Original Sin? (A Sermon for the First Sunday of Lent)

Lent already? It only feels like yesterday that we were celebrating Christmas together! Well I suppose that’s what we get for aligning a Christian festival to a pagan one! Easter, as I’m sure you know, was superimposed onto an existing pagan feast of the goddess Eastre – the so-called ‘goddess of the dawn’. Which is why we still have eggs and bunnies, and all that lovely imagery of new life.

But for now, we’re in the period of Lent… and period in which we pause, and hold our breath before the celebrations of Easter morning. And, of course, it’s a time for examining ourselves, and for asking ourselves whether we’ve fully understood the full implications of the Easter message that we are about to celebrate in 40 days time.

This morning’s readings, which come straight from the authorised lectionary for this year, invite us to consider one of the key messages of Scripture…the rather disturbing notion that we are all sinners, who have inherited our sin from Adam.

It’s a message that many people struggle to hear. I think that I will never forget the first funeral that I conducted soon after my ordination as a deacon. When trying to explain to the family that we would have a prayer for forgiveness near the beginning of the service, they asked, “what’s all that about then?”. I replied, innocently, that it was a chance to ask God for forgiveness of our sins…at which the family erupted. “Sinners!” they said. “We’re not sinners…and our Gran definitely wasn’t one!”

I could see that I was not going to get very far with this particular family. The idea of sin had become irretrievably linked in their mind with heinous crimes like murder. They had no concept that sin could be something far less dramatic. I found myself rather amused a little later however, when I asked them what their dear Gran’s favourite leisure-time occupations had been. “Oh”, they said, “she liked to go out into the country on Sunday, and do a bit of poaching!”

So what are we to make of this word ‘sin’ – what is actually meant by it? Clearly it includes murder. But what else? Are we really meant to define ourselves as sinners who have all erred and strayed from God’s ways like lost sheep. Are we really the ‘miserable offenders’ that we declared ourselves earlier to be – in the words of the confession? I think that if we are honest, most of us probably don’t see ourselves in quite that way. We are normal, honest, church-going people aren’t we? I doubt that any of us have done anything particularly evil this week. I can’t imagine that many of you have been out murdering anyone in the last seven days!

The Genesis story tells us that the Serpent tempted Eve to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. He told her that if she did so, she would be like God – understanding the difference between good and evil. He also told her that God was lying when he said that she would die if she ate the fruit.

And of course, the Serpent was lying…on both counts. Physical death arose as a direct consequence of Eve’s, and then Adam’s actions. But more than that, the Serpent lied when he said that Adam and Eve would become like God, understanding the difference between good and evil. Patently, that was not true. Oh, we can understand the very basics of the difference between the two… but we are not capable of making the tough decisions about what is right or wrong. If you want proof of that, just think of all the ethical issues that the church has grappled with throughout the centuries. Slavery? The equality of the sexes? Attitudes to abortion, or stem cell research? Even the current debate in the Anglican Communion about the rightness or wrongness of homosexuality.

We are simply not wise enough to be able to judge these issues with any sense of certainty. All our decisions are provisional, and open to challenge by equally committed and faithful people who are grappling with the same questions. Our knowledge of good and evil is certainly far less than God’s.

So the story of Adam and Eve – whatever we think of its merits as an actual historical event – is a powerful statement of what happens when we human beings try to make ourselves like God… when we move from allowing God to shape us, and try instead to shape ourselves. We end up in a mess. We become subject to sin. We create societies and cultures which are infected with incompetence, and the inability to reach clear moral decisions about just about any important issue.

It might also be helpful if we see sin like an infection. The things that our ancestors got wrong, continue to affect us – or infect us today. And the things we are getting wrong (like destroying the planet, or tolerating great evil around the world) will affect, or infect our descendents. I think that’s the idea that St. Paul is leading us towards, in our second reading, when he says that ‘sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned’ (Rom 5:12)

So if sin has infected the world, like a disease, what is the cure? Well St Paul outlines the remedy for that too. He makes a comparison between the first Adam – the man through which the infection of sin first entered the world – and the ‘second Adam’ – which of course is Jesus. (We might like to remember that the word ‘Adam’ simply means ‘Man’). In other words, the first Man (with a capital M) has now been replaced by the second ‘Man’ (with another capital M). The way of disobedience – of thinking that we are capable of living without God – is replaced by the way of obedience…modelled by Jesus up to and including the point of death. That’s what Paul means when he says, in verse 19: “For just as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous”. Paul himself summed this idea up much more succinctly in his first letter to the Corinthians, when he said “All in Adam die. All in Christ are made alive” (I Cor 15:22)

There are, I think, two distinct ways in which this new life is offered to us through Jesus. The first is, plainly, through his death. Again in Paul’s words, a little earlier in Romans chapter 5, “For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly” (Rom 5:6) By a mechanism which remains an eternal mystery – something that we can only begin to grasp with our feeble human minds – Christ death had the effect of wiping away our sin. Entire branches of Christianity have been founded on trying to understand the depth of that statement. Was Jesus sacrificed in our place? Were our sins attributed to him so that he was punished for us? Or was his death an immense example of how far God is willing to go to draw us back to his ways? Did he, in some way, pay a ransom to the Devil to free us from the Serpent’s clutches? Substitutionary atonement. Penal substitution. Ransom. Redemption. Moral example – all these, and many other ways of grappling with the meaning of Jesus’ death have been offered – even by different writers in the New Testament. But what they are all pointing to is essentially the idea that Jesus – the second Adam – somehow undid the damage of the first Adam. Jesus was the cure to the infection of sin.

And the second way that Jesus offers us new life is quite simply through his teaching. If his only purpose was to die for us, then he could quite simply have done that without spending three years telling us what else we needed to know.

What Jesus called us to, throughout his life of teaching, was the idea that we can chose to live under the Lordship of God – the Kingdom of Heaven, the Kingdom of God. Jesus offers us the chance to live in a kind of relationship to God – similar to that of a subject to their King, or a child to their father. We are offered God’s way of living, through the teachings of Jesus. It’s a way of poverty, and of peace. It throws aside notions of power and wealth and warfare and exploitation. It reaches out to the poor and the sick – and declares to the meek and the humble that theirs is the Kingdom of God.

And Lent is a period when we might spend some of our time thinking about that very question. Accepting entirely that Jesus has done all that is necessary for our salvation; we then need to consider whether we have truly begun to live the eternal life that he offers us now! Jesus said that he had come so that we may have life, and have it to the full. (John 10:10) He didn’t just mean life after death – he meant eternal life that starts NOW. Jesus’ challenge is that we are capable of living lives that are pure, holy and, in Paul’s words to the Romans, ‘made righteous’ – now.

So what about us? Have we heard the voice of Jesus, calling to us across the centuries? “Repent” ‘Turn away from doing things your way – and turn to my way’. The Kingdom of Heaven is breaking through now… you can live a righteous and holy eternal life…now.

Let me invite you, then, to take time this Lent to slowly, deliberately, and prayerfully read through the Gospels. Take time to let Jesus’ radical call to a new way of living get soaked into your mind and into your consciousness. Take time to begin fully living eternal life, in the ‘family’, the ‘community’, or the ‘lordship of God’. Now. It’s there for the taking.

Amen