|
Original Forgiveness Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis February 28, 2010, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Genesis 1:26-27; 2:7; 3:8-19 I Corinthians 15:42-49
The logical place to begin a season of reflection on forgiveness is “in the beginning” with the story of our original sin. It is a beginning in dust that we can only comprehend in light of our ending in resurrection. Yet both the beginning and ending are stumbling blocks to those of us whose rejection of a literal interpretation of scripture and denial of the doctrine of original sin has left us unable to hear the truth about ourselves we could know in no other way save through the first Adam’s dust and the final Adam’s destiny. I think I can safely say there is no one in this sanctuary who believes Adam and Eve were literally the first two human beings ever created; that they actually were set down in a Mesopotamian garden with a talking snake until they broke a rule; that at some specific point in history they were condemned to toil and hardship and pain in childbirth and death by the God who condemns us still. “Why would any modern man or woman define their essential humanity in terms of a transgression committed by a primal couple whose very historical existence they do not believe?” asks Old Testament professor Gary Anderson. Then playing the devil’s advocate, Anderson goes on to note how woefully ill-matched the doctrine of original sin is to modern existence, outlining as it does “our common human condition in such stark and grim terms that it no longer inspires.” Indeed some hold that the doctrine’s effect is far worse, its “pervasive pessimistic outlook leav[ing] little room for contemplating our vast potential for grandeur.” Perhaps, then, we would do well to begin our consideration of forgiveness at a place other than Eden. Begin instead, say theologians more in line with popular culture, at the feet of Lady Wisdom who, from the beginning, assumes a kinder and gentler attitude toward human nature. “Come eat of my bread, and drink of the wine I have mixed. Lay aside immature thoughts and truly live, walk in the way of insight.” That is to say, if we begin with our capacity for good and affirm ourselves as creatures of incredible potential, then we more likely will live toward our best selves instead of wallowing in our unworthiness. This is New Age spirituality. It is the reason some churches have dropped the confession of sin from the Sunday morning line-up. It is also the reason this age is ill-equipped to do business with the darkness that lurks in us all and with the chaos that threatens the fragile ordering of our common life. The paucity of New Age spirituality and the problem with beginning any exploration of the human condition at the feet of Lady Wisdom is that, biblically, she ends up on the ash heap with Job. “Where can Wisdom be found?” Job cries from out of his intolerable suffering. “The answer is not one of reassurance: ‘It is hidden from the eyes of all living, and concealed from the birds of the air.’ Not even the dead have a privileged point of access. ‘We have heard,’ Death and Hell confess, ‘only a rumor with our ears.’” In the end, the humanly unbearable experience of pain and toil, of exile and death return us to our original beginning, hoping we have missed something crucial concerning the man of dust whose image we bear. Our initial tutor is Paul. He was the first to connect the end of the story in Christ as the second Adam with the beginning of the story in Eden and the first Adam. He does so in a letter to members of the Corinthian community concerning their doubts about the bodily resurrection of Christ. While they are struggling with whether or not one man had been raised from the dead, Paul teases out the cosmic dimensions of the story of our salvation from the ending to the beginning. Knowing that Adam stands for humankind, he finds that in Adam we all are born as creatures who must die. Elsewhere he says that the wages of sin are death, and I think he means in part that we spend our lives anxiously consumed by our mortality, thereby distorting the good thing God has begun in each of us. We squander our days denying our death and we do this by trying to assert a godly sort of control which, by definition, refuses God’s gracious rule. In the same cosmic sense, says Paul, Christ is the second Adam: he too stands for humankind. His death and resurrection are not singular events that happened to one human being. Rather his death and resurrection have universal and eternal consequences. Therefore what happens in the end to the last Adam “sets the stage” for our seeing and understanding what happens to the first Adam. As in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive! Put another way, only in the light of the original forgiveness revealed on the cross can we speak of and begin to comprehend humbling reality of our original sin. Enter our second tutor who is none other than John Milton. At the end of Paradise Lost, Adam and Eve are evicted from Eden while Satan returns to the underworld in triumph. One would expect Adam’s words to be words of despair and Satan’s to be awash in victory. The opposite is the case! Satan’s return to hell “is greeted with lamentation, not celebration. His is a pyrrhic victory. Adam and Eve, on the other hand, have lost all that they hold dear. Condemned to permanent exile,” Anderson is right in saying that “we would expect their mood to be morose….Such is not the case. As Paradise Lost draws to a close, Adam is exultant as he makes his way out of Eden.” “O Goodness infinite, goodness immense!/that all this good of evil shall produce,/And evil turn to good,” Adam exclaims. But more! For Milton believes Adam’s sin to be “the necessary prelude for the appearance of a far greater good.” Milton’s take on the meaning of our beginnings in Adam rests on a tradition known as felix culpa or the “happy fault.” From the ancient liturgy of the Easter paschal vigil, present day cantors still sing the Exultet: “O necessary sin of Adam, that Christ has blotted out by his death; O happy fault (felix culpa) which has earned for us such a great redeemer.” The paradox at the center of the story of salvation is astonishing: our turning from God in the beginning, our refusal of a relationship with the One who made us, leads not to our eternal condemnation but to the revelation of God’s steadfast love and mercy in the death and resurrection of Jesus. This, in turn, leads Milton’s Adam to wonder “Whether I should repent me now of sin/by me done and occasioned, or rejoice/Much more good thereof shall spring/To God more glory, more good will to men/From God, and over wrath grace shall abound.” Through Milton’s eyes we begin to see that the doctrine of original sin--our human condition seen from the fault that is chasm we inevitably forge between ourselves and God--can only be seen for what it is in the light of the redemption wrought in Christ. The analogy that begins to put flesh on what this has to do with our day to day lives is the human experience of being loved. What we say in response to the beloved is not, Gosh, I sure had this coming! Rather we are humbled by our deep sense of love being unmerited and ourselves being unworthy of such a gift. We know all know, deep down, that “true love is unmerited love.” [Anderson] The original forgiveness that is the heart of love illumines our unworthiness and our inevitable rejection of our lover who is God. That is original sin in the light of original forgiveness. O happy fault which has earned for us so great a redeemer! One last tutor: it is Jesus whose telling of the story of the prodigal Son and the Father’s love, a story often used to introduce the season of Lent, “brings home, in a powerful way, that the depth of human sin is seen most clearly from the vantage point of one shown mercy….The unfair reception of the prodigal son serves a profound theological point: the lower one falls, the greater the joy at one’s return. Or to reverse the matter,” says Anderson, “the more powerful one’s sense of redemption the more profound one’s sense of sinfulness.” What does this mean and matter—this doctrine of original sin--in your life and mine? I think it means that only in the face of Jesus Christ do we see ourselves as we really are. For to know ourselves as forgiven is to know ourselves as the prodigal on the way home and not as the brother in no need of mercy. It is to know ourselves as the woman caught in adultery rather than finding ourselves in the crowd who has gathered to throw stones. It is to know ourselves as the woman bathing Jesus’ feet with her tears and not reclining at table with Jesus because we are righteous. Unless we begin where God begins with us in the grace and mercy revealed in Jesus Christ, we will forever be in search of fig leaves to hide our nakedness. In the second place, it means the individual confession of our sinful and broken lives spoken to those whose love we have betrayed, to those whose humanity we have denied, to the one whose spirit we have broken or whose future has been foreclosed by our infidelity is no random act of kindness but participates in the redemption that has been wrought in us all by Christ. When we forgive one another and when we are forgiven, we bear the image of the man of heaven and, for a moment, we may glimpse the end that is in our every dusty beginning. In the third place, it means we can rejoice with Milton’s Adam and so be given eyes to see in the midst of our pain and toil, our exile and impending death the happy fault that has earned for us such a great redeemer. This is no casual glance in the mirror, however. To behold our true and essential nature, “we have to look not to Adam the fallen man but to Christ in whom what is fallen has been cancelled and what was original has been restored. We have to correct and interpret what we know of Adam by what we know of Christ, because Adam is only true [humanity] in so far as he reflects and points to the original humanity of Christ.” Therefore we may rise each morning in the confidence that the mercy shown to the prodigal is not an isolated case but defines the very ground of human existence. The end that is the redeeming love of God for us while we were yet sinners awaits us in the midst of every far country to which we have run and joins us on the dust heap of this mortal life. “This is precisely the reason why the Christian tradition has ascribed the fall to the sin of just one man,” concludes Gary Anderson. “The defeat of that first man is swallowed up by the victory of the last man—Jesus Christ. [And t]his is no exercise in literary artistry as though the writers of the Bible had merely aesthetic interests at stake when they closed this story as it had opened. The purpose was theological” and downright redemptive! Just so, on this second Sunday in Lent, “The story ends as it began in order to bring home the point that God’s forgiveness of Adam through Christ defines all human creation. That forgiveness and grace are not arbitrary moments in the lives of random specimens for the species homo sapiens. They are the very center point around which all creation turns—and flourishes.” That just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image of the man of heaven. This is the doctrine of original sin. Thanks be to God. |