But now being made free from sin, and become servants to God, ye have your fruit unto holiness, and the end everlasting life (Romans 6:22).
In today’s Second Lesson, we are introduced to a group of our fellow humans starving in the wilderness. These men, women, and children have followed Jesus into the teeth of our fallen world—a terrain teeming with dangerous beauty where everything, in its own way, is conspiring to kill us. It’s almost as if the creation itself is seeking some kind of revenge against us for our failure to be the faithful stewards God commanded our first parents to be. Contemplating this human struggle for survival, I thought of the story from Thailand some years ago where 12 young men and their soccer coach were rescued from a flooded cave. What was to be a short trip to gaze in wonder at the beauty of the natural world quickly turned into a desperate struggle against that same world. An interesting detail to emerge from the ordeal was that the starved survivors had to be fed very carefully, as the natural impulse to eat would drive them to eat too much, upset the chemical balance of their bodies, and kill them. Every part of these starved peoples’ bodies is screaming at them, “Give me more,” when it is exactly this excess which will murder them. Do we believe the doctors and rescuers who denied food to these starving people were being cruel? Well, no, the cruel thing would have been to give those people the food they so desperately wanted and watch them crumble to the floor and die—to watch them be poisoned as they received exactly what they wanted.
When we are starving to death, we are not in our right minds; we certainly aren’t in a good position to know what’s best for us. But, stumbling through a wilderness, mad with hunger, is an excellent way to describe the human condition—even in the affluent West. This analogy, between wandering in the wilderness and living day in and day out in our fallen world, is a big reason why the Bible, in both the old and new testaments, focuses so much on people feeling the pangs of temptation as they wander in the wastelands sin has created. It begins, of course, with Adam, who, after eating the fruit of death and madly declaring himself equal to God is cast out of God’s carefully crafted paradise. Adam was punished by getting exactly what he had asked for, he was cast into the wilderness and given the chance to see if he was indeed equal to God; he was given the chance to beat against the dirt and build a garden for himself. As God told our first father, “…cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” (Genesis 3:17-19). The absence of God’s blessing on the earth is a curse, but despite this curse, the children of Adam have in one way or another been attempting to build some form of that paradise, that garden, ever since. They have been beating against the earth and trying to make heaven appear from the dust.
We cannot deny that there is something romantic about the idea of humanity struggling against nature and bending it to our will. From the settler moving West and breaking himself against plow and untouched prairie to the research scientist manipulating the building blocks of life against the forces of death and decay, our popular imagination is rich with these images of man vs. nature, and we glory in any triumph which temporarily holds back the inevitable revenge nature, swiftly and without mercy, rains down upon us. It is death, the most fundamental symbol of our inequality with God, which is the ultimate trump card of the creation made our antagonist by sin and pride. History has shown us that all of our dusty Edens will eventually fall because they are held up by the arms of a humanity whose natural destiny is to collapse and become the dust from which only God can bring life. Every coffin, every urn, is a God sent reminder that the fruit from the trees we plant will always be marked by the aftertaste of death. Mercifully, St. Mark tells us that as God the Son looks out onto the starving mass of humanity, Jesus says to His disciples, “I have compassion on the multitude…” (St. Mark 8:2). This human compassion—experienced by the God who walked among us—is worth more than all the empires of men, and it remains the only hope for creatures still playing in the dirt.
St. Paul, throughout chapters 5 and 6 of his great Epistle to the Romans, has been comparing the Kingdom of Adam (marked by rebellion and hubris and death) to the Kingdom of God (marked by loving sacrifice, faithful obedience, and life). His goal throughout is to drive the saved and the damned to recognize the utter futility of laboring under the slavery of sin and death—whether or not we call this slavery “freedom.” No matter how much we may want it, there is no happy ending to our story if we actually believe we are powerful enough to rule our own lives and will ourselves to perfection or eternal life or fulfillment or whatever goal we may have. The Kingdom of Adam is populated and served by all those who ignore the millenniums of human history and actually believe themselves to be little gods capable of building paradise with their own two hands. It is a kingdom for every person who has said, “I decide what is right or wrong” or “I am the captain of my fate” or “I don’t owe anybody anything” or any of the other ridiculous things people repeat as if saying it enough times will make it true. It is a kingdom for both the lawless libertine and the self-righteous stickler; it is a kingdom where the ends justify the means; it is a kingdom of anxiety and pressure and fear because everyone who calls it home, or feels pulled back to its familiar walls, knows everything depends upon them, and that everyone who has every gone before them has failed. There is no grace in the Kingdom of Adam: there is only survival today and the grim prospect of facing tomorrow a little weaker than we were the day before. It is there that we are invited to eat the fruit of the unrighteous tree we planted in our hearts—daily poisoning us against ever taking part in the glory of God.
The Kingdom of God is so very different. In the Kingdom of Adam, the children of men fight and jostle to be temporarily enthroned at its center, but in the Kingdom of God there is only one man who has earned the right to sit on the throne bought with no blood but His own. Often, St. Paul is left awestruck as he imagines the love and mercy of God made real and concrete in the human man who found it fitting to experience our fear and pain culminating on the cross. He writes, “For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly…God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life” (Romans 6:6, 8-10). What we find at the center of the Kingdom of God is the absolute opposite of the useless selfishness that steals our time and treasure and pays us back in death; no, in the Kingdom of God we see the new tree of life—the cross with the world’s rightful king offering Himself upon it—blooming with the fruit of salvation. It is this fruit, freely given by God to his servants, that brings eternal life in the new earth to come; it is this fruit by which we are miraculously fed at every Holy Communion; it is this fruit which unites us to the new tree of life and brings us one step closer to the new Eden re-created and ruled by the second Adam, the first born of the new creation, our resurrected prototype for the new humanity, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
And so, as we spend this week preparing to partake in the fruit of the cross, let us remember that it is there that we are united with the Kingdom of God and the glorious future of the human race, there that we become little trees of life ourselves—bearing fruit for the kingdom of God and sharing the sacrificial love which has already saved the world. God has saved the world, and He has chosen us to bring that truth to kings and slaves, republicans and democrats, rich and poor. We never have to search for a purpose in our lives because we are not searching for anything anymore. We have been found and claimed by the Spirit, God’s Garden has been planted in our hearts, and our only purpose in life is to bear fruit—in rain or shine, darkness or light, joy or sorrow. Our smallest actions of love and service in God’s church and in the rescue mission of the damned matter more than the movements of armies or the schemes of politicians because we are not fighting over the scraps of the Kingdom of Adam; no, we are feasting and sharing in the food that flows from the compassionate loving heart of the God who will not leave His people starving in the wilderness. Let us eat of that spiritual food and drink of that spiritual drink and never go hungry again.