Sermon: “Christianity: A Well-Known Stranger”

Six months after I retired, we moved from Harwich to Chatham. After the closing, Linda and I walked through our new home. One of the things I noticed was the beautiful Leyland cypress trees lining the edge of the property – all the way around.

But just as I was luxuriating in their splendor, I had a sudden start. Uh oh, I thought, I’m going to have to maintain all these trees! Dollar signs flashed before my eyes. For, in truth, I’m not the world’s most capable, much less dedicated, handyman. Just ask Linda. As a result, we had to hire a young man to trim our trees twice a year.

As it happens, he’s a very intelligent and thoughtful person and we frequently get to talking about politics, philosophy and, God forbid, religion. I might add, he’s not a Christian.

In general, our secular culture has bought into the progressive idea that life is steadily evolving from lower to higher form, that life invariably gets better and better with each passing day. It’s as if by turning the page on our calendar, life automatically improves. We’ve moved beyond the past, after all, with all its base ignorance and superstition.

Most recently, while discussing the troubling state of our current political situation, the subject of sin came up (by me, that is). My argument was, and is, that much of what secular society promotes these days is utopian in nature, that if we somehow rejigger this and tweak that, we can build a perfect society. Admittedly, it’s rarely stated quite so baldly, yet this does seem to be the underlying assumption, if only subconsciously believed.

We today are so much smarter and more sophisticated, we think. We even have powerful computers in our pockets to prove it. Just imagine how awesome Jesus could have been if he ‘d had high-speed internet access!

The problem with this type of utopian thinking, political or otherwise, is the stubbornness of the human heart. True, science and technology progress (think modern dentistry), which only tends to propagate the illusion that all of life is progressing.

Overlooked, as I say, is the inconvenient fact that human nature and its waywardness has not changed, not since biblical times, not ever. Each individual, in every age, is tasked with learning for him or herself what it means to be fully human.

God has, as I always say, no grandchildren, only sons and daughters. Each generation, that is, must struggle to attain moral and spiritual maturity. There are no shortcuts. Character doesn’t just get passed down or appear automatically. It is we, and we alone, who must make it our own.

Given this aspect of human nature, I asked our young tree trimmer, again a non-Christian, what he thinks the word “sin” means, since it plays such an important role in human affairs. After hemming and hawing a bit, I asked him not to overthink it. Just tell me what the word means off the top of your head.

“Sin has to do with bad things,” he offered finally.

In this he was partly right, but mostly wrong. Technically, sin does not refer to particular malevolent acts, but means, simply, “the state of being separated from God.”

It’s a relational term, having to do with our personal relationship with God. And it is from this broken relationship that all of life’s problems flow. All our individual “sins,” in other words, issue forth from our primal, existential estrangement from the One who brought us into being.

I then went on to cite the Fall in the beginning chapters of Genesis. In this mythological story, the Garden of Eden symbolizes the perfect relationship between God and humanity. It is paradise. Adam and Eve are so perfectly one with God, in fact, that they are completely innocent of evil. Everything is as it should be, just as God intends.

But then, the Serpent tempts our spiritual forbears to eat the forbidden fruit. The fruit, again symbolically, represents humanity’s primal urge to shed its radical dependence on God and to go its own way.

“Eat of this fruit,” the Serpent assures, “and your eyes will be opened, and you will be just like gods yourselves.”

In falling for this seductive ruse, Adam and Eve commit “Original Sin,” breaking relationship with God and “freeing” themselves from God’s providential care. Immediately, we are told, they are banished from paradise, sent “East of Eden” (with flaming swords barring readmittance), to live apart from God and God’s providential plan for their lives.

And because they have jettisoned God’s love, the new world they find themselves in is ruled necessarily by flawed human wisdom and desire, and by flawed human beings acting as if they themselves were God. This “secular” world, I might add, is the same one we find ourselves in today. 

Since my biblical explanation probably sounded too much like a bunch of theological mumbo-mumbo, I offered my young friend what I hoped was a more relatable story.

Suppose, I said, you fall in love for the first time, perhaps as a teenager. The world suddenly is transformed into paradise by the magic of love. Everything seems new and the world reborn. The sun shines, and the sky is a perpetual blue.

Then imagine, as so often happens, you break up. Paradise is lost. The relationship is ended. You have lost contact with the beloved, the source of your hopes and dreams. You now live East of Eden.

As time goes by, you find you no longer know what the beloved is thinking or doing. You’ve lost touch. Mutual friends may tell you bits and pieces of what she’s up to, but that’s distant hearsay. You have become all but strangers to one another.

And that’s how it is with us and God, our primordial love. Humanity can grow so far apart that it no longer knows who God is or what God wishes for us. It has abandoned the relationship. It has lost touch.

But here’s where the Cross comes into play. Suppose the forlorn teenaged lover in our story suddenly is reconciled, reunited, with his first love. Along with joy comes a certain unfamiliarity. For over time, the two lovers have grown apart and no longer know each other as before. They’ve lived separate lives. In a real sense, in spite of their love, they must learn anew how to love one another. 

Through the Cross we have been reconciled to and reunited with our first love, our Creator. But because of the distance born of our wholesale separation from him, we have become, in many respects, strangers. This suggests we must learn, often in fits and starts, what it means to be in this newborn relationship with God.

After I was finished with my little sermonette, the young tree trimmer seemed surprised. He offered that most of his friends, “hippies,” as he called them, and non-Christians to boot, probably wouldn’t disagree with anything I had said.

Perhaps the problem is that our contemporary society has a distorted view of Christianity and therefore rejects it for what it isn’t.

For, in truth, if I thought Christianity was what its critics say it is, I’d reject it too.

Christianity is, as I often say, a well-known stranger, familiar in its cadence, but strangely unknown. Which is to say that, as a culture, we generally are familiar with its words, or so we think, but often have no idea what they actually mean.

Given this, it’s all too tempting to look to the secular world for direction and purpose, thus confusing the secular with the sacred – a critical mistake.

King David is celebrated throughout scripture primarily for one thing: he understood the difference between the “kingdoms of this world” and the “kingdom of God.” He understood that he was a mere mortal whose task was to be an intermediary between God and those whom God had given him to serve.

Unlike many, if not most kings, past and present, in whatever form of political power, he had the rare capacity to understand that his role was as an instrument of God, and not God himself. Amen.