is not wisdom, but knowledge, and they are subtly different things. One description is that wisdom is knowledge coupled with the love of God, but here it is uncoupled - they have disobeyed God rather than loved him, and the result is knowledge of their nakedness rather than wisdom. We have struggled with having knowledge rather than wisdom ever since - there is profound truth in that simple bit of the Genesis story. University students and teachers, take note.

Told like this, the story suggests that God has set the rules almost in a cavalier way, no reason is given for the restriction on their actions. But if we look earlier in chapter 2 we get a bigger theological picture. This account of creation was written down in the period of the monarchy in Israel, about 1000 BC when the people lived in the hill country around Jerusalem, on rugged land that is not hospitable for crops unless you really work the land. And so it is interesting to see how the story teller of Genesis paints the picture of creation. Unlike the separate and later creation story in Genesis 1 where God speaks and things come to be, in this story God is the gardener - God gets his fingernails dirty, forming man from the dust of the ground, planting a garden in Eden, making things grow, watering it all. In the context of life in the hill country where farming is hard work, what is every farmer's dream world? A garden where the gruelling work is already done, where God has done the clearing and planting and watering and all they have to do is move in and look after things. And Genesis 2 tells us that God has done just that, God has given them not only a garden but a hoed and watered garden where trees already grow and they don't have to break their backs doing it. It's heaven on earth for a hill farmer.

That is the theological context - God has put the man and the woman in a very good garden, where everything is under control, where they can freely eat of anything except one tree. God's purposes and provision for them are as good as they can possibly be. And the reason for the one restriction is not so that God can keep the upper hand but to prevent them dying. Seen in that light, we can see just how the serpent twisted the goodness of God, making God seem a power-hungry dictator.

And the tempter has been doing that ever since, twisting the words of God very subtly so that we get the wrong end of the stick. We heard another attempt in the gospel where the tempter quotes scripture at Jesus, trying to get him to misinterpret it, taking it out of context, tempting Jesus to tempt God, claiming power for himself that is rightly God's. So often temptation in our lives comes through what is, on the face of it, good and religious, making us feel hard done by, called to worship a god who does not have our real interests at heart. It's lies, all lies.

I wrote this sermon before the press this week proved to us, yet again, the wisdom that is embedded in the Genesis story. What havoc can be wreaked when we make banner headlines out of what someone has not said, and then tempt others to over-react to an embellished and distorted version of the facts. This morning I read Rowan Williams' speech and I need to go back to it to grasp it since it is so multi-textured, so I am not going to comment on it except to say that as a nation it has confronted us with our lack of wisdom, and what have we done? we've fallen hook, line and sinker for exactly the same temptation that Eve faced: to let other people who have their reasons for stirring up controversy and trouble feed us a version of the story that suits their purposes, rather than finding out for ourselves what was said and then engage with wisdom with the very serious and complex issues of life in God's world. Just like Eve who in the story let the serpent exaggerate what God had said, we have let the press do the same. As a church and a nation and the press we have all sold ourselves short this week: we are called to and capable of the pursuit of wisdom, God's wisdom. Thank God that Jesus withstood the same basic temptation when it was presented to him.

The press has not reported the last two sentences of the Archbishop's speech. Referring to the paradoxical ideas he has been discussing, he concluded, "...theology still waits for us around the corner of these debates, however hard our culture may try to keep it out. And, as you imagine, I am not going to complain about that." We are called to be theologians in God's world and, far from calling, as some done this week, for the Archbishop's resignation and sending him back to the less headline-grabbing world of academia, which would only drive a further wedge between wisdom and academic knowledge, we need to pursue wisdom which means engaging with God in the issues facing our world. Thank God for people like him who can address these complex issues; we should not be surprised if they are difficult to understand at times. The author of 2 Peter admitted to finding some things Paul wrote hard to understand and that some ignorant and unstable people twisted his words. Nothing has changed.

We are called to be theologians in God's world, and the challenge we face at the beginning of Lent which falls so close to the Christmas season is how we are going to hold in creative theological tension the sense of the sheer goodness of God to us that we celebrated until last week and see in Genesis 2 with the call to discipline ourselves during Lent that we prayed about in today's collect. How are we going to keep a holy Lent in which we pray for God to create and make in us new and contrite hearts? In which we face our sins and our wretchedness, and yet also know that we worship a God to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hidden. God knows all about us, Lent is a time for us to get to know ourselves a bit better, and also to get to know the goodness and love of God a bit better too.

If you are anything like me, it is probably a lot easier for you to see what is wrong with the world, with others, with yourself, than to see what is good. And Lent is a time for discipline, for taking stock of where things are, dealing with what is amiss. But that can only be done in a godly way if we also have a strong sense of the goodness of God in which we are held. God knows all about us, we are coming late to the knowledge of ourselves. The man and the woman discovered, through their disobedience, that they were naked and they tried to cover themselves up. Later in the story God comes looking for them, calls out to them, faces them with the truth about what they have done and its consequences but also provides for them. Incidentally, God also drives them out of the garden so that they don't go one further and eat of the tree of life and live for ever in this state of sin and punishment. God in his goodness protects them from even worse - and at the end of the bible in the book of Revelation we encounter this tree of life again, for the healing of the nations. God's purposes are quite marvellous.

In Lent the church faces us with our shortcomings and names them as sin and wretchedness and weakness. We need to be honest about ourselves. But we also need to be honest about God, and to learn not to get things out of perspective so that we miss the goodness and love of God in the midst of the discipline and discipleship. For those for whom life is good at the moment, Lent can be a useful time of training for the harder times, six weeks of intentional discipline. But if life is tough at the moment, perhaps Lent can be a time when you can focus on the goodness of God. Jesus' first temptation was to fear that God would not provide the food he needed, and he answered it by keeping his eyes on God's provision of much more than just bread.

So, as we begin Lent, what do you need to do to answer your part of the prayer we prayed, "Give us grace to discipline ourselves in obedience to your Spirit, and as you know our weakness, so may we know your power to save."? On Ash Wednesday plummeted to the ground, worthily lamenting our sins, but we need to move on. We are called to take up our cross and follow Jesus, to set out as disciples of a crucified and risen Lord and in closing, I offer you another picture that might help as we begin the long and deliberate ascent of Lent. It is not a roller coaster but a ladder.

Each month the Cathedral Chapter meeting begins with a reading from the Rule of St Benedict. In January the set reading was from chapter 7 of the Rule, on humility. Benedict, who is referring to Jacob's dream in Genesis 28 of a ladder upon which angels are ascending and descending, says, "Without doubt, this descent and ascent can signify only that we descend by exaltation and ascend by humility.  ... We may call our body and soul the sides of this ladder, into which our divine vocation has fitted the various steps of humility and discipline as we ascend." Two things stuck me from this as I heard it, first the profoundly countercultural assertion that "we descend by exaltation and ascend by humility" (tell that to the politicians and pop stars) and second the description of God fitting into the ladder of our lives the various steps of humility and discipline as we ascend. Lent is about climbing step by step up those steps of humility and discipline as we pursue wisdom not mere knowledge, following Jesus of whom the early church sang, "he did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited but emptied himself taking the form of a servant... therefore God highly exalted him". This Lent, as Benedict reminds us, we ascend by humility. As we keep the cross in mind, may you pursue wisdom and have a holy and humble Lent. Amen.