The Free Gift and Fighting Sin

Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7
Matthew 4:1-11


Rockville United Church
Rev. Dr. Duncan Newcomer

February 10, 2008

When we read the Bible or hear the Bible read, we stand in front of the words. Our place of understanding is that we are here in our place and the Bible words are over there. In our place, our social location, and all that that means, we each hear a Bible passage in a way unique to us and different from another’s. For example, Johanna Bonnelycke asked me the other day after I had preached about James and John following Jesus and leaving their father Zebedee in their boat, what about Mrs. Zebedee? Didn’t they also leave her and what’s the story there? Johanna’s “place” gave her a different read. And wouldn’t that make for an interesting sermon! Of course the unvoiced stories of women in scripture are one of the travesties of past church history. Today I hope to join the chorus of new light by lifting up Eve, in the Adam and Eve story. To see her both as saint Eve the patron saint of intellectual and moral curiosity, but also even more radically: to see Eve as the image of God because, the story clearly says, God made humanity in God’s own image, male and female. What do we see of God in Eve?

And that’s my second introductory point about hearing and reading the Bible—not only do we stand in front of the words, but something stands behind those words. Something comes through those words to us. We value the Bible because we believe, sometimes, that both something about God and something about our humanity, both come through to us from behind those words.

Now, I have actually been asked here, at RUC, to preach about sin. If ever there were a day to do that the Sunday after Ash Wednesday and the first Sunday of Lent would be the time, I guess. And then we have these scripture readings, Adam and the unfairly “framed” Eve (my favorite bumper sticker is “Eve Was Framed!”) and then the devil’s temptations of Jesus.

The first problem I find in preaching about sin is that sin as a topic makes us feel bad, or feel mad. Bad that we are sinners, or mad that somebody has the nerve to pronounce such a judgment on us. And then there’s that wing of Christianity that keeps flapping around in circles squawking about who they know to be sinners! To thoughtful people, that mostly seems crazy.

So a sermon on sin needs to stealthily fly in under the radar of our feeling bad, mad, or just crazily judgmental. And since the Hebrew Bible, which is, at least, a time-tested source of wisdom and truth, since the Bible’s Genesis starts the human story with sin, it is really irresponsible for you and me to ignore that week in and week out. And also since Jesus’ ministry is forged early on in the fiery furnace of his own hot debate with the devil, we should gain some knowledge about sin and to who Jesus is by looking at his dialogues with the devil—however we want to define “devil.” And, then, of course, the hinge on which the gate of “The Lord’s Prayer” hangs, and swings open, is our words of asking for forgiveness of our sins and acknowledging our need to forgive those who’ve sinned against us.

So, my friends, “sin” it is, for better and for worse!

I believe that my own experiences with the concept of sin, if not sin itself (because I continue to find that quite hard to define), are somewhat representative of your experience as well; and at least I shouldn’t preach beyond what I know something about. I had two basic introductions to the Christian concept of sin.

One was the Presbyterian Calvinist idea of original sin. Like a fish in water I knew nothing else but that I and the whole human race swam in the waters of original sin. Basically the “thought” I “breathed” was: God is good and I am not. While that concept seemed to have invigorated our Puritan and Congregational fore-bearers, it did, for example, fill the heart of Jonathan Edwards, the New England divine of the Great Awakening, with a glorious sense of the sweetness and excellency of God’s love, yes, it generally had the same dampening and damning effect on me as I think it probably—in its various ethnic and denominational forms—has had on you. I, myself, felt about original sin both mystified then as to the purposes of human activity and I felt afraid of feeling good.

All this “theology of sin”—and this is my second and more experiential introduction to sin—came down on me in a keystone memory of a split-second event with my father. Not to worry: it’s not the saddest story in the world and it would not even make the try-outs for the Oprah show—but I’m nine or so and we’re at the shore on vacation, leaving a little restaurant and near the cash register is one of those little silver pedestal trays of those after-dinner mints—little white pillows of sugary-ness. And Duncan takes a handful. Duncan reaches out and grabs a simple fistful of those powdery white sweets—and my sharp-eyed, preacher-tongued (later-in-life loving) father shoots down that gesture with these words: “Don’t be so small!” “Don’t be so small!” So I knew I was taking too much and that grabbing for more meant that. I was little, being small, not at all being big or trying to feel good.

Again, this sin thing mystified me. “Don’t try to be so big” would have at least been a boundary about appetite. But the brain-twist for me was that the very act of trying for more was in fact labeled “small,” not “too big.” That could only have made sense in the logic of original sin, the logic of that place where any and all human desire is an affront to the goodness of God simply by definition because it is a human desire.

I’d say it only took me about forty years to work my self, my theology and my psychology out of that little dark box.

But the story takes us to the word and to the place that I think is where we bump into sin, if we ever even think about sin at all. And that is the word “desire.”

Desire is at the root of the Adam and Eve story. Not sexual desire itself, but oh how the church we know has made it so! And desire is at the core of the devil’s logic with Jesus: can the devil (and why is the devil always a “he”?) get Jesus to desire the wrong thing?

For Adam and Eve in the garden, the wrong thing to desire was the fruit of the tree at the center of the original garden: not the Tree of Life, but the tree that held the fruit that reveals the knowledge of Good and Evil. But now if we are to be thinking about sin, as if we ourselves are ever going to know what God forbids us to know—good from evil, then it seems to me we are just like Eve. And we are. We have great curiosity to know what is good and what is evil. But God it seems is more like a mindless mystic companion in this deep story. God just wants to walk with us in the garden in the cool of the evening. To live a natural life with each other and with God seems to have been God’s original intent. Thus is seems we are too smart for God’s plan or our own good. Thus it seems that our super-cherished frontal lobes are not the prize we think they are. Of course this line of thought makes the whole project called Christian ethics an oxymoron—Christians cannot be good because they cannot or should not know the knowledge of good and evil. This, it seems to me, is the grace-filled silver lining in the dark box called original sin: we are free to live with God, and not to try to live within the endless struggle of ascertaining the impossible knowledge of good and evil.

I felt, growing up, some of the grace of that by-product of the doctrine of original sin. In the hands of my parents it felt like a put-down to a necessary child’s ego. But in adolescence, 14-18, from the pulpit of the Second Presbyterian Church in Kansas City, Missouri and my first non-family minister, Rev. Dr. Lou Patrick, it sounded like wisdom and freedom and the true love of God.

Inside original sin I began to feel OK not to know if I was OK or not. It began to feel good not to feel that I could know the good and had to do it. Life began to take a fork in the road and that made all the difference. The world, even the religious world, seemed to be going down the road of moral self-scrutiny and some certain judgmentalism, but life, the Tree of Life, maybe even gospel-life, seemed to go down that less-traveled path of freedom and even desire.

Clearly Eve started down the wrong road first. She wanted to know. But the story of Eve doesn’t end there. What we see in her, can see in her, remember God said humanity would be made in “our” image, male and female, is the image of God. What we see in Eve is desire, divine desire, the self-reflection of wanting life and to know all about it.

In my midrash here what God says to God’s self when seeing Eve reach for that fruit with her own hand is this, what I hear God say upon seeing that is: “Well, I see that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree!” Let’s use the masculine pronoun for a moment. He says, “I see she’s a lot like me.” Let’s use the feminine pronoun for a minute. God, she says to her self, “I see Eve is a lot like me. She has a lust for life. She desires to know even my inmost thoughts.” She is, it seems to me, clearly the saint of intellectual and moral curiosity and the impulse to reach beyond the boundaries of life, to have it more abundantly. She is certainly the liveliest, most intriguing figure in this story. And she lives to live another day. Suffering consequences, yes. But natural garden life will no longer do.

But now, whose fault is that, my friends? Whose fault—if you still want to go down the road of moral judgments—whose fault is it that the created creation wasn’t perfect? Who was it but God, himself, herself, who made a world that got out of control?! Who put the freedom into humanity!! Not us. Most of us spend our lives, as Eric Fromm said, trying to escape from freedom. Freedom wasn’t our first choice. It was God’s first choice for us and for God.

Where, but at the hands and feet of the Creator, can we place this fatal flaw, this desire for freedom and free choice? This lust for life that says “Don’t tell me no! Don’t tell me what not to do!” I’m not saying that God is bad. I’m saying the Biblical God is not a God of Greek perfection, but rather turns out to be a God of perfect love because God continues to love imperfect creation.

Human companionship—the orthodox doctrine of creation—got God into trouble. Eve reflects that trouble. God wanted to share life so badly that God overstepped the boundaries when it came to humanity, to you and to me. The trees don’t act freely. The water doesn’t commit a sin. The sun and the moon don’t go all wrong. But we do. And God did. Because God wanted shared life.

And so the whole rest of the Biblical story is God making amends. God making rainbows. God getting the broken commandments re-carved. God trying to bring lost people through the wilderness and God giving voice to endless love and beyond-morality forgiveness, in Jesus.

My friends, one way to read the Bible after we see Eve reveal, unveil, the desire for freedom which is at the center of God’s heart, one way to footnote the whole rest of the story is to hear in it God saying: I’m sorry. I went too far. I wanted a free and natural creation with free and natural human companions. My song was of a love unknown even to me.

Let us then, God says, start over. Let us begin again and then again—again if necessary. Let’s re-work this. Let’s make my divine presence more available. Let me put myself in Jesus, so that the next time this snake-devil comes around we will know how to handle sin and temptation, because we will be together, human and God, one and together. God is totally with Jesus in the devil’s wilderness temptation. God will no longer go walking alone in the garden in the cool of the natural evening. God will be right there with you when you are in the wilderness, forty days hungry, tempted by magic or ego or glory. God says, I will be with you this time and the devil will leave and angels will come and attend to your needs. Your needs are my needs. Your desire for freedom can live!

Amen.