Lent 1

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Dear brothers and sisters in Christ,

This past Monday morning, I woke up to a big giant head ache. Not literally, mind you. My head wasn’t literally hurting. Rather I woke up Monday morning to reports that my Facebook account had been hacked. Some malcontent living in some remote corner of the world got into my Facebook account and started sending bogus emails to all of my cyber friends, posing as me and pretending to be stranded in London England and needing a immediate transfer of money. First of all, thanks to all of you who were concerned. I appreciate it, although some of you told me you assumed it was just London Ohio and figured I could probably walk home. But many friends and former acquaintances took the trouble to call or contact me to let me know what was happening and offered their help to get the issue resolved. I appreciate it.
Bottom line, in spite of the many plans that I had for things I was intending to do Monday morning and afternoon, instead I found myself dealing with the effects of sin in the world. Some cyber thief, some computer hacker, targeted me and my friends to run a scam. It was frustrating. A big headache, makes me wonder if Facebook is worth the all the trouble.
Manny Acta, the manager for the Cleveland Indians recently tweeted, “There are more positive things going on in the world than negative ones… Negativity is just louder.”
Mr Acta reflects a common sentiment found in the world today. There are positive things and negative. You have to choose to listen to the positive and tune out the negative. And you know what, that sounds really good. And most of the time you can get away with that. But there always comes a time when you can’t ignore the negative, when you have to hear it and acknowledge and find some way of explaining. There comes a time when tuning out the negative is even kind of naïve.
My personal Facebook fiasco was kind of frustrating. It was an example of the negative. True enough Mr Acta, it’s not worth worrying about all that much. But my personal interaction with the negative pales by comparison to that of many others.
Take the people of Japan, for example. They are suffering with the aftereffects of an earth quake and ensuing tsunami. Hundreds have lost their lives, thousands have lost their homes, a nuclear power plant is on the brink of meltdown, there is untold devastation from the flow of water, and from aftershocks. The people of Japan are living a nightmare.
Sometimes you can tune out the negativity. But other times, that negativity is so loud, so prominent, you can’t just turn it off. As much as you would like to change the station to your favorite positive sounding pop music channel, you can’t. The negative, the bad, the horrible is being broadcast on every station and there is simply no escape.
When that happens it is time to wake up. Take a hard dose of reality and come to grips with the truth.
Our text offers us a good dose of that truth.
Our text provides the answer. Our text shows us the solution. It demonstrates the cause, it diagnoses the problem and then it provides the answer. The problem is sin, the problem is that God’s good world has been ruined and spoiled by sin. The solution is God’s promise, salvation brought about by God’s own intervention through the sacrifice and death of Jesus our savior.
It all goes back to the beginning. To Adam and Eve as they were living there in God’s paradise. Satan, that Old Evil snake found Eve in the Garden and he began to tempt her. “Did God really say?” He was getting Eve to doubt God, to question whether or not he was as good as she knew him to be. Satan always does that to us.
Eve responded. “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, 3 but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’” She was mostly right. They were not supposed to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and Evil, God said nothing about touching it. But she was correct, to eat it would mean death for Eve.
“You will not surely die.” Said the snake. “For God knows that when you eat of that fruit your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good from evil.”
Satan has plaid that same trick with you and me and everyone else ever since.
Take my Facebook thief for example. Whoever it was he or she certainly has the smarts and computer savvy to earn a decent living, to earn an honest living. But Satan has convinced them to earn their living dishonestly, to focus on what God hasn’t given and to find some way to take it dishonestly, to prey on peoples friendship and loyalty. God hasn’t given you what you deserve so you have to take it for yourself.
So many times Christians have asked themselves the question, they have wondered why in the world God put that tree, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, in the garden in the first place. Why did God give them the chance to disobey? Wouldn’t it have been better if that tree were never made?
But we are short sited in our question. We assume God put it there for ill. But we forget the true nature of God. God is good. God gives only good gift. This tree was not a carrot on a stick, it was not a temptation for Adam or his wife. It was a blessing.
In his commentary on Genesis, Luther calls this tree their church, their temple, their place of worship. God made Adam and Eve and placed them in the garden with no rules, no regulations for his entire creation. They could go anywhere and do anything and as such, they had no way to serve Him; no way to thank him, no way to obey him. God gave them this tree with a specific command so that they could go to that tree and worship. It was God’s Word, God’s command for them. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil was the very place where they good go to demonstrate their love and devotion to their Creator.
So then you see just how insidious Satan’s trick was. He attacked the very spot where Adam went to church, he attacked Adam at the heart of worship and divine/human interaction. Adam, the God you have come here to serve has been holding out on you. He has been denying you what should be yours. Don’t use this tree to worship that stingy and selfish God. Instead be your own god. Eat the fruit. Know good. Know evil. Then you will be god unto yourself.
And Adam listened. He listened to the snake. He was deceived by evil and he paid the price. God’s perfect creation, God’s unspoiled world, was suddenly polluted by sin. And just like pollution corrodes and corrupts the beauty of what’s green and alive so has sin polluted and corrupted God’s entire world. It brought death to Adam and to Eve, it brought suffering and evil of every kind. Earthquakes, tsunamis, large scale disasters, but even the smaller disasters that happen only to you. They all point back to this one event.
Adam was scared. He knew what he had done and he all of a sudden felt feeling he never felt before. Anxiety, fear, shame, anger, bitterness, confusion, uncertainty. And then he heard the Lord coming. Walking through the garden. And so he did what any one of us would have done. He tried to cover his tracks. He felt exposed. Eve felt exposed. The threw together a covering of leaves – a lot of good that would have done – and they hid from the Lord.
But God knew. He had seen and heard what they had been up to. There is no hiding from the Lord. But that didn’t stop them (or us) from trying.
But here is the beauty. Here is the remarkable thing. In spite of all they had done, in spite of how greatly they had ruined and destroyed the good world that God had made, in spite of their disobedience to God, in spite of the fact that they undermined his love and care for them, God forgave them. They should have caught the brunt of God’s wrath, they should have experienced his full punishment, his anger at sin, but they did not.
God loved them. In the same way that God loves us, God loved them and he forgave them. He showed them mercy, and grace, and forgiveness, and promise, and hope, and salvation.
And so here we are back to our original question. The bad, the negative, the unpleasant, and even the tragic. Why does it happen and how does it come. And here we have the answer. It comes because of sin, but sin has a solution.
God found Adam and Eve hiding in their sin and he confronted them. And then he confronted the snake. Your head will be crushed by the offspring of Eve. Your work will be undone by a child to be born. Generations down the line, descended from Adam and Eve, God himself was born of a woman, the Son of God born to a daughter of Eve. Jesus the solution to sin and answer to suffering.
Eden was God’s original blueprint for his world, there was no sin, there was no suffering, there was no death. Those were all later additions brought about because of our sin. Sin has consequences. Pain in childbearing, morning sickness, the battle of the sexes. Hard work, thorns and thistles, sweat and toil, and finally and worst of all, death. As you and I find ourselves interacting with sin, with our own sin and the sins of others, we see the effect that it has. All of earth’s disasters have come about because of sin. But God has a solution. God has sent Jesus.
In our Gospel text for today, we see Satan hard at work once again. He battled with Adam, he battled with Eve and he led them into sin. He thought he could do the same with Jesus. But he could not. Jesus withstood his attacks and fought him off. Jesus lived his life from beginning to end without sin, without falling or failing even once. And this perfect life of Jesus enabled him to be our perfect sacrifice, to be our righteous substitute, to die for us in our place as he suffered on the cross. And Jesus has given his life to cover ours.
Adam and Eve tried to cover their sin and shame with fig leaves. Fig leaves don’t offer a whole lot of protection from the wind and the rain. So God gave them a coat made from leather. Warm and secure, protection from the elements. But protection brought by death, protection because of some animal made the ultimate sacrifice.
In the same way, the feeble attempts at righteousness that we come up with on our own are out done by God as he covers us with his own robe or righteousness also cut in blood. The righteousness earned by Jesus as he died on the cross to save us from sin and secure us for salvation.
What is so utterly amazing is that here in our text, but also in our lives, God finds us as we are affected by sin. At various times in our lives the bad the negative the hard and the tragic frustrate us and our efforts and living our lives. These things have come about because of sin. But God has dealt with that sin. He has saved us and he has given us to the hope of salvation found in Jesus. He did it at Eden, He has done it here at Chuckery.
Amen.