Season of Pentecost, Proper 5(B) - Genesis 3:8-15, Mark 3:20-35
Every day we gather at 1:45 for prayer. And despite being an ordained pastor with eight years of experience and two Master’s degrees in religion, I have no idea what is going on.
Let me explain. I’m working to become a professor, someday teaching Old Testament. I earned a Master of Theology degree at Princeton in May, and am spending my summer at Jewish Theological Seminary in Manhattan to get the Jewish perspective on our shared scriptures. I wasn’t sure, at first, about being a gentile, living and studying in a Jewish community, but I’ve been accepted with open arms. The classes are interesting, and the professors aren’t afraid to explain what’s going on when the Christian in the room doesn’t get it. I’ve been invited to see movies with new friends and to share in Sabbath dinner. I am always welcome at even the most Jewish of events going on. I am as much a part of the community as everyone else.
Except, see, Minchah is Jewish midday prayer. We all gather together in the campus synagogue, and the prayer leader starts to chant the liturgy. In Hebrew. As fast as humanly possible. Honestly, it seems like there’s some special prize I don’t know about for the one who gets through prayer the fastest. There is so much going on in these prayers that I don’t understand. For Christians, when it’s time to say something together in worship, we say it together; there, everyone goes at their own pace in a cacophony of voices. At the beginning of prayer, everyone prays silently, and then we seem to go back to the beginning and start again aloud. Some days we sing to the God of Abraham, and other days to the God of Abraham and Sarah. There’s a section that seems to be read by random people from the congregation; yet everyone knows who is supposed to read each day, except of course for me.
But it strikes me that prayer is the time when people should be able to come together most, and instead, I find it to be the time when I feel our division most greatly. In fact, there are a few other non-Jews in our classes, and while they attended prayer the first few days, now they’ve just stopped coming.
If this feels like a jarring experience to me, how much more jarring must it have been for God that day soon after creation when he was walking through his garden, and strangely, his human beings were nowhere to be found. Usually they ran up to God with excitement, devoted in love to the One who created them, (who, admittedly, was devoted in love to them too). But today, they seemed to be nowhere.
So God called out to them, and heard a faint sound coming from behind a group of bushes. “I’m hiding.” Rule number one of hiding is to not give away your hiding spot by saying, “I’m hiding,” but I guess the human hadn’t really done this before. “I’m naked. I don’t want you to see me.” And of course, God knew what had happened.
When this story of creation begins back in Genesis 2:4, everything is connected. The water flows up from underneath the earth; water and earth are connected. The ground is gathered together to create the human; human and earth are connected. The human is filled with the breath of God and comes alive; God and human are connected. Animals are created to companion the human; human and animal are connected. The second person is created to partner with the first; people are connected to each other.
But then the serpent whispers to them, “You will be more like God.” And that sounds like a good thing. But the biggest difference between us and God is that we cannot exist without God, but while God loves us, God can exist without us. To become more like God is to rely on ourselves rather than on God. And that is not what we were made for. Whether you take the fruit of the tree as an actual piece of fruit, or simply a metaphor, the point of it is that we turn away from God and toward ourselves. And this is the best definition of sin that I know.
Self-reliance means ignorance of all those connections we noticed before. And that is exactly the result of the people’s actions; all our interdependence is torn apart. We only hear the beginning of the results in today’s reading, but it tells us that the people are torn apart from the animals, and serpent and woman are at enmity with each other. What follows after the reading ends is a description of the division between people, the loss of equity between man and woman, the breaking of our real love for one another. And the most surprising to me when I first learned it: The human who works the ground will find it difficult to cultivate, because the ground is actually cursed because of the human. The relationships between all of creation are destroyed, and the world is torn apart.
And don’t we know it. The world we live in is becoming increasingly polarized. People in our individualistic culture are oriented toward the care of no one but themselves. Hate groups are gaining strength and a louder voice in our nation—Hate! God created us for love, and we drive each other toward hate! Racism, and classism, and sexism, and ageism, and heterosexism, and cisgenderism, and ableism, and nativism, do you hear this ridiculous list of things that we use to divide us? They are all gaining in legitimacy in our world. And they are all contrary to our basic nature as beloved children of God.
I am convinced that this is what Jesus means when he talks about blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. In a speech where he explains that a house divided against itself cannot stand, it is not only the house of Satan, some sense of external evil, that he is talking about. He is also talking about the house of humanity. We divide ourselves against one another. And in doing so, we deny the presence of the Holy Spirit in, with, and under the parts of humanity that we see as fundamentally removed from us. And the house of humanity, when divided, cannot stand. We cannot live like this. We are not really living, when we are like this. We may perpetuate existence, but no one will be able to truly live.
And then, look what Jesus does: His mother and sisters and brothers, are calling for him, and he begins a new teaching. “Who is my family?” It isn’t that he turns away from his actual human family. But he looks at the people listening and says, “You are my family. Anyone who does the will of God is my family. Anyone who does the will of God belongs to me.” Jesus opens a path to reconnection, to bringing ourselves back into relationship with him and with the rest of creation, to restoration and wholeness. Jesus tells us that doing the will of God will fix this mess we’ve gotten ourselves into.
Which sounds like he’s saying that we’d better do God’s will. And honestly, that would be a good thing. But then Jesus goes a step further. He does God’s will on our behalf. Jesus, who has the power to create universes and stop the heavens in their tracks, allows himself to be arrested, and given a sham of a trial, and sentenced, and tortured, and executed. Jesus freely chooses to do God’s will, and by doing so, restores the connection for us. It’s not just that Jesus opens a path for us; he drags us kicking and screaming down that path, bringing us back to a created wholeness, sometimes seemingly against our will. This is the will of God, then: That we be one.
When I was in seminary ten years ago, a few friends and I decided to do Evening Prayer every day during Lent. We gathered at sundown in the seminary’s prayer chapel, a room hardly ever used (as people preferred the large chapel), with stark decoration, which also made it a perfect space for the school to set aside for our Muslim students to perform their prayers. One evening, as we were praying, Dr. Aasi, professor of Islam, came in to do his prayers. We offered to leave and find another place, because this space should be his if he wanted it. He told us that wouldn’t be necessary. As we carried on, he laid out a prayer rug nearby and began to kneel and prostrate himself, according to his tradition. And then, when he’d finished, he joined us in reciting our last psalm before we went on our way.
And in light of that experience, I’ve decided that every day, at 1:45, I will go to the campus synagogue and quietly pray the medieval Christian daily office for mid-day, reading psalms and prayers and hymns honoring the God I have come to know, surrounded by Jews reading psalms and prayers and hymns honoring the God they have come to know. We will pray differently, which is right, because we ARE different. That is true; all those differences that divide us are real. They are legitimate differences. It’s just that they shouldn’t divide us. They should enrich us, and draw us deeper into love for one another and for the Holy Spirit we each carry, the Image of God for which we were made. According to my faith, Jesus Christ has brought us together. And so they will pray their way, and I will pray mine, but we will pray together, and because of God’s mercy and God’s love, we will be connected and united as one.
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