THERE'S A WORM IN THE APPLE John M, Buchanan
Genesis 3:1-13, Romans 7:18-25 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
April 16, 1978 Columbus, Ohio

The topic will win no popularity contest. The simple fact is that none of us
wants to be told that there is something wrong with the human condition, and particu-
larly our human condition, The story is told of a tiny church in the hills of
Appalachia, The preacher was breathing hell fire and brimstone, condemning adultery,
stealing, lying, murder, dancing, movies: after each broadside a little old woman
in the back pew responded vigorously, "Amen, Brother, Tell it, Praise the Lard."
Then the preacher directed his attention to chewing tobacco, And the woman responded,

"Now you've stopped preachin' and gone to meddlin'!"

There's something like that in each of us, I suppose. We don't mind considering
sin in the abstract, or even the particular, so long as the object of our attention
is someone else. We do not appreciate, however, the inference that we are involved,
Besides, we've had enough of that, We're learning that the lack of self-esteem is a
primal psychological dynamic for most of us, The Transactional Analysis school of
Psychiatry is telling us that we carry around feelings of "not OK-ness" all our lives
and try desperately and unsuccessfully to prove that we are "OK", We are told that
the Christian doctrine of Original Sin is, in no small measure, responsible for the
fact that many people feel perpetually guilty and are never able to live comfortably
with their own humanity, Why make matters worse by adding to the burden of guilt
and insecurity and feelings of inadequacy that most people bear? No less an author-
ity on human relations than Erich Segal, after all, has proclaimed that "love means
never having to say you're sorry" which, by the way, I regard as a candidate for the
single worst statement ever made, Norman Lear is at least honest when discussing
their relationship Edith Bunker says: "I was just thinking, In all the years we have
been married, you never once said you was sorry," Archie responds: "Edith, I'll
gladly say I'm sorry - if I ever do anything wrong," It is no coincidence, by the
way, that Archie can't say, "I love you" either, (Spencer Marsh, God, Man and
Archie Bunker, p.30).

Why bother with the topic? Why a sermon on sin instead of more enlightening and
uplifting matters? Because I believe that dishonesty about the human condition is
responsible for history's greatest tragedies. 1 would submit that one of the
geniuses of the Judeo-Christian heritage is its view of humanity. I would submit
that both Jews and Christians have the most honest and most accurate anthropology in
the market place of ideas, And I would submit that the guilt-producing negativism
we ordinarily associate with the idea of sin is an aberration, a misunderstanding;
that, in fact, our honest approach sees more potential, and is a higher, holier and
more hopeful view of humanity than any other,

The problem is one, first of all, of misunderstanding. Dr. Seward Hiltner,
Professor of Theology and Personality at Princeton, suggests that if you ask the
average churchman about theology he will be terribly vague, "But if he is asked
about sin, he may be sure that he knows what it is. And he will very probably be
wrong, There is no theological idea that has fallen victim to such widespread
misunderstanding." (Theological Dynamics, p.81).

In the first place we ordinarily think about sin in terms of petty vices,
stealing, cheating, lying. The revivalistic tradition in Protestantism and con-
servative Roman Catholicism have notoriously over-simplified the matter, If sin is
no more profound than the occasional breaking of the common ground rules of moral

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behavior it is not a serious problem: it can also be overcome, simply by trying
harder, We mean more than that, however, St, Paul suggested that there is something
about us that prevents us from doing the good even when we know what it is, Psychia-
try often supports that view,

In the second place, we have defined sin too long in a literalistic interpreta-
tion of the Fall in Genesis 3, The result has been a devastating propensity to
regard sin solely in sexual terms, Adam and Eve didn't know they were naked until
they ate the fruit: then they were embarassed: and when they were exiled from the
Garden and started to make babies, their original sin was passed on genetically. Thus
the Christian Church has, at times, concluded that sin is transmitted sexually,
children are conceived in it, The logical deduction is that sex itself is sinful:
celibacy is best - which is about as far from the lusty, life-affirming view of the
Old Testament as it is possible to get,

That is not what we mean either. There are many good reasons for growing beyond
a literal interpretation of Genesis, The best, however, is that in this case
literalism is misleading, Eden is on no map, Adam means every man: Eve, every woman,
It is a gorgeous, metaphorical expression of the human condition, and in the ex-
pression, I would suggest, it is accurate, x

Again "All in the Family" is a helpful setting, In his little volume, God, Man
and Archie Bunker, Spencer Marsh says, "Archie is a cigar-smoking Adam with clothes
on. He is a fugitive from the Garden of Eden,"' And then paraphrases Genesis 3 ina
way I should like to borrow: "Adam and his wife Eve lived in a park called Eden.
Eden Park seems to have had everything a desert-living people would dream of includ-
ing an abundance of trees which provide shade as well as an abundance of fruit,

"All the fruit is for the pleasure of Adam and Eve except for that one tree,
which they are not to eat and which they do not touch until a serpent comes along
with an exciting promise, If they eat the prohibited fruit, they will be like God,
Knowing they will never get a better offer, and not realizing the serpent is a liar
they eat the fruit,

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"Time passes and the scene ends with two bloated nudes sitting under an empty
tree surrounded by a giant pile of apple cores, (Or more realistically, olive pits).

"That desire to be like God led to their downfall, and to the downfall of all

» (| humanity since, A God is whatever is Number One in a person's life, and with Adam
|land Eve it was 'self' that received that first slot." (p.31-33), The author con-

cludes that violence in the world, hell within families, alienation in personal
relationships are the result of human beings elevating self to first priority in life,

That is the first and classic Christian idea of sin: selfishness, egotism,
pride, The philosophers and theologians regard it as part of the givenness of the
human condition, To be human is, by nature, to be self-centered, We are motivated

aT by primal drives toward self-preservation, self-protection and security. But to be

self-centered is to be out of sync with one's neighbors and one's God, Bertrand
Russell was no CHristian but he understood the human condition, He wrote, "Every

\ man would like to be God, if it were possible; some few find it difficult to admit

\ the impossibility." (Power, A New Social Analysis, p.1l).

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Sin as selfishness, self-centeredness may, I believe, be observed along the
entire spectrum of human behavior: in the notion, for instance, that my race is
better than all other races and therefore I have the right to subjugate, eliminate,
discriminate against, dislike and not go to school with people of another race, Or
in the simple little game of "mine is better than yours" which we play with such
fervor, and which prevents us even from listening to one another, or in the insist-
ence in marriage that my gratification takes precedence over yours,

I continue to be impressed with the realism of that view of humanity, And I
continue to regard that kind of sin as something for which we should be ashamed -
regardless of the arena in which we are committing it, and about which we need to
say "I'm sorry" to God and to one another and from which we need to be delivered, In
purely theological terms sin is always against God, because it has no room for Him,
When I am busily putting another person down, for instance, what is happening in terms
of theological dynamics, is that God who is the Father of both of us has been pushed
aside to make a place for my expansive ego. f

But there is another side to it, An awareness of sin as egotism can be paral-
yzing, To combat our pride, we can try to be humble and discover before long that we
are feeling rather proud of our humility which is certainly more profound than our
neighbor's, The discovery can be paralyzing, We can be so sensitive to our own ego
cravings that we lose the ability to enjoy life; feel guilty about feeling good, and
refuse to extend ourselves for fear that we might end up regarding ourself too highly.
The other side of the matter, as far as I'm concerned, is sloth - the propensity to
be less rather than more than, we are,

Think again about the Genesis 3 story, In the Garden of Eden Adam and Eve are
given dominion, responsibility and power over the rest of creation, The first thing
Eve does is to allow a serpent to talk her into eating the forbidden fruit, The first
thing Adam does is allow Eve to talk him into following suit, They aren't so much
egotistical and arrogant as they are lazy. When God confronts them with their
offense Adam tries to slip out from under personal responsibility for his behavior
by pointing the accusing finger at Eve, Eve blames it on the serpent, That is to
say humanity is here pictured not only in terms of egotism, but most certainly the
abdication of personal responsibility; the refusal to be as much and as big and as
self-determining as they could be,

Even more than pride, I have come to appreciate moral laziness as the relevant
sin of our time, The early church called it "sloth", a word not used much anymore
but a good one nonetheless, It is, according to Harvey Cox, “the refusal to live up
to one's essential humanity...the unwillingness to revel in the delights or to share
the responsibilities of being fully human," (Who's Killing the Church, p,111-112).

Sloth is the great American Middle Class Sin of not giving a damn, It is what
makes injustice possible: it allows evil to assume monstrous proportions because no
one cares enough to be responsible. Dr Hiltner comments: "If we set out to destroy
the world, the best combination we could find would be dictators convinced that they
are right and (people) who couldn't care less about anything beyond the immediate
environs." (op,cit., p.97).

Indifference, not caring, not being responsible, taking the easy way out, is
what we're talking about, Beginning this evening and continuing for four nights
there will be a Television experience available for anyone interested in the form

~A-

this kind of sin can take, Watchine the Holocaust will not be pleasant, We're going
to react to it in the same way we find ourselves reacting to the Prayer of Confessian:
"rT didn't do that: I'm not that evil.” The point is that the very flower of
Christian civilization allowed it to happen: not that every German was a Nazi ~ but
that they - and we - stood by and watched. The Time Magazine review last week in-
cluded this statement: "In Holocaust most Nazis are seemingly normal people who all
too easily answer the call of a racist and fascist government,,. (it) forces us to
wonder whether we might ever collaborate with an immoral government for the sake of
opportunism and self-preservation."

t don't want to see it again. Even less do I want to risk forgetting about it.
I don't want my children to be distusbed, But even tess do I want them to know
something other than the truth about the human condition, about what can and does
happen when normally good people don't care,

yi Several years ago Karl Menninger wrote an excellent book, Whatever Became of
Sin, in which he suggested eloquently that the overwhelming psychological dynamic

of our age has been the reduction of the individual to insignificance, Along with
that reduction has been the excusing of the individual from any responsibility for
our common life, or for that matter, for personal life, It is all out of our hands,
We are either the victim of genetics, or social conditioning, or bad parenting: our
lives are determined by big government, multi-national corporations, big labor, And
the real temptation is to despair - which means burying oneself in the comic strips
or nightly televised pap or the pursuit of instant gratification, That's the sin ,
i'm concerned about; a potent and complex combination of egotism and laziness,

And so I will continue to put my money on Genesis 3, I know the self-destructive
power of unresolved guilt and that the only resolution is forgiveness, I regard
that moment in our liturgy when the minister says, "Friends, Relieve the Good News
of the Gospel" and we respond, "In Jesus Christ we are forgiven" as a very happy
moment, Remembering a Little history, looking at current events, L regard a
religion that pats me on the back and tells me all is well with the world, and that
I'll be all right if I simply try harder, as nonsense, mot worth my time.

But most of all I continue to be intrigued by the idea that God wants us to be
more than we are, I am stimulated and haunted by that ancient picture of our
humanity as the bearers of God's image, His co-creators, the ones with the potential
to be so much more thatn we ever dared imagine, I am haunted by that Hebrew insight
that Adam's gin was not so much his vanity and egotism, as it was his laziness, his
refusal to be the man God created him to be, [ am cheered and saved from despair
by the Good News that God did not give up on His creation, but sent a new Adam, a
model of a new humanity available to every man and woman,

The Gospel of Jesus Christ is a cali - not to servility, not to self-depreca-
tion, not to a lifetime of wallowing in self-imposed guilt, Rather it is a call ta
become all that we were created to become, It is based, not on a hard, moral demand,
but on God's patient love; a love powerful enough to stand with us when we fall and
eall out of us reserves of potential we didn't even know existed, The Good News is
not that we are sinners, doomed to drown in our own guilt, but that there is a new
life now available, In Jesus Christ God has promised to accept us and forgive us and
love us, and in that accepting, forgiving, loving, to give us the power to Live
creatively in the days ahead, "In Christ", the promise goes, “we are new creatures
altogether, The past is finished and gone, Everything is fresh and new," We respond
to the Gospel when we seize the responsibility for our own lives: when we summon the
stamina to be responsible for self - and for the world, We respond to the Gospel when
we move in the direction of becoming fully and joyfuily and responsibly human,

Amen,