Sermon

Adam, Eve, and the God-shaped hole

Scripture Text:

Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7

Sermon:

Lent is the time of year where our sanctuary and worship change more than any other season.  It’s a time of hardness and emptiness, but it’s also a gift to us – a time to look at our lives in a radically different way, a time to consider our relationship with God in a different way.

The earthquake in Japan has actually turned my mind upside-down in the same sort of way… I look at my house, our community, our church, the water and electricity and heat, and I see everything in a different way.  I don’t take anything for granted.  I’m suddenly so grateful for all the details of my life that I normally don’t even think about.

I can’t compare Lent to the horror and destruction of the earthquake, tsunami, and radiation threat in Japan right now.  It’s hard to know what to say knowing that hundreds of people lost their lives in terrifying ways, that whole communities have been totally wrecked, that and that families will have to find ways to reassemble their lives and homes, or may just never be able to return to the places that used to be home to them.

But Lent is like an earthquake in one way:  it shakes up our perspective.  It’s helps us remember how to see God and the kingdom of God around us.   It helps us imagine our lives without our connectedness to God.  It helps us not to take our spiritual health for granted.  And then when Easter comes, we understand joy and resurrection more deeply and completely because we’ve reminded ourselves that death, sin, and despair are real and what they can do to human life.

We heard the story of Adam and Eve this first Sunday of Lent.  Now, usually, we think this is the story that tells us where human sin comes from, but I think the ancient Temple scholars wrote down the story of Adam and Eve to tell us what human beings are like.

If you’ve ever sat down with your Bible and read the first few chapters, the story of Adam and Eve is actually a hilarious and very moving story because it so true to what people are like.  The second and third chapters of Genesis are actually full of fascinating details that often get lost.  Some of you spent a Sunday Seminar in January with me on Adam and Eve and we really had a great time going over all the little parts of it.  A few things we noticed:

-       the serpent isn’t the devil; he’s described as a creature of God, but “crafty,” a sort of trickster who likes to mess with human beings and see what he can get them to do

-       we’re never told that the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil is an apple!

-       Adam and Eve are actually together when the serpent gets them to eat the fruit, so we can’t blame Eve for everything,

-       God tells Adam and Eve that if they eat the fruit, they will die; but they don’t, at least not literally.

Adam and Eve have everything they need; they have each other, they have enough to eat and drink, they have a beautiful place to live, they have meaningful work, and God is so close to them that apparently they can hear him taking evening walks in Eden.  And yet, they’re feeling incomplete, insecure, and like they don’t quite have enough.  When the serpent comes along, he plays on their insecurity by telling them that God hasn’t told them everything, that God can’t be trusted to have their best interests at heart.  That they can have it all if they just eat some of the fruit from tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

And Eve suddenly sees how truly wonderful this fruit seems, and it almost sounds like she’s narrating a commercial:  the tree was good for food, it was a delight to the eyes, and the tree was to be desired to make one wise. Wonderful tree… wonderful fruit.  ”Life.  Just the way you always wanted it!”

Sometimes we hear about “original sin” but this is a kind of “original insecurity” that we humans have.  Original insecurity that also gets us noticing advertisements for products that seem to promise a fullness of life or an identity that we like.  What sorts of things give you a little rush as you’re buying them, because some part of you feels that you’re about to become a more fulfilled, satisfied person because of that product?

Another way of saying “original insecurity” is what Blaise Pascal, the 17^th century French philosopher, called having a “God-shaped hole.”  Pascal believed this was part of how God meant to stay in relationship with us, by placing a hole in us that we had to return to God to fill.  Now, that could sound a little passive-aggressive.   But now listen to the way St. Augustine, an African bishop from the 4^th century, puts it in his autobiography (which echoes one of our Eucharistic prayers): “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you.”
  That restlessness, that hole we have, is something that keeps us searching for who God is, how we can be in relationship with God, what God is asking of us.  But that restlessness can also lead us to try to satisfy ourselves with other things instead:  substances, products, power trips, escape hatches, the promise of that next thing just around the corner.  We can throw a lot of things into that God-shaped hole; and that’s what Adam and Eve probably were hoping when they took a bite of that fruit.  Maybe this will fill me up.  It wasn’t the devil that made them do it – but misplaced human longing; original insecurity.

But God created us to be ultimately satisfied at the deepest level only through our identity in God: our awareness of our connectedness to God.  Our relationship with God is how we fill that hole.  Which is scary; because we’ve eaten the fruit and we know we’re naked!  A relationship with God demands some incredible vulnerability, as well as some incredible chutzpah.  Adam and Eve hide from God after they eat the fruit.

When Jesus is out in the desert by himself, the devil finds him and tries to speak to his insecurities, too.  Is God really going to provide for you, Jesus?  Are you sure you’re the Son of God?  Why not take power for yourself?  Why not be independent and see what you can do on your own?  Paul describes Jesus as the “second Adam,” and he is – he’s tempted in the same way Adam and Eve were, and yet he chooses differently.  He doesn’t choose to define himself apart from God, or to try to go off on his own way.  And he’s tempted several times in his life to do that.  Being a religious person doesn’t mean that you never experience temptation, doubt, or feeling like there’s something missing in you.  Being a religious person may just mean that we choose to keep putting ourselves in places where we hope to bump into God: church, Sunday worship, the bible, the Eucharist, religious music, prayer.   And so we bump into God and remind ourselves that God fits in the God-shaped hole better than anything else.

Lent is a time when we make that hole more prominent.  We take things out of worship: bells, Alleluias, and holy water, and we add other things that feel jarring and kind of harsh.  We may take certain sweet or delicious foods or habits out of our lives for Lent, that might otherwise seem to fill the hole.  Those things aren’t inherently bad, but they may become a sort of padding that we try to rest on, when what where we really need to be resting is in God.

It is so tempting to define ourselves by what we have or don’t have, rather than to define ourselves through our relationship with God.  Your relationship with God is the most trustworthy, reliable thing you can ever have.  I invite you to spend some of the silent time now to be honest with yourself about the temptations in your own life, so you can get in touch with your own “original insecurity.”  But also remember that God clothed Adam and Even before he sent them away from Eden, and that God has also clothed you and offers you hope and strength to deal with temptation on your journey out in the world, too.

Amen.

This sermon was inspired by an essay by The Rev. David Lose, workingpreacher.org

 

Uploaded on March 13, 2011 in by RevHeidi

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