Sermon as preached 3/16/14 at Lambs and Evington UMC
This week we begin a
new sermon series that is called “Separation Anxiety” As most of you know we
have entered into a season of the church that we call Lent. While in today’s
culture most people associate Lent with giving up some minor guilty pleasure in
our lives like chocolate, or coffee, even caffeine all together. The true
purpose of the season of Lent however is a time that prepares us for the great
feast of Easter. Lent is not too dissimilar to the more familiar season of
advent that prepares us for the for the arrival of the Son of God at Christmas.
The major difference between the two is that in Advent we are preparing for
Jesus’s arrival and therefore there is an emphasis on expectation and waiting,
whereas for in Lent we are not preparing for our Lord’s birth but rather, for
his death and resurrection. And so how do you prepare for Jesus’ death and
resurrection; for this even that is the basis for our whole belief system, the
essence of our salvation? How do you prepare to celebrate Christ’s atonement
for our sins and the promise of eternal life that it provides. We prepare by
reflecting upon why it is important in the first place. When we start this type
of reflection it become apparent quite quickly that we need it because we are
such broken and sinful people. No matter how hard we try we seem to keep
falling short of the glory of God, we get corrupted by evil, we turn our
desires towards ourselves rather than upon God and on others. We realize that
we cannot save ourselves and we desperately need God’s grace to save us. And as
we reflect upon our need for God’s grace we begin to truly realize the distance
between us and God. Not because of anything God has done , for God’s grace is
always extended to us, but because we have separated ourselves from God, we
have put up our own barriers. And so during Lent we give up these things that
devour our time and our energy, these things that distract us from God, and at
the same time we take on spiritual disciplines that realign our hearts with the
heart of Christ. This is the beauty of Lent, this is why over the next for
weeks we will look at ways in which we separate ourselves from God, because to
truly appreciate Easter, we need to appreciate why we need it so badly.
We look at the world today and we see violence and wars,
we see animosity in the political spheres, we see homelessness, poverty and
starvation around the world and in our own community. We even find ourselves
occupied and worried about so many different things that “have to” get done. We get so used to
this type of world that we live in that we begin to think that this is the
norm, that this may even be what God wanted. But if we read from Genesis and
look at the creation story, we start to find a world quite different than ours,
we notice that this isn’t how it has always been. In Genesis 2 we find Adam and
Eve, the first man and woman, and we find that they are living in paradise, in
the garden of Eden. The two of them were together with the birds and the
beasts, and the creatures of the sea. There did not have to worry about
starvation because food was abundant, in fact its seems as though they did not
have to worry about death at all. They were naked and not ashamed of it, for
what guilt or what shame should they feel, they were as God created them. All
of this was freely given to them with the one stipulation that they must not
eat of the tree of knowledge of good or evil.
The Lord warned them that if they it from it, if they even touch it they
will die.
Things were great in paradise, that is until sin crept
into the world through the power of curiosity and through the serpent. The serpent persuades Eve to take of the
fruit from the tree of good and evil, Eve persuades Adam to eat from the fruit,
and from there on the course of history, of human nature had been changed. Sin had entered into the world. Now there are
certainly many questions that arise from this story, many are good questions
that we just aren’t able to cover today.
Did God create the serpent, and if so did God create the serpent evil? Did
God create evil? Why was there even a potential of sin in the first place. As
I’ve said these are great and difficult questions, questions that pastors,
laity, theologians, and philosophers alike have been trying to answer for
centuries. It is not as important to focus on the why sin entered into the
world as it is to recognized that we as humans have been changed because of it.
Instead of asking why is there sin, we should be asking what is sin.
What is the sin that occurred during what we call the
fall of humanity? We see that the action
that led to the fall was the eating of the forbidden fruit, but was it simply
the act of disobeying God that led us to the state we are in now? Not entirely,
yes disobeying God was bad, but it was what happened before that which to that
original sin. The serpent tells Eve that if they eat from the fruit “You will not die; for God knows
that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God,[a] knowing good and evil.” You
see Adam and Eve ate from the fruit, ate from the tree of good and evil because
they were tempted to make themselves like God. They wanted to be able to
determine good and evil, the quality best reserved for a ruler. They wanted to have
more power than that which God had already given them. They wanted to be like
God. And so when they ate of that fruit their eyes were opened, and yet somehow
as their eyes were open they lost focus. They became focused on themselves,
they noticed that they were naked, something that had always been, but now they
were ashamed of it. They recognized that it made them no different than the
animals around them, and that just could not be. Those people of honor and
glory hide their intimate parts, they were no longer like the animals after
all, they were now like gods. You see
the original sin of Adam and Eve was that in that moment they changed their
very natures from living as creatures in union with God’s vision of creation,
and became creatures who rejected God’s vision, and saw themselves as something
greater than they already were. They had turned their vision and their focus
away from God and put it squarely on themselves. So when God questions what had
happened, the damage was already done. The humans tremble in fear and feel an
emotion they have never felt before, guilt. As promised the humans now face the
fate of death, the face a world of toil and pain, they face a life of sin.
There is a separation from the garden,
in our scripture it seems as some sort of punishment but for what
purpose I’m not sure. Scripture tells us that God says, “See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and
evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life,
and eat, and live forever.” What
does this mean I’m not sure, maybe God is preventing humans from a greater hell
of living an eternal life while focused
on ourselves, or maybe God’s banishment from the garden in God’s first act in
trying to restore our nature to what it once was. Whatever the case may be the
story ends with humans banished from Eden with a twisted, perverse nature that
seeks our own pleasure and power over that of any one else.
This is the essence of sin, that our focus has been
shifted from God and shifted toward ourselves. As we continue in this season of
Lent before we do anything else we must try to get a grasp upon what sin really
means. In our culture we like to talk about sin as an action that we have done.
Murder, lying, cheating, stealing; for us these things are sins, and indeed
they are. And yet if we live our lives simply trying to avoid committing these
sins, then we are doomed for failure, we are looking at sin all wrong. Instead we should think of sin more like a
disease, like a genetic disorder, like an illness. An example of a disease is
more fitting than that of an illness, but out of respect for so many who have
faced diseases, let us use the example of a flu to explain what I mean by sin
being like a disease. So say you wake up
one morning shivering, and coughing. You start to feel nauseous, your body
aches and so you take your temperature and find out that you have a fever. How
do you react? Do you look at each thing separately and take medicine for each
ailment, or do you realize that they are all symptoms of a greater illness, the
flu, and realize you need to go see a doctor.
You see those daily sins that we commit they are much like symptoms of a
disease. We lie because we want to protect
ourselves our make ourselves look better. We gossip because we enjoy the thrill
of knowledge and the feeling of being superior to someone else. We could try to treat eat symptom, we can try
to stop gossiping, we can try to stop lying, and we should, but that doesn’t
solve our overall condition of sin.
So are you, how am I affected by sin? What does Adam and
Eve’s mistake have anything to do with us?
Well if we viewed sin and simply committing evil acts, then the answer
would be that it doesn’t affect us. That we are separate entities making our
own separate mistakes; that the only way that they affect us is that we learn
their bad habits. It is because so many
of us have this understanding of sin that we find the concept of original sin
so disgusting. We ask how can a baby be sinful if they haven’t even done
anything wrong? But do you see how that’s the wrong question to ask? A baby
isn’t sinful because they have committed some wrong, the baby is sinful because
we as humans are all sinful. We are all affected with this disease, this nature
of sin. It is quite amazing how our
modern technology can actually help us to understand this point. Over the past
few decades amazing research has been done in human genetics. In fact the human
genome project has mapped our DNA.
Researchers are slowly now able to find abnormalities or predictors in a
person’s genes that show the passing of genetic diseases from parents to
children. Now I’m not saying that sin is a genetic disorder or that we can find
sin somewhere in our DNA, but what I am saying is like genetic disorders are
passed from parent to child, so too has sin been passed onto all of us. In the
fall human nature was changed from a perfect state to a sinful state, so that
all the offspring of humanity were no longer able to reap the benefit of the
perfect nature originally created for us, but rather we have inherited that
distorted nature of sin. This morning as
we begin to start out talking about what it is that separates us from God, we
must first start by admitting we are in fact separated. That this life that we
live, this world that we live in is not as it was intended to be. That we have
inherited the sinful nature of sin, the disease of sin, so that now our
inclination is to treasure ourselves over anything else, that serving God,
loving God more than we love ourselves is a struggle. In fact so much of a
struggle that so often even our faith is primarily focused on the hope of our
own personal salvation and assurance of heaven, rather than the will and desire that God has for all creation.
And so as we begin this sermon series, as we recognize
and admit that we live with this disease of sin, we can now start the process
of having our health restored. Just like with a disease, the first step is
recognizing the symptoms and getting diagnosed. So this morning we come
recognizing our own symptoms of sin, that we daily fail to be obedient to God’s
will, that we fail to serve our neighbors, and even failed to love God with our
whole hearts. It is why we say prayers of confession because it allows us to recognize
the fact that things aren’t the way they should be. We aren’t the way we should
be. The diagnosis is simple we have sin;
sin is part of our nature. And yet the good news is that there is a cure. That
Christ has come to Earth, taking on our sin upon the cross and conquering it
and death with his resurrection. As is the case with most cures though the
treatment is long. We must strive each
day to be drawn closer to Christ. Each
day will bring challenges are we get sidetracked by our own desires, as we feed
our own ego, but today we take the first step, we recognize that we are sick
and that we need help. The good news is
that even when we fail in our journey, and we do constantly, that God’s grace
is there to pick us back up. Our sin is never terminal for even when our love
fails and we turn away, Gods love remains steadfast, because grace is greater
than sin.
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