Adam 2.0

Propers: The First Sunday in Lent, A.D. 2017 A

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

It all begins with Adam.

Myths are not fiction. Myths are true. They are timeless tales, primordial stories, that convey deep truths about God, the world, and human beings. Myths tell us who we are, how we got here, and why the world is the way that it is. In this sense, the Big Bang is a myth, evolution is a myth—which is not to say they didn’t happen. Science is quite clearly a powerful tool for discerning true answers to certain types of questions. But they are myths in that their narratives allow us to make sense of reality. We all need a story to live inside of.

The most powerful myth that we have is that of Adam and Eve. See, there are many stories of creation, many myths of how the world came to be. And despite varying widely in detail, the pagan stories all agree on three core truths: (1) the gods arose from nature; (2) the world is a hostile and indifferent place; and (3) human beings are of little concern in the grand scheme of things. It doesn’t matter what mythology we look to—Norse, Greek, Egyptian, Vedic—they all agree that the gods are brutes, the world is harsh, and people are generally worthless.

And a whole lot of folks would still agree with that today. Many who claim to have an atheist worldview in fact have a very pagan worldview.

Genesis turns all of that upside-down. Genesis says that there weren’t cruel gods who arose from nature, but that there’s One God who is perfectly Good and True and Beautiful; who made the world, not of necessity or accident, but from pure creative joy, for the fun of it. And this world that God made, it isn’t harsh or indifferent. It’s good! Nature reflects her Maker’s glory. Like Him, she is good and true and beautiful, bounteous and harmonious. And human beings, far from being an afterthought, are in fact the stewards and sub-creators of this world, tasked with caring for all that God has made, born to be a bridge between the spiritual and material realms.

God is in control; the world is good; and people matter. That is what the story of Adam and Eve tells us about the reality in which we live. It is the myth that turns all the other myths on their heads. And it is still the basis for our understandings of the innate dignity and value of every individual, and of our responsibility to care for and make sense of our world.

Of course, there’s just one problem with all that. If God is in control, and the world is good, and people matter—what the heck happened? How did everything get so messed up? Where did evil come from, or sin, or death? Who broke the world? We find our answer in this morning’s reading from Genesis.

In the beginning, all was well in the garden. God, humanity, and the whole of Creation dwelt together in perfect harmony. But the devil slunk in with that ancient temptation. “Judge good and evil for yourselves,” he hissed. “Go ahead, take a bite. Be your own gods.” And they chose, didn’t they? Adam and Eve chose to disobey God and listen to the serpent. They chose to taste the forbidden fruit, to judge for themselves, to be their own gods. And that one great Fall destroyed us all.

Typically two big questions arise from folks who read this story. They want to know, first off, whether the whole thing wasn’t a set-up. Why was there a forbidden tree in the garden to begin with? And then they want to know how, if God created everything good, the devil exists at all. Either inquiry deserves more attention than we can give it here, but suffice to say for now that God is love. And love, by its very nature, cannot force, cannot tyrannize; love has to invite, to seduce. Love always requires assent in order to be love.

And so Eden, if it were to be a Paradise rather than a prison, had to have an exit door, even if God desperately desired for us never to use it. Similarly for the devil: he wasn’t made evil. Evil isn’t even a thing; it’s just a lack of something good. The devil chose to abandon his post, to abandon his very nature, as one of God’s highest and most glorious angels. He chose instead to try to be his own god. Why is a story for another day. But we do know that he was angry enough, and jealous enough, to pull us down with him.

We were tempted and we fell. That’s all there is to it. We broke the world, not God. And yes, it was us, because Adam and Eve are not simply two people out of however many billion. Adam and Eve are all people, the primordial human being; we’re all just derivatives and offshoots of them. Their weakness, their brokenness, their divisiveness, remains in us to this day, which should be obvious to anyone who watches the news or opens a window.

We know, deep down, that there is a great order and purpose and harmony latent within Creation. We know this because that’s how we were built, to be the gardeners of Eden. And this truth is available to every person of reason and goodwill. But we’re so broken and out of practice that we ignore the world’s proper harmony in order to put ourselves before others and even before our own innate purpose.

We’re terrible at resisting temptation, aren’t we? Just awful at it. Power, sex, sloth, fame, fortune, pleasure, pride—we let them run amok, rather than put them in their proper place. We cannot resist the fallenness of the devil, the world, and the flesh. We couldn’t manage to resist an apple! And so we are a defeated race, a broken humanity, slaves to our own sin. From where is our hope to come?

But then, just when all seems lost, God goes and does something unexpected. He rewrites the myth. God returns to the beginning to make all things new.

A Man is born in Bethlehem who is unlike any other man. He is, in fact, a completely New Man, a New Creation, a New Adam. But this Adam is not like the first, for this Adam cannot fail. This Adam will never abandon His duty as the steward of God’s Creation, the living bridge between the natural and the supernatural. He will not fall into temptation. And that is because this Adam is not just a man made by God, but is in fact God Himself made Man: a Man who cannot be separated from God because He is God—He can’t not be God—and this changes everything!

In Jesus Christ, we are witness to the culmination of God’s creative joy, the figure of Man perfected and raised to eternal glory! An Adam both ancient and ever new! Here at last we see what we were always meant to be: Man Unleashed! The Artist Himself has become His own Masterpiece; the Creator has entered Creation. Jesus is the new myth, because He remakes the relationship, the very reality that exists, between God and Man and the whole of Creation. Our story is rewritten! “Behold!” He proclaims, “I make all things new!”

This is the foe Satan cannot defeat. This is the Champion God has sent into the world. And His touch will heal the sick. And His Word will cleanse all sin. And His Blood will revivify all of Creation so that death itself will die, choking upon His unblemished soul, and the very arrow of time lifted up to eternity.

We all fall in Adam and Eve, and their brokenness infects us to this very day. But it is as nothing compared to the life that the New Adam is even now pumping deep into the arteries of the world, through Word and Sacrament, through the forgiveness of sin, so that all of Creation now groans in pains of building labor. In the beginning, all were one within the body of the old Adam; in the end, all will be one within the Body of the New. Our myth has been rewritten. For just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for us all—for we are all of us “the one man”—so now one Man’s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for us all.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.