what do you want to be when you grow up?
Wonderings:
I wonder when you have taken on too much, or been burdened with too much?
I wonder what you want to be when you grow up?
Reflection based on these wonderings + the readings assigned for the First Sunday of Lent.
Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7, Psalm 32, Matthew 4:1-11
Let us speak, and listen: held in the presence of our loving, liberating, and life-giving God. Amen.
Let’s go back to Adam and Eve. Adamah—the creature made out of earth. The earthling. And Chavah—the woman.
Our ancestors in the faith have made a lot of meaning out of this story. A lot of meanings, plural. St Augustine, a North African bishop who lived in the fourth century, made this passage about eating the forbidden fruit the foundation of his novel theory of “original sin.” And this idea of the inherent, even genetic depravity of human beings was filtered through Augustine’s somewhat famous anxieties about his sexuality, about his desire. And that’s one reason that even though this passage never once uses the word “sin” and there’s no sex in it at all, for the last 1600 years most Christians have read it as being all about sin, and somehow, somehow, about sex. Oh, and it’s all the fault of the woman. In a patriarchal society, that’s also obvious.
But again, our ancestors in the faith have made a lot of meanings, plural, out of this story. Other early church fathers like Basil of Caesarea and Tertullian found it just as obvious that this story was a cautionary tale about food. And that the first sin of human beings was gluttony. It is, after all, a story about eating.
But a seminary professor, David Carr, once said something that changed the way I read this passage forever. Again, this is just one interpretation, do what you want with it. But Dr. Carr asked us to put aside the ideas about sin and sex and to imagine this as a story about two children.
Dr. Carr said that, from his broad reading in sacred literature from across the ancient near east and his experience as a dad, he thought of this story as a parable about the totally natural development of self-consciousness.
When you’re 3 or 4 or 8 or even 10, you live largely in the present. You don’t experience regret over the past or worry for the future except in brief flashes. Because the whole world is now. And the world equals your experience of the world. You don’t really have the neural architecture to take on other perspectives, to see yourself from the outside.
But then… well let’s just say that one reason that it’s so so hard to be in middle school is because for the first time, there’s a real future to worry about and a real past that can’t be undone…and I can’t believe I said that in front of everyone.
And what must they all be thinking of me? All of a sudden, you’re contending with other people’s perspectives, taking seriously for the first time that your view of the world is just one among many. And you can see yourself from the outside, and you might not like what you see.
Up until this point, for Adam and Eve, the Garden had been for them a kind of Neverland, where you never have to grow up, where they never even registered that they would grow up, but then…their eyes were opened. The past and the future became as real as the present—maybe even more real. They could feel real regret about past actions and real anxiety about future pain. And they could see themselves in a way from the outside, and they felt naked; perhaps they recognized not that their bodies were shameful, but that they were so, so vulnerable.
So here’s the invitation: what if this story of Adam and Eve evoked the deeply ambivalent experience of growing up?
And if we roll with that, what if our Gospel lesson today hinges on the question of what we want to be when we grow up?
To remind us of the context of this Gospel story, Jesus has just been baptized; a voice from heaven has just boomed out that he is the beloved Son of God—and that’s so overwhelming that he flees into the wilderness to be alone, to process. To continue his initiation into this new identity.
And he’s out there and he's hungry and he’s lonely and he hears this voice that says, “Son of God, child of God, huh? Well, kid, who do you want to be when you grow up?”
This voice says to Jesus, wouldn’t you like to grow up into power? To climb to the top of the ladder, to triumph in the rat race—hell, to have whole nations under your feet? That would surely make life worth living, no?
And wouldn’t you like to be invulnerable, to leap from a cliff as fearlessly as a child jumps off the bed, because any dumb choice you make would have no consequences? Wouldn’t you like to be eternally protected from pain?
Oh, and wouldn’t you like to grow up into self-sufficiency, into complete independence? To know that you would never have any needs that you couldn’t immediately satisfy, all on your own? Wouldn’t it be nice, when you got hungry, to turn stones into bread and lint into Lobster and ditchwater into Dom Pérignon?
But Jesus says no to all of it. He says that’s not how I want to be when I grow up. I don’t want to dominate anybody. I want to stay vulnerable; I want to stay dependent.
And he does. Jesus proves himself to be a man of power: power to heal, power to change the lives of people around him, power to feed 5,000 hungry people on a hillside. But it’s not power over. It’s power with: the power to act, the power that grows when it’s shared, when others are called into their power to act.
And as we will confront most fully in Holy Week, Jesus’ commitment to healing, solidarity, and empowerment—that way of being in the world is such a threat to the powers and principalities who are terrified of losing their power over: they ultimately crucify Jesus as a criminal, revile him as a domestic terrorist, an enemy of the state. And Jesus remains vulnerable to the pain of that betrayal, to the torture of his body. Because he’s not seeking invulnerability, he’s seeking integrity.
And that integrity can only be lived in community—in relationships. So while Jesus knows his own mind and follows his own call, he does not try to go it alone. His whole ministry is walking from town to town, totally dependent on the generosity of others for his basic needs. And he urges his followers—us—to bear one another’s burdens, to give what we have to sustain others—and perhaps more challenging, to accept the help that others offer.
What do you want to be when you grow up?
Let me just note that we are all surrounded by advertising and governed by public policy and contending with economic realities that have been saying to us since a tender age that if we have power, if we’re invulnerable, if we never need to ask for help, then that is SUCCESS.
There has never been a time in human history when there has been more pressure to be an individual: to bear the joys and burdens of life on our own. And everyone in this room has been formed by that pressure—to succeed on our own, to survive on our own. I know that I myself have been deformed by that pressure to be self-sufficient, to pretend I’m invulnerable, to play power games, or to surrender to those who do because I don’t want to get my hands dirty.
And so this season of Lent is dramatically counter-cultural because it invites us to remember that God’s dream for us is to grow up into something other than success; something more than safety. To be vulnerable, dependent creatures—nothing more and nothing less. To give and receive gifts; to depend on each other, to bear the pain and grief of life together.
Amen.
