GENESIS 2:4b-9,15-17,25-35

PSALM 51

ROMANS 5:12-21

MATTHEW 4:1-11

 

Sermon – 2/17/02

 

      The great, symphonic opening of the Bible – the Creation Story of Genesis 1:1-2:4a – vividly and poetically lays down the first great theme of the revealed Word of God: that God is One, and the One True God is omnipotent, spectacularly generous, and loving.

 

      The next nine chapters of Genesis wrestle with the crucial question: if God is both omnipotent and loving, why is the world in such a mess?

 

      The answer lies in the great primal rebellion of humanity against God which shattered the primeval shalom of the Garden of Eden and led to human exile from paradise, continued human rebellion and fratricide and continued divine efforts to guide, lead and offer hope as well as judgment while respecting human freedom.

 

      To understand the value and depth of those stories we have to realize we are dealing with a different kind of literature than we encounter anywhere else, something that is rare even elsewhere in the Bible: profound, divinely-inspired stories about what it means to be human starting from the creation.

 

      To even use the word “story” sounds pejorative; we’re used to saying something is “only a story”, as though activity which could be videotaped live would be automatically more important and more valid – more “true” – than anything which was composed.  Which has more truth: a year’s worth of “America’s Funniest Home Videos” or the collected works of William Shakespeare?  We can clearly learn more truth about the human condition and situation from great literature than from miles of tape of “historically verifiable trivia” – or from a lot of historically verifiable non-trivia.

 

      The Bible is the story of God’s self-revelation to humanity, beginning with the people of Israel, a self-revelation given to a long series of inspired but very human beings who received God’s revelation through the

 

filters of their own minds, languages and cultures.  The first Chapters of Genesis, however, stand above and beyond merely Israelite culture and speak to us about ourselves: human beings.

 

      The first Chapters of Genesis tell us the truth about God and about ourselves.  We cannot find the Garden of Eden on any map – which means no one can blame someone else’s country for what happened there.  Archeologists will never discover Adam and Eve’s skeletons, which makes their story no less full of truth about ourselves.  We don’t need archeological digs to establish the truths being told in these stories, contrary both to those who keep looking for Noah’s Ark and to those who laugh at these chapters because no one has found it.

 

      The first Chapters of Genesis take us to a period in human experience that cannot be carbon-14 dated: the psychological and moral childhood of the human race.

 

      In contrast to other ancient peoples, the Hebrews came to know that there is only one true God: all-powerful, all-knowing, profoundly loving – so much so that God created human beings and gave them free will, the freedom to disobey their creator.

 

      God created the two archetypal human beings, Adam and Eve, and placed them in a tropical paradise where all their needs were provided for.  The peace in Eden was so profound that they were vegetarians and they spoke with animals instead of eating them.  The two human beings rejoiced in each other and spoke with God in an unaffected, innocent way.  They experienced no pain, felt no shame and assigned no blame.

 

      They were made free by God, and free means being able to make choices – including the choice to disobey God.  They only had one commandment to remember (“Don’t eat the tree of the knowledge of good and evil”) – and since they had plenty else to eat, there was no reason to disobey except for the thrill of disobedience, to see what would happen, to see if the snake was telling the truth and God was lying!

 

 

 

      Ah, the snake.  Please note that Genesis does not say the Devil tempted Eve – the snake is just a snake.  To invoke some supernatural power at work here is to let human beings off the hook: and even the Devil, when he appears later in the Bible, has the power to tempt, but not determine human behavior.

 

      So, we can’t say, “the devil made her do it” – that is the all-time cop-out, an effort of human beings to duck responsibility for our decisions.  No, the temptation was to do it “to be like God”, and she bit.  And so did he.

 

      THAT is “original sin”: the primeval rebellion against God in an effort to become our own gods.  Anytime we say, “The rules don’t apply to me”, or “It’s nobody else’s business what I do” or “I want it and that’s the only thing that matters”, we are Adam and Eve.

 

      The Christian thesis is that every human being – except Jesus – has done this at some time.  We are all our own worst enemies.  The world is in such a mess because human rebellion against God shattered the primeval peace of creation and ended our innocence, just as an infant’s innocence gives way to a toddler’s willfulness when the toddler first learns to say “no!” and “mine!”

 

      Human beings continue, in word or action, to say or to live “no” and “mine” throughout our lives.  In order to move towards recovery as individuals and as a species we need to recognize that we are part of the problem.  Not “other” people who are the “bad” people: all of us.  A species which is more destructive of its own kind and of other species than any other species that ever lived, a species that holds the future of life itself hostage to a plethora of nuclear weapons, a species which overindulges its own rich while letting hundreds of millions of its poor waste away from sickness and starvation would have a very hard time convincing a jury of members of other species that homo sapiens should go unpunished.  This, in addition to all the billions of individual acts of willfulness, selfishness and self-worship which break the two greatest commandments, to love God with all our hearts, minds and souls and our neighbors as ourselves.

 

            In the immortal words of the late, great comic strip “Pogo”: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

 

      You want to find Adam and Eve?  Don’t go on an archeological dig in the Middle East; just look in the mirror.

 

      The consequence of humanity’s rebellion against God, as detailed in the brilliantly vivid story in Genesis 3, is shame, blame and pain.  Suddenly, Adam and Eve felt ashamed of their naked bodies.  Disobedience ended their innocent joy in their creatureliness and led to shame and alienation from their own bodies.  When God confronted them after their sin, rather than take responsibility for their actions Adam and Eve looked for someone to blame, thus showing their alienation from each other.  And henceforth, to make a living and create life they would experience pain (in work and in childbirth) and mortality: suffering and death would be tokens of their alienation from the Creation itself.  We can see further fruits of such alienation today in the self-destructive behavior of individuals, violence from domestic violence to wars between nations, and environmental destruction.

 

      We do not have the cure for our own sin within ourselves.  Godless utopias which seek to cure our ills only create nightmares, as the 20^th Century’s catastrophic experiences of Nazism and Communism clearly show.  Only God can rescue us.

 

      Thank God.  God has.  Now if only we can suppress our pride enough to accept being rescued.

 

      For God’s grace has come to us – a word Paul uses four times in today’s Epistle – grace, the love God has for us when we need it most and deserve it least.  God’s grace is free to us but came at enormous price: God’s own self, incarnate in Jesus Christ, “taking the rap” for all the sin and the sins of all of humanity in all times and places, being punished to the utmost when deserving nothing, and still refusing to hate even his torturers and executioners.

 

      Christ took upon him the shame, the blame, the pain that we might be liberated from all three, that our alienation from ourselves, from each other, from the Creation might be ended, by ending our alienation from God.  Christ died, that we might live – not merely survive but LIVE, abundantly and forever, beginning now and concluding in our heavenly father’s house.  Christ rose again, that we might be made new and come home again and be at peace – this time by choice instead of by nature.

 

      Accepting our and humanity’s responsibility for our and humanity’s plight, accepting Christ’s atonement for our sins, accepting Christ’s authority to lead us into new and better lives, accepting our wondrous and joyful opportunity to be contagious in our faith, hope and love – that is how Lent hopes to prepare us for Easter, so that we may embrace the life which is life indeed.

 

      Let us begin.  The adventure awaits.  Like Jesus, we may spend time in the “wilderness” in some sense, and we will surely face temptations.  But it is in plunging on through the thick of life with Christ as our guide that we can find wholeness, holiness and home.

 

 

(The Rev.) Francis A. Hubbard

 

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church