The Drama of Desire

It's Harvest at All Saints this week.- the other 3 churches next week - so perhaps it's appropriate that we are in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve in We Make the Road...This week's theme is The Drama of Desire, and we consider the consequences of humanity's disobedience. I think the conversation between God, Adam and Eve is significant, based as it is around three questions (well, actually four!):

1. Where are you?
2. Who told you?
3. What have you done?

In a way, these are existential questions and all have to do with accountability for our actions. Are we in denial? Are we blaming others? What results from human disobedience? We naturally feel guilt and shame when we know we have done something wrong, and either 'cover up' or blame someone or something else. The result inevitably is humiliation, hardship and hostility either for ourselves or others. Possibly both. The story of God's salvation is that God comes looking for us (ultimately in the person of Jesus Christ), faces us with our sinfulness and leads us back to himself. The way back is always God's initiative.

The connection with Harvest Festival is not hard to make. In the 'garden of creation' many wrong choices are made, because we play God and misuse the blessings God has given us. This results in the pollution of oceans and rivers, the stripping of forests, the destruction of the ozone layer and the climate change  most scientists now accept is the result of human exploitation.

I had the pleasure of a long train journey on Friday, and got stuck into a new book called The Invention of Nature. It is, in fact, the biography of an extraordinary German explorer and scientist called Alexander von Humboldt, who lived at the turn of the 19th century. Though little-known, he is credited with being the first to discover what we now call 'climate change', and the inter-relatedness of the whole of nature. Previously, the long-held majority view was a rather mechanistic one of a universe where all species essentially exist each for themselves, under the supremacy of humankind. Arguably, that is how our current ecological problems began. Humboldt saw that humanity itself is part of this 'web of life', with everything interwoven as with a thousand threads.

So, to get back to McLaren, humanity must choose: We can imitate one another's competitive desires and so be driven to fear, rivalry, judging, conflict and killing. Or we can imitate God's generous desires...to create, bless, help, serve, care for, save and enjoy. (p21)

The fourth question is at the beginning of Genesis 3: 'Did God really say...?' When doubt sets in, we are liable to lose our way.