The title of my sermon today asks: Why does God Giventh and then Taketh away? This question could be posed colloquially as: why does life suck so much? or Why do we loose faith? Why are we not all unified in our perception of God and Religion? Why does evil exist? Does God really cast out the sinful? Why are we constantly lacking the power to bring peace to our world?
I believe the answer is what Paul describes as the “The Hidden Reason.”
But before I jump to this answer I would like to expound upon some preconceived notions that aggravate this question and cause this reason to be a “hidden” one.
The story of Adam and Eve is such a tasty story. It has so much magic and dangerous with the talking animals, the wrath of God and the fiery sword guarding the fountain of youth. It would be fantastic as the premise for the next Indiana Jones movie. I read a hilarious summary of Christianity the other day and I wanted to share it with you before I proceed.
It goes like this
Christianity: The belief that some cosmic Jewish Zombie can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him that you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a snake to eat from a magical tree… Makes perfect sense.
Being that we are a rather artistic, well-educated congregation, I believe that we can humor the Bible in all its sensationalism and look within its metaphoric, poetic format in order to utilize its content rather than its distractive characteristics.
The apple, the snake, the disobedience, the shame, the ensuing difficulty in living. The story spells out a useful account of the human condition. Yet while the story of Adam and Eve is attentive to the actions of the human element is significantly lacking a complete picture of God’s role in the events.
Adam and Eve eat the apples; they have disobeyed the simplest of commandments. God asks Adam “Have you been eating from the tree I forbade you to eat?”
Adam points to Eve and sais,
“It was the woman you put with me, she gave me the fruit and I ate it”
God asks Eve what she has done and she points to the snake and says “he told me to do it.”
Then God punishes all three of them. The world officially sucks. Humanity has to endure thousands of years of sin and dozens of leaders making covenants with God and then screwing them up until, finally, Jesus shows up and forgives this prehistoric sin.
This bring me to the gigantic hole in the story.
Adam’s head is on the chopping block so he points at Eve
Eve fears death and points at the snake…
and that’s were it stops.
Maybe I missed something but I thought it was well established that this snake could talk. Was the snake not at home, did he plead the fifth? Why did the snake not get a chance to defend itself? The answer is that the finger pointing must end with the snake, not because it has no fingers but because if the blame train pulled into the next station it would unload it’s fault cargo on the Yahweh platform at God Station.
If the snake had been present during this infamous finger pointing session this is what I imagine he or she would have said to God when blamed by Eve.
So let me get this strait, you created this garden, you put a tree in the garden, you lied to your own children about killing them if they ate this tree’s fruit, you created me with the knowledge of the tree’s true nature, then you put me in the garden with you children? And I thought my parents were messed up.”
Please excuse my sacrilege as I take the side of the serpent in this story. It is not that I believe the serpent was in the right and that God was a conspirator in the creation of evil. What I believe this whole in the story points out the incomplete theology behind the story. The Adam and Eve story’s value, lies in the affects of our separation from God not the origin of that separation. It does not address the snakes position because if disobedience had been set in motion by God then God would have no excuse to punish, which in this story is the motivation for our separation from God.
In the Adam and Eve story God takes away… God takes away his greatest gifts because of an obviously preordained act of disobedience. I believe that a crucial concept was missing when this account of how we have ended up in our predicament was penned. In the Romans reading today Paul was writing to the new Roman Christians addressing their rising desire to persecute the remaining Jews who had up to that point resisted the Good News. In his explanation of why action against the Jews is unwarranted I believe Paul touches on the true “hidden reason” for our separation from God.
The reason is hidden because it goes against so many assumptions we have about sin. The general definition of Sin is an act against God. Sin is what we are judged for in the end, it is what people are sent to hell for. Sin brings us pain in this life and the next. It is the opposite of God and love and good.
The first step to seeing past this surfacial definition of sin is to recognize that God is omnipotent. The term omnipotent term gets throw around somewhat casually in reference to God but taken seriously it has some intense implications. It means that God has no need. God is not lacking. NO vulnerability. Omnipresent, Omni-powerful. There is no action or occurrence that can function outside, away from, and in essence, against God. With an omnipotent God, sin, in its conventional definition, cannot exist. The definition of sin requires that God exists yet the definition of God makes it impossible for sin to exist. Further more God has no need to pursue pleasure or avoid pain. What then would motivate God into action? Why would Omnipotents act ?
The answer is not an answer but an abstraction. The abstraction is “divine action”. In Taoism the Tao, which translates into The Way, is an inconceivable nothingness that generates what is conceivable. It is God. It is the power behind the veil, that generates existence.
Think for a moment: to create existence the way it should be, to split the singularity of a pregnant nothingness, how would you shape the pieces?
In Hinduism, the principals of existence are much closer to Paul’s perception of God than I am sure he ever would have imagined. In Hinduism they call the life we experience presently the “illusion”. Our experienced world is believed to be a temporary division of a singular spiritual existence. This enables multiple independent points from which the spiritual entity may view itself. We are all part of the same source experiencing the illusion that we are separate beings.
I would guess that many of you are asking yourself what this could possibly have to do with Paul’s take on our relationship with God?
In the scriptures read today Paul says that God has imprisoned man in their own disobedience in order to show mercy to all mankind.
Upon my first reading of this I contemplated what kind of a sadistic, egomaniac of a God would make us evil so that it could act as the merciful hero. But then I remembered that God is not lacking. God does not desire to play the role of the savior. When I remove my greed from the situation and accept that god made me flawed for a true, divine reason: when remember the intense pleasure of receiving God’s forgiveness, God’s undeserved love, God’s Grace, I am then admit to myself that being in need of God is the most beautiful desire imaginable. Disobedience is not Sin, it is not against God. It is the condition of need. It is the condition of being incomplete. In our creation God broke us away form God’s self. We were broken away from one another. It is the Hindu illusion, the illusion that we are separate that gives us our individuality and simultaneously our incompleteness. The fact that we are flawed was not a mistake, it was not some sin enacted by man against God. It was divine action.
When we realize we are incomplete and that it is possible to commune with God, religion is then born through the execution of this communion. Without this separation there would be no life, no action, no desire. The two Greatest Commandments of Jesus Christ are to love the lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with your entire mind, and the second is to love your neighbor as yourself. And why is this the ultimate law: Because Jesus knew that the recurring experiencing of our incomplete nature being filled by God is the purpose of our creation.
Paul’s hidden reason for not persecuting the Jews over their current failure it that it is better to be lacking and receive mercy than to be perfect in the first place. Yes it was wonderful that the new Christians were receiving the words of Christ but this did not change the final outcome of the Jews who were temporarily enemies of God in regards to the Good News.
When we can see our purpose clearly we realize that God gives and God never takes away. We are God’s beloved from the beginning and we will be God’s beloved at the end.
Life is a blessing in which we are given an opportunity to experience God from the outside looking in. It is a partnership in which we are able to stare at each other for a time, in amazement and awe, until we grow so tired that we fold into sleep at the feet of our creator, humbled and grateful for the opportunity to see.
The song I am about to sing is a picture of the divine exchange between God and man. God is referred to only as love.
