The Monday Funnies: Original Sin edition

Fig trees in the vineyards?

"Coastal Vineyard," by Gregory Kondos

Today's sermon is based primarily on Luke 13:1-9.

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This morning we are treated to a host of grim biblical passages about serpents, clouds, burning bushes, falling towers, blood mingled with meat, threats to a fig tree in the vineyards, and a pile of manure.

So I want to talk about something else – at least for a few minutes. You may not know this about me, but I have spent a lot of time in vineyards, and not just on the way from the car to the wine tasting room.

I have spent days and days in Napa Valley, and I’ve learned at the feet of the great vineyard masters like George Hendry, Davis Bynum, Miljenko “Mike” Grgich, and Mark West.

I’ve toured many of the vineyards in our Central Virginia region, and I have the greatest respect for the growers here who produce fine grapes in a wet climate.

I know that the Norton grape grows well here while the Pinot Noir grape does not.

When we lived in California, I even experimented with growing my own Chardonnay grapes, and Lori can tell you that the birds got more of my grapes than ended up as juice in the refrigerator.

I can show you how to graft a vine onto a disease-resistant root stock.

I’m familiar with how grape growers plant roses around the perimeter of their vineyards because rose bushes are susceptible to the same blights and diseases as grapes, and so rose bushes serve as an early-warning system in the vineyards.

I’m also familiar with how grape growers plant mustard between the rows in their vineyards in the winter to add nitrogen back into the soil.

I mention all of these elaborate details this morning so that you will trust me when I bring one simple fact to your attention:

No one – but no one – plants a fig tree in their vineyard.

A fig tree would consume too much ground water, the canopy would produce too much shade, and the fig tree would attract birds that would eat the grapes.

So when you hear this story about a fig tree in a vineyard, you should be alert to the possibility that this story might have to do with something other than figs and grapes.

Indeed, this entire passage from the Gospel of Luke is a cascade of figurative and metaphorical language designed to pull us out of our comfortable sense of reality.

The Luke passage begins with two historical inaccuracies: There is no record of Pontius Pilate massacring Galileans and mingling their blood with Roman sacrificial meat. He was a butcher, but he probably did not do that.

Nor is there any record, other than here, of a tower of Siloam falling on 18 people. And then we have this parable of man cursing a fig tree because it bears no fruit, and the gardener saying, give it another year.

So what is going on here? Does God hate figs?

In the time of Jesus, the fig tree was a symbol of religious teachers and their institutions. Rabbis taught while sitting under fig trees, and so fig trees were symbolic of the institutional religion of Jesus’ day.

In the Luke passage, Jesus seems to be saying that religious leaders have one more chance to get things right.

I find that a personally sobering message.

Yet there is also grace entwined in the figs and vines – even grace for religious leaders. And the grace that Jesus talks of come when we least expect it, in places we least expect, and from people we least expect.

If you keep reading this section of Luke beyond what is presented today, you will hear Jesus telling stories about how God’s grace springs forth from mustard seeds and yeast – or at unexpected times like a visitor in the night, or in unexpected places, like this fig tree growing where it does not belong, in a vineyard.

Give grace a chance, Jesus says. Let it grow. You never know where you will find it.

Yet these stories also come with admonitions that are hard to hear about sin and repentance. Not a popular topic then, not a popular topic now.

So let’s step back a few paces and look at the dreaded subject of sin. You might be surprised that the word “sin” does not quite mean what the popular culture thinks it means.

The basic meaning of sin is to be disconnected from God. To be born human, born mortal, means we are born disconnected from our creator. We are born into the noise of the world and into the deafening silence of our separation from God.

That is not a moralistic statement about good and bad, but a statement of reality. By being human, we cannot see God. In all of the Biblical stories, only one person has ever seen God – Moses. For the rest of humanity, we have times when might feel utterly disconnected from our creator.

To live in sin means to live in silence from God. It is unavoidable and real.

The sin Jesus talks of over and over is how we inherit this fractured broken world that seems perpetually disconnected from God – that is the meaning of “original sin.”

To be born requires learning how to live in this fractured broken world. We must learn many things to survive, including how to live amidst good and evil.

The allegorical story of the Garden of Eden, and Adam and Eve, is about this disconnection from God we all experience by virtue of leaving our mother’s womb – the Garden of Eden – and how we must learn to live.

Let me say as an aside, those who read the Adam and Eve story as a science text for “creationism” are sadly missing the point.

It is our disconnection from God that leads us to the arrogance of believing we need to rely on only ourselves – that we are more powerful than God.

And it is from that that self-centered focus that abusive “sinful” behavior comes.

To repent means to turn around – to turn back to God, to end our silence with our creator, to be humble enough to see that it is NOT all about us.

I hope you heard the words in one of the first prayers today, known as the “Collect of the Day”:

“Almighty God, you know that we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves…”

It is from that starting point of humility that our repentance begins. That does not mean there are no morals or ethics, quite the contrary.

Our morals and ethics spring from our compassion and connection to God, and each other. We live morally and ethically because it is right so to do, not because of an expectation of reward and punishment.

If you read closely the stories of Jesus healing people, you will notice that Jesus connects forgiveness of sin with healing, and therein is a major clue to what Jesus ultimately means by sin and forgiveness – and this is the unexpected fig tree growing in the vineyard.

The forgiveness Jesus pronounces is about reconciliation with God and not about moralistic dogmas. In the healing stories of Jesus, people come who are sick, and they’ve done nothing wrong. It has taken me years to figure out why Jesus says they are “forgiven, sin no more” when they’ve done nothing wrong. He is saying you are reconnected with God – it is not a moralistic statement. Forgiveness gives us the power to turn back to God.

To be healed and forgiven – to live in the reality of salvation – is to end our silence with God despite the brokenness of the world where we dwell.

Our sin – our silence with God – is healed, and this healing brings us back into relationship with God so that we can help heal this fractured out-of-kilter world we inherit by our birth.

The lesson Jesus gives over and over is that grace, healing, forgiveness, reconciliation comes where and when no one thinks it will. It comes like a fig tree growing in vineyard.

We do need to give this fig tree a chance to grow. We do need to be open to the forgiveness and healing that comes our way when we least expect it.

We do need to plant a few fig trees in our vineyards. We might even surprise ourselves when we see it grow. AMEN.

By James Richardson, Fiat Lux

Part III: Original sin, arguing with God, forgiveness, healing and a few other Big Hairy topics: My theological reflection

I’ve taken you on a roundabout theological journey the last few days, starting with questions about the concept of “original sin” as an explanation for the brokenness of the world and the calamities we endure. If you are still with me, thank you and congratulations for coming this far.

As my reflection has unfolded, I’ve seen “original sin” not as a transmission of wrongful acts by a proto-human (Adam and Eve) but as an allegorical statement of the human condition of being born into disconnection from God.

I might add that the original author of the original sin doctrine, Augustine of Hippo, viewed the Bible primarily in allegorical terms.

As an Augustinian Christian, this brings me ultimately to the story of Jesus, but also raises questions about finding the meaning in Jesus dying on the Cross. Often Christians use the shorthand “Jesus died for our sins” to explain the crucifixion, but that phrase has some disturbing implications for how we view God.

The phrase comes partly from a Christian interpretation of the “Binding of Isaac,” the biblical story of Abraham nearly killing his son, Isaac in Genesis 22:1-24, discussed yesterday. In this strain of Christian interpretation, Jesus becomes the lamb – the substitution – for the sacrifice of Isaac, who represents us, hence we call Jesus “the lamb of God.” He died so that we might be spared of being sacrificed ourselves, or the “atoning sacrifice.”

But there is something deeply troubling about this concept of atonement. It leaves us with a blood-thirsty God demanding a blood ransom of his own son for human wrongdoing. And if Jesus is divine, is God killing himself?

And if this was a ransom to get us off the hook from our own sins, why is the world still a mess and full of evil and sin? The ransom didn’t seem to work.

There is another way of seeing the Abraham-Isaac story (see yesterday’s post) and that might also bring us to another way of looking at the meaning of the Cross. But rather than getting bogged down in theological abstractions, let me tell you a few stories:

In my time as priest (and even before) I've heard many stories of people who have had experiences of the Holy coming to them in an extreme crisis; a friend nearly dying in a car accident, and feeling enfolded by the arms of God; patients in hospitals seeing a gleaming face; a woman who thought she was about to lose her daughter to cancer and then feeling the presence of the Virgin Mary.

Recently a young mother told me how one of her children suffered a terrible accident and nearly died. The doctors told her they weren’t sure they could save her son, that it was touch-and go. As she waited in the hospital, she felt she was standing on the edge of the most terrible abyss imaginable.

And then she felt this amazing unexpected presence, and a voice telling her “I love you. I will hold you. I don’t know how this will come out, and it may not come out the way you want, but I will be with you, and I am never going to let you go. I will love you forever and I will always love your son. I will always be your companion.”

Call him Jesus, or the Holy Spirit, or the Hand of God, the divine came to each of these people and absorbed their pain. Each of these hurting people saw and experienced a divine presence in a way that spoke to them personally, and each felt their burden lifted from them.

To me, all of those experiences come from Christ speaking from the Cross. The woman in a car accident had not “sinned” – nor had the young boy who nearly died, nor his mother. None of them deserved to be standing at the abyss.

This was not about a ransom or a sacrifice. It was about Jesus being with them because he had been there before, on the Cross, on the edge of the abyss and beyond.

The message each heard was not about moral failings, but about unconditional love in the worst moment of their lives. The salvation they received was not delayed for their afterlife, but came then and there. Jesus spoke to them from the same place of suffering where they were suffering. He could do that because he had been there.

The story of Jesus, as it unfolds in the gospels, is a story of how he willingly lived with fractured people in their broken places to the point of going to his death with them. He sought out the hurting and the sick, touched them when others thought they were dirty, healed them of their wounds, and traded places with them when they died.

The point of the Cross is that Jesus was willing to dwell with us in our most painful place imaginable. By sharing our pain and showing us we are loved unconditionally, he also points us to a life without fear, here and now by reconnecting us with our creator. It is not about an insurance policy for the next world, but about a way to live in this world.

The biblical stories of healings by Jesus are not about cures that make bodies invincible – that never happens in the stories – and that, I would suggest, is a huge clue about the underlying “original sin.” The healing that comes from Jesus is about reconciling people with God so that they might live no matter what happens to their bodies. Even Lazarus, raised from the dead, passes from this earth again.

Here is where I believe this “original sin” concept is crucial.

Notice that Jesus nearly always mentions forgiveness of sin when he is healing people. The two are usually spoken of together, for example with the paralyzed man in Luke 5:17-26 who is healed and told “your sins are forgiven.” Jesus underlines three times in the story that healing is connected to forgiveness.

Yet we may ask, what sin did the paralyzed man commit? What did he do wrong to deserve being paralyzed? Luke doesn’t tell us. We should presume none at all. Nor does the paralyzed man “repent” of any "sins," or even ask Jesus to be healed (his friends do that for him). He’s done nothing to “accept” Jesus or anything else to deserve healing. He’s paralyzed and he is completely incapable of doing anything, good or evil. He is healed with no strings attached and told he is forgiven.

What then is this concept of sin and forgiveness that Jesus is getting at?

It may be that the sin Jesus is talking about is living in this fractured broken world that seems perpetually disconnected from God – the “original sin.” The paralyzed man, like Job, has done nothing wrong. But by being born and paralyzed he is living in a sort of silent paralyzed disconnection from God. He can do nothing. The forgiveness he receives is not about moral forgiveness, but about reconnection and ending the silent paralysis.

That same disconnection from God begins for each of us when we are born from our mother’s womb. The Garden of Eden is an allegory for the womb, and the “fall” of Adam and Eve an allegory of human birth.

We must be born to be human; we must learn many things including good and evil to survive. To be born is to learn how to live in a fractured broken world. To be healed and forgiven – to have salvation – is to be reconnected with God despite the brokenness of the world that we enter.

As I see it, the forgiveness Jesus pronounces is about reconciliation with God and not about moralistic dogmas. Jesus says to the paralyzed man, in effect, “You are healed, your body mended, and you are reconnected with God. The fracture with God is healed, the brokenness is now unbroken. Go now and live acting in this knowledge.”

That does not mean there are no morals or ethics, quite the contrary. Our morals and ethics spring from our compassion and connection to God and each other. We live morally and ethically because it is the right way to live, not because of an expectation of reward and punishment. Our sin – our silence with God – is forgiven, and that healing brings us back into conversation with God about how to heal this fractured out-of-kilter world we inherit by our birth.

Jesus throughout the gospels links forgiveness and healing to action, or “discipleship.” You are healed, you are reconnected to God, so get up, go forth and do something. To be a follower of Jesus – to be a disciple – is to do likewise: "Forgive others, be an agent of healing and be there with others who are on the edge of the abyss. When you do, I will be there with you because I've been there before."

This call for discipleship weaves throughout the story of Jesus, beginning even before his birth. In Luke 1:68-79, Zechariah tells his baby son, John (the Baptist), how he is to be a follower of Jesus, and it is a mandate for action to all of us:

“To give knowledge of salvation to his people by the forgiveness of their sins. By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.”

To walk with the way of the Cross is to agree to live in the fractured places with others because that is where Christ truly dwells. That requires being vulnerable to our own brokenness, to touching our own pain (Psalm 23): “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me…”

By being there in those painful places with others, we are also reconnected with God as they are reconnected with God. The silence ends, the paralysis is over. At the very end of the Bible, comes this declaration that the story of original sin is ended, once and for all, because God dwells with us forever: (Revelation 21:3-4):

“See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.”

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Thanks for coming along with me the last three days on this journey of reflection. To any who have been offended, my apologies. Where I have strayed, forgive me; this reflection is mine alone. Whether you agree or disagree, I hope it has given you at least food for thought and prayer. I am also much influenced in this view of forgiveness and the Cross by the writing of Jesuit Jon Sobrino in his book Christ the Liberator: A View from the Victims, and former-Domincan James Alison in his book Raising Abel: The Recovery of Eschatological Imagination. And now I am off to the Diocesan Council. Keep me and those who take council in your prayers.

Crucifixion art above: Folk art from Cameroon; Medieval stained glass; painting by He Qi, China; "The Ascension of Christ," Salvador Dali.

Part I: Original sin, arguing with God, forgiveness, healing and a few other Big Hairy topics

The calamitous events of our world in recent weeks are many: the attempted assassination of a Congresswoman in Arizona and the murder of six people, floods in South America, an earthquake in Pakistan, war in Afghanistan, the death of friends.

The list begs many questions. Some of those questions are about public policy and democracy, and our response as human beings to the plight of other human beings.

Other questions are about God.

Why is it that our world is broken? Why does God put up with this? Where is God? Those are theological questions; many have proposed answers, none fully work.

For some, the answer is that we are being tested by God. Life is a big test, and for those who pass, there is a prize at the end in the here-beyond. That concept, however, seems to blame God for everything that goes wrong, and the logical extension of that is to give ourselves credit for everything that goes right. That seems backwards to me and not very satisfying.

The classic response of the Church is that the brokenness of the world reflects the “original sin” of Adam and Eve, as told in Genesis 2:4-3:24.

But I must confess that I’ve struggled with the concept of “original sin.” It has never made much sense to me. How would the “sin” of Adam and Eve be transmitted to me? Where is the “original sin” DNA located in the human genome?

And if our human species evolved from earlier primates, as I am certain beyond a reasonable doubt is factually true, just who is Adam and Eve? The fossil record shows our human ancestry to be far more complicated than the myth of two people who were created whole out of mud.

We’ve crossbred with other earlier hairy hominids (now called “hominins” by scientists). From which branch of the human species do Adam and Eve get and their “original sin”? And, even if there were an Adam and Eve, how would their sins be transmitted to me?

To put this another way, I don’t buy it, at least not the way much of Christianity has warped science to fit the concept of original sin.

I suspect those who hold to a “creationist” view of the Genesis biblical story do so not out of any genuine interest in scientific pursuit, but to defend the concept of “original sin” transmitted from Adam and Eve. A lot of sin-punishment-repentance-election-salvation theology hangs on that story being literally true. If the story goes away, the doctrinal edifice collapses, hence there are people willing to die in the ditch to defend the historical veracity of the Adam and Eve story.

Yet even of the story doesn’t go away, you don’t have to reach the New Testament to call into question human sin as the explanation for all that is wrong in the world. The sin-punishment etc. doctrine is picked to pieces in the Book of Job, and rather convincingly.

So we are back to the original question: How do we explain the brokenness of our world? Something is out of kilter, of that I am also certain. Science is not getting us off the hook either.

Recently, I’ve begun to see this original sin concept another way, and I hope you might go with me here. There is considerably more depth to this concept than meets the eye or the popular religionist’s lore.

I will say more about that tomorrow. Please join me then for Part II.

Illustrations: "The Creation of Adam," Sistine Chapel, by Michaelangelo; the fossil "Lucy," a 3.2 million year old hominid found in Ethiopia.