Dr. David D. Young
January 6, 2008
Genesis 1: 1-13
Romans 3: 21-31
"The ‘Ouch’ in Garden Living"
(Fall)

Today is Epiphany Sunday, today is the day of Epiphany, the twelfth day after Christmas, when we mark the coming of the wise men to the manger. It’s the symbolic time when they would have arrived. Epiphany means manifestation, it means illumination – so we think of the light and the star that led the Wise men to the manger. We think of the illumination in our minds and in our hearts by faith of what it means to affirm Christ as Lord. And we celebrate all that today on Epiphany Sunday.

The wise men are still with us here in the sanctuary – symbolically to represent this epiphany – this manifestation of light and Christ coming into the world and we celebrate that today.

Today is also Communion Sunday. On the first Sunday of the New Year we celebrate newness and what Communion means in our lives and in our faith – that’s a wonderful time to celebrate a new beginning at the beginning of 2008.

And today is the beginning of our Winter Sermon Series, "There is a Place for You: Winter Journeys in Christian Foundations." We are going to be exploring for the next several Sundays significant theological concepts or ideas that have been important throughout the history of Christendom as we look more deeply into some of these particular ideas and notions some, of which we don’t think about that often but we need to re-reflect on from time to time.

This morning we will look at the Fall – not the fall season and the dropping of leaves – but the fall of humankind as passed on to us through the ancient story of Adam and Eve.

A church school class of youngsters was asked to draw a picture of their favorite Bible story, and the teacher was a little puzzled by one which showed a very long limousine with a venerable elderly person at the wheel, and a couple of heads away at the other end. Questioned about the story it depicted, the child replied: "That’s God driving Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden."

Cute, but wrong. Adam and Eve took themselves out of the garden through their disobedience and sin. They fell from grace. They fell from paradise and humankind has been falling ever since.

Theirs was the first act of disobedience – but it was certainly not the last. To be human is to struggle with sin and temptation. The historicity of Adam and Eve cannot be proven nor disproven. If you want my opinion – it like many stories in scripture – is a wonderful myth from a particular time and a particular experience that points to a larger reality of our relationship with God and each other.

But whether or not the story itself is true – it does contain truth. And it is this truth that we are interested in this morning. Yet, it is a truth about ourselves, a truth that perhaps we would just as soon not deal with. You see, when most of us are given the opportunity to be as God – that is – to control and see all there is to life – we grasp at the chance – just as Adam and Even did.

And when we rely on ourselves – without even knowing it – we push God right out of the picture. That’s alienation – and alienation is the most basic definition of sin. Sin is anything that alienates us from God. Sin is anything that breaks relationality. That’s true particularly in our relationship with God, but it’s equally true in our relationship with each other.

Let’s go back to our story just for a moment. Adam and Eve eat of the forbidden fruit and who wouldn’t – after all the serpent made a lot of sense and the fruit looked awfully appealing. And interestingly, they did not die as God had told them – their eyes were opened and they saw their true condition.

A side note – if the story were literally true, wouldn’t Adam and Eve simply have died when they ate the fruit – end of story? Well, what happened next? After their cover up – of fig leaves as opposed to erased or destroyed tapes or shredded documents - they sense the presence of God and they hide – Alienation!

And who of us has not been alienated from God? And friends, it is usually by free choice. No one else can force us to be alienated from God. When we have to hide from the personal presence of God in our inner lives – when we by disobedience alienate ourselves from God – when we by sin separate ourselves apart from God – we experience the "Ouch!" in garden living.

For you see, we are all God’s guests in the global garden. And at times we all hide from the host – perhaps out of fear or guilt – but inevitably because we have made free choices that have separated us from God’s good intentions for us.

I don’t know about you, but when I find myself alienated from God – it feels lonely, scary and I hurt. And I – as did Adam and Eve metaphorically, experience the "Ouch!" in garden living.

Another way to put it is that sin is the heart curved in on itself – and so when our eyes are opened to self first – it is very difficult to see God.

A cartoon from the London Spectator:

The scene: the Garden of Eden. Exiting: fig-leaved Adam and Eve. Guarding the gate: the angel with the flaming sword. The caption: Adam to Eve, "We never had a chance, coming from a single-parent family."

And isn’t that the second temptation we are so susceptible to – wanting to grasp at scape- goating and self justification? After all, Adam had a great line when confronted by God about eating the forbidden fruit, "Ah, Lord aren’t you forgetting the woman you gave me – she made me eat it." And Eve – she in good human character passes the buck too, "There was a sneaky serpent who tricked me." "The Devil made me do it! The Devil made me do it!" It’s kind of catchy isn’t it?

I mean when we’ve done something wrong and we’re not pleased about it and don’t want to admit our sinful behavior – it’s pretty handy to be able to say, "Well, so and so left me no choice" or "Well, if so and so hadn’t provoked me, I wouldn’t have."

It’s convenient to have an alibi – whether in our inner personal relationship with God or in our relational lives with others. Human pride and the notion we really aren’t all that bad when compared to others can really skew our ability to recognize our disobedience to God and our susceptibility to temptation.

Some people ask if it’s really necessary to have a prayer of confession each week in worship – because a lot of times the particular prayers aren’t addressing where they are at. And the response is – Yes, we need confession every week – because although a particular prayer may not speak to you – it may for someone else and it does in a general way remind us all that we are susceptible to sin and temptation – even though there isn’t a burning issue that week – and we are reminded that we all stand in need of God’s grace.

J. Baily put it this way,

"The first and worst of all frauds is to cheat oneself. All sin is easy after that."

You see, if we think we are without sin – we are all the more blind. There are thousands and thousands of unhappy couples and parents and children who respond to each other with anger and agitation because each perceives themself as right and the others as wrong and they simply don’t know how to act otherwise. Starving for love – they only hurt one another.

Such locked-in relationships produce frustration and persons are motivated by painful feelings and thus act rashly and without hardly giving any thought to their actions. This past year now spent and then focused during the Christmas season and now in the New Year – we are more aware than ever – that we do not live in a world of peace.

Christmas reminded us of one who came into a world to bring love, healing, hope and peace. The countless hungry who are unfed, the poor who are not clothed, the homeless who have no place to lay their heads. Many, not all – but many of the world’s problems are a result of sin. It is so easy to hide behind phrases like,

"complex situations," "personality maladjustments," and "social conflicts."

But by and large they are superficial ways of referring to what the Bible means by sin. With the war and so many other conflicts facing us – these words of William Sloane Coffin in his book, The Courage to Love, are worth pondering,

"Most of all, regarding our enemies we have this to consider; if we are not one with them in love, at least we are one with them in sin—which is no mean bond, because it precludes the possibility of separation through judgment. That is the meaning of ‘Judge not, that ye be not judged.’ Fight evil, yes, but never as if evil were something that arose totally outside of yourself."

The fall didn’t happen when Even and Adam ate the forbidden fruit. It happened from the beginning when we were given free choice. I have found this thought of Bishop John Shelby Spong in his book, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, very helpful:

"On what real basis do we suggest that the creation began good and then fell into sin? Where is the evidence? Did the animal nature in us that drives us to survive, reproduce, satisfy the basic needs for food, water, and procreation, which formed our values, suddenly become evil? Was it not always there and would we have survived without it? Did these ancient and basic urges come into existence only in the ‘the fall?’ Or is it not more accurate to say that they were part of creation itself and in time had to submit to the civilizing influences first of life in the clan, then in the tribe, then in the nation, and finally today in our vastly interdependent world?

Are not the human qualities we call selfishness or self-centeredness the result of the drive to survive far more than of the fall into sin? Do not those very qualities that once served our need to survive now threaten to annihilate us as we struggle to be the keeper of our brother and sisters in a shrinking, overpopulated world that can no longer absorb the garbage we selfish Homo sapiens create in our quest for individual pleasure?"

This morning, I have been trying to say, that not all, but many of our problems and difficulties today- most of the violence and suffering in our world is caused by us – by what humans do to each other – or don’t do for each other - war, terrorism, global warming and starvation – just to name some of the biggies.

It’s easy to "fall" into the trap of thinking those things aren’t really all that big or important – because for us life here in Greenwich is going pretty smoothly. When things are going well for us why should we bother with obedience to God. I mean, after all aren’t comfort, security and happiness the chief goals of life? No, the end and means of life is obedience to God through Jesus Christ who showed us what a life of obedience is all about.

For as Paul has written in our New Testament lesson that Sue McCalley read for us,

"For there is no distinction; since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, they are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as an expiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins; it was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous and that he justifies."

The good news that came into the world in Christ is that the answer to sin, no matter what its’ origin, is grace. God’s magnificent, wonderful, abundant and amazing grace.

A story in a New York newspaper in 1955,

"An old couple adopts two aggressive orphans. They had been kicked out of three foster homes. The first eighteen months was hell. They squirted hoses in neighbor’s windows. Finally their resistance broke and the children adjusted. ‘How did you do it?’ asked the reporter of the couple. ‘We merely said to them that no matter what you do we aren’t going to let you go.’ Later as the young girl was showing the reporter a book containing the family genealogy she came to the last page and said, ‘And this is where we come in…’"

Friends, this is the time when we open the book and come in to fill in the pictures of what the rest of our album will look like. On the personal level we will fall again and again. But by grace we will be born again and again. And grace is stronger than sin.

At the world level we will fall again and again. But by grace and guidance we need not contribute to the "ouch" in global garden living – rather we can through obedience help take away some of its’ sting.

In closing, a marvelous poem by George MacDonald,

"I said, ‘I will walk in the field.’ He said, ‘No walk in the town.’ I said, ‘There are no flowers there.’ He said, ‘ Not flowers, but a crown.’

I said. ‘But the air is thick, and fogs are veiling the sun.’ He answered, ‘Yet souls are sick, and souls in the dark undone.’ I took one look at the fields then set my face for the town. He said, ‘ My child, do you yield? Will you leave the flowers for the crown?’

Then into His hand went mine, and into my heart came He, And I walk in a light divine, the path I had feared to see."

On this most amazing day – the word on my lips is not sin – but Grace!

Amen!