St. John Chrysostom Episcopal Church – Delafield, WI
3rd Sunday after Pentecost (B) – June 10, 2018
The Very Rev’d Steven A. Peay, PhD
“Where are you?” That’s the question God asks in this almost idyllic, intimate scenario painted in Genesis 3. But that question carries some heft, it’s not just a “yoo hoo,” if you get my point. God is asking that hard question that I remember my mother asking when I had most certainly done something out of line, and she was looking to get to the bottom of the issue. WHERE ARE YOU?
That question still holds, doesn’t it? When we’re wondering where someone stands on a particular issue, how they have engaged – or not engaged – in an activity, name it, we very often ask, “where are you?” And God, the Creator, the One who made us in God’s own image and likeness continues to ask that question of us, and to seek after us. When you give it some serious thought the whole Biblical record is really the playing out of this initial question. God wants to know us, be intimate with us, and we flee – what’s the problem here?
Well, let’s look at what this particular account of the Fall, which would give us that great line in the various readers going back to the 1697 NEW ENGLAND PRIMER: In Adam’s fall, we sinned all. God goes looking for Adam, and Adam talks about his embarrassment at being naked, so “I hid myself.” God inquires how Adam even realizes that he IS naked, and then asks if Adam has partaken of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Adam IMMEDIATELY tries to shift the blame elsewhere, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate.” Then God asks Eve and what does she do? “The serpent tricked me, and I ate.”
It’s like the commercial with the kids – covered in mud – standing on the carpet saying, “It’s not my fault.” Here is the essence of that dreaded three letter word: SIN. It starts with the desire of human beings to be in charge of our own destiny, to take God’s place (or as it says in the first account in Genesis 3:5 when the tempter says to the woman, “for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”) It is a desire to have all the authority with none of the accountability. It is a move toward self-centeredness and self-will – that’s sin. We’ve trivialized sin as a catch-all for various misdemeanors, and missed the reality of how it changes us from being OTHER focused to being self-focused, and concerned with self-justification.
What we see here is the continual conflicted state that human beings have been dealing with from our origins. And, that there are two accounts in Genesis of the Creation and the Fall tell us that we’ve been trying to make sense of our condition for about as long. We see some of this same rather harsh reality in Paul’s Second Letter to the Church in Corinth. He tells them “our outer nature is wasting away . . . .the earthly tent we live in is [to be] destroyed, “ And there’s even struggle that works its way into Jesus’ family, at least that seems to be what Mark is indicating. The two bottom lines, what we can see in these readings, as the late Carroll Stuhlmueller said, intercept one another to give us a solid foundation on which to orient our journey. “The one line declares that sorrow cannot be avoided; struggle is part of living. The other line promises victory in the midst of this struggle, provided a person does not blaspheme against the Holy Spirit.” [Biblical Meditations, vol 5, p. 262] We Christians are not the only ones who grapple with this conflicted state of affairs. If you take a look at the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism you’ll discover that the first one says that life is suffering, and the other three deal with how one gets through dealing with suffering.
The last verse from Genesis we read today is traditionally called the Protoevangelion – the proto-gospel or first proclamation of the Good News. “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will strike your head, and you will strike his heel.” God addresses this to the evil one, the tempter, but early Christians saw in those words the promise of God’s deliverance and the restoration of humanity to the intimacy for which we were created.
We are, and we will be, engaged in an ongoing battle between good and evil. That’s the struggle, but there is an ultimately positive outcome. As Paul tells the Corinthians, “So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure, because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal. For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.” Our task is to grow, day by day, more and more into the fullness of the life God has opened to us in fulfilling that Protoevangelion with THE GOSPEL revealed in Jesus Christ.
How do we do this? We do it by growing in spiritual maturity; to use Paul’s words in Ephesians 4: “We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love.” Similarly in his letter to the Philippians Paul calls us to, “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus…” How does Jesus say it in Mark’s gospel: ““Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.”
My point is that we have to be serious about doing God’s will – and not our own. We have to work at the relationship we have with God in Christ which began at our baptism and should be maturing our whole lives. We deepen that relationship every time we spend time in prayer, time in prayerful, intentional study of God’s Word, and especially when we come to the Lord’s Table and receive Christ in the Holy Communion. It is in that divine exchange that we , in the Words of Rite I, as “partakers of this Holy Communion, may worthily receive the most precious Body and Blood of thy Son Jesus Christ, be filled with thy grace and heavenly benediction, and made one body with him, that he may dwell in us, and we in him.” And in that mutual indwelling we are transformed, enabled to live, to love, and to serve just as Jesus did, and that’s where we’re supposed to be.
So, where are you?