The Beginning Of It All
Sermon
ACCESS TO HIGH HOPE
Second Lesson Sermons For Lent/Easter
On May 20, l927, Charles A. Lindbergh left New York on his solo flight to cross the Atlantic in his plane, the Spirit of St. Louis. The whole world waited with bated breath to hear if this brave young man could accomplish the feat that would introduce the infant airplane industry to a new era of world travel. The humorist Will Rogers wrote in his daily newspaper column that there would be no jokes that day. He noted it was a day when the young flier would be prayed for to every kind of supreme being who had a following. One newspaper columnist asked rhetorically if Lindbergh was flying alone? Hardly, he answered. He wrote that personified Courage, Skill, Ambition, and Adventure rode along in that plane. Beyond that, there were millions of people on both sides of the ocean who were with him. A. Scott Berg noted all of this along with much more in his lengthy and definitive biography of the remarkable personage of Charles Lindbergh.
Berg observed that when the humble young hero wrote an account of the flight in the book titled We, Lindbergh meant to include all of his sponsors, the manufacturers of the plane, the ground crew, and all the people who were his supporters. What a support system that was! The Lindbergh experience is an ideal example of how intimately our lives can become one. We can become united in the common experience of an event or through the special feats of one individual. In the Second Reading today, the Apostle Paul helps us to understand how we are all joined together through the experiences of both the First and the Second Adams.
All Have Sinned
Paul begins his essay on how we are all related through the experiences of the two Adams by rehearsing the significance of the First Adam. He writes, "Just as sin came into the world through one man." Paul in no way would suggest that when Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden of Eden, their disobedience demands that now all of humankind has the burden of paying for their sin. The reality is that sin did first come into the world through Adam, but sin comes into the world the same way every day since. The story of Adam's fall is our story. Sometimes people talk about original sin as though we inherited from Adam his sin. No, our sin is original with us. We sin originally. Paul says death came into the world as a result of sin, "and so death spread to all because all have sinned."
John Grisham pictures this for us in his novel Testament. Troy Phelan is a self--made billionaire, who has seven heirs whom he has sired through three wives. Phelan regards all those children, together with their mothers, as totally obnoxious. What Phelan has to reckon with is the fact that what makes the children so unlovable are the same drives that made him what he was. They were all made of the same cloth. Their desires were the same. Nate Riley, a lawyer, is assigned to find another potential heir in the wilds of central Brazil. Nate, himself, is an alcoholic, a broken man who has lost count of how many times he has been through treatments for his drug abuse. This cast of characters illustrates how pervasive the sin within the human condition is and how trapped all are by the same sin. Nate Riley comes to recognize painfully how desperate the human condition is, and that the cure itself cannot be found within oneself. Help has to come from beyond one's self. This hard fact about humankind is universal. As Paul points out, "Death spread to all because all have sinned." All human beings are as linked together by their sin as they are linked together by their common ancestry. As surely as we are the children of Adam, we are all the children of sin and death.
Adam As Type
Paul wants everyone to understand the direct connection between sin and death. Death did come as the result of sin. He knows sin was in the world before the Law. There was no formal law before Adam sinned in the Garden of Eden. The Law of God as we know it was not in its formal form before Moses. Paul mentions this, because ordinarily one does not count something as sin unless there is a law prohibiting it. Yet death was very much in the world before Moses came along. Death also came to people whose sin was not like the sin of Adam. This had great significance for Paul. What it meant for Paul was that Adam, the first one to sin, became a "type of the one who was to come." Paul uses the term "type" here in a unique way. The Greek word is tupoz which comes from a Greek word tupto, which means "to strike." One would strike with a hollow mold so as to make a similar thing.
In Paul's time the word tupoz was used as a "model." Paul does use the word that way sometimes or as to express something as "typical" (cf. 1 Corinthians 10:1 and 11). Here, however, he uses the word as a universal experience. Adam is a type of the one who is to come in the sense that as surely as sin and death were to be identified with all of humankind with the havoc Adam introduced to the world, so the life of the Second Adam would be the universal benefit of humankind. In that sense the sin and death of Adam are a preview of what would happen with the coming of the Second Adam. The second universal experience would be of a higher nature and would be the opposite of the first experience. What is typical about the experience is that universally we participate in both.
Death Exercised Dominion
There is no escaping the fact that, as Paul indicated, death exercised dominion after the fall of humankind. Death stalks all of life. Death intimidates us, and death controls all of life. The list of things we do to prevent death is endless. We do so in taking preventative measures to insulate ourselves against violence. We do what we must to prevent accidents. We adopt medicinal, physical, and dietary practices to postpone death. We are doing an extremely good job of that. The average life span has been increased considerably in recent years. To sense that, all one has to do is pick up the morning newspaper to read the obituaries. It is not a surprise to see the high ages people have achieved. A good number of the listings are people who have achieved the eighties and the nineties. We are no longer shocked to read summaries of the lives of people who have reached a hundred and more years.
Futurists note the possibility that people will soon stretch their lives to 150 years, not only because of our expertise in diagnostics and exotic surgeries but because of the rise in the use of vitamin and health supplements. Yet the fact remains that death is still the last enemy. What is important is not only that we exercise the best physical and hygienic regimes to fight off the threats to physical health, but that we know that we are fighting also the threat to our spiritual well--being. Death is the enemy because it is the result of our sinful condition, not simply a weakened physical condition. That is the emphasis that the Apostle Paul would make in alerting us to recognize the human condition common to us all. Long, long ago someone coined the phrase that the only two sure things in life are death and taxes. No doubt the originator of the saying was more worried at the moment about taxes and how to avoid them. Paul would have us be more concerned about the implications and significance of our common experience of death as the result of sin. At the same time Paul helps us to understand what God has done to reverse the result of the human condition.
The Free Gift
Paul writes it should be obvious to us that all humans die from the time that sin entered into the world by one man's trespass. What is not so obvious to all people is that now the grace of God comes wrapped as a free gift in the grace of one man, Jesus Christ. We are not used to that. We can readily see how all people sin like Adam. Nobody is perfect. Yet it is hard to see that everyone receives the free gift. Not everyone wins the lottery. Not everyone wins in the Reader's Digest or magazine sweepstakes. Billie Letts has written a novel about a seventeen--year--old pregnant, unmarried girl titled Where The Heart Is. Novalee Nation is left abandoned and totally depressed in a small town in Oklahoma. Yet a quartet of caring people come to her rescue. A religious older woman, an older African--American, the son of an aristocratic family, and a young native American combine to make everything come up roses for Novalee.
When Billie Letts was interviewed about her novel, she mentioned that there were all kinds of young unmarried mothers in Oklahoma who suffered the same kind of abandonment as Novalee. Billie wanted more people to care about them. The truth is that the majority of the abandoned young mothers do not have the same kind of free gifts coming to them as Novalee did. Free gifts normally are not delivered evenly. However, Paul makes the point that the free gift in Jesus Christ is for all people. Paul writes, "If, because of the one man's trespass, death exercised dominion through that one, much more surely will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness exercise dominion in life through the one man, Jesus Christ."
Justification For All
The effect of what Paul has to say about the manner in which Jesus Christ, the Second Adam, brought grace and light into the world is to reverse completely the effect of what came into the world by the First Adam. As the First Adam opened the door to sin and death, the Second Adam broke into life with righteousness and life. The result is that death no longer has to hold sway over everything we do and say. The bumper sticker on the truck of the carpet man says, "Life is short. Pray a lot." The intention, of course, is a holy effort to get the tailgater to think of how death makes life a short span in which one is accountable. The free gift of life and righteousness Jesus brings makes a different emphasis. In Christ we know that life is eternal. We are free to serve now with the confidence that what we do in service to others is righteous and endures in love and grace to eternity. That may not be apparent to everyone, and that is the point. By faith we know that what we do in love is not measurable by worldly standards.
Our lives are not measured by calendars, ratios, judgments, guidelines, or any other kind of yardsticks. Our lives are already redeemed, that is, forgiven and made holy, and made fit for eternity. That is what Paul means when he summarizes, "Just as one man's trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man's act of righteousness leads to justification for all. For just as by the one man's disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man's obedience the many will be made righteous." Paul goes on in the next breath to say, "Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more." Faith recognizes that in a way that the world cannot understand apart from the revelation that God has made in Jesus Christ. This says, no matter how bad it is in the world, internationally, nationally, locally, or personally, God is covering for us. That is not to say, God is covering up the situation, but rather God gives us the freedom to act, to cope, to intervene to do what we can to alter matters and know that results are already forgiven or counted as righteous.
Life Is Free For All
President John Kennedy is quoted frequently for his observation that life is not fair. He, of course, used the expression to indicate how difficult it is to govern and let people think that life will be the same or fair for all people. Observers, however, could relate Mr. Kennedy's statement about life to the successive misfortunes that happened to the Kennedy family. This is an American family the nation has watched with great interest, because few American families have known so much wealth, power, and fame. Yet their propensity for tragedian pains and losses modeled for Americans how fragile all of life, fame, and fortune are. Glumly Senator Ted Kennedy observed, "There are more of us than there is trouble." That was one way to accept or cope with the list of Kennedy calamities. However, the witness to the faith was more in evidence than that.
Yet Jack Kennedy's word about life being unfair did not originate with him. All parents should know that they have to teach their children that. Woe to them if they do not know that! It is impossible to make life come out fair for your children. And it is extremely difficult to help understand how life is not fair. We all struggle with that in our lives. When misfortune or pain come to us, we wonder why we have to be the target. When we are passed over or passed by, we are pained. On and on it goes. Why me? Why not me? Our Lord lifts the burdens from trying to make life fair under the terms of any earthly or legal judgments. He makes it possible to live under the freedom of grace and love which lift us above making life fair to take what comes with the freedom of grace and divine patience.
God Does It All
Ernest Gaines has written a novel that partially illustrates what Paul has written in this text from Romans. The novel, A Lesson Before Dying, is set in the South in the '40s. Jefferson is an African--American who has been condemned to the electric chair for a murder he did not commit. In the courtroom, his defender offered what appeared to be an impassioned plea in order to win the compassion of the jury. He said the jury should not want to send this hog to its death in the electric chair. Jefferson's godmother Emma knows that she could never work for a reprieve for Jefferson. However, she knows how depressed he is not only for the injustice but the greater judgment that he is no more than a hog. Emma approaches Grant Wiggins, a teacher of children, to work with Jefferson to assure him that he is not a hog and that he can go to his death as a man. Wiggins is reluctant but gives in. He does not belong to the church and does not think of himself as a believer. After struggling with Jefferson and trying to give him strength, Wiggins finally begins to rely on the language of the faith he thought he had given up. Jefferson responds to that. He goes to the chair standing tall as a man and a child of God. Someone asks Wiggins how he did it. Wiggins replies that he did not do it. Who then? Wiggins surprises himself and his questioner by saying that God did it. That is how it is for us, too.
Only God is the One who is able to prepare us for the death that comes upon us. God handles what no one else can. There is pseudepigrapha material, that is, writing which pretends to be authored by an historic person, which makes Eve out to be the real temptress in the Garden of Eden, excusing Adam from being the first to fall from grace. There always will be someone trying to escape the fault for sin and death entering our lives. Paul helps us to see that we are all in it together, caught up in the same guilt and death with Adam. However, by the grace and mercy of God we are also by faith caught up into the life, death, and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ so that in the Christ we are made both alive and righteous. From the beginning the promise of release from sin and death was promised in him. In him we are set free.
Berg observed that when the humble young hero wrote an account of the flight in the book titled We, Lindbergh meant to include all of his sponsors, the manufacturers of the plane, the ground crew, and all the people who were his supporters. What a support system that was! The Lindbergh experience is an ideal example of how intimately our lives can become one. We can become united in the common experience of an event or through the special feats of one individual. In the Second Reading today, the Apostle Paul helps us to understand how we are all joined together through the experiences of both the First and the Second Adams.
All Have Sinned
Paul begins his essay on how we are all related through the experiences of the two Adams by rehearsing the significance of the First Adam. He writes, "Just as sin came into the world through one man." Paul in no way would suggest that when Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden of Eden, their disobedience demands that now all of humankind has the burden of paying for their sin. The reality is that sin did first come into the world through Adam, but sin comes into the world the same way every day since. The story of Adam's fall is our story. Sometimes people talk about original sin as though we inherited from Adam his sin. No, our sin is original with us. We sin originally. Paul says death came into the world as a result of sin, "and so death spread to all because all have sinned."
John Grisham pictures this for us in his novel Testament. Troy Phelan is a self--made billionaire, who has seven heirs whom he has sired through three wives. Phelan regards all those children, together with their mothers, as totally obnoxious. What Phelan has to reckon with is the fact that what makes the children so unlovable are the same drives that made him what he was. They were all made of the same cloth. Their desires were the same. Nate Riley, a lawyer, is assigned to find another potential heir in the wilds of central Brazil. Nate, himself, is an alcoholic, a broken man who has lost count of how many times he has been through treatments for his drug abuse. This cast of characters illustrates how pervasive the sin within the human condition is and how trapped all are by the same sin. Nate Riley comes to recognize painfully how desperate the human condition is, and that the cure itself cannot be found within oneself. Help has to come from beyond one's self. This hard fact about humankind is universal. As Paul points out, "Death spread to all because all have sinned." All human beings are as linked together by their sin as they are linked together by their common ancestry. As surely as we are the children of Adam, we are all the children of sin and death.
Adam As Type
Paul wants everyone to understand the direct connection between sin and death. Death did come as the result of sin. He knows sin was in the world before the Law. There was no formal law before Adam sinned in the Garden of Eden. The Law of God as we know it was not in its formal form before Moses. Paul mentions this, because ordinarily one does not count something as sin unless there is a law prohibiting it. Yet death was very much in the world before Moses came along. Death also came to people whose sin was not like the sin of Adam. This had great significance for Paul. What it meant for Paul was that Adam, the first one to sin, became a "type of the one who was to come." Paul uses the term "type" here in a unique way. The Greek word is tupoz which comes from a Greek word tupto, which means "to strike." One would strike with a hollow mold so as to make a similar thing.
In Paul's time the word tupoz was used as a "model." Paul does use the word that way sometimes or as to express something as "typical" (cf. 1 Corinthians 10:1 and 11). Here, however, he uses the word as a universal experience. Adam is a type of the one who is to come in the sense that as surely as sin and death were to be identified with all of humankind with the havoc Adam introduced to the world, so the life of the Second Adam would be the universal benefit of humankind. In that sense the sin and death of Adam are a preview of what would happen with the coming of the Second Adam. The second universal experience would be of a higher nature and would be the opposite of the first experience. What is typical about the experience is that universally we participate in both.
Death Exercised Dominion
There is no escaping the fact that, as Paul indicated, death exercised dominion after the fall of humankind. Death stalks all of life. Death intimidates us, and death controls all of life. The list of things we do to prevent death is endless. We do so in taking preventative measures to insulate ourselves against violence. We do what we must to prevent accidents. We adopt medicinal, physical, and dietary practices to postpone death. We are doing an extremely good job of that. The average life span has been increased considerably in recent years. To sense that, all one has to do is pick up the morning newspaper to read the obituaries. It is not a surprise to see the high ages people have achieved. A good number of the listings are people who have achieved the eighties and the nineties. We are no longer shocked to read summaries of the lives of people who have reached a hundred and more years.
Futurists note the possibility that people will soon stretch their lives to 150 years, not only because of our expertise in diagnostics and exotic surgeries but because of the rise in the use of vitamin and health supplements. Yet the fact remains that death is still the last enemy. What is important is not only that we exercise the best physical and hygienic regimes to fight off the threats to physical health, but that we know that we are fighting also the threat to our spiritual well--being. Death is the enemy because it is the result of our sinful condition, not simply a weakened physical condition. That is the emphasis that the Apostle Paul would make in alerting us to recognize the human condition common to us all. Long, long ago someone coined the phrase that the only two sure things in life are death and taxes. No doubt the originator of the saying was more worried at the moment about taxes and how to avoid them. Paul would have us be more concerned about the implications and significance of our common experience of death as the result of sin. At the same time Paul helps us to understand what God has done to reverse the result of the human condition.
The Free Gift
Paul writes it should be obvious to us that all humans die from the time that sin entered into the world by one man's trespass. What is not so obvious to all people is that now the grace of God comes wrapped as a free gift in the grace of one man, Jesus Christ. We are not used to that. We can readily see how all people sin like Adam. Nobody is perfect. Yet it is hard to see that everyone receives the free gift. Not everyone wins the lottery. Not everyone wins in the Reader's Digest or magazine sweepstakes. Billie Letts has written a novel about a seventeen--year--old pregnant, unmarried girl titled Where The Heart Is. Novalee Nation is left abandoned and totally depressed in a small town in Oklahoma. Yet a quartet of caring people come to her rescue. A religious older woman, an older African--American, the son of an aristocratic family, and a young native American combine to make everything come up roses for Novalee.
When Billie Letts was interviewed about her novel, she mentioned that there were all kinds of young unmarried mothers in Oklahoma who suffered the same kind of abandonment as Novalee. Billie wanted more people to care about them. The truth is that the majority of the abandoned young mothers do not have the same kind of free gifts coming to them as Novalee did. Free gifts normally are not delivered evenly. However, Paul makes the point that the free gift in Jesus Christ is for all people. Paul writes, "If, because of the one man's trespass, death exercised dominion through that one, much more surely will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness exercise dominion in life through the one man, Jesus Christ."
Justification For All
The effect of what Paul has to say about the manner in which Jesus Christ, the Second Adam, brought grace and light into the world is to reverse completely the effect of what came into the world by the First Adam. As the First Adam opened the door to sin and death, the Second Adam broke into life with righteousness and life. The result is that death no longer has to hold sway over everything we do and say. The bumper sticker on the truck of the carpet man says, "Life is short. Pray a lot." The intention, of course, is a holy effort to get the tailgater to think of how death makes life a short span in which one is accountable. The free gift of life and righteousness Jesus brings makes a different emphasis. In Christ we know that life is eternal. We are free to serve now with the confidence that what we do in service to others is righteous and endures in love and grace to eternity. That may not be apparent to everyone, and that is the point. By faith we know that what we do in love is not measurable by worldly standards.
Our lives are not measured by calendars, ratios, judgments, guidelines, or any other kind of yardsticks. Our lives are already redeemed, that is, forgiven and made holy, and made fit for eternity. That is what Paul means when he summarizes, "Just as one man's trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man's act of righteousness leads to justification for all. For just as by the one man's disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man's obedience the many will be made righteous." Paul goes on in the next breath to say, "Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more." Faith recognizes that in a way that the world cannot understand apart from the revelation that God has made in Jesus Christ. This says, no matter how bad it is in the world, internationally, nationally, locally, or personally, God is covering for us. That is not to say, God is covering up the situation, but rather God gives us the freedom to act, to cope, to intervene to do what we can to alter matters and know that results are already forgiven or counted as righteous.
Life Is Free For All
President John Kennedy is quoted frequently for his observation that life is not fair. He, of course, used the expression to indicate how difficult it is to govern and let people think that life will be the same or fair for all people. Observers, however, could relate Mr. Kennedy's statement about life to the successive misfortunes that happened to the Kennedy family. This is an American family the nation has watched with great interest, because few American families have known so much wealth, power, and fame. Yet their propensity for tragedian pains and losses modeled for Americans how fragile all of life, fame, and fortune are. Glumly Senator Ted Kennedy observed, "There are more of us than there is trouble." That was one way to accept or cope with the list of Kennedy calamities. However, the witness to the faith was more in evidence than that.
Yet Jack Kennedy's word about life being unfair did not originate with him. All parents should know that they have to teach their children that. Woe to them if they do not know that! It is impossible to make life come out fair for your children. And it is extremely difficult to help understand how life is not fair. We all struggle with that in our lives. When misfortune or pain come to us, we wonder why we have to be the target. When we are passed over or passed by, we are pained. On and on it goes. Why me? Why not me? Our Lord lifts the burdens from trying to make life fair under the terms of any earthly or legal judgments. He makes it possible to live under the freedom of grace and love which lift us above making life fair to take what comes with the freedom of grace and divine patience.
God Does It All
Ernest Gaines has written a novel that partially illustrates what Paul has written in this text from Romans. The novel, A Lesson Before Dying, is set in the South in the '40s. Jefferson is an African--American who has been condemned to the electric chair for a murder he did not commit. In the courtroom, his defender offered what appeared to be an impassioned plea in order to win the compassion of the jury. He said the jury should not want to send this hog to its death in the electric chair. Jefferson's godmother Emma knows that she could never work for a reprieve for Jefferson. However, she knows how depressed he is not only for the injustice but the greater judgment that he is no more than a hog. Emma approaches Grant Wiggins, a teacher of children, to work with Jefferson to assure him that he is not a hog and that he can go to his death as a man. Wiggins is reluctant but gives in. He does not belong to the church and does not think of himself as a believer. After struggling with Jefferson and trying to give him strength, Wiggins finally begins to rely on the language of the faith he thought he had given up. Jefferson responds to that. He goes to the chair standing tall as a man and a child of God. Someone asks Wiggins how he did it. Wiggins replies that he did not do it. Who then? Wiggins surprises himself and his questioner by saying that God did it. That is how it is for us, too.
Only God is the One who is able to prepare us for the death that comes upon us. God handles what no one else can. There is pseudepigrapha material, that is, writing which pretends to be authored by an historic person, which makes Eve out to be the real temptress in the Garden of Eden, excusing Adam from being the first to fall from grace. There always will be someone trying to escape the fault for sin and death entering our lives. Paul helps us to see that we are all in it together, caught up in the same guilt and death with Adam. However, by the grace and mercy of God we are also by faith caught up into the life, death, and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ so that in the Christ we are made both alive and righteous. From the beginning the promise of release from sin and death was promised in him. In him we are set free.
