2-26-23 Sermon & Scripture

Hey. I’m not starting off with a story today, I’m just going to get into the meat of dissecting a story we already have. But, a little teaser for what’s to come, I’m going to try something out in March, telling a serial story told throughout the month. No, not a story about Frosted Flakes, but serial with an ‘s’, one story told in bits with a cliffhanger at the end each week, so you have to tune in the next week to see what happens. And all of the bits relating to the main point of the week’s scripture lessons. At least the first, second, and fourth weeks of March will. I don’t know how to work in the third week of March to that story, but I have another story that week that is not unrelated to the larger story being told in March. And the big story is a World War II story that is pretty exciting, so you don’t want to miss it. 

But now, the story in which we all find ourselves. Every religion, every philosophy, every work of art, grapples with trying to reconcile two contradictory things that we all intuitively know are both profoundly true. Life is good, and life is messed up. The world is good, and the world is messed up. People are good, and people are messed up. I am good, and I am messed up. 

We all see that there is a beauty, a rationality, a symmetry, a harmony that exist in God’s creation. You have to try hard not to see it. How that came to be the case, well, there are different stories about that. And we all can see that creation, life in the world, is ugly, random, violent, scary, predatory, heartless. This is all the way from the atomic level to the astronomic level, certainly at the anthropological level – people. You have to try hard not to see that truth. How that came to be the case, well, there are different stories about that. But we also sense that the bad stuff is kind of, on top of, the good stuff. As if the basic reality of things is good, but has gotten messed up, perverted away from its original nature and we need help. Not all stories capture it quite that way, but that is at the heart of the Judeo-Christian story.

So the question we are asking is, “What happened to turn a good reality bad?” 

And we have a story in our scriptures that doesn’t necessarily give us all the answers, but invites us into a certain understanding of what has been going on in this good world that isn’t all good anymore. It doesn’t tell us everything. I don’t think God wants to tell us everything about how exactly everything came to be and how we ended up where we are. And there are hints within the text itself that suggest this is only meant to be like a parable containing wisdom about what it means to be human, what our purpose is, how to relate with God, with others, with the earth.

I don’t like the story told in Genesis 2-3, which we only get a snippet from today. It offends my sensibilities. God makes people, and gives them a tough job of taking care of the garden of creation. God makes a tree right in the middle of the garden that gives knowledge, which you’d think they need to do their job, and then God tells the people, “Don’t eat the fruit from this tree or you will die that same day.” And makes a snake that can talk and is clever and, for some reason, wants to trick the people into eating that fruit. Why? Why God? Why did you do it like that? How long was that supposed to work for? And then they eat it, but they don’t die that day, but some things do change about their relationships with one another and creation and God. And they won’t get to live forever. 

Now, I may not like the story, and many people throughout the centuries have had problems with this story, but we do have to acknowledge – it is the way the life works, like it or not. Deal with it. Act accordingly. This world has limits. This world has good things that can be used in the wrong way or at the wrong time. Sometimes it’s all to easy to make a foolish choice. Actions have consequences. But the story sounds like God is telling a baby not to put this piece of candy in its mouth, and then just laying it right in the crib. Does God really need to wait and see what’s going to happen?

The way I like to think about the problem is more straightforward. I like to go with Micah 6.8, which Jillian Twigg preached on a month ago. What does God require? God has shown you, O mortal, O humanity, O Adam, what God wants from you, and it’s simply this: Do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with God. What God wanted from the original human beings was to do justice (bring order to creation, starting with the Garden), love mercy (be fruitful and make all kind of new human beings who will have differences that we welcome), and walk humbly with God (you don’t know how to do this well, so learn from God and don’t try to take God’s place). If we did those three things, that would be great. We human beings decided to say no to doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with God, and as a result, the whole thing broke down. God’s image became distorted, our relationships warped.

We want a revelation that confirms what we think we want to believe, and as 21st century Americans, what we want God to spell out for us is a message that we should love everybody. Tolerance. Acceptance. Peace. Can’t we all just get along? And certainly that is a good thing that God’s Spirit is leading us along in. But that message is also a bit fuzzy. Fuzzy enough where a multinational corporation can slap that on as a logo to get you to buy their product made by slave labor in a developing country. And Jesus gets crucified in a world that talks so much about love.

And so God gives us a story about a tree that promises to give us knowledge, but the catch we don’t quite realize at first is that we gain wisdom, not by eating it, but by not eating it. When we eat it, all of the sudden we become idiots, trying to cover ourselves with leaves. And trying to hide from God. And we realized we just took advice from a snake. Knowledge hangover.

For us, we want love, everybody to be loving. That’s our word. We think we know what love is. And we certainly shouldn’t violate our sense of what is loving. But love is much more than a feeling. Love is a discipline. Love requires self-restraint. Love requires purposeful, intentional choices to go in a certain direction. Because everything we hate about our world is related to love. Think about it. Love is the only reason we have hatred, sadness, fear, anger. Because we care about something, someone. Maybe we love inordinately. Maybe we make something or someone into a God. Maybe we don’t trust that God loves even more than we do. Something else becomes our whole world. Woe betide anyone who is perceived as a threat to it. The root of all evil is love, a twisted truncated love that is more about my happiness than my commitment to the good of other people made in God’s image.

At the same time, we can be easily tricked into putting ourselves and what we love into a vulnerable position. Which makes us all the more prone to negativity and violence, as well as shame and guilt. No wonder we are in such a mess. We strive after things we think we need, the wrong way, and we never quite get it in a satisfactory way. 

And we run and hide from the one who is the source of all love, the one whom is everything we could ever really want, the true satisfaction of every human need. The word ‘sin’ is never mentioned in Genesis 1-3. Not until Genesis 4, when Cain was contemplating killing Abel. Certainly original sin is never mentioned ever in the Bible. The word ‘fall’ is not a part of the Adam and Eve story. Again, that word first comes up when Cain is contemplating killing his brother and Cain’s countenance has ‘fallen.’ Nor does Satan suddenly take over creation when Eve and Adam eat a bite of the fruit. God doesn’t turn away from them or unleash wrath and hatred upon them. They gained new knowledge they weren’t quite ready for. Okay. God can handle that one, gently correct that one. People breaking a rule. That can be okay.

But Adam and Eve did something that day, led the way that day, in something human beings have been doing ever since. They hid from God. That is the #1 sin. Trying to hide from God. The Bible doesn’t present sin overall as breaking rules. Sin is broken relationship. 

And so this is the emergence of the species Homo latebansis – hiding man. The problem is not that we won’t follow a list of rules. The dilemma of God’s good creation is that the human beings, made in God’s image, called to lead creation as God’s representatives, human beings have absconded and abdicated their responsibility, words that bring me back to studying for the GRE. And so creation is left without someone to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God. The solution to this is that we just stop hiding. But we won’t. We can’t. We are naked and ashamed, and we are too busy trying to cover ourselves with whatever we can find, blaming each other for the predicament we’re in. This isn’t a story about something that once happened. This is a story about something that keeps happening. The solution is that God comes to find us.

And God takes responsibility for making a world where this kind of thing was bound to happen. God becomes one of us, faces the same snake we face. And God in Christ commits to a hard, complicated choice of love. A restrained, disciplined love. That practices self-denial in the desert. That reasons through tough choices about what is needed and what is not needed to be faithful to the God of love. Jesus triumphed where human beings have failed, and through him, God is calling out to you and me, “Where are you? Come out. Stop hiding! Be restored! All is forgiven!” You can’t hide anyway! God has eyes that can see right through you, and they aren’t frightened by anything in there. God delights in you. Come back home.

And join us at St. John’s where our mission, proposed mission that you will hear about at our annual meeting that that we are committed to building a loving, accepting community centered on growing in Christ. Where we don’t hide from God or each other anymore but walk into the light where what has been broken can be healed. And we know love can be fuzzy, so the discipline we have as a community is in our proposed tagline: Faith. Service. Community. This is where the discipline of love is lived out together. More discussion of that to come, so join us for our annual meeting.