Please Click Here For Online Worship Video
Years ago when I was preparing for the ministry, I was under the care of the Presbytery of the Shenandoah down in Virginia. That presbytery had so many people going into the ministry that they had a special committee called The Committee on Preparation for Ministry to look after them. I had to meet with that committee once a year to review where I was at. There were certain tasks that needed to be completed, but also seminary can be a place, a time, a period in life when stuff gets churned up within that can make you rethink your call and so forth. The CPM made sure we candidates for ministry were faring well as we trod the beaten path.
There was a particular person on that committee that I never looked forward to seeing. She always seemed to be playing the Devil’s Advocate, the person who made you doubt your fitness for ministry (if anybody is ever fit for such a thing). She would ask questions in such a way as to let you know you were never going to meet the standards. She called it a “rhetorical question”. It went like this. “Randy, you’ve had a painful childhood. Don’t you think that’s going to have an impact on your ability to be a minister?” Before I could answer, she would say, “That’s a rhetorical question. You don’t have to answer.” It didn’t matter that I could answer it and would have gladly answered it. Her shutting me down like that only seemed to me that, contrary to Scripture, she believed wounded people shouldn’t be ministers…at least not until they had taken responsibility for their lives and sought healing for their wounds. She always hit the button in me that spun me off into some very negative self-reflection.
Well, an odd thing happened at the end of the preparation process. She came to me at the reception following my ordination service and said, “Randy, I know you think I’ve been especially hard on you. It’s just you remind me so much of my own son and I just don’t want to see you get hurt.” She took her role on the committee seriously because she knew that too often certain people in churches and/or the system of relationships in churches will seek out a minister’s wounds and exploit them and hurt ministers badly and in the same way, ministers in their woundedness can and will hurt their churches badly. She just didn’t want to see anybody get destroyed; especially somebody for whom she felt motherly instincts. She was making sure I knew to tend to my wounds by asking those “rhetorical questions” that made me evaluate how well I was taking responsibility for my life and caring for myself.
One thing I have learned in my years of wrestling with the Scriptures is that when a passage has a question in it, it might just be one of those “rhetorical questions” that we should take to heart and let it push our buttons. Again, a rhetorical question is a question that makes us own up and take responsibility for our own lives. In our reading here from Genesis there are some “rhetorical questions” that God asked of Adam and Eve. I think God already knew the answer to the questions, but God asked them to make Adam and Eve take responsibility for their lives and own up to what they had done and come to terms with the consequences. And, oh my, isn’t it telling that Adam and Eve answer these “rhetorical questions” by blaming someone else. Such a display of human nature!
The first question, “Where are you?” God comes strolling through the Garden in the cool of the day to enjoy the aesthetics of his wonderful Creation and to hear what wonderful new discoveries his beloved Adam and Eve had had that day. Adam and Eve’s eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil has not changed God or God’s daily routine. In fact, we would be reading into the text any sort of notion we might have that God knows that they have eaten of the Tree he told them not to. The story doesn’t say God knew “it” had happened. But then again, God is God and could something this cataclysmic have escaped his all-knowingness? It would be so easy to answer the “Why did you let that happen, God?” question by saying that God didn’t know it had happened until we brought it to his attention. That way God is not all-knowing and all-powerful and only gets involved as a “fixer”.
But, I don’t think the God that the Bible challenges us with is oblivious to the bad, to the evil stuff that happens in his good Creation before, during, or after it happens. God knows. An oblivious God only leads to oblivion. For all the bad that does happen, there’s limitless more that doesn’t and I like to believe God puts a limit on the chaos. Yet, we are still left asking, “God why did you let this earthquake, this tsunami, this cancer, this pandemic, this holocaust, this murdering of children slip by? God, are you not still ultimately responsible for what happens in your Creation even in the wake of Adam’s sin?” That’s an unanswerable question. Yet, God does answer it but not with a rational explanation. God’s answer is his presence with us giving us peace and the strength to go on and we have to learn to live with that.
Back to our passage and it’s rhetorical questions. “Where are you?” God calls out to his child Adam. Like a child Adam is hiding from God and why is Adam hiding? He feels naked and afraid. Now tell me, who can’t relate to that? You would be a rare human being arguably suffering from a personality disorder such as narcissism if you did not get out of bed this morning with a little bit of inexplicable shame weighing on your heart. We all have a bit of irrational shame and guilt buried in us, a sense of failure, a sense of inadequacy and in turn, for fear’s sake, for feeling vulnerable, we keep our “self’s” hidden from others, even those closest to us, so that our secret self won’t be discovered and we get rejected.
But the thing is, we can’t hide our “self’s” from the God who made us. I can’t hide “me” from God. Whether I’ve done something wrong or I just feel like there is something wrong with me, I cannot hide my “me” from God. We cannot hide ourselves from the God who in love made us and who in love comes searching for us, not to smite us, but to heal us and save us from ourselves. Yet, we try to do it. We try to hide and the list of the stupid, hurtful, and self-destructive things we do ever grows.
Adam could have done something a little different here. Instead of hiding Adam could have taken the approach of the Psalmist in Psalm 130 that we read at the beginning of the service. “Out of the depths I cry to you, O LORD. Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications! If you, O LORD, should mark iniquities, Lord, who could stand? But there is forgiveness with you, so that you may be revered. I wait for the LORD, my soul waits, and in his word I hope; my soul waits for the Lord more than those who watch for the morning, more than those who watch for the morning. O Israel, hope in the LORD! For with the LORD there is steadfast love, and with him is great power to redeem. It is he who will redeem Israel from all its iniquities.”
Adam could have stayed out in the open waiting for God to come round in his usual manner, and in hope thrown himself into his loving Creator’s arms saying, “I have done what you said not to do and now there’s something wrong with me that I don’t understand. Can you heal me?” But fear kept him from it. Why be afraid of the God who in love made you? Well, Adam is sick in his mind. He now has an irrationality with respect to God. Instead of adoration, hope, and faith in God and his steadfast love and forgiveness, Adam has an irrational fear of God that he cannot shake that is easily exploited. This is what we call Sin. Sin is a disease of the mind with respect to God that affects everything else in life, particularly our relationships.
This irrationality of the mind leads Adam to blame Eve for all that’s happened rather than accepting full responsibility for his own actions. Eve, the smart, curious, wonderful perfect friend God gave him whom Adam, for fear of not wanting anything terrible to happen to her, he didn’t exactly tell her straight about what God said about that tree. It was Adam’s interpretation, his version, of what God said about the Tree that the Serpent was able to twist and trick Eve into eating. God said “But of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil you shall not eat of it, for in the day that you do you shall die”. Adam didn’t even tell her the name of the Tree. Like a parent telling a child not to open a box of cookies by saying “Please don’t open that box” instead of “Please don’t open that box of cookies”. Mention cookie and the child will likely open the box. He simply called it the tree in the center of the garden and he added, “Don’t even touch it.” Adam’s patronizing version of God’s warning made it appear that God was being petty and controlling. Adam’s insecurities seem to have preceded this thing we call the Fall and led to it. Something wasn’t right with Adam even before he ate the fruit – he was simply being human. Adam more or less lied, “white lied”, to Eve to protect this woman whom he loved and it came around to bite them. So much for Adam and Eve being created in a state of perfection from which they fell. This story is very accurate description of what it is to be human rather than a historical record of something called the Fall. Topic for another day.
“Rhetorical questions”, “Where are you?” Answer: hiding from God. “Why?” Answer: I feel vulnerable and ashamed. “Have you done something you shouldn’t have?” Answer: “Well yeah, but it’s not my fault.” Now to the consequences. The one consequence mentioned here was that God cursed the Serpent because the Serpent willfully took advantage of the situation to work evil. On his belly he went and God pledged a day when an offspring of Eve would finally crush the Serpent’s head. That’s the first inkling of a hint of the Incarnation, of God the Son becoming a human and reversing the effects of Sin.
One comment I had on last week’s sermon on the Trinity was that this person got lost once I started reading from the labyrinth of Romans 5 about how Jesus’ one act of obedience wrought healing for all just as Adam’s one act of disobedience brought ruination for all. God has set about healing this disease of irrationality in the mind we have with respect to God, self, and others that makes us think and do terrible stuff. Jesus, God the Son born of Mary according to promise, was the beginning of a new humanity, a new creation. By the work of the Holy Spirit God the Son was born into diseased human flesh but he always turned to God the Father so that he “knew” no sin. His death, the death of God the Son in human flesh, put to death sin and death bringing about a new life for us all. God gives this new life to us now by the gift of the Holy Spirit coming to indwell us and giving us the gift of knowing the steadfast love of God so that we need not irrationally fear him and hide. Those who are in Christ are a new creation, a new humanity because God the Holy Spirit is permanently dwelling in us healing us of this irrational, sin-diseased mind that we have. Before Jesus, this was not the case and that is why we call it a new creation. It is a foretaste of the full New Creation that is coming when Christ Jesus returns and all things are made new and as Isaiah said, “The earth will be full of the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea.”
Until that day, it is important that we take the route of the Psalmist and turn to God, waiting on God in hope assured of God’s unfailing love and forgiveness. It is important that we take responsibility for our lives rather than blame others. We’ve nothing to fear from God because God will be with us through all the having to live with the consequences of our acting on our short-comings. In Christ we are something new. God created a new humanity as Jesus, a new humanity in which God dwells. By the gift of the Holy Spirit, God makes us to be that new humanity. Our task is to die to that old humanity that’s in us and live according to the new and for that we need each other. Just as the Committee on Preparation for ministry looked after my pastoral development and regularly checked in with me to see where I was, so must we do the same with each other. And so, I’ll close with a rhetorical question, the very first one we find in the Bible: Where are you? Amen.
