THERE'S A WORM IN THE APPLE

September 14,1986, 11:00 a.m. Worship Service
John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

“The serpent said...'God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be
opened and you will be like God..." --Genesis 3:4,5 (RSV)

Scripture
Genesis 3:1-7

The simple fact is that nobody wants to be told that there is a worm
in the apple. None of us wants to know that there is a basic flaw in the
human condition, particularly our human condition. It is the least popular
topic for religious discourse.

The late Phylis McGinley, a witty and wise poet, observed our
reticence about it in a piece entitled Community Church:

“The Rev. Mr. Harcourt, folks agree,
nodding their head in solid satisfaction
Is just the man for the community,
Tali, young, urbane, but capable of action
He pleases where he serves. He marshalis out
The younger crowd, lacks trace of clerical
unction,

Cheers the Kiwanis and the Eagle Scout,
Is popular at every function.
And in the pulpit eloquently speaks
On diverse matters with both wit and clarity:
Art, education, God, the early Greeks,
Psychiatry, St. Paul, true Christian charity,
Vestry repairs that shortly must begin —
All things but sin. He seldom mentions sin."
[Times Three, Selected verse, p. 134]

_. The subject will win no popularity contest. There is something about
us which resists getting up on the morning of the one day off we enjoy per
week, dressing up in our Sunday finery, making our way to church to be told
that we are, all things considered, mournfully without much sociaily
redeeming value. The prospect is altogether unpleasant and, when one
ponders it very long, quite depressing. Who needs it? Besides, we have at
least entertained the notion that the whole business is some kind of
Freudian projection, that a judging God is no less than a psychological-
mythological variation of the parent we once had and that our guilt,
anxiety, or dis-ease when we think about it is no more than a fifty year
old result of the fact.that, at the age of seven we once confided to chum
that we wished our mother would die.

We have had enough free floating guilt. We are. trying to learn that
it is "OK".to feel "OK" about ourselves. We pay money to go to workshops
designed to help us affirm who we are, to accept and think positively about
our bodies and minds. We buy books to read up on becoming our own best
friend, and we are trying to take seriously the admonition of Jesus to love
our neighbor as we love ourselves which begins with the assumption that we
know how to love ourselves. We know too many people whose lives are
diminished, whose spirits are crippled, because they think too little of
themselves. And we know, al] too often, that the source of it is the
notion of their own sinfuiness.

Thus - a broad based cultural aversion to the very notion of sin and
sinfulness which Phylis McGinley caught in her poem: and which was
macvelously lampooned in the song in West Side Story, “Gee, Officer
Krupke,“ sung by members of a street gang about one of their buddies who
has been subjected to a whole battery of juvenile justice social services,
designed to rehabilitate him...

"0, Officer Krupke, you've done it again.

This boy don't need a job, he needs a
year in the pen,

It ain't just a question of misunderstood:

Deep down inside him, he's no good."

The same aversion used to show up regularly on “Ail in the Family."
One time Edith Bunker said, "Archie, I was just thinking. In ali the years
we have been married, you never once said you was sorry." Archie en,
responded: “Edith, I'll gladly say I'm sorry if I ever do anything wrong."
{Spencer Merish, God, Man and Archie Bunker, p.30]

Recently, Meg Greenfield, in one of her fine Newsweek editorials
asked Why Nothing is Wrong Anymore. She wrote: “As a guide and standard
to live by, you don't hear so much about 'right and wrong! these days. The
very notion is considered politically, not to say personally, embarrassing,
since it has such a repressive, Neanderthal ring to it." [Newsweek, July
28, 1986]

By contrast to the cultural inclination that wants to take a rosy,
up-beat position, I would propose that the genius of Judeo-Christian
religion is its balanced view of humanity. Several centuries ago the
philosopher Pascal wrote: “Without the mystery of original sin man remains
a mystery to himself." [See The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr, ed. by R. M.
Brown, p. 246] I believe he was right. Reinhold Niebuhr quipped, “The
doctrine of original sin is the one empirically verifiable doctrine of
Christian Faith." [Ibid, p. xii] We could spend all our time this morning
documenting that assertion. It is tempting always to do so. And there is
a sense in which church-goers think they are hearing the real thing when
the preacher bears. down on the all - the sins of the world. ‘This preacher
will assume that you read the papers: and that at least, on occasion you
pause at the bottom of the front page and conclude that after all these
years the one consistent thing about us is our astonishing capacity to make
a mess of it, and furthermore that when we get together, even though we
don't intend it, we manage to create rather massive stains on the canvas of
history - like wars, pollution, apartheid, poverty.

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I'm going to assume that you want your religious reflection ta be a
little mare stout and honest than “ten steps to happiness." I also assume,
believe - rather - that the analysis of the human condition contained in
scripture, is accurate, helpful, and that to know it is to participate in
that truth which sets us free.

The first problem, however, is that the topic is so grossly
trivialized - often by the church. The pietistic tradition in
Protestantism and Catholicism notoriously oversimplifies the matter. If
sin is simply breaking the common ground rules of moral responsibility it
is not a serious problem. It can be overcome, by trying harder, or by
engaging in a simple religious rubric. The Bible means more than that.

St. Paul confessed that there is something about us that prevents us from
doing the good even when we know what it is and want to do it. Sin, in the
Biblical idiom, is not trivial.

The second problem we have is that sin has been defined too long by a
literalistic reading of the Book of Genesis. The result has been a
devastating propensity to focus on sexuality as the context for sin. What
we think we read in Genesis goes something like this: Adam and Eve didn't
know they were naked until they ate the fruit: then they were embarrassed,
and when they were exiled from the Garden and started to make babies, their
original flaw was passed on genetically. And so, the Christian Church has
at times, usually under the influence of Greeks, taught that sin is
transmitted sexually: that when the Psalm says “in sin my mother conceived
me" what it means is that the act of sexual intercourse is itself so sinful
that when conception occurs the child is infected. It's no wonder then,
that celibacy has seemed preferable at times. It is why we take care to
regulate the degree of sexual explicitness our children can see in motion
pietures, but don't mind the brutality and dehumanizing violence of Rambo
or Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

The equation of sexuality with sin is not what the Bible means. But
it is a major theological detour that* the Christian Church often ‘takes.
The corrective is always the life affirming, joyful sensuality of the Old
Testament, the acknowledgement that sexuality was God's idea, not as an
afterthought, but that maleness and femaleness together are what God
intends humanity to be, and, of course, that marvelous affirmation which
occurs in the creation story when God observes the’ creation and says “It is
good. It is very good.” ,

The Genesis story of Adam and Eve is a sustained and profound look at
the human condition. Adam - man: Eve - woman: are all of us. The story
suggests that the purpose of the whole project of creation is a humanity
which Lives in harmony with the creator. One Biblical scholar, commenting
on Genesis 3 puts it very clearly: “The destiny of the human creature is
to live in. God's world...with God's other creatures, on God's terms."
{Walter Brueggemann, Genesis, Interpretation, p. 40]

What happens in the story is that the man and woman refuse to. do
that. God's terms are rejected. Human terms are adopted instead. . God
says, “don't toitch the tree." The man and woman conclude that they know ;
better... The result is disaster, alienation, exile and indescribable family

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tragedy as one son murders the other... The classic. and altogether serious
Judeo Christian idea of sin is.that human beings substitute themselves for
God.

The synonyms we use are pride, egotism, self-centeredness.
Christianity suggests that it is part of. the given about us. . It is our
original sin in that to be human is to be self-centered, deeply and
profoundly. We are motivated, at levels. so. deep. within ourselves. we. can't
possibly understand them, or even be aware of.them,. by drives for self-
protection, self-preservation,.security and self-enrichment. To act it
out, to be natural as it were - is to be in conflict with one's neighbors -

which, if you believe God created them also, - is to be in conflict with
God.. The Psalmist understood that too - "Against thee, and thee only have
tf sinned.”

Bertrand Russell was no Christian but he understood the human
condition in a way that reflects the third chapter of. Genesis. “Every man
would like to be-God," he wrote... “Some. find it difficult to admit the
impossibility."

Sin as selfishness, self-centeredness,...in the language of theology,
Filling that place at the center of my-being which. God has created there. -
for God; filling it with me-my-mine - can be observed along the entire
spectrum of human behavior;.from dumping toxic wastes into the rivers, to
killing off Great White Sharks for the thrill of it, to playing the
relatively harmless cocktail party conversation game “mine is better than
yours" which prevents us from ever hearing each other; to the newly
fashionable relational posture which says - my gratification, my needs, my
fulfillment come first, ail the way back up to the insidious but devilishly
persistent notion that the color of my skin grants me the innate right to
subjugate, discriminate against, elliminate, if need be, people whose skin
color is different. Professor Martin Marty wrote an editorial in the
Tribune last Thursday about his recent experience teaching in South Africa,
and the almost bizarre disparity between the kindness and generosity and
religious fidelity of the white people of Capetown and the absolute and
utter evil of the system they have created. Marty said that it was
Reinhold: Niehuhr, and the classic Christian definition of sin he wrote
about in a book Moral Man and Immoral Society which gave Marty a framework
to begin to understand how it is possible for basically well~meaning, kind
people, to participate in gross historic evil.

{ think the Judeo-Christian assessment is the realistic view of
humanity. Sin is. real... [t is heaithy, I believe to acknowledge it, be
ashamed of it and ta say "I'm sorry" for it -— to one another and to God.
Regardless of the arena or the scope of egotism, I believe we need to be
delivered from it. I believe it is always against God. When I put
another person down, for. instance, what is happening is that I have pushed
aside the God who is the creator of both of us to make room for my
expansive ego.

There is another side to it as well.. Sin is thinking too highiy of
ourselves but it is also thinking too little of ourselves, thinking so
little of ourselves that we relinquish responsibility for our own lives and
the life of the world. The classic name for it is sloth. It inspired

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Dr. Karl Menninger to write a wonderful book several years ago under the
title, What Ever Became of Sin? It is aiso part of what Genesis 3 is
saying about the human condition in the story of a man who blames the woman
for his disobedience and the woman who blames the snake. We'll think about
it next week.

For now my hope is that the story opens a window into ourselves -
through which we can understand something very important.

The mystery is that the deeper one probes into one's own spirit, the
more conscious of sin one becomes. The more spiritual one is, the more
aware of the gap between what is - and what ought to be. Literature is
full of it. The publishing event of the summer was a Hemmingway novel
about human ambiguity and the curious deterioration of human relationships
and human personality under the power of self-gratification. It's title,
significanly is, The Garden of Eden. The publishing event of the fall is a
new John Updike novel which, again, explores the flaws in our humamity,
even the best of us. God's word, God's disclosure of the human condition,
will be expressed, it seems, sometimes in very curious places.

And it's a good bet that anyone who has struggled with it personally,
great: people of literature, or little people who simply wonder what has
gone wrong, why this relationship is crumbling in my hands, why I da the
things I de, why I actually end up hurting the people I love, why I. never
guite measure up to my own expectations of myself, why my life contains its
shadowy side of deception, and betrayal, - all who know about that listen
with special care when St. Paul, from a distance of 2,000 years, confesses:

"] do not understand my own actions...I do not do what I want...I do
they very thing I hate... see in my own numbers another law at war with
the law of my mind. Wretched man that [ am! Who will deliver me from this
body of death!" [Romans 7:15, 23]

That's strong medicine. . Paul, on sin, is not for the faint-hearted.

It was St. Paul's greatest modern interpreter, Karl Barth, who called
the church back from the insipid positiveism of the early part of this
century: a shallow optimism that tried to look the other way while
Germany, the citadel of Christian civilization, the culture which produced
Martin Luther and Johann Sebastian Bach somehow found it possible not to
see the Brown Shirts or hear the hob-nailed boots in the night streets and
not to notice when the first of six million Jews began to disappear.

It was Rarth who reminded 20th Century Christians that there is a
capacity for evil within us, that to know that about ourselves is not
repressive, guilt enducing, but healthy, redemptive, and that al] hope
begins at least with honesty about the human condition.

Barth taught, as well, that the person of deep religion will be morc
sensitive to sin, know about sin, struggle with it, agonize over it.
Honest religion, Barth warned, won't produce serenity, peace and the glow
of vighteous self-satisfaction. [f it's honest religion it will inevitably
reveal the depth of the human dilemma. Popular peace of mind merchants
need to rediscover Barth when he wrote almost enviously about the fortunate

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pagan who is at peace... "Happy the man who is able to deny the truth.
May he long remain innocent of his own questionableness." [The Epistie to
the Romans, p. 266]

"Tf we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not
in us," the author of the First Epistle of John said to the early church.

The Gospel of Christ is an invitation, not to a life-time of guilt,
but to an honest acknowledgement of the human condition: an invitation to
come clean, to knew the truth about ourselves.

It is an invitation which requires courage. There is much about us
which resists the effort. There are a multitude of convenient reasons for
not probing the depths of our own spirit. The Gospel, by contrast, is an
invitation to a degree of integrity about ourselves which will understand
what St. Paul meant - “O, wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me?"

Honest religion invites us to an integrity that at times approaches
despair about the human prospect. But at the same time is an invitation to
know a God who has created us as we are - and who is so committed to us
that he does not give up on the project when we fail. it is the assurance
of that God's forgiveness and acceptance and recreating love.

it is the astonishing suggestion that the God who created us, who
called us into being and willed us to live in God's world, with God's other
creatures, on God's terms, has watched us violate that covenant, and
instead of writing us off, has been moved to come among us, radically, to
live in this creation, in a way that not only shows how it is supposed to
be done, but a way which somehow gathers up our failures, our personal
betrayals, our sin, in the strong arms of love. God, our creator, loves us
- in the way a good parent loves - with particular strength - a disobedient
and rebellious child. The Gospel is the invitation to know and to trust
God's love expressed in Jesus Christ which somehow, subject it to the worst
example of human sin, a conspiracy which managed to crucify it, rose above
human sin, is victorfous over it, and promises that in the embrace of
that strong love we are safe and free, new every morning.

“Who will deliver me?" St. Paul asked, in what sounds for all the
world like the darkest pit of despair. And then answered with Gospel, with
the sublime simplicity of the Creator's love - “Thanks be to God through
Jesus Christ our Lord."

Thanks be to God, indeed! Amen.

Praise be to you, Lord God, for the mystery of it all: for the
potentia] in all of us, for truth and beauty and nobility. Praise be to
you for freedom to fail, freedom not to measure up. Praise be to you for
insight and dis-ease and guilt strong enough to make us wonder about
ourselves. Praise be to you for love big enough to forgive us and create
us anew each day.

Praise be to you, Lord God,. through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

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