A long time ago and far away, I served as Director of Children’s Ministries at another church. One year, we decided to do a children’s Ash Wednesday service where we explained to the children what sin was – so what better way to explain it than with today’s Garden of Eden story from the Old Testament? We wanted to tell the story experientially, so here’s what we did. We set up in the middle of the courtyard a tree – just a branch with no leaves on it, planted in a pot. On the end of each branch of the tree we put a big, fat, juicy, luscious-looking gumdrop. As the children arrived, I greeted them and watched their eyes go straight to the gumdrop tree. They were attracted to it like moths to light. And every time I saw one of them looking at it, I would explain, “No, I’m sorry, you can’t have a gumdrop. It’s against the rules.”
I started telling the Garden of Eden story, but when I got to the part about how God said the man and woman couldn’t eat from the tree, I suddenly “remembered” something I had left inside, and told them I would be back in just a minute to finish the story. While I was gone, of course I had set up someone else to be a “tempter” to tell the children it was all right, they could go ahead and eat the gumdrops.
I came back outside and the first thing I saw was a little boy, his cheeks bulging with gumdrops, a little bit of blue dribbling down his chin. He saw me and pointed at his sister. “She ate some gumdrops!” he accused. I looked at his sister, whose cheeks were also bulging and who had a little bit of red dribbling down her chin, and she pointed at the tempter. “She said I could!” she said.
It was one of the funniest Ash Wednesday experiences ever, and the parents and I could hardly keep from giggling our way through the Imposition of Ashes. If you ever want a hilarious Ash Wednesday service, this is a method you could try. And I have to say, it was one of the best enacted parables I was ever able to achieve in working with children.
However, I’m not sure I would ever do it again. For one thing, the “tempter” wasn’t too happy about being cast as Satan. But the most troubling thing was that we set up the children to fail. We knew their little hearts could not resist temptation. And we put the tree there knowing (hoping) they would eat from it.
Which begs the question: was the whole original biblical Garden of Eden story an elaborate setup by God? Did God create humans with desires, put the very thing in the garden that they desired most, then forbid them to take it? Why would God do this except to find us laughably charming? Except that in the story, God doesn’t seem to find it too laughable – the penalty is death, but he gives the people a stay of execution – banishes them for life, out into the wilderness, where they will spend the rest of their lives toiling, sweating, suffering and longing for what they left behind in the garden. God takes this transgression very, very seriously.
So the question is, what’s going on in this story and what is it saying to us? The first thing we all need to agree on is, this is not intended to be history or science. We Episcopalians agree that Genesis is not intended to provide a scientific or historical account of the origins of the world (in fact, the writers would have been puzzled by our ideas of science and history). What it’s intended to do is to convey to us a deeper truth than that: the truth of who we are as human beings, and what we are intended to be in relation to God.
So let’s listen to a beautiful, true story, and explore what it tells us about ourselves. God has created all that is, and has said it is not just good, but very good. As the crowning achievement, Genesis 1 tells us that God made human beings, male and female, in God’s own image. Genesis 2 then gives us a new wrinkle on this creation of humans. It pictures God doing this creating by taking a handful of dust, forming a little clay doll, then breathing life into it so that it becomes a human. The human is called “Adam”, which means creature of earth, little dust man. Interestingly, our own name human, from the Latin, points out the same relationship – human comes from same root as Humus, soil, and humble. Our very language confirms the truth of what the Bible tells us – we are creatures of dust and earth, made to be rooted in the earth, mortal, humble. We are dust, and to dust we shall return.
Yet God has a special love for the little earth creature, knows that the human should not be alone, and gives the creature a companion. And together, like a couple of teenagers, the two humans get into all kinds of mischief. The humans look at the one thing that has been forbidden to them, and they want it, they crave it, they realize that in this whole beautiful garden where they have everything they need, there is still an empty place deep inside them, a place where they are incomplete, insufficient, insecure. They look at the fruit of that beautiful tree and they suddenly believe that it is the perfect shape to fill up that empty hole, and they take it and eat it.
And why do they do this? The serpent, who is nowhere called Satan, but is instead a creature created by God, a part of nature, you might say a representative of the desires and yearnings of the human heart, gives us the key: he comes to the people and says, "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."
That’s the temptation: first, to believe that they will not die – to forget that they are creatures of dust. Second, to believe that God has set the whole thing up as some kind of purposeless test (“God knows”), to be violated at will. In other words, God, like me in my pretend garden years ago, is not trustworthy. And third, in their failure to trust God, they believe they can be like God.
Our mysterious human desire, the forbidden fruit that we may not grasp yet continually reach out for, the thing that we believe will fill the empty place in our hearts, is our desire to put ourselves and other things in place of God . In the garden, Adam and Eve have forgotten who they are and whose they are. And we too want to forget that we are humans, little dust creatures who will one day return to the dust we came from. We want to deny our own identity. We want to make ourselves gods, and we believe we can do it – we can stand on our own two feet – we have no need of God.
But surely this week of all weeks should remind us of our own dustiness. In the church, we come down rapidly from the mountain of the Transfiguration that we climbed the last Sunday of Epiphany, our faces still glowing from Christ’s glorious reflected light, straight down into the dry, dusty valley of Lent, as we are reminded Ash Wednesday that we are dust and to dust we shall return. And if we had any question of that, we need only to read the news – another terrible earthquake and tsunami in Japan, an advanced industrial country whose people were helpless in the face of forces of nature beyond our control. We think we can control the world around us, sitting in 72-degree comfort year-round, with our world lit up day and night, every comfort available to us, never hungry, never thirsty, able to reach out anytime for any luxury we desire. Yet videos of cars, trucks and ships slamming into buildings like specks of dust, advanced nuclear power plants exploding from too-hot water vapor, extremely well-built earthquake-resistant buildings collapsing nevertheless, should surely convince of us our own dustiness, our smallness, our mortality.
The great truth of our human existence is that we are not immortal, we are not like gods, we are dust – and yet our salvation lies in that very realization. Because as we realize our own mortality, we begin to understand that on our own we are incomplete. At the heart of our humanity is a restlessness, a yearning, a grasping for something more. We spend our lives searching and hoping, always looking for that thing that is missing, the thing that perfectly fits the emptiness we feel inside us.
Some of us try to fill our emptiness with good things – our families, friends, people we love. But isn’t it easy to try to stop up that emptiness with other things too? How many of us reach for alcohol to fill our emptiness? How many of us pour ourselves into our work? How many of us try to fill ourselves up by emptying other people out, through gossip or competition or grabs for power? We all have addictions, things that fill our emptiness, things we grow to depend on, yet ultimately the emptiness remains. And we are still incomplete, insufficient, insecure.
Blaise Pascal, the 17th Century French mathematician and philosopher, said that we humans are empty inside – we have a God-shaped hole in our hearts. Yet he saw that hole not as a curse but as a blessing. It is the tether that keeps us throughout our lives attached to God. It is the thing that keeps us from believing we can be completely self-sufficient, a belief which in the end can only bring us death. St. Augustine said “You have made us for yourself, O God, and our hearts are restless till they find their home in you.” Only God can fill that God-shaped hole in our hearts.
And so here we are, beginning the season of Lent. It is a season of emptiness – a season when, with Jesus, we commit ourselves to spending 40 days in the wilderness. If we take Lent seriously, we do with this season what Jesus did: we empty ourselves, we fast from the things that promise falsely to fill us up, things that don’t fit that God-shaped hole in our hearts. What addictions do we need to let go of? What things present themselves to us as the perfect shape to fill that God-shaped hole? And how does God give us the strength to let go of them? And what disciplines do we need to take on, to train our longing hearts to grasp onto God for our identity, like Jesus in his desert, and not the empty things that tempt us to put them in the place reserved for God alone?
This time of Lent becomes our time to remember who we are and ask Christ who we are intended to become. And to journey through this desert, this dry and dusty wilderness, with Christ. Because those words of Ash Wednesday – we are dust and to dust we shall return – are balanced by the words of baptism: There is one Body and one Spirit, one hope in God’s call to us, one Lord, one faith, one Baptism, one God and Father of all. With God as our loving Parent, we are more than dust this Lenten, desert season: we are beloved children of God, on a journey from dust and ashes to resurrection life.
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