Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7; Matthew 4:1-11
Exactly two years ago this Sunday, I was in Tanzania. And I was having a conversation with a young man from there, who asked me, “Why do you work?” Now, I knew that the question had to do with why did I, the mother of two children, with a spouse who worked, have a job outside the home. And I knew that I could answer that it was because I enjoyed it, because it gave meaning to my life, because I was helping people. But what I said was, “Because we need the money.” Which of course sounds ridiculous to someone working at a tourist lodge. In what way could a tourist need money?
Naturally, I didn’t get into the whole thing of my dad paying for the whole trip so we could create memories as a family rather than just leaving us money after he died. But we did get into a conversation comparing costs-of-living, and what percentages of our income went towards housing and food. In Tanzania, if you want to own a house, first you buy some land, which is about one year’s worth of one person’s income. Anybody know of any land around here for $50,000? And then, in Tanzania, you build a very small house - just with one or two rooms, which costs about six months’ worth of income, which you expand as you have need and money. When I explained to him that to live in our city, the only land for sale comes with a house already built on it, and that my house and land was almost ten years’ worth of my income... Well, first he actually gasped and then he said, “Now, I know why you and your husband both work.”
But that’s just housing; then we got to talking about food. And I asked him, “Where do you get your food when you’re not working here?” Because, as an employee of the lodge, he was provided with his meals from the kitchen when he was there. And he explained that some of his neighbours had goats, and if he was really hungry, he could just walk past one of the fruit trees growing along the road and help himself. And I said, “See, we can’t do that in Canada. In the cities, we have to buy all our food. Everything, we pay for. We pay for our water, we pay for our fruit, for our rice, for our chicken, for our greens.” And again, he gasped. And then he shook his head, and he said, “It’s better here.”
Now, of course, there are many ways in which it’s better in Canada. High-quality education for our children is free and easily accessible. Life-saving surgery is likewise. We don’t have malaria. Our children are well-nourished, and vaccinated against childhood diseases. Our infant mortality rates are way lower, and the life-span of women, especially mothers, is way longer. This isn’t true for everyone in Canada, to be sure. It’s not-true for Canada’s indigenous people, who in some ways are worse off than people in Tanzania. But looking at our quality of life as a whole, by most metrics, Canadians are doing much better than Tanzanians.
But at the same time, I wonder. You see, I was really struck by what this man said about food. In Tanzania, people are connected with their food. They live with it as part of their community––the local trees have “public” fruit, the neighbours have chickens or goats, the local Maasai have endless supplies of milk and beef. In Canada, we live very separately from our food. For more than 80% of Canadians, those us who live in cities, our food is not growing along the street, or in our neighbours yard. It’s in the grocery store. We can only access it if we have money. In Canada, if you’re hungry and you don’t have money, you have to beg for your food. You have to go through the humiliation of going to a food bank and being told, I’m sorry, you’ve already been here the maximum amount of times you can be this month, you can’t have any more. You are isolated, separated, from one of the necessities of life.
Now, we’re so used to this way of living that we accept it as the way the world is supposed to be. But it’s not. More importantly, it’s not the way God created the world to be. The first few chapters of Genesis remind us that God created us so that the entire world––people and animals, plants and oceans, the sun, the sky––would all be one living community, brought into being and given life as a whole by God. Our Scriptures give us the beautiful story of creation in one week, which is meant to convey the completeness of what God has done, and tell us that God has meant for the earth and us to nurture each other, to be a community together. Science tells us that we are all part of a finely-balanced ecosystem that depends on not just the things we can see but on the networks of microbes and rhizomes and bacteria and fungi that knit all living things together. Scripture and science together remind us that we, humans, cannot survive if we are separated from the world around us. God designed us to flourish together.
But, as Scripture also tells us, we are constantly tempted to think otherwise. This morning’s Gospel reading is particularly making that point. In our story, Jesus is tempted by the devil three times to reject the belief that God provides. First, the devil tempts Jesus to provide food for himself. Second, the devil tempts Jesus to protect his own life. And finally, the devil tempts Jesus to take control over the entire world.
Naturally, Jesus resists. Which is part of the point of the story. But the other, just as important part, is that Jesus resists by reminding the devil that God has already created the world with everything in it that a person needs. First, God gives us our daily bread and God’s own word––God is the source of both our physical and spiritual nourishment. Second, God is the source of life and protects that life. And finally, God is the one who has ultimate power and control over the entire world, not the devil or anyone else. Jesus knows that the devil’s temptations are built on a lie. It is a lie that our needs can be fulfilled apart from the essentials God has already provided. Jesus is able to resist the temptations that the devil offers by proclaiming that our provider is not we ourselves, but God, who is gracious and generous to all.
In Canada, we are tempted in many ways to believe that our needs are fulfilled by someone or something other than God. Our food production and distribution systems, that separate us from the land and from the people who grow what we eat, are one of those ways. Our manufacturing systems, that separate us from how our clothes and our homes and our goods are made, are another. When I have the power to buy something with the tap of a card or the click of a button, the relationship between me and the people who are producing what I’m buying, the connection between me and the resources and methods used to provide the materials, the community that God has created for our mutual well-being becomes invisible.
And this is dangerous. Because when we are separated from the world, from the raw materials that are used to make what we need, from the people who create these things for us, from the plants and animals that feed our bodies, then we forget where these things came from. We forget that we are in community together, and we forget that the source of all these things––materials, food, people, life itself––is God. And we begin to think that we––through our money, or our jobs, or the economy––provide the essentials of what we need to live. And we are tempted, as Jesus was, to turn away God.
In Lent, we are called to turn, or rather to re-turn, to God. We are called to follow Jesus in resisting mindless and self-centred consumption, and to stop disconnecting from the world around us. Instead, we are called to think about how God has created us to be in community with one another and with the entire world. We are called to think about how God is the true source of our essentials, and how God gives abundantly to all. To think it through, and to live it out, and to say, Thanks be to God. Amen.
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