Trinity 7
Gen
2:7-17
7/30/17
It’s gone! It’s gone!
Rejoice with me! It’s gone! I’m talking about the sweet gum tree that was
in the back yard at our house. A couple
of years ago I mentioned the tree in a sermon.
I told of how growing up at my parents’ house in Indiana we had a sweet
gum tree in the back yard. I quickly
learned to despise that thing. Its
leaves weren’t pretty in the fall – they just sort of turned brown. And those
pods…. It dropped those hard spiked pods. They meant it hurt to walk barefoot and they
had to be raked up and removed every year.
I was therefore less than pleased when we bought our house here
in Marion and I realized that we had a large sweet gum tree in the
backyard. During the last eleven years
my sons learned to despise it too. They
learned how the pods from the tree hurt your feet and they took part in the
less than pleasant task of raking up and removing the pods.
The tree grew during the last decade to the point that a large
branch was hanging out over the corner of the house where Amy and I have our
bedroom. It wasn’t hard to imagine that
one of these days the storms that blow through our area might bring that branch
down on the house.
We had someone in to trim the branch, and then we just decided
to go all the way. I certainly didn’t
want spend the money, but the opportunity presented itself to get rid of the
thing.
And there was rejoicing in
the Surburg house. Where the tree once
was, there is now a stump with a barrel on it that Amy and Matthew filled with
beautiful flowers. The sight brings me
joy.
Our experience with that sweet gum tree contrasts greatly with
what we learn in our text about the creation that God made. In Genesis chapter one, Moses gives us the
“big picture” of God act of creation. We
hear about the six days of creation as God says, “Let there be” and creation is
made.
Now in chapter two, he moves in for a close up as we learn the
particulars about God’s creation of Adam, Eve and the world in which they
lived. We
learn: “The LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into
his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.” These
are actually are some of the more important words in the Bible, because they
tell us about what God made us to be. He
created us as individuals who have a body and a soul. We can’t be what God intends us to be without
both of these. Anything less than that
is not the “very good” that Moses uses to describe God’s creation.
God created Adam with a body to live in
place. And then we learn about the place
God created for him. We hear: “And the
LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom
he had formed. And out of the ground the LORD God made to spring up every tree
that was pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was in the
midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”
God gave Adam a place to live – a beautiful
garden where every tree is pleasant to the sight and good for food. We learn that a river flowed out of the
garden, and that there in the garden was the tree of life, and the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil. God put Adam in the garden of Eden with a purpose –
with a vocation. He was to work it and
keep it. This was work that was not work
– it was the privilege God entrusted to Adam in which he found fulfillment as
the only creature created in God’s image.
God told Adam that it was all there for
him. He said, "You may surely eat
of every tree of the garden.” It was all there for him, that is, with one exception. God added: “but of the tree of the knowledge
of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall
surely die.”
Adam alone was created in the image of God.
But Adam was not God. So God gave Adam
something by which he worshipped God.
God had created Adam as body and soul.
He had made the place – the garden – where Adam lived. And so God gave Adam the located means by
which he showed that God was God and he was not. He identified the tree of the knowledge of
good and evil as the one tree from which Adam was not to eat. Adam showed that he feared, loved and trusted
in God above all things – that he worshipped God – by leaving this one tree
alone.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just stop there? Well actually not right there. We haven’t yet heard about God’s greatest
gift to Adam. In the next verse God
says, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I
will make him a helper corresponding to him.” God created Eve from Adam, and
when Adam saw her he said: “Wow!” Well, ok, not exactly. He said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she
shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man” – but you get the
point. And we are told, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother
and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his
wife were both naked and were not ashamed.”
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could stop right there?
But of course we can’t, because Adam and Eve were not content to be
God’s highest creation. They weren’t content to fear, love and trust in God
above all things. They weren’t content
to trust and obey God’s word.
And actually, you don’t have any trouble
understanding what that is like. Their
first sin was about not trusting God’s Word.
It was about wanting to be God.
And you’ve been doing that your whole life. God promises to care for you, but you don’t
like how he is doing it so you worry or you get upset. God has told you in his Ten Commandments how
he as God has set up life to work. And
instead, you choose to act like God and make up your own rules. You get angry
and hurt others; you look at pornography and lust; you gossip and you covet.
God told Adam “but of the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it
you shall surely die.” And he wasn’t
kidding. As St. Paul told the Romans, “The wages of sin is death.” It brings physical death. You are all sinners and apart from the Last Day
you are all going to die. And it brings eternal
death because sin evokes God’s eternal punishment. It brings God’s curse, since as Paul told the
Galatians: “For all who rely on works of the
law are under a curse; for it is written, ‘Cursed be everyone who does not
abide by all things written in the Book of the Law, and do them.’”
But the good news of the Gospel is that God
didn’t leave things there. The first Adam brought sin because he didn’t trust
and obey God in relation to a tree. And
so God sent forth his Son to be incarnate by the Holy Spirit and born of the
virgin Mary. He sent him into this world
in the flesh – true God and true man. In Jesus Christ all the fullness of the Deity
dwells bodily. And Jesus, the second
Adam, trusted and obeyed God in relation to a different tree. Paul went on to say in Galatians, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a
curse for us--for it is written, "Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a
tree."
Jesus Christ hung on the tree of the cross
in order to receive the curse for you.
The wages of your sin brought him death. And by doing this he redeemed
you from sin – he freed you from it. But
that wasn’t enough – not for what God intends you to be. And so on third day
Jesus defeated death as he rose from the dead.
His risen body is the first fruits of your resurrection. God has acted in Jesus so that on the Last
Day when Christ returns you will be renewed in both body and soul, never to die
again.
This good news means that you have
forgiveness and peace now. You know that in God’s eyes because of Jesus you are
a saint! It means that you have hope right now.
You know how things will end. You know that death can’t separate you
from Christ and that the final victory is yours on the Last Day. You can count
on it because Jesus has risen from the dead.
Forgiven? Yes. Confident because you are certain of the
future? Yes. But you are also still
living right now. You are going to go
home after the service and there is going to the lunch to fix. There is going to be a lawn to mow. There is going to be dinner to get ready.
There are going to be kids to bathe and put to bed. And come Monday for many of
us there’s going to be job to go do.
In our text we learn that God gave Adam a
vocation – a calling. He was to work and
keep the garden. God has given you
vocations too – he’s put you in positions and stations in life where he uses
you to provide and care for others.
This is a good thing. It means that God takes the seemingly mundane
things in life and gives it a divine importance. Yet this morning I want to mention another
side of this. Your vocations and Adam’s
vocation in our text are different in that Adam did not yet know sin. Living perfectly according to God’s will, his
calling was second nature. It was a
source of joy and not of difficulty.
It’s not that way for you and me. Sometimes, our vocations are work; they are
not easy; they are not fun. Now it’s not
always. There are certainly joys in our vocations. But many times they are just something we
have to do. And you know what? You
probably don’t want to hear this, but that’s
good for us. That’s God at work
through our vocations not just for the sake of others, but for our sake. God uses our
vocations to crucify the old man in us.
When we want to turn in on ourselves in selfish ways, God uses vocation to turn
us outward and make us serve others because we don’t want to do so.
Because our new man needs nourishment and
support in that struggle with the sin still present in us we come here. We come to this place to hear Christ speak
absolution to us. We come to hear his called servant proclaim the Gospel to us.
And we come to receive his Sacrament. We come to receive the true body and blood
of our Lord Jesus Christ, given and shed for us. For through this gift at the
foretaste of the feast to come we receive sustenance for our service in the
present. And in the body and blood of
the risen Lord we have the guarantee of the day when everything will be very
good once again.
