“I can do it.”
“Well, let me give you a hand”---
“NO, I CAN DO IT MYSELF!”
It’s a step in the natural development of a child’s growth to go through the I CAN DO IT MYSELF stage.
Between the ages of 3 and 5—basically preschool age—children begin exploring and then trying to assert control and power over their environment. According to Child Development expert Erik Erikson’s, success in this stage of life gives children a sense of purpose while failure results in a child exerting too much power, bringing on adult disapproval and leaving the child with a latent sense of guilt.
In other words, children between the ages of 3 and 5 are testing the limits of their own power. And the job of the adults around the child is to patiently listen to the tantrums that naturally occur and then soothe the child saying, “I know you don’t like this now, but one day you’ll understand.”
Today’s reading from Genesis is The Story of Humankind’s Fall. As a professor of Hebrew Scripture at Princeton puts it: “[This reading] is less about explaining the origin of sin and more about describing the reality of what it is to be human and our mysterious human tendencies to rebel against God, to resist the gracious boundaries and limitations God places around us for our own good, and to desire to be like God.”
The story of the first humans falling away from God is the foundational story of how we, like pre-schoolers, want to do everything on our own, without assistance, without limits. When we fail to let God set some limits on us, we get into trouble, we forget that we are the children and God is the wise and loving parent who says, “I know you don’t understand now, but one day you will.”
Our readings today deal with that most Lenten of topics: the down n’ dirty reality of what it is to be human.
In Genesis, Adam and Eve are wooed by the serpent’s tempting words, and as a result they unleash a desire for more power.
In Romans, Paul describes Adam as the carrier and unleasher of the disease called sin and Jesus as the vaccine against it.
Sin is a disease and Jesus is the antidote. I love that!
The conflict between our desire to be all that God created us to be and our desire to be fully independent and self-reliant with no need for help from God (or anyone else for that matter) is nicely summarized later in Romans when Paul states, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” (Romans 7:15). I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate---for me that's the quintessential definition of sin.
Turning away from God, engaging in things that carry us farther from God, isn’t what we want to do, but it ends up being what we do "do."
In today’s gospel the devil—the evil one-- tries to tempt Jesus into giving into the temptation for more power and glory, but he doesn't succumb. Now it’s easy to brush this off as Jesus’ divinity, outweighing His humanity. That He saw the devil’s tricks and didn’t fall for them. But to assume this is, I think, insulting to Jesus the man.
Jesus didn’t give into the temptation because he didn’t feel it---he felt it as powerfully as any of us would--- but because he was strong enough, open enough, trusting enough, he didn't give in. Giving in would be to deny God’s love and Jesus --both in his humanity and his divinity--just wouldn’t do it.
Jesus was human in every way, except he didn't sin.
Now for a lot of us sin is a tough word, but understand it as God does-- not us being “bad” but us being stubborn and child like. To sin is to forget God, to turn away from God, to insist that we can do it ourselves!
From the wilderness to the cross, in the most desperate times imaginable, Jesus never turned away from God. He never shut God out.
We, on the other-hand, shut God out all the time. When we stop making space for God to work within us and through us, we're shutting God out, refusing God's help, leaving us frustrated, lost, lonely and empty.
And that's when we get into trouble.
Because, in our I CAN DO IT MYSELF MENTALITY of forgetting God and forging ahead on our own, we distance ourselves; leaving an ever-widening chasm between us and God. The pain of this chasm is so intense we seek to bridge it, to fill it with all sorts of things. Things to distract us from the pervasive sense of loneliness that living without God brings into our souls.
These distractions block God—which is why we engage in Lenten fasts.
The goal of a fast isn’t to make us miserable, the goal is to get us quiet enough, focused enough, open enough to notice God, to trust God and to invite God in.
By fasting from earthly distraction: from clutter and filler we come face to face with a holy emptiness. An emptiness, a void that allows God the palate, the clean slate, the welcoming soul God uses to do wondrous things with us, God’s beloved children.
So I encourage you to spend these forty days getting really needy. Not needy for the stuff of this world, not distracted by the wants of our temporal life, but needy for, longing for, a Divine filler, a Holy distraction, a Loving presence.
When we tap into THAT need, when we empty ourselves of distraction clutter and filler we’ll discover something truly amazing: that empty space deep within us, that chasm of loneliness, anxiety and fear which we strive to fill with everything but God? It will be filled to overflowing by our Loving Creator who knows that in spite of our limit-testing, in spite of our stubborn cries of I CAN DO IT MYSELF, we will, one day understand.+
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