Sermon of the Month - November 2008
Creation: Crisis
Introduction
Who are we, we humans? ‘Homo sapiens’? Or ‘Homo sapiens sapiens’, as scientists sometimes name our species. To translate that Latin into English, that makes us “wise, wise human”. But are we wise – or just clever? ‘Sentient’ is the favourite word in science fiction to describe this ability more neutrally: we are self-aware. We have a creative ability to shape and reshape our lives and our world, unlike the animals. But do these abilities make us better – or worse?!
“What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals…” (Shakespeare’s Hamlet)
I could give examples from music, literature or art, but let’s look at the ‘beautiful game’ instead – football. I don’t watch lots of football, but I do like to watch Cup Finals, and the World Cup. When you look at extraordinary players like Pele, Maradona, Ronaldo, Ronaldinho you see sport become art, almost wizardry: those fantastic moves. Perhaps you’ve got your example. Ah yes, did I say Maradona? Maybe you immediately remembered that notorious “hand of God” moment, the famous handball goal that he got away with, costing England the match and their place in the World Cup, which Argentina went on to win.
Human ingenuity – in sport, as everywhere else – can be misused. All our inventions, right back to the wheel and fire can be used to benefit or harm. The wheel? Transport – and armed chariots. Fire? Cooking – and arson. And today? Biological, chemical and nuclear research – for medicine and safe energy? But also for WMD. Who are we?
1. Fallen
Genesis 1-11 tells a story. That’s the Bible’s way: it doesn’t spin theories; it tells stories, stories of what God has done. It’s a story of a world made good in which we were made good – with great potential – in which we went off the rails, and now we live in a world which has gone off the rails.
How should we take the Bible’s story? On the one side there are secularists who tell us to ditch it as out of date nonsense, at best myths, legends and fables. And there are liberals who try to provide a more positive version of the same idea: they say in effect that the Bible, particularly in these stories of creation and fall, is telling myths, fables and legends, but they say that these old stories are true as symbols of our humanity. I understand why people have gone down that road for two centuries, but it’s misguided. The Bible has no interest at all in timeless myths. It tells us what happened: that in space and time, we human beings were made good and that we fell. Having said that, we do need to recognise that the way the Bible tells its story includes symbolic elements. We’ve seen that already with the names of Adam and Eve – these are individual people but they have symbolic names, meaning ‘mankind’ and ‘living’, because they represent human life. Now the snake is symbolic not only of evil, but of the animal world. As Nicky Gumbel reminds us in his very good section in the Alpha course on this passage, when Genesis 3:14 tells us that God says to the snake, You will eat dust all the days of your life, we know thatthis is symbolic. Snakes do not just eat dust, they swallow their prey, and the truth of the Bible is not dependant on proving that snakes eat dust.
Of course there are those who tell a different story: the critics of God. Richard Dawkins and his atheist followers tell their story (which they want to advertise on London buses). Their story is that we developed as a result of natural selection, so changes have happened for genetic advantage. Of course, it’s a mystery to him why human beings should develop a desire to worship God. It just doesn’t fit his story at all. He tries to pass it off as a “Darwinian mistake” – a very lame response, a way of saying it doesn’t make sense at all to him. If evolution explains everything, then why did religion evolve?
Of course there is a rather simpler alternative, articulated in famous words of a prayer of Augustine in the year 400: “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you.”
Other critics of God say that we are simply made the way we are. If there is a God, they say, then he made us the sinners we are. Sydney Carter had a nice take on this in one of his ballads. He pictured the hostile thief on the cross as saying “It’s God they ought to crucify, instead of you and me, I said to the carpenter a-hanging on the tree.”
But the Bible tells a different story. God has made us good. He made us capable of personal relationships with one another and with him. But we opted for something else, and we fell from grace. And we continue to opt for things other than what God wants for us, and we continue to fall.
2. How the fall happens
Genesis 3 is the great exposé of evil in the Bible. The serpent, the snake, voices the temptation. It is a temptation to doubt God, to disblieve him and to act against him, by doing what he has forbidden as lethal for us. But it is more than that. The exact expression of the temptation makes it sound worthy: you will be like God. What is better than being like God? Surely the Bible is in favour of us being like God? Sure God himself wants us to be like him? That is the nature of the temptation: it promises heaven, however, it delivers hell; it promises to raise man and woman to the heights, but it delivers us to fall to the depths. Why a snake? The snake not only symbolises the tempting voice of evil, but the temptation to fail our potential and live merely at the animal level. But why a snake? The poisonous snake in the wild can of course be the deadly enemy of human beings. But the significance goes beyond this. At one level, the snake represents animal creation: the effect of the fall is that we are alienated from creation.
So we are promised Godhood, but lose what we have. We do not lose it completely, but it is lethally corrupted. Of course the tempting voice of the snake is a lie. The temptation is to become like God. But we have already been made like God, we have been made in the image of God. This new temptation only displaces what we have already been given. We are made with a God-given image; we are given the potential of love, godly, creative love. But we humans pass that free gift up for the stolen and false promise of the snake.
And what is this fruit, the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? Fruit and knowledge in the Bible regularly relate to experience, live experience. The knowledge of good and evil is the experience of good and evil, and to experience evil is to be corrupted. To eat that fruit is to be corrupted.
We are made for relationships of trust and love: trust in God, trust of one another, love for God love for one another. But the fall to temptation, this temptation to experience good and evil, represents and expresses the breakdown of trust and love; it replaces them with suspicion and alientation.
First of all the man and woman are alienated from each other, and they hide. The fig-leaves represent a simple, primal form of hiding. Our masks are on. This alienation is shown further in the second of the curses, the curse spoken to the woman. At one level we can take this simply naturally, as indicative of our distinctive humanity: giving birth is painful for human females because of the size of the human skull, which in turn is large because of a brain large enough for all that knowledge. But it goes much further than the natural dimension: we were created for good, loving and harmonious relationships, but now as the result of our sinful desires these have been lost. Now we live in a world of alienation between people, and this certainly includes alienation between men and woman. Rivalry between the sexes instead of complete harmony – that is part of our world now.
It is not just alienation between the sexes, but alienation between people generally. Human relationships so need to be centred in love, and so often aren’t. That’s why the optimism of humanist atheism is so absurd. It promises that we can overcome our problems, our limitations, if we make a god out of mankind, or some segment within it. Marx and Lenin did this with their perfect class and political party, and tens of millions died; Hitler and Moussolini did this as the supposed perfect leaders, and even more died. Our own Western culture make the consumer a kind of god, and assumes the market has godlike powers. But these gods have clay feet, as we now see. Humans are alienated from each other, and we cannot solve our problems without God.
But there’s a problem! For secondly, we are alienated from God. Up to this point relationship with God was simple, direct, free, and full. This was expressed by the extraordinary picture of God walking in the garden in the cool of the day. But the man and woman hide from God. This expresses guilt in a simple, direct and primal way. They hide from God, and ever since we have been hiding on and off from God, and indeed ever since we have found that God is hidden from us. We are estranged and alienated from God.
And third, we are alienated from creation. The first of the curses – directed towards the serpent, with its striking words about enmity between [it] and the woman – represents a lethal hostility in the wild between humanity and the poisonous snake, but the snake stands for the whole of animal creation here: we are alienated from creation as a whole. This is expressed more clearly expressed in the curse against the man, that life will be a struggle.
3. Crisis, what Crisis?
“Crisis, what Crisis?” Famous words that Prime Minister Jim Callaghan did not exactly say, but which the tabloids of the day gleefully summarised him as saying. But the word crisis in a biblical context has a peculiar resonance: the Greek word krisiV [krisis] means judgment. The fall of mankind was a crisis, and a judgment. But the Bible does not end with negative word. For there is another who came with a krisis, a crisis which is also a judgment: Jesus. This finds an echo in the words of Bryn Ress’ hymn the kingdom of God, with its lines, “His love for us sinners brought Christ to his cross, our crisis of judgement for gain or for loss.”
I quoted Sydney Carter earlier on. His poem sounds very biting and sarcastic – until you take it as irony. It’s God they ought to crucify – and it’s God they did crucify. The Bible tells a story in which God’s purpose is to have us created, to be people in his image, capable of knowing God truly. But we snatched at it. We fell to the temptation to grab at being God, and in the process, we did not just lose our true divinity, we lost our true humanity.
But God has acted in person, in Jesus, to turn this whole world round. Here was a second Adam who ‘to the fight and to the rescue came.’ Here was one who did not take equality with God as a matter of grasping, but emptied himself, made himself nothing; sin entered the world through one man, Adam ... but if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God’s grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many!
This is the crisis, this is the judgment: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. The crisis came for Adam – the judgment – which he failed. God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. But Adam chose darkness. And we join him in the primal failure, as the selfishness at heart of sin is our common experience. But Jesus enters the world as a new judgment, as new crisis. Now we have the opportunity to turn to the light, to receive the light that shines in our darkness. For here is the light of the world. Here is the one who can restore the world, and can restore creation and can restore each one of us in our relationships with God and each other. God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son Jesus to die for us and for our salvation.