Randy Harris 7-12-26

If you'll stand, we'll hear the word.

I'm hoping to see a text up there in a minute.

But the gift of God is not like the trespass. For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God's grace and the gift that that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many? Nor can the gift of God be compared with the result of one man's sin. The judgment followed one sin and brought condemnation. But the gift followed many trespasses and brought justification.

For if by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God's abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ? Amen. You may sit.

If I were preaching two weeks from now, I would undoubtedly preach a different sermon than the one I'm preaching today. When you're the pinch hit preacher, that's what happens. You preach on whatever you're thinking about in the moment.

And this sermon is called Adam, Jesus and Frankenstein.

I forgot we were having a blood drive. I could have done Dracula.

So I'm a creature of habit. Despite the fact that I'm retired. I get up at the same time every day, 6am, have the same routine every morning, and I'm on the ACU track at 6:45 to walk for an hour. Those of you who are there when I'm there know that I'm not interested in getting to know you there.

I'm walking and I'm listening. I'm listening to a book. Every morning for an hour I walk listening to a book. You would be amazed at how many books you can listen to in a year. And one of my more recent listens was Frankenstein, which I had not read since I was a teenager and I got interested in.

Well, what is this book that launched hundreds of bad movies.

The scariest thing about most of them is that you're watching them in the first place.

But I had recently watched the Bride of Frankenstein from 1935, which I will assure you is a truly great movie. I didn't say great horror movie. I said Great Movie. After 90 years, it holds up shockingly well. And towards the end, the creature utters three words that are so heartbreakingly moving you can hardly stand it.

And then there's the more recent movie which I watched, which is beautifully made and gory and too long and beautiful and moving. And the reason I wanted to watch that movie is because the guy who was playing the monster, got into show business as a male model, and I thought, now, how's this going to work?

How scary can he be? And I'm not counting, you know, all of Herman Munster, you have to be of a certain age to know, or Young Frankenstein, Gene Wilder's wonderful comedic work. But there are dozens and dozens of other bad movies. And so I decided I'm going to go back to the source. I want to know what the book was like.

I'd read it as a teenager, but I couldn't remember it very well.

And it's better than I remembered.

It's very moving, it's very philosophical. And there is one moment of such existential horror.

Well, on my walk around the track, I think I started to cry. Now a spoiler is coming. But it's pretty early in the book, so I'm not going to ruin the book. And besides, it's been around over a hundred years. If you haven't gotten to it, you know, I'm not sure I feel very sorry for you at this point.

The most horrible moment in the book, gut wrenching moment. Victor Frankenstein has managed to create life where there was none, by the way. Electricity is not involved in the process. That's movie stuff. And having created life, which to him looks so horrifying, so awful, he does the worst thing you can imagine.

He walks away, Doesn't say a word to his creature, who's now come to life and doesn't understand where he is or what he's doing. Victor Frankenstein runs away from his creation.

And that book, like the great 1935 Bride of Frankenstein, and like the 2025, Frankenstein, is really about one thing, loneliness.

It's about a creature, not a monster.

A creature whose creator has no love for him and in fact has no one in the universe who cares for him.

Well, unless I get lost, maybe too late. Frankenstein is not the only book I've read as a teenager that I've kept reading. There's also Romans, which I've read a great deal more often, which is a kind of obsession, I don't mind telling you. Paul's my guy. You know, all the early Christian writers, of all the people who wrote what we now know as the Bible, Paul is my guy.

And his deep reflections over what it means to be loved by the one who created us is a kind of obsession with me. And I don't know if the passage I just read is incredibly simply or incredibly complex.

In some ways it's puzzling, and in other ways it's very straightforward.

Paul has a story to tell. And the story is where a good creator creates a creature to love and be loved by. And this creation, God goes completely off the rails.

This creation does not go off the rails because the Creator walks away from it, but because the creature walks away.

And he exemplifies that all in the one man, Adam. And Adam apparently introduces a virus into the world, a virus we would call sin. And Adam's sin multiplies in the world until it takes everything in.

We can have some discussion about what the nature of that sin is. Or I could just tell you, because I know.

Adam's sin is he does not trust God.

That's the sin that launched a thousand sins.

I can remember the moment in class one time where I was talking about Genesis 3, because I always was. And talking about this failure of trust that brings the world down. And that what it means to be human is first, foremost, and always to trust God. And there's one student out there who's clearly in distress. These were graduate students.

And afterwards we talk. And I said, okay, that clearly bothered you. Tell me why. And he said, if you had just said, love God, because I love God. But you didn't say, love God.

You said, trust God. And he starts to tell me his story why he has very good reasons not to trust God.

It kind of hit me in that moment. Hmm.

Trust may be harder than love.

And our failure to trust, our attempt to become the source of our own security, makes us monstrous towards one another.

The creation goes off the rails.

But unlike Dr. Victor, God refuses to walk away.

Instead, he conspires. He conspires with himself in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He conspires to see how that this story of the failure of trust can. Can be reimagined as a story of trust, redemption, and love. Now, I'm 68.

I have been thinking about what happened when Jesus died on the cross for the last 50 years, and it's not going that well.

I thought about it and I thought about it, and I've read about it and I've read about it, and I've run Paul over and over into my mind. And what Luke was saying around communion was highly appropriate for this, too. There's a mystery involved that I can't quite solve.

But I want to tell you what I think happened.

Something like this.

Father and Son, by the way, I'm not leaving out Spirit. He's going to show up in a minute.

Father and son say, well, this can't be.

We have to fix this mess.

And what we need is somebody to replay the Adam story. And instead of failing to trust God, trusting God completely, trusting God so much that he wouldn't even save his own life, that he would count on God to raise him up when he died.

So Adam walks to a tree, fails to trust, and the whole world goes to hell. And Jesus Christ walks to a tree, climbs on a cross, and the whole world is redeemed. Redeemed from hell. That's the story Paul wants to tell. And somehow all of that mistrust and all of that sin and all of that violence, all of that oppression was brought to one point in Jesus Christ.

Sometimes we use the language of scapegoat to. To explain it. He takes it all. He takes it all.

And in that moment, in his ultimate trust in God, it loses its power to kill us.

And then he sends the Holy Spirit, infuses into us the possibility of following God in a way we never could have before, breaks down the walls between us, creates a world where love is actually a possibility.

When, as I preached through the years, I increasingly used humor and storytelling.

Now part of that was personality. I like stories, and I've tried to develop a sense of humor, But that's never what it was about.

I came to understand that the people I preach to and that myself are very guarded and protected.

And we live in fear.

We want to protect ourselves. We want to make sure nothing bad can get in.

But of course, the problem is when you put those walls of protection up, you not only keep your enemies away, you keep your friends away too.

And so I kept thinking, okay, what's the side door? Because the front of the castle is too well protected. Maybe humor, maybe a story and the love of God will sneak up on people and they'll say, oh, that's what it feels like to be unconditionally and completely loved.

That's what it feels like when I don't have to be a success to be loved by my Creator.

That's what it feels like.

And when you feel like that for a moment, you never want anything else. Who in the world wouldn't want to be loved like that? And if I understand it, that's what we mean by the gospel, the good news. I was talking to one of my atheist friends recently, and he's a. He's a good atheist.

And is not ready to change his religion for the moment, so to speak.

But he was once a believer, and he says, I miss that unconditional love, because when he gave up God, he gave up that, And he misses it.

Last thing from this interesting little paragraph I read, it's the gracious mathematics of God.

One man's sin comes in and sin multiplies and multiplies, and then Jesus Christ comes in and he says, from the one act, all of those trespasses are overcome.

I was also talking to one of my science friends and he. He was trying to explain to me certain kinds of mathematics. I don't understand, and I don't even remember the term for this now, but there's some sort of mathematics where something has to turn 720 degrees to come back to where it is now. If you have forgotten your Math, that was 360 degrees and I'm back where I was. Now, what does it look like when you have to turn 720 degrees to get back where you were?

I said, can you explain that? No.

Can I explain how the act of the one man created this possibility of love and acceptance and relentless unconditional love? How did that one act do all that? Oh, it was 720 degrees.

It's the mathematics of grace.

Apparently we're having a debate in Texas at the moment about the Bible and education and I'll stay out of that debate. I will merely suggest to you that when you go home and watch the 1935 Bride of Frankenstein, you look for the crosses in the movie.

And if you go back and read the novel Frankenstein, which you should, you will know the book is unimaginable without the story of the Bible, the book's unimaginable without the Tower of Babel, the book's unimaginable without the Creator God and his relationship to his creation. The book is all one torqued meditation on what can go wrong.

Buried deep underneath is this most primal story of a God who will never let his creation go.

Would you stand?

The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you and give you peace. To him who is able to keep you from falling and to present you before his glorious presence without fault and with great joy to the only God our Savior, Be glory and majesty, dominion and power through heaven, Jesus Christ our Lord, before all ages now and forevermore, world without end. Amen.