Sermon by the Rev. Dr A. K. M. Adam

Therefore just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all.

In the Name of God Almighty, the Blessed Trinity on High— Amen.

Sisters and brothers, if I had known two months ago that Fr Nicholas would have me back to Clarkston, preaching on these particular readings, I would not have used up my story about the primary-school children who loved my sermons about the transgression in the Garden. Those children loved to hear me preach about the Garden of Eden because they apprehended the truth that the story tells about us. No matter how simple the rule, no matter how great the benefits of obedience, people always have found a rationale for disobeying. “Look, honey, it is a delight to the eyes! Plus, it is to be desired to make one wise!” Who could resist such a treat, even if God had forbidden it?

My very young congregation was actually just about the right age to recognise the kind of story that the Book of Genesis is telling us. You may recognise this kind of story too — “Where did the Elephant get his trunk?” “Well, the Kolokolo bird told the ’satiable Elephant’s Child to go down to the banks of the great grey-green greasy Limpopo River, and there a crocodile caught him by his little nose, and he pulled, and pulled, and pulled, and at each pull the Elephant’s Child’s nose grew longer and longer.” That’s how the Elephant got his trunk, O Best Beloved. And by the same token, “Why do people suffer, and grow old and die?” “Well, the serpent told our ancient ancestors to eat the fruit that grew on the forbidden tree, and when hey ate of it, God banished them from the garden where they might have lived in comfort all their days.” Just so, O Best Beloved, did we come to the sad condition in which tragedy afflicts us, trial breaks us, striving aches us, and death lays claim to each and every one. Something went wrong somewhere. Somebody made a fatal error.

We want to know more — exactly whom shall we blame? Exactly what went wrong? When and where did this happen, and how did life go before this catastrophe? We long for answers, but a Just So story responds only with its own story; we insatiably curious children of God will receive no fuller answer than that serpent, that fruit, and that fateful bite.

Israel seems to have known that. This story drops right out of the Old Testament after the Book of Genesis; you will look in vain to hear Samuel tell King Saul that he will eventually have to die because of Adam and Eve; you will study in vain to find traces of Haggai telling Zerubbabel that death entered the world through one man’s transgression. Israel accepts death as part of the package: “The dayes of oure age are iij. score yeares & ten: & though men be so stronge that they come to iiij. score yeares, yet is their strength then but laboure and sorowe: so soone passeth it awaye, & we are gone.” The Old Testament pays almost no attention to Adam, Eve, serpents, forbidden fruit, and the unfortunate couple after these few chapters.

St Paul, however, is confident that Adam provides the explanation for the mess the world is in. Even in this morning’s epistle lesson, though, he shows more concern in Adam’s symmetrical relationship with Jesus than he does in the particulars of who tempted whom, what kind of fruit they ate, and so on. The point, says Paul, is that the reign of death is over, that from the very first human being, death and sin have laid claim to us — but now, through our sharing in Christ’s faithfulness, in his death, and in his unconquerable life, we have been united with Jesus as the last Adam, the ultimate human being. Paul cares about Adam mainly insofar as Adam provides him with one of the keys to understanding Jesus, and Paul hardly cares about Adam at all as a character in the story who does things.

The impulse to make this morning’s scene in the Garden of Eden into an exhaustively precise drama of events that happened in just that way — the sort of thing you see in an episode from televised crime scene investigators, that enables us to pin down the guilty party, to deduce the exact method of the crime, and bring the culprit to justice — tempts us to make the same kinds of mistake that humans have been making all along. Reading this lesson as a bill of indictment against Eve and Adam shifts the spotlight from us and our own frailties onto them, the primordial ancestors whose sin has set us on the road to perdition. We blame Adam; Adam blames Eve; Eve blames the serpent; but the fact remains that we all have done things we ought not to have done (whether somebody else tempted us or not). Blaming others doesn’t let us off the hook, it doesn’t lessen the extent to which we have sinned in thought, word and deed, and in what we have failed to do. The more vigorously we seek some outside cause for our sins, the more we reveal the truthfulness of the Just So story from Genesis.

St Paul sees that the origins of sin matter mainly because they tell us what kind of people we are; but he promises us that we can be different, that Sin and Death are true words, but they need not be the last word. Where you and I are bound to fall into sin as we are bound by gravity to fall down to the earth, Death could not bind Jesus. The pale pleasures of mortal indulgence couldn’t lure him to rationalise, to blame others, to sneak a bite of the forbidden fruit. Jesus didn’t fall into sin — Jesus rises! As we are ever prone to collude with the gravity that drags us ever downward, Jesus offers us a way of living, a way of rising to life again, that counteracts the downward pull of sin’s gravity.

One part of that gift involves our just tangling our lives up with Jesus’ life, so that when he rises, we rise with him. That doesn’t require that we take some moral step, only that we accept the gift of life from Jesus. The free gift, the no-strings gift, builds us into the Body of Christ, and as part of the Body of the Christ over whom death couldn’t prevail, we will share in Christ’s victory. That, oddly, is the hard part.

It’s the hard part because it’s actually easier to perform a few miscellaneous good deeds, smile, avoid really obvious big sins, and to rationalise our lingering bad habits without stepping forward and permitting ourselves to be justified by grace. We already dwell in a world of trade-offs and compromises; we know our way around, and we know that we’re not the worst transgressors by far. It’s much harder to put our trust in grace that justifies not us alone, but also those really horrible sinners in the other party, on the other side, in the other country. It’s easier to imagine that we can take matters in hand and do something about it, whatever “it” is — and it’s always easier to blame God for not living up to our standards, not arranging the world by our well-informed criteria. For us to accept God’s free gift of life, we need to let go of the illusion that we’re in charge, that we set the standards, that we have the insight and strength to do the job ourselves.

The saints tell us, though, that the narrow gate of grace brings us inestimable comfort. The saints (and you can take my word that I’m not there yet) say that once we recuperate from the illusion that we’re responsible for the world, we can flourish in grace as we continue Christ’s work in the world, drawing on his strength. Grace fills us with the confidence that what we give is not lost, what we share replenishes with abundance. The hard path of grace leads us to glory by ways of light and beauty.

Elephants do have remarkable trunks; the Just So story underscores the truth about elephants in a fanciful way. Likewise, humans do fall prey to sin and death. The saints are not immune to death, nor to suffering, nor even to sin, nor has Jesus removed cataclysmic evil from the world, but the saints’ story, our story, ends not in grief of the tomb, but in the glory of Christ. Sisters and brothers, when we once lived in a lush garden of abundance and beauty, our foolish short-sighted rationalisations spoiled our blessings and drove us out into a world marked by sin and death. Now, as we live in a tragic world where beauty and abundance may collapse to rubble in a moment, we who share in God’s free gift of grace have the opportunity to show a love greater than sin and death. Where lives have been devastated and hearts broken, grace puts everything we can do at the disposal of our neighbours. Grace gives without measure, grace shares from limitless abundance, grace heals and supports. When sin and death besiege frail mortality, grace once again takes up the cross and follows Jesus to the depths of human need — and in the aftermath of cataclysm, O Best Beloved, grace always rises.

Amen.