Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7
Romans 5:12-19
Matthew 4:1-11
Good morning.
I’ve been reading this book—it’s a contemporary attempt at a Victorian novel—and in it is this very minor character, a former soldier of the crown, one Colonel Leek—today we’d call him a disabled veteran—He sits in his wheelchair day in and day out in the front hall of the dilapidated tenement where he lives; and as it happens, Colonel Leek’s true passion remains war, and other outbursts of violence and disaster. Throughout the book, whenever he appears he is shouting out the latest bits of bad news he has found in his daily newspaper…Disastrous overturn of train! Gunpowder explosion on the Regent’s Canal! Steamer gone down off the Bay of Biscay! --the people who walk by stare a moment and then go on about their business…well, more on Colonel Leek in a moment.
Today is Episcopal Relief and Development Sunday. ERD was established in 1940 as the Presiding Bishop’s Fund for World Relief mainly to assist European refugees fleeing the war. At General Convention in 2000, the name was changed to Episcopal Relief and Development to more clearly reflect its growing focus on proactive development projects.
In this diocese, Burt Purrington is our ERD Coordinator and he has done a tremendous job of keeping us informed of the many ways ERD makes an impact around the globe. ERD focuses on four program areas: emergency relief and rebuilding, food security, primary health, and HIV/AIDS. They partner with Episcopal and Anglican churches and ecumenical organizations to serve suffering people in Latin America, Africa and Asia. In this country, ERD works with local dioceses after natural and human-made disasters to provide critical supplies, such as food, shelter, and medicine.
So what you may ask has this to do with Colonel Leek? Well, as I chewed over what I might say today, I thought of all the disasters that ERD responds to, which in turn reminded me of Colonel Leek and all his disasters, and then I realized that many of us live with our own Colonel Leek, often times parked right in our homes…I’m speaking of course of the Internet – whether you use Yahoo or AOL or Google as your home page, you know what I mean. We log on and there’s Colonel Leek spouting off little headlines concerning the latest disasters to hit the globe—Earthquake hits Peru!... Touring bus falls into ravine!... Fire rages through poor neighborhood!…and just like the other characters in my book, more often than not we stare a moment, maybe shake our heads, and then go on about our business. Of course, if you’re not linked up to the Internet, most news reports on television and radio often sound a lot like Colonel Leek themselves—and our response or lack of response is essentially the same.
And you may rightly ask, “But what can I do?” The temptation to do nothing is often very seductive. We feel overwhelmed by the scale of the devastation, we feel overwhelmed by the tenacity of the corruption, we feel overwhelmed by the intensity of the violence and hatred…and so we despair, and we become numb, and we do nothing—we succumb to the temptation to do nothing.
Giving in to temptation…it’s part of our human nature. In the Genesis reading this morning, the story of Adam and Eve eating of the forbidden fruit, giving in to temptation – albeit with a bit of peer pressure from the serpent—I used to think this was a story of how we got to be bad—sinful—however, in many traditions this story is seen in a different way, that this is a story of how we got to be human. In many ways, Adam and Eve were more pre-human, metaphorically living naked in the womb that was the Garden of Eden. With the knowledge of good and evil they became truly human.
And then we have the Gospel reading, Jesus of Nazareth, the carpenter’s son, newly baptized and awakening to his calling, goes out into the desert to pray and cleanse and seek a transcendental vision. For forty days, he exists on next to nothing—no food, no shelter—and then he has his vision. The adversary comes to him with temptation—temptations of the body, temptations of doubt, and finally temptations of power and control. Satan is offering Jesus an apparently easy path to address the injustices of the world – a way to feed the hungry by turning rocks into bread, a way to convert the masses by dazzling them with awesome displays of infallibility, and finally the immediate possibility of a world theocracy under his leadership—take the shortcut to success and bring Israel and the world home to God. And Jesus says, “No!” Or rather, instead of giving in to temptation, Jesus says Yes to God’s way…Jesus says Yes to God’s way.
Paul in his letter to the Romans sees these two stories as a way to explain the wonderful saving grace of Christianity. First with Adam and Eve we get unredeemed humanity, suffering, and death; and with Jesus we are all redeemed…we get forgiveness and life everlasting—all because one succumbed to temptation and another resisted it. Paul was making a dramatic point as he worked to build up the church – his letter to the Romans is very black and white—the very human Adam and Eve, the very divine Jesus, disobedience…obedience, death…salvation…but what about us?
Our lives are lived out in the gray area in between…Our temptations are more mundane—the child who whoops it up in church, the adolescent who sneaks out after dark, the grownup who parks illegally just for a minute, or the middle aged man who eats the box of cookies anyway…Is it evil to succumb to these temptations? I don’t think so…
Is it evil to succumb to the temptation to do nothing? It has been said that “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for enough good people to do nothing.” On a grand scale I embrace that belief—yet, on a personal level it begins to lose its meaning…Is it evil when we succumb to the temptation to do nothing?...to walk past that homeless woman? To toss the solicitation from UNICEF into the trash unopened? To hear news of the latest tragedy and feel numb? No, I don’t believe these to be evil either. We could obliterate ourselves responding to every request for our time or money or love or empathy…we are human, …we often give in to temptation and we do nothing…but we also have the knowledge of good and evil and we try to do what we can and we often wish we could do more.
Evelyn Massaro of Public Radio likes to remind her listeners that all pledges matter no matter how small—they all make a difference. So the next time you give in to the temptation and do nothing and you begin to feel bad about it, remember the things that you do…you give money to the poor when you can and say a prayer for those homeless men and women when you can’t; you feed the hungry—by bringing in groceries for the food pantries or by cooking a meal for the soup supper--or you bring your friendship and share in the meal when you can’t…and when you plan your charitable giving for the year, try to set aside some money to give to Episcopal Relief and Development—and remember every dollar makes a difference.
I will leave you with this story…About two weeks after the 9/11 attacks, the late Stephen Jay Gould had eaten at a favorite restaurant in Lower Manhattan…the chef game him a bag with 12 apple brown betty desserts and asked him to give them to the workers at Ground Zero. In describing his experience of the chef’s gift and the fire fighters’ gratitude, he reasserted what he calls “The Great Asymmetry:” that “every spectacular incident of evil will be balanced by 10,000 acts of kindness, too often unnoted and invisible as the ordinary efforts of a vast majority.
So in your lives as you contribute to the next 10,000 acts of kindness…keep in mind that, like Jesus, you are not only saying No to the temptation to do nothing, more importantly you are saying Yes, to God’s way.
Amen.
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