Readings for the Day:
Sermon:
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There’s this memory I have from back in the VHS days of a trailer for Jacob Have I Loved, which was the tale of two twin girls, one who seems favored by her family, the other who feels she isn’t. As a side note, the title itself is a reverence to a famous set of twins in the Bible, Isaac’s sons, and Abraham’s grandsons, Esau and Jacob.
Now I never watched the movie, nor have I read the book it is based on, and I have only a passing familiarity with the plot. What stuck with me was this one image of the girls in church, the one who feels unflavored, as she looks at a stained glass window. Slowly, dark edges come from either side of the window and grow until they meet in the middle, covering the entire window in darkness.
That is what sin is like.
Sin is that which separates us from the love of God. It is what starts to seemingly close that metaphorical door to our Lord. As our Outline of Faith says, it even “distorts” our relationship with the Lord.
We learn quite a bit about sin today. We see the effects and impact of sin all the way from the beginning with Adam and Eve. We even get a look at the meaning of their sin from Paul.
As another side note, let me be specific, it is their sin. Our reading makes clear that Adam has been right there with Eve the whole time. He knows better since God first told him about the tree. He could have spoken up at anytime and chose not to.
More importantly for our purposes, we should look at what the serpent says and what it calls Adam and Eve to do. The serpent suggests the fruit will make them “like God”. The desire for the the fruit that Adam and Eve feel is that it will “make them wise.”
Adam and Eve are thus trying to not rely on God by finding their own wisdom. They are trying to cut themselves off from God. They are distorting their relationship with their Maker. They are turning away from the Lord.
The sad thing is that the serpent tells them they will be “like God knowing good and evil.” Yet evil does not draw us closer to God or make us like God. Instead evil is that which turns us away from God. It is opposed to God, and the opposite of the way of Life of our Creator is death.
Paul reminds us of this in Romans. Sin, in leading away from God, brings us to our death. Instead of being able to exist without God, we have found the reverse to be true. Instead of “knowing good and evil”, we now find ourselves becoming confused to the point that many times our ethicists have trouble knowing the right way forward. Instead of taking a step forward, we’ve taken two, maybe even more, back.
What happens is we become cut off from God, not unlike the stained glass window in Jacob Have I Loved. The one thing that sustains us has been torn from us.
Thankfully for us, sin is only one part of the story. Just as Genesis tells us of the Fall to Sin, the Psalm responds, as it is supposed to in our liturgy, with the hope of forgiveness. Just as Adam leads us to death, God in our Lord Jesus Christ brings us back into life, as Paul reminds us.
What we couldn’t do, Jesus could as He shows in His Temptation from the evil one in Matthew today. When we couldn’t obey, Jesus could. When the Law was too much for us, Jesus used it to fight back at the evil one through His quotations from Deuteronomy, all passages every good Jewish boy in Jesus’ day would have known. When we could only be separated from God, Jesus maintained His relationship undefiled and undistorted.
The flow Adam made, Jesus reversed. Thanks to Jesus, we no longer have to be separated by sin from God. No longer do we have to move away from God’s life-giving Being. Now we can move back away from death. Now we can move back to God.
Sin is hard because it separates us from God. It can be soul-crushing. Yet Jesus has provided us a solution. Free-of-charge and completely unearned, Jesus offers us the Gift of Grace that brings us back to God and thus to wholeness and strength.
Lent offers us a time, a path, to make our way back to God through this wonderful Gift of Grace. Jesus is offering you a life-line. Take it. Climb back from all that separates you from the Love of God so that you might have a more life-giving and life-affirming Easter.