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First Presbyterian Church, Bridgeton, NJ
Richard E. Sindall, Pastor
Sermon for the Seventh Sunday of Easter, May 4, 2008
Lessons: Genesis 2:8-9 and I John 3:1-2,14-24
Cultivating Life
Out of the ground the LORD God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
What is the choice we make between the two symbolic trees? Be assured, we make this choice all the time; we have not left it far behind us in the primordial Garden of Delight. But what do the trees represent in our choice-making? Well, by their fruit you know them.
To eat from the Tree of Life at the center of the garden is to receive life from God as a gracious gift, each day. To eat from this tree is to look to God as our God, not just “the God” or the idea of God. This way of receiving life is personal and relational. Life is not the fact of existence but the gift of God’s constant love for us.
To eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil means something harder to discern, but we see the results. God becomes now “the God,” placed over against us as our judge confronting us with the truth that we are not gods but creatures. It’s like pretending to be the boss, until the real boss comes back and catches you sitting with your feet up on her desk. That would be embarrassing, wouldn’t it? The first result of eating this fruit is shame, which leads, of course, to resentment and hostility. So, humanity quickly invents religion as a way of managing God. I’ll make the prescribed sacrifice or perform the proper ritual so God, I suppose, will not judge me but will favor me by giving me what I need or want, without getting too close. We turn relationship into transaction by the magic of religious deal-making with God. Instead of receiving life as God’s gracious gift day by day, we make rules for a system of rewards and punishments: rewards for what our rules say is good, punishments for what our rules say is evil. Then we measure ourselves against those others who break the rules, so we can achieve pride and pass along shame to someone else.
So, how can we eat from the Tree of Life rather than from the tree that kills life by turning us away from God and against each other? At the heart of evil is the denial of relationship. We will not have God as our God, and we will not have other people as our sisters and brothers. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” That’s not the question of one primordial murder but of every murderer, of everyone who kills the life of another person in any way. John writes to the Christian churches, echoing Jesus himself, “All who hate a brother or sister are murderers, and you know that murderers do not have eternal life abiding in them.”
How do we stop denying relationship? How do we cease saying to God, in effect, “You are not our God but only ‘the’ God – the one we keep high up in heaven, the one with whom we make deals for what we want, the one from whom we expect reward for our goodness or punishment for our sins and failures”? How do we stop saying to people, “You are not my brother,” and, “You are not my sister”?
John tells the churches, “We know that we have passed from death to life because we love one another. Whoever does not love abides in death.” One problem I have with understanding this First Letter of John is that it speaks in the language of “either-or”: either I love or I abide in death, either I sin or I do not sin, either I believe in God’s Son or I do not. Like the Gospel of John and the book of Revelation, this letter speaks in polarities: light and darkness, truth and falsehood, children of God and children of “the evil one.” Such polarities can be helpful but also dangerous: helpful when they remind me that petty evil is still evil and just being more virtuous than the next person is not good enough, dangerous if I use them to demonize others. Living within the grace of God is a process in which we continue throughout our lives. Why else would John bother writing a letter encourage Christian growth? We are talking about a process of cultivating life. As the desperate father said to Jesus, “Lord, I believe. Help (me with) my unbelief.”
We are passing from death to life as we learn to stop denying relationship and, instead, respond to God as our God, the one who loves us, and to other people as our sisters and brothers. Evil is the denial of relationship, which is why Jesus sums up everything the Teaching of God requires in the two commands, to love God and love our neighbor. Look at the Ten Commandments. Murder is the extreme denial of relationship, but adultery is certainly a denial of relationship, as well, and so is theft. Clearly, idolatry denies our relationship with God as does the abuse of God’s name. Every commandment concerns the denial of relationship, because God created us for relationship. We are made for God to love, and made to respond to God’s love, especially in the way we regard and treat each other.
On Thursday, I listened as a young woman who works with the victims spoke openly of a matter mostly kept secret because of shame: the sexual enslavement of girls and women brought into this country without proper documentation. That is shocking but not at all surprising. Wherever people are kept at a disadvantage, we find slavery in all its forms, including that one. And what is this horrible, evil, but also wildly popular trade in human flesh but an extreme denial of relationship? It is sex with no shared humanity. This particularly noxious financial enterprise terrorizes its victims and reduces them to a subhuman level even in their own eyes.
But is this outrage unique? Or is sexual enslavement just the extreme of many financial enterprises in our world? The pursuit of the cheapest possible labor denies relationship with the people we hire. Downgrading jobs, then saying something contemptuous like, “We could get a chimpanzee to do this one,” denies the humanity of the person to be hired. Then someone’s son or daughter is hired, already labeled as a chimpanzee. The conditions in which many people work in other countries are appalling, but even this country is not without its places where workers are treated as subhuman.
She’s not my sister. He’s not my brother. You’re not my neighbor or even my fellow human being. You are one of “them.” In how many different ways do people deny relationship every day in our world? To what extent do we ourselves participate?
To justify our actions, we drag out our prized possession: the knowledge of good and evil. With it, we decide who is deserving and who undeserving; who is one of us and who is one of them, who has earned our respect and who merits our contempt.
Wait a minute! Am I saying there are no actions that merit contempt? Does everybody deserve our respect and understanding no matter what the person does? Is that not ridiculous? Now, wait another minute, because those questions come from our stolen knowledge of good and evil, and I say so, not because they distinguish right from wrong as surely we must in human society, but because they deny relationship. The wrongdoer, the sinner, is still our sister or brother who has done the wrong. From the Bible and especially from Jesus (and him crucified), we learn that God passes no judgment that does not hurt God. We see that God never denies relationship, not even in judgment. That’s because God is not evil and has no evil at all.
As God places the human into the Garden of Delight to cultivate its life and growth, so Jesus Christ places us out in the world to cultivate life within and among its people. He has given us the task of affirming relationships presently denied – relationships with each other and our relationship with God. One more time, wait a minute. Why did I reverse the two commands and start with people instead of with God? Who first taught you to be loved and then to respond by trusting and loving back? Did you get your lessons directly from God, or did God work through some human agents? John reminds us that no one has ever seen God. So, if we will not love, respect, hurt with, and care for, our sisters and brothers in the world, we are only lying to ourselves if we claim to love God.
Life is a relational matter. Jesus has sent us out to cultivate life. We don’t represent doctrines or salvation formulas; we’re not selling tickets to heaven or blessings for those who do the religion-thing correctly. We are sent to represent the truth of God’s love in a world that continues to do the evil of denying relationship with God and among people. Amen.