A sermon about the Fall

This is an old sermon from several years ago, but I've revisited it thanks to the lectionary sending us into Joshua at Mattins and some Twitter conversations. 

Somebody once said “the optimist believes we live in the best of all possible worlds; the pessimist fears this is true.”

People often try to divide themselves into optimists and pessimists – and I think the three readings we had today might be one of the things that optimists and pessimists hear differently. So I wonder what you heard in those readings – were you an optimist or a pessimist? did you hear about sin or about redemption?

When I read the readings first, I was a pessimist – all I could hear was sin and despair.

But we know that sin is never the end of the story – God will never abandon us to despair. And these readings are also full of hope.

Even from the very beginning of the Genesis reading – from the first moment after sin has entered the world – God is still there. God knows what has happened and God still comes to walk among his creation, to talk with his people. He won’t accept their hiding in shame – he calls them out to face up to what they have done.

This isn’t comfortable for Adam and Eve – but it is hopeful, for them and for us. It’s only by being called out by God – by being brought to realise the content of their shame, the reality of their sin – that they can learn to live again in this changed world. And as a sign of this, a little after our Genesis reading ends, God clothes them. Adam and Eve are ashamed because they are naked – a nakedness that is spiritual as much as physical. And God – the creator of the heavens and the earth – creates for them clothing.

It’s easy to see Genesis 3 – the fall and what happens afterwards – as the end of a story. If we read it like that, it’s a tragedy – God creates everything and sees that it is very good, but created humanity wrecks it. If we thought that tragedy was the fundamental story of our faith, we would be right to despair.

But the story of the creation and the fall is not a standalone tragedy – it’s a scene-setting prologue. It’s the premise for the real fundamental story of our faith – the story of God’s redemptive, liberating love and grace. It’s a necessary premise and we shouldn’t downplay its significance – but it’s not the whole story. Just as the promise of redemption isn’t the whole story – God’s redemptive grace would make no sense if we had nothing to be redeemed from or forgiven for.

So what does it mean to be fallen people whom God loves and redeems?

It means that we are not the people we were designed to be. It means that this is not the world as God made it to be. It means that we cannot by our own efforts restore ourselves or our world.

But it also means that God has come to be with us – just as we are. It means that God has offered us the chance to be restored. And it means that the liberation God offers us is not just for ourselves, but carries the responsibility to join in God’s liberating work in the world.

The promise of God’s restoration, redemption, liberation is hope – but the hope depends on our recognising the reality of our broken world. We can’t receive God’s restoration until we realise that we need it. We can’t become part of that liberating work until we realise that our world needs the building of the Kingdom.

Those are things our contemporary culture makes it hard to hear. Consumerism depends on the lie that humans are capable of becoming perfect. We all of us know that we are fallen – we are not the people we could be – but consumerism tells us that if we just – lose weight, or buy a bigger house, or get a better job, or all manner of other things... then, finally, we will be perfect and we will be loved.

But the story of sin and redemption – the story of our fall and God’s restoration – says no to both those things. The story of salvation history tells us, over and over again, that we can’t be perfect. There is nothing we can do to make us perfect. We are fallen, spoilt, broken creatures and we live in a fallen, spoilt, broken world. There’s nothing we can do to change that.

BUT. There is something God can do to change that – and God is doing it already and has been doing since the very first moment. God has offered the very being of God to us. God has come to be with us. To liberate us, free us, save us and offer us a new future.

That’s what’s going on in the Gospel reading. Jesus is busy healing – but healing in a very specific way, casting out demons. At the time, a lot of illness was thought to be caused by the work of Satan, that is, the fallenness of the world. So when Jesus casts out demons, he’s fighting against the fallenness of the world. He’s misunderstood – he is attacked by the religious establishment, the scribes, and even by his own family. And in return, he makes an authoritative declaration.

In the face of misunderstanding and attacks, Jesus tells people that all their sins can be forgiven and invites everyone who wants to become part of his family.

This is not, perhaps, what we would expect from someone under attack – someone whose divine work is being misunderstood as devilish.

But if we remember Genesis, it should be exactly what we expect from God.

Once again, God’s response to our human mistake-making is to hold out love and grace – the offer of forgiveness, salvation, liberation.

(In various points throughout history, people have been particularly hung up on what seems to be an exception to this offer of forgiveness – Jesus’ caveat that whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can’t be forgiven. But the context of this seems to say that to blaspheme against the Holy Spirit means to falsely call the good works of the Spirit the works of the devil – to look at the liberating power of God, and make the deliberate choice to close yourself off to it. It can’t be forgiven because it’s a deliberate human refusal of forgiveness.)

But that is all by the by. Our Gospel passage is frequently derailed by the question of the sin against the Spirit – but it shouldn’t be.

The point of our Gospel passage is to offer far-reaching love and forgiveness; to highlight the liberating work of God in Jesus – tying up the strong man, the devil, and plundering his kingdom of the souls he has falsely claimed – and to invite us all in to that liberating work. “Whoever does the will of God,” says Jesus, “is my brother and sister and mother.”

It’s inside that family of Christ – doing the liberating work of God – that Paul finds the reassurance which we hear him offer the Corinthians. Paul knows that this is a fallen world. This is a world shaped by the reality of sin. But however dark things seem – however bad they get – Paul reminds us it’s also a world in which the redemptive love and grace of God are active; the brokenness of the world has a horizon, a hope in heaven, where there is eternal glory beyond measure.

So both the optimists and the pessimists are wrong. This is not the best of all possible worlds – it’s a fallen world. But it’s a fallen world with the love and grace of God active in it; with the promise of liberation and the hope of heaven.

That makes us fallen but forgiven –sinful but saved –inevitably caught up in the sinful structures of this broken world, but empowered by the Holy Spirit to break through them into the horizon of heaven. We are offered liberation, freedom in the family of God; and if we choose to take it, we are invited to join in with God’s liberating work. Trusting, not in our own power, but in God’s faithfulness. And ready to offer the forgiveness and freedom which we have received.

Sermon: Cathedral, First Sunday after Trinity, 7^th June 2015

Genesis 3: 8-15

2 Corinthians 4:13 – 5:1

Mark 3: 20-end

Focus statement: the liberating power of God

Function statement: be liberated and liberate