Advent I Midweek Lenten Sermon
Three Ancestors Jesus Chose: Eve
Genesis 3:1-24
Midweek Advent Service
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
What part of “Don’t eat the fruit of that particular tree” did Eve not understand? She had God’s will laid out quite clearly before her. Eat from the fruit of any other tree you want. Just not that particular tree.
You’d think that with only one explicit commandment to worry about, Eve could have managed. But no. You would have thought that a reptile striking up a conversation with her out of a clear blue sky might have been enough to put Eve on guard. But all it took was the suggestion that God had been holding out on her and Adam, and all of a sudden the fruit of that one tree started looking really, really delicious. From there, it was a short step to picking one, and taking a bite-and all of Eve’s children have been paying for it ever since.
I have a friend who suffers from a rare form of MS that is slowly causing the muscles of her body to waste away. Every time she finds herself unable to do something she’s been able to do all her life, she has a standard response: “Thanks a lot, Adam!” Now, being a man myself, I have to stick up for Adam a little bit. True, he let Eve talk him into taking a bite of the fruit, too. But wives tend to be more believable than talking snakes. And besides, Eve bit first.
Luther used to imagine the fights Adam and Eve had during all those nine centuries or so their marriage lasted: “You bit the apple!” “Yeah, but you gave it to me!” I have to admit, though, that in some ways Eve comes off a little better than her husband. True enough, neither Adam nor Eve was willing to take responsibility for his or her own actions. But while Eve blamed the snake, Adam not only blamed Eve, but God Himself: “The woman you gave to be with me, she gave me the fruit of the tree, and I ate.”
And so began the oldest of human games: the blame game. And not even God Himself was immune from being blamed because His creatures couldn’t seem to resist listening to that snake.
“On the day you eat of it,” God had said of the fruit of that tree, “you will surely die.” And die they did. Not physically, of course- though that might have been a blessing. No, they had to live out nearly a millennium of mutual blame for the fact that they were getting old and that they often fell ill and that life was nothing like the good old days in the Garden.
I was born by Caesarian section, - which my mother highly recommended to anybody interested in having a baby. But the woman whose bed was next to hers didn’t. As she went through a long and difficult labor, Mom told us, that lady called her husband names that Mom had never heard before, and rarely heard thereafter- and greatly enhanced Mom’s vocabulary, even though she didn’t ever use them herself.
Just think what names Eve must have called Adam. Childbirth wasn’t supposed to be that way. And as Adam spent those long days out in the hot sun, his muscles aching and his back breaking with seemingly so little to show for his efforts, I imagine Adam had some colorful thoughts about Eve, too.
And all for a piece of fruit.
Sneezes, coughs, and stomach cramps. The common cold. And the one thing God had never intended for His human creatures: death itself. Each of them would die one day. And the stomach flu, that was enough to make them wish for death. The broken hearts of parents who not only lost their own son to murder, but whose sorrow was compounded by the knowledge that his murderer was also their son.
There is no sorrow, no loss, no pain and no suffering that does not come even today from the invasion of God’s creation and the human soul of the debilitating disease of sin. The virus of rebellion had entered the body of creation, and the cancer of sin had entered the human soul.
That last was the worst of all. No, Adam and Eve did not die physically that day in the Garden. They died spiritually. They lost their ability to choose the good when they opted to sample the fruit of the tree which opened their souls to the knowledge of evil, too.
But one of my theology professors in college used to say that he didn’t think that the Fall really happened when Eve bit into the fruit. No, Professor Schaibley thought it happened when Eve listened to the snake, and entertained the thought that there might be another, better way than God’s.
Many, many years later, Saint Athanasius would say of human nature, “What has not been assumed has not been redeemed.” He wasn’t talking about sin, of course. As deeply as sin infects our humanity, it is not a part of human nature. God didn’t create it; man chose it back in the garden- and has been choosing it ever since.
But the capacity to choose, and with it the possibility of being tempted, is very much a part of what it is to be a human being. Any being created in the image of God would have to have the theoretical possibility of forfeiting that image. Whatever the exact moment was when the Fall took place, it involved a misuse of something essential to any creature made with a spiritual resemblance to its eternal Creator. And that’s why Eve- and for that matter, Adam- are such good examples of the kind of people Jesus chose to be His own ancestors. He came, after all, to redeem people who had misused and thus lost the free will which He Himself had given to His creatures.
Yes, Jesus came to die for our sin- to pay the price God’s justice demanded for Adam and Eve’s sin, and for all the sins that followed, including yours and mine. But that was only part of His mission. He came not only to die for us, but also to live for us- to be the Second Adam, the One Who was tempted as Adam and Eve were tempted, but who got it right.
And it is through the righteousness Jesus won by His perfectly righteous life that we, who are baptized and who believe, are declared by the Father to be righteous through justification, and actually made righteous in sanctification. Jesus’ righteousness is our righteousness, too. More than that, in living as well as dying on our behalf, Jesus Himself became our righteousness- the only righteousness any child of Adam can ever claim, and the only righteousness any child of Eve will ever need.
Yes, as we consider the human beings Jesus chose to be His own ancestors, Eve- the Mother of All Living- is a fitting place to begin. The One Whose coming we await, after all, fully satisfied the demands of God’s justice for every descendant of Eve. And to do that, He needed to be a descendant of Eve Himself. And because that Son of Eve came to die for our sin and to live for our justification, the spiritual death Adam and Eve brought upon themselves in the Fall can rise from spiritual death in Holy Baptism and live before God forever, just as God had in mind for Adam and Eve when He made them. Many and dire are the consequences of the Fall. There is no human pain or sorrow that does not flow from it. But the One Whose coming we await this Advent comes to share our every sorrow, or every sickness, our every pain and our every loss.
He comes as one of us, so that He might share our sorrow, suffer our pain, and die our death. He comes to take everything Adam and Eve got so wrong, and to make it right.
God comes to Earth and becomes one of His own creatures, so that we who are His creatures by birth may be reborn of water and the Spirit to be His children, and to live with Him in Paradise just as He intended Adam and Eve to do before Eve decided so blithely to have that fatal chat with a talking reptile, and to crush Satan’s head under His heal so that the work of that snake in the grass might be undone.
May the peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
Genesis 3:1-24
Midweek Advent Service
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
What part of “Don’t eat the fruit of that particular tree” did Eve not understand? She had God’s will laid out quite clearly before her. Eat from the fruit of any other tree you want. Just not that particular tree.
You’d think that with only one explicit commandment to worry about, Eve could have managed. But no. You would have thought that a reptile striking up a conversation with her out of a clear blue sky might have been enough to put Eve on guard. But all it took was the suggestion that God had been holding out on her and Adam, and all of a sudden the fruit of that one tree started looking really, really delicious. From there, it was a short step to picking one, and taking a bite-and all of Eve’s children have been paying for it ever since.
I have a friend who suffers from a rare form of MS that is slowly causing the muscles of her body to waste away. Every time she finds herself unable to do something she’s been able to do all her life, she has a standard response: “Thanks a lot, Adam!” Now, being a man myself, I have to stick up for Adam a little bit. True, he let Eve talk him into taking a bite of the fruit, too. But wives tend to be more believable than talking snakes. And besides, Eve bit first.
Luther used to imagine the fights Adam and Eve had during all those nine centuries or so their marriage lasted: “You bit the apple!” “Yeah, but you gave it to me!” I have to admit, though, that in some ways Eve comes off a little better than her husband. True enough, neither Adam nor Eve was willing to take responsibility for his or her own actions. But while Eve blamed the snake, Adam not only blamed Eve, but God Himself: “The woman you gave to be with me, she gave me the fruit of the tree, and I ate.”
And so began the oldest of human games: the blame game. And not even God Himself was immune from being blamed because His creatures couldn’t seem to resist listening to that snake.
“On the day you eat of it,” God had said of the fruit of that tree, “you will surely die.” And die they did. Not physically, of course- though that might have been a blessing. No, they had to live out nearly a millennium of mutual blame for the fact that they were getting old and that they often fell ill and that life was nothing like the good old days in the Garden.
I was born by Caesarian section, - which my mother highly recommended to anybody interested in having a baby. But the woman whose bed was next to hers didn’t. As she went through a long and difficult labor, Mom told us, that lady called her husband names that Mom had never heard before, and rarely heard thereafter- and greatly enhanced Mom’s vocabulary, even though she didn’t ever use them herself.
Just think what names Eve must have called Adam. Childbirth wasn’t supposed to be that way. And as Adam spent those long days out in the hot sun, his muscles aching and his back breaking with seemingly so little to show for his efforts, I imagine Adam had some colorful thoughts about Eve, too.
And all for a piece of fruit.
Sneezes, coughs, and stomach cramps. The common cold. And the one thing God had never intended for His human creatures: death itself. Each of them would die one day. And the stomach flu, that was enough to make them wish for death. The broken hearts of parents who not only lost their own son to murder, but whose sorrow was compounded by the knowledge that his murderer was also their son.
There is no sorrow, no loss, no pain and no suffering that does not come even today from the invasion of God’s creation and the human soul of the debilitating disease of sin. The virus of rebellion had entered the body of creation, and the cancer of sin had entered the human soul.
That last was the worst of all. No, Adam and Eve did not die physically that day in the Garden. They died spiritually. They lost their ability to choose the good when they opted to sample the fruit of the tree which opened their souls to the knowledge of evil, too.
But one of my theology professors in college used to say that he didn’t think that the Fall really happened when Eve bit into the fruit. No, Professor Schaibley thought it happened when Eve listened to the snake, and entertained the thought that there might be another, better way than God’s.
Many, many years later, Saint Athanasius would say of human nature, “What has not been assumed has not been redeemed.” He wasn’t talking about sin, of course. As deeply as sin infects our humanity, it is not a part of human nature. God didn’t create it; man chose it back in the garden- and has been choosing it ever since.
But the capacity to choose, and with it the possibility of being tempted, is very much a part of what it is to be a human being. Any being created in the image of God would have to have the theoretical possibility of forfeiting that image. Whatever the exact moment was when the Fall took place, it involved a misuse of something essential to any creature made with a spiritual resemblance to its eternal Creator. And that’s why Eve- and for that matter, Adam- are such good examples of the kind of people Jesus chose to be His own ancestors. He came, after all, to redeem people who had misused and thus lost the free will which He Himself had given to His creatures.
Yes, Jesus came to die for our sin- to pay the price God’s justice demanded for Adam and Eve’s sin, and for all the sins that followed, including yours and mine. But that was only part of His mission. He came not only to die for us, but also to live for us- to be the Second Adam, the One Who was tempted as Adam and Eve were tempted, but who got it right.
And it is through the righteousness Jesus won by His perfectly righteous life that we, who are baptized and who believe, are declared by the Father to be righteous through justification, and actually made righteous in sanctification. Jesus’ righteousness is our righteousness, too. More than that, in living as well as dying on our behalf, Jesus Himself became our righteousness- the only righteousness any child of Adam can ever claim, and the only righteousness any child of Eve will ever need.
Yes, as we consider the human beings Jesus chose to be His own ancestors, Eve- the Mother of All Living- is a fitting place to begin. The One Whose coming we await, after all, fully satisfied the demands of God’s justice for every descendant of Eve. And to do that, He needed to be a descendant of Eve Himself. And because that Son of Eve came to die for our sin and to live for our justification, the spiritual death Adam and Eve brought upon themselves in the Fall can rise from spiritual death in Holy Baptism and live before God forever, just as God had in mind for Adam and Eve when He made them. Many and dire are the consequences of the Fall. There is no human pain or sorrow that does not flow from it. But the One Whose coming we await this Advent comes to share our every sorrow, or every sickness, our every pain and our every loss.
He comes as one of us, so that He might share our sorrow, suffer our pain, and die our death. He comes to take everything Adam and Eve got so wrong, and to make it right.
God comes to Earth and becomes one of His own creatures, so that we who are His creatures by birth may be reborn of water and the Spirit to be His children, and to live with Him in Paradise just as He intended Adam and Eve to do before Eve decided so blithely to have that fatal chat with a talking reptile, and to crush Satan’s head under His heal so that the work of that snake in the grass might be undone.
May the peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
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