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The story of Lent really begins back in the Garden of Eden. The Passion of our Lord would not have been necessary if the creation and its creatures continued to exist in the state of bliss described as the condition of the origins of life. However, on Sunday, the First Sunday of Lent, the readings will include the tragic account of how sin entered into the world through the disobedience of the children of God. Some of us may recall having to read Milton's Paradise Lost back in first year of English in college. Or it may have been we had to read it in senior high. At any rate, Milton was convinced that the rehearsal of that story with proper interpretation would help all people to see that this was the root of all problems in the human condition. Above all, Milton wanted all his readers to understand that the Fall of Adam was the story of everyone.

Each person has to take responsibility for the subsequent judgment of his or her own rebellious behavior before God. It is obvious that the world has not given evidence of a common acknowledgment of Milton's insight. Yet the story of the Fall has its own final word. The story concludes with God giving promise that God will always war against the evil that had invaded the creation. At the same time, in order for people to look to God for help rather than the perfect creation as the creatures had, God closed down the perfect garden. The Cherubim was ordered to stand guard at the gate with the flaming sword. So it was that paradise was lost, and the rocky road we have to travel in life reminds us how the Cherubim stands between us and a rosy and smooth path in life.

A Rocky Road

Now mind you we have no evidence whatsoever that it was God's original intention to make life difficult for us. Rather, it is the other way around. The story of the Cherubim guarding the entrance into the garden with a flaming sword is meant to keep us from thinking that life consists only in living the life of Riley with complete ease. Life is not dependent upon our being comfortable! Our lives are totally dependent upon our relationship to God. The vision of the Cherubim with the fiery sword is designed to have us renounce any nostalgia for the Garden of Eden. We are to experience and discover our need to look to God. The creation itself manifests its warp without the perfection of the original garden. As the Apostle Paul says, "Creation was subjected to futility ... and the whole creation has been groaning in pain" (Romans 18:18--21). Thus it is not only that the creation has been scarred and marred by the occasion of the fall of humanity, but the creation itself appears to conspire against us.

In the Second Reading appointed for Ash Wednesday, the Apostle Paul gives an account of the obstacles he had to overcome in order to share the gospel with the people who comprised the congregation he had founded at Corinth. Paul had been especially careful to help the Corinthian Christians understand that the gospel had come to them completely free of charge. However, he also wanted them to understand that he had to pay a price in order for them to receive the gospel. He wrote, "No fault may be found with our ministry, but as servants of God we have commended ourselves in every way: through great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, (and) hunger." All of us can identify with the majority of those experiences. We may not have been in prison or been in the midst of a riot, but we all flinch as we recall most of the other hardships and afflictions Paul mentioned. As he underwent these hardships in the pursuit of his calling, we do the same in our careers and vocations. As Willie Loman says in Arthur Miller's Death Of A Salesman, "It goes with the territory."

More Problems

It is true enough that we must suffer all kinds of problems that develop from a variety of sources. Some times we can identify the source of some of the hardships. Other times we cannot. In addition, people can make life difficult for us. Paul had his problems with the people in the congregation at Corinth. The two letters to the Church at Corinth may have been three or four letters, and he indicates that he had written more. The letters deal with the problems within the congregation. A good part of the difficulty was the attitude of some of the people toward Paul. His authority was called into question. Then some of the people also reacted poorly to some advice he had given. Once more we have a feeling that what went on with Paul was symptomatic of the same kind of problems we face from time to time in our human relations.

Paul mentions that some of the people held him in ill repute. Some claimed he was an impostor of the apostles. Some complained of his effectiveness because of his illnesses. Others wanted him punished. And the congregation at Corinth did not contribute to his support. Who has not known some of these criticisms? All of us have known those people who treat us shabbily. There are times when our paranoia is extremely acute because of the manner in which people treat us. Critics have commented on the fiftieth anniversary of the drama Death Of A Salesman. After fifty years the play still speaks to the American experience. In Willie Loman, the salesman, Arthur Miller caught the kind of pain that comes to people who fail in their human relations. It is the universal experience of hurt people feel when they have been ill treated by others, when they feel they have messed up their own lives, and when they do not know who they are.

Time For A Change

Paul wanted the relationship between himself and the people at Corinth to change. He made a strong appeal to them. This was the right moment for them to be reconciled to one another. Whenever things go bad between people, that is the time to do something about it. We should not wait. Paul quotes from the Prophet Isaiah (49:8), "At an acceptable time I have listened to you, and on a day of salvation I have helped you." Paul wanted the Corinthians to see that a practical application of their salvation was involved. They could make a current application of the faith in God's mercy by being merciful to one another. That certainly would be a wholesome application of the faith. Paul would want reconciliation to take place before the return of the Lord. However, why wait until the last minute? Isn't that true of all our human relations? If people delay the time of working out a reconciliation with someone, they have to carry the pain of anger and hurt around in their hearts, their heads, and their stomachs.

The anger, the hurt, and the desire for vengeance wear on us and eat away at us. If we think we can postpone reconciliation, we ought to take note of the fact that our irascibility literally shortens our lives, and we pay dearly for our anger. Paul's advice would be to deal with the problem and confront those who have hurt or wounded us so that we might deal with them. Yet we all know how difficult it is to make the first move toward reconciliation. There is always the feeling that we are giving up something, that we lose something. We think we are in danger of "losing face." No matter how reasonable it may appear at times that we should be reconciled to our neighbor, our emotions have their own logic which says that we cannot afford to give away something. That is the heart of the problem. Our emotions have their own rationale and their own demands. When that happens we rightfully say we are pathological. That is to say, we are reflecting the logic of how we feel.

There Is A Better Way

Paul would argue that there is a far better way for us to deal with damaged human relations. Instead of trying to rationalize our way through the matter or dealing with the logic of our emotions, we can deal with others on the same basis that God has dealt with us. Paul reminded the Corinthians that he had come to them as ambassador of our Lord Jesus Christ. That meant he was to preach and teach that God had reconciled the world unto himself through our Lord Jesus Christ. Because we are reconciled to God, we know how God did that for us. God made Jesus "to be sin for us who knew no sin, so that in him we might be made the righteousness of God." Therefore we are put in the position of being clean, of being pure, of being forgiven, of being established as the children of God. We are God's children regardless of what people have done to us or said about us, or how they have hurt us. We have the advantage of knowing that we are free to act toward our neighbor exactly the same way that God has acted toward us.

We can act in the freedom of grace. We can love, forgive, show mercy, or whatever is necessary for our neighbor to know that we see him or her in a perfectly new way. We can look at the neighbor in the same way that God looks at us. That is reconciliation. That is being reconciled, or being made friends again. In order to impress that upon ourselves and to equip ourselves to act by God's grace and mercy, we can go back again to that scene in the garden, where all the problems began. The Cherubim with the flaming sword has not reopened paradise for us. We cannot go back to that life of ease. However, all obstacles between God and us are removed. There is nothing to prevent us from accepting what God has offered to us through our Lord Jesus Christ.

No Obstacle

Paul stresses that there does not have to be any obstacle between him and the Corinthians, because God has healed the situation between God and us by moving all obstacles. We can do the same. Paul says to the Corinthians, "We are putting no obstacle in anyone's way, so that no fault may be found with our ministry, but as servants of God we have commended ourselves in every way." Then Paul goes on to mention all those things that he had endured for the sake of getting the word to the Corinthians in the first place. By the grace of God we can employ the same strategies in dealing with our neighbors who do us injury or harm. We began by noting that all of us have to travel a rocky road in life. Like the Apostle Paul we have to deal with all kinds of troubles. We do not need the added burdens of carrying around the pain our neighbors caused us or the resulting anger.

In his book The Gift Of Peace, Joseph Cardinal Bernardin made notes about his bout with cancer before his death. While he was serving as the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Chicago, the church and our nation was shocked when he was accused of having molested a seminarian when the archbishop had served in Cincinnati. The archbishop relates how difficult it was for him to handle this untrue allegation. However, during his illness he made the trip to Philadelphia to confront his accuser who was dying of AIDS. The accuser had dropped the charges against Bernardin, had given up the faith, and was no longer a member of the church. Bernardin forgave him and asked him to admit Bernardin had not abused him. The accuser complied. Bernardin also offered to say a mass for him. The accuser refused. Bernardin then offered a Bible as a gift. The accuser broke down and asked that a mass be said immediately. Reconciliation had taken place. The obstacles were removed because Christ had made reconciliation possible. Just so reconciliation in the worst of circumstances is always possible for us.

The Resources

The Apostle Paul would make it perfectly clear that when we are called to be ambassadors for Christ for the ministry of reconciliation, we are not merely being called to imitate what God has done for us. In one sense that should be motive enough, and we certainly are deeply moved by the fact that if God forgives our lives, we should be able to forgive a neighbor or neighbors. However, God has also filled us with the resources to be able to serve as reconcilers in the world. He indicates that he was able to deal with the tensions with the Corinthians "by purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, holiness of spirit, genuine love, truthful speech, and the power of God." Those are the gifts God gives us for dealing with human relations. We are not left to rely upon our own weaknesses and excuses for not being forgiving.

Richard Carlson, a psychiatrist, has written a book titled Don't Sweat The Small Stuff. The book was on the best seller list for months on end. It is written exceedingly well and is most appropriate for our generation which bitterly complains about stress. Of course, such a successful book had to have a sequel, which is, Don't Sweat The Small Stuff At Work. About the middle of the second book, the author writes, "Become Aware of Your Wisdom." What Carlson writes is wholesome stuff for good mental and emotional health. However, this chapter epitomizes the approach. Carlson would have you make the most of what you have. The Apostle Paul helps you to go way beyond that. He encourages you to use the gifts of the Spirit, the gifts of God, which are the assurance that the power of God lives within you. The weakness of most therapy is that it relies on the resources of the flawed patient. Paul's offer of the Holy Spirit is an offer of God's resources.

A Final Word

Paul's advice worked. Paul and the Corinthian congregation were reconciled. As a result, we have the epistles he wrote to that congregation as models of how reconciliation works between Christians and how it can work between Christian and non--Christian or non--believer. We know also that sometimes this approach to reconciliation does not work. The majority of the world does not live by grace and forgiveness. That makes it all the more important for us who have been reconciled unto God to serve as the agents of reconciliation in the world. We started out by observing that the majority of the world does not understand the depths of the depravity in the world are caused by our disobedience to God. The story of the Fall in the garden of Eden should remind us of our own fallenness. The Cherubim with the flaming sword at the entrance to the garden of perfection was to be a reminder that we cannot look to the creation as a means of achieving the perfect life. Rather we must look to the Creator who does not disappoint us.

In the passion and death of our Lord Jesus Christ, God has removed all obstacles to life and peace with God. Nicolaus Herman, a hymn writer of the Reformation Era, could pen the Christmas hymn in which he wrote that our Lord Jesus Christ is the key and door to the new Paradise. "The angel guards the gate no more," he could write. We do not look back upon the first Paradise with any sense of longing. Now we can look forward to the relationship with God which has been perfected and made possible through the life, passion, death, and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. Whatever obstacles have been thrown in our way by the demonic forces of the world we can overcome by faith and trust through which our Lord delivers us as authorized agents of God's grace and love for the reconciliation of the world. Our Lord Jesus Christ has made that possible for us. The Apostle Paul exemplified for us how it is done. This Lenten season is shaped to fill us anew with the power of that grace, love, and forgiveness to be reminded of how we are called to serve as reconcilers.