Original Grace Happens

Original Grace Happens: Delivered At First Congregational Church of Murphys, CA, Oct. 10, 2010


Scripture: Genesis 3

Have you noticed that there are some words in our language that we don’t say out loud in polite company? No, not vulgar words. I mean the kind of words that are actually okay to say but only if you whisper them; like bathroom.

“Pardon me. Do you know where I might find a bathroom?”

“I know, they’re not even married yet but I think Judy’s already pregant.”

“Oh, don’t worry. It’s not about you. Mark’s just cranky today because he started his new diet. I’ve never met a man who cares so much about what he looks like but it’s probably just because he’s gay.”

And then there are those words you know you have to whisper but you do it really loudly just to make sure everyone heard it.

“Yes, Don is doing much better and he’ll be back to work on Monday but I heard he’s going to have to start seeing a psychotherapist.”

Have you noticed we usually mean something just a little bit derogatory when we use a word in a whisper? You might want to especially notice that about the word, “gay.” I’m just sayin.’

We have words like this in Christianity, too. Words like “sin.” Oh, what? You didn’t hear that? You want me to whisper it louder, so everyone can hear? The word is “SIN!” Wo! Oops, did I say that out loud? Sounds kind of sinister when you whisper it that way, doesn’t it? It’s a little bit like when Harry Potter speaks parcel tongue, “Seth hash ekaaa!” For those who are not familiar with the wizarding world of Harry Potter, (“They don’t know who Harry Potter is? They must be muggles!”) parcel tongue is snake language. Harry knows how to talk to snakes.

Hmmm…talks to snakes…I wonder if Adam and Eve had to know parcel tongue in order to talk to the snake in the garden? Oh, probably not, but this does bring up an interesting point. Why would the antagonist in the story of Adam and Eve be a snake? Snakes don’t usually much of a sound we can perceive at all. So many of the other animals seem to almost “speak” but we rarely associate the sounds a snake makes with speech of any kind. Well, it just so happens that there were all kinds of religions and beliefs in the ancient world and some of them included not only gods but goddesses, as well. As it turns out, one of the symbols for some of the goddesses was the snake and in this guise the goddess was wise and knowledgeable. So, one of the ways to interpret this story in Genesis chapter 3 is a as a warning to stay away from the temptation of the matriarchal, or mother/goddess centered religions. If you disobeyed this commandment and took up with the heretics, which just means a person who thinks differently, you would be eternally barred from the garden where God takes care of his own.

Another way of interpreting this story, however, and the one we Christians are most familiar with, is that is a story about sin. (Can I stop whispering the word now? Good. Thank you.) I don’t know a single person who doesn’t have trouble with the word “sin” and I think it goes back to the story of Adam and Eve. It’s the first place in the Bible where we encounter the concept of sin. In fact, it’s usually referred to as the “original sin” and traditionally, it has been interpreted as a story about the fall of humankind from God’s grace into sin and more often than not, that sin has been defined as being about disobeying God which had the effect of launching us into the first sinful explorations of our sexuality.

This is one of the first stories I encountered in church and even before I fully understood the technical aspects of sex this interpretation made very little sense to me. I suppose it’s the fig leaves and the mention of nakedness that makes people think the story has something to do with sex but I never really bought into that idea. I was also full of questions about the nature of God that seems to be revealed in the story. For instance, why would God have placed two very dangerous trees in the middle of a supposed paradise? Was God trying to tempt Adam and Eve into disobedience? Furthermore, it is clearly the snake who entices Eve to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. So why did God punish Eve, not to mention poor Adam, for the snake having tricked them into disobeying God? As for punishing the snake, I thought it was pretty high handed of God to punish the snake when it was God who had obviously made the mistake of leaving those two trees where Adam and Eve could get to them in the first place. Also, how in the world were Adam and Eve able to “hide” from God and how come God had to look for them upon returning to the garden? Doesn’t God know and see everything? Finally, I was none too impressed with a story that declared me and everyone else to be made out of dirt. I much preferred the version in Genesis 1 in which human beings are the ultimate creatures God creates at the end of a long and satisfying work week and that we are so exalted as to have been made in the very image and likeness of the divine. I mean, if we are created as images of God and we’re sinful then; does that mean God is sinful?

Well, these are questions that have baffled the attempts of better theologians than I was as a child to understand and make some sense out of. So, quite reasonably, at about the age of 8 or 9, I discarded the story of Adam and Eve as a strange little tale that was interesting but fairly irrelevant to my understanding of who I am and of what is my place in this world.

I encountered the story many times over the years, in Sunday school classes and in seminary and eventually came to discard it again – not because I couldn’t make sense of it but – because I finally decided, in my acquired wisdom and maturity, that the very idea of human beings as sinful and in need of redemption was, in fact, the illusion and that God’s unconditional love would never have allowed us to be so humiliated. Furthermore, all human kind really needed to understand about Jesus’ was that he was the messenger of the good news of God’s unconditional love. You remember the Beetles’ song, “All you need is love.” Well, I got that message loud and clear. The pop theology of our day, courtesy of John Lennon.

Sin just didn’t make sense as far as I was concerned. No one really believes in “sin” anymore. We have psychology. We know what makes people act and behave and even think the way they do. I thought that our big problem as a society was in recognizing ourselves as essentially good; if we could just drop that 5,000 year old self-esteem-squashing rock of an idea that we are broken and fallen and just accept God’s loving embrace then all would be well with the world and paradise would be restored. That was Jesus’ real message. What I ended up really doing was turning Jesus into the ultimate feel-good, self-help guru who was peddling the product of God’s grace.

I’m presenting all of this is in a somewhat humorous manner but it’s not really all that funny. I’m trying to laugh at myself for being so far off the mark and pardon myself for being…human. You see, by denying the concept of sin I was denying God’s grace and it was killing me. I was in the process of dying because I didn’t have God’s grace. I had to interrupt my Master of Divinity in a crisis of faith because I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea of sin and I didn’t know that I was denying myself God’s grace. I actually thought I had it!

So what is grace? I’ve been defining it all these years as that which removes whatever separates us from experiencing full relationship with God. Isn’t that a great theological definition? Grace is that which removes whatever separates us from experiencing full relationship with God. I got it, but I didn’t “get it.” And the reason I didn’t get it was because I couldn’t figure out what it was that separated us from having full relationship with God because the answer has always been…sin. And that was the one thing I couldn’t accept about myself or any of the other really wonderful people in my life. I and they are not sinners!

Do you want to know why I had so much trouble with the concept of sin? Yeah, I understand on an intellectual level that: sin is that which separates us from having full relationships with God but I didn’t understand what it is not. I had equated the word “sin” with the word “bad.” I read that creation story about Adam and Eve and made the same connection most everybody else seems to make; that sin has to do with morality, and that, therefore, if I am sinful I must be bad. Wow! And that idea leads to the question: How could God love me? I’m such a bad person. How could anyone love me? How could we love each other? Maybe it’s just that bad people love other bad people. That still doesn’t explain how or why God would bother to love us. Yes, God’s love had better be unconditional because otherwise God couldn’t love us, either.

That’s where most theologies leave us, with us sinners receiving God’s underserved gift of love. And that’s really wonderful but that still left me being “bad” and essentially undeserving of anybody’s love and that’s what’s been killing me. How many of us walk around all our lives with this idea that we are sinful and therefore bad and that we don’t deserve love? Yes, Christian theologians have told us that God is so great and Jesus was so full of God’s grace that they were able to overcome our sinfulness and make it possible for God to love us again. But that wasn’t Jesus’ message!

Jesus didn’t say, “After I sacrifice myself in exchange for your sins you will be made worthy of God’s love.” He said to the disciples, “You are the light of the world! No one lights a lamp and covers it with a basket, they put it on a stand where it shines because it is of such value to everyone!” He was telling the disciples that they were wonderfully made and of as much value as brilliant light in a pitch dark cave. In Genesis we are created in the image and likeness of God. How did we go, in one chapter, from being so good to being so bad?

Well, here’s where I had it right because we didn’t and we aren’t. What we are is sinful. That doesn’t make us bad. It just makes us full all kinds of stuff that separates us from being in full relationship with God. So, how does this idea make it possible to interpret the story of Adam and Eve?

Here goes: the tree of the knowledge of good and evil represents our decisions to try to know, understand, comprehend everything about our selves and our world without filtering it through God’s love. When we decided to know for ourselves, rather than knowing and perceiving everything from the perspective that we would have had if we had stayed in full, conscious and perfect spiritual union with God, we began the process of separating ourselves from God. We separate our consciousness from Gods’ consciousness. We stop knowing and seeing ourselves as God knows and sees us; as images and likenesses of the divine and we become ashamed and we hide from God. Why the shame? Because Divine love is unconditional, it never judges but we have now separated ourselves from divine love itself, and so all we can do is judge. All we can do is moralize between good and bad because we have knowledge of good and evil but we have separated ourselves from the unique knowing that comes from perceiving all that is from a state of unconditional divine love.

What the tree of the knowledge of good and evil did was to send us in pursuit of knowledge about ourselves and the world apart from that knowledge which is wholey informed by and depends entirely upon perceiving ourselves and creation through the eyes of God’s unconditional love. Matthew Fox and Rupert Sheldrake trace this path of our pursuit of knowledge through its most recent culmination in these days which are often referred to as the age of post-enlightenment. Ever since Renee Descartes introduced his mechanistic view of the natural world and Darwin declared that every living being is nothing more than the culmination of a set of chance circumstances driven by natural selection and the survival of the fittest, God and our ultimate interdependence upon God have been increasingly regarded by many educated and reasoning persons as religious superstitions of the past, or at best, a complimentary but still supplemental explanation of how things came to be as they are.

Fox and Sheldrake insist that this is the reason society seems more and more self-destructive, disillusioned, cynical, and apathetic; we have literally dis-spirited our entire reality. We perceive all of creation to be in a state of sin, that is, in a state of separation from God. In other words, we have made irrelevant God and God’s estimation of us as priceless and infinitely valuable. We have very nearly separated ourselves completely from the love of God which is the very source of our existence. Matthew Fox says that if we are to survive as a viable species then we are going to have to reclaim our understanding that we were originally created from God’s love and that God is continually inviting us to return to this place of our origins, this state of grace, the garden of Eden where all we know and all we feel is God’s love and affirmation of our existence.

Thomas Currie says that God’s “…love can never finally be merely useful, only essential. Without it we die.” (44) This what God means when God tells Adam and Eve that they will die if they eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; that we will become consumed with knowing all that we can discover for ourselves and that we will come to ignore all that God’s loving perspective tells us about reality. This is our original sin but it is also not the end of the story. For out of original sin comes God’s original grace.

Karen Kuchan notices that after Adam and Eve eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and hide from God in shame, God comes looking for them. God pursues Adam and Eve until they are finally “found” by God and despite their fear of retribution are instead clothed and taught how to feed themselves and loved. This is the relationship between God and ourselves about which we are told throughout the rest of the Bible.

Sin isn’t an action or a behavior. Sin is what causes us to think, say and do things that we then define as either good or bad because sin is a state of being; once that separates us from living our lives in full relationship with God. Jesus real message is that, yes, we are sinners but we don’t have to live in sin all the time. God’s grace invites us back into the garden, to share in that very personal, intimate relationship with our God and to join God in that place where unconditional love is all there is and that divine love is all we need to know and feel. Every moment of every day we are invited to meet God in that place in our souls where we remember that garden state of being; to rest in God’s love and affection for us, to allow God to comfort us and nurture us, to heal the hurts we’ve taken and given, to hang out with God and just be together. Grace is that state of just being with God and knowing ourselves and each other as God knows us, as God re-members us and as God re-deems us– just as we were when God first brought us into being; perfect images of the divine, perfectly loved and in perfect union with the very source of our being, our sweet, wonderful, loving, caring, compassionate, always-there-for-us God.

Let us pray:

“We pray, gentle, loving God, that you may give us a spirit of wisdom and revelation as our mutual relationships with you grow, so that with the eyes of our hearts enlightened we may know what is the hope to which we have been called, what is the wealth of the inheritance you offer us, and what is the immeasurable power of your love for transformation in our lives when we trust and believe in your abundant grace. Amen.”

Grace Happens, a Brief Bibliography


Currie, Thomas W. Ambushed by Grace: The Virtues of a Useless Faith. Allison Park, PA: Pickwick Publications, 1993

Dybdahl, Jon, A Strange Place for Grace: Discovering a Loving God in the Old Testament. Nampa, ID: Pacific Press Publishing Association, 2006

Fox, Matthew and Rupert Sheldrake, Natural Grace: Dialogues on Creation, Darkness, and the Soul in Spirituality and Science. New York: Doubleday, 1996

Gulley, Philip and James Mulholland, If God is Love: Rediscovering Grace in an Ungracious World. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004

Kuchan, Karen, Visio Divina: A New Prayer Practice for Encounters With God. New York: Crossroad Publishing Co., 2005

McCullough, Donald, If Grace is So Amazing, Why Don’t We Like It? San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005

Richardson, Cheryl, The Unmistakable Touch of Grace. New York: Free Press, 2005

Toms, Justine, Small Pleasures: Finding Grace in a Chaotic World. Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads Publishers, 2008