Shane Hughes 9-20-26

Fault. Good morning, Highland. It's good to see you here today. My name is Shane Hughes. I'm one of the ministers here.

And we are in a series called From Dust to Glory. And I. I want you to notice the first thing that happens in Genesis chapter three, which is just how quiet it is, how peaceful and calm. There's a garden, a river, two human beings walk with God in the cool of the day. And then a serpent speaks. And the conversation almost sounds very casual at first.

Did God really say. It's the oldest question in the world, frankly. It still works. But listen how the serpent asks it. It doesn't accuse God of anything.

It just gets the sentence a bit wrong. Did God really say you can't eat from any tree in the garden? That's not what God said. What God said back in chapter two was that they could eat freely from every tree. Freely except one.

The serpent takes a sentence about the generosity of God and quietly turns it into a sentence about restriction. And notice how well it works. By the time the woman answers, she is adding to God's command. We can't eat it. We can't even touch it.

And somewhere between the first sentence and the second, the God who gave the garden has become a God who is holding something back. Walter Brueggemann is a theologian that spent his lifetime meditating on these old stories. And he says that the serpent is the first person in Scripture to practice theology in the place of obedience. Now, I want to be clear about what he's saying. He's not saying that there's something wrong with theology as long as theology is grounded in a life of faithfulness.

But when you separate theology from obedience, you begin talking about God instead of to God. God becomes a third person and an object to be analyzed or questioned, maybe even second guessed, rather than one who speaks and is spoken to. And the serpent invites Eve to step outside of relationship with God to talk about God. And once that happens, I want you to notice that the gift that God has given becomes a barrier. The edge of the safe place starts to look like a fence, something to be negotiated or improved upon or quietly set aside.

And so these first two humans, they eat and their eyes are opened and they know that they're naked and they make a wardrobe. It's fig leaves. The first human response to shame, by the way, is a clothing line. Ours has only gotten more sophisticated online. You can use a filter.

When they hear God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, they hide in the trees, which is a bold move, considering God is the one that created all those trees.

And I want you to notice something. God doesn't arrive with a lightning bolt and thunder ready to strike them dead.

God arrives with a question. Actually, it's three questions. Where are you? Then who told you that you're naked? Then what is this you have done?

These three questions from the someone that already knows the answers. God isn't gathering information. God is doing the very thing the serpent couldn't said, couldn't be done. He is talking with them instead of about him. Every question is an open door.

And listen how they walk through. The man says, the woman you gave me. In one sentence he has blamed both God and his wife, which is remarkably efficient in my opinion. And the text has quietly told us back in verse six that he was standing there, right there, the whole time, silent, presumably chewing. And the woman says, the serpent tricked me.

And nobody says, I did it.

Nobody says, I'm sorry.

A relationship made for openness has become a circle of pointing fingers. And. And what follows is this long unraveling through the rest of Genesis 1 through 11 is shame and blame and thorns. And finally a gate. And the two of them are driven out with a cherubim posted in the east of the garden with a flaming sword.

But it doesn't stop at the gate. You turn the page and Cain, burning with envy, kills his brother Abel. And God comes again with a question. And you'll recognize the sound of it. It sounds very familiar.

Where is your brother? Where are you?

Where Cain? Where is Abel?

Once we are hiding from God, we also find ourselves hiding from each other. If something went wrong at the root of the human story, at the very beginning, and we have been living with the consequence of those decisions that ever since. Which brings us to a hard word which is called original sin. And many in this room grew up maybe hearing that phrase and never quite knowing what to do with it. And it can sound like an ancient legal claim that every baby born is already guilty of a crime committed in a garden that none of us can remember.

And that, frankly, seems a little unfair to me. You would rather think of sin as something we choose, or something that can be managed with better habits or a better therapist or. This old doctrine sounds foreign.

So let me be clear and honest about two things. First is for 1600 years, Christians have talked about exactly how this works, how the crack in Adam and Eve becomes the crack in all of us. Augustine and Pelagius were at it, and I'm not going to settle it this morning. The second, the Church always Held. The thing that matters most is that the human story is broken at the root and none of us get to stand outside pointing in.

Augustine's whole doctrine comes down to this. Our nature was wounded at the beginning, and only the grace of God can heal it.

So maybe think of it this way. Nobody chooses the family nose that you inherited. I didn't choose my grandfather's hairline or my mother's giraffe knees, or for that matter, the gene that makes cilantro taste like soap. Nobody chooses this stuff. You inherit strengths, and you inherit weaknesses and tendencies and dispositions.

And Brad east says, we are not sinners because we sin. We sin because we are sinners. And there is something in the human condition that none of us choose and none of us can fix by ourselves.

But this is where the image. I want to come back and say it limps a little bit. It's not 100%, and I don't want to say this part out loud. Medical language only goes so far, right? Nobody asks a person that inherits a condition to repent.

Yet God does not treat us as patients. Only God treats us as humans. And we are responsible for whatever it is we do with the nature we've been given. God does not hold you guilty for a crime you've never committed. God holds you to the life you actually live with the inheritance that you actually received.

This is not a doctrine meant to crush anyone. It's an honest account of where we stand. It's more descriptive theology than anything else. It's the first step toward being able to hear good news at all. And so maybe sin, original or otherwise, isn't just a hard word.

I believe sin is the word that gives us freedom.

It's a word that gives us a way back.

It's a word that lets us come home.

And this is exactly where Paul meets us in Romans, Chapter three. Because Paul has been generating this brilliant rhetorical argument up until this point. In Romans, chapter three, Romans, Chapter one, he takes on the obvious target that everybody would recognize. You know, all those people out there that do idolatry, They've exchanged worship for God with shapes of animals and creatures and stone. Well, those guys are all idolaters.

They're a bunch of sinners. And everybody says, yeah, we get that. But in chapter two, he turns the page and he begins to look at the moralists and the churchgoers and say, you, all of you that are judging them, well, you're just the same.

By the time he's finished, the whole courtroom is silent. Everyone has been Indicted, including Paul, the one holding the microphone.

But then he says two words, but now. And I got to tell you the truth, if I could choose any two words in the New Testament, I think in Romans chapter three, it, it might be these very two. Everything before but now is what we have done to God and to one another. Everything after is what God has done about it, apart from the law. But now, apart from the law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed.

Not achieved, not discovered, disclosed. It's like a curtain that's been pulled back on something that was there all along. God did not have a plan B regarding the law. Paul says the law and the prophets were pointing to Jesus the whole time. And so Paul says there's no distinction, not between the churchgoer and the skeptic, not between the person whose life is a wreck and the one who, it appears it's all together, all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

And what is that glory? It's not some far off shining thing. Remember last week in Genesis 1, you are the glory of God. You bear God's image. You share a likeness with your father.

You have his giraffe knees. You have his gait. You look like God. You bear his image. But the problem is that you have taken your life, which is like a mirror hanging on the wall, and just turned it around so that the mirror only faces the wall.

But then he says, here's the gift. We are justified by his grace as a gift. Justified is a courtroom word.

It means to be declared in the right. But watch how big Paul makes this word. A jury can say not guilty, and you can walk out of the courtroom a stranger to everyone in it. My sister was a lawyer and then a judge, and she would always say there is a lot of distance between not guilty and innocent. Not guilty meant there wasn't enough evidence to convict you.

Innocent meant you didn't convict the crime. And she said, I as a judge cannot tell you the difference. I can only declare you not guilty. But being declared not guilty in this kind of court, Paul does something so much more that when you are justified, it means you are put right. You are no longer a stranger to those that are there.

This is the verdict that brings you back. It puts you right, restored. You get called by name. Not only does it mean you're not going to be punished, it means you get to come back to the family.

Tim Keller used to say that every other major religion in the world spends its time teaching you how to approach God, teaches you to build A record so that you can approach God. It sends you the message that if you're good, then you'll be accepted. But the Gospel of Jesus Christ turns that upside down. You are accepted, therefore you can begin to be good. That that perfect record that all of us desire has already been prepared by someone else, the someone else in your name and is offered to you as a gift.

And Paul's word for gift here means freely for nothing, with no cause in you. And that's how God loves you.

Paul carries on to say the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. And redemption is a slave market word. It's for buying someone out of bondage. But to Jewish ears, they hear something more than just the slave market. They, in their minds, they hear Egypt.

They hear a people that could not free themselves, but they had to be freed by someone else with great cost. They hear in their ears Babylon, when they were carried off into exile and they had no power to return on their own. And all of our instincts tell us a certain story about that price, that someone must have talked an angry God into it, a kind of Son persuading the Father. But Paul says, whom God put forward, not talked into it. God willingly did it.

Put forward is what the word that Paul used there, he pulls from the Greek version of the Old Testament, but it's the same word that they use for the place of atonement. And this is think of the Ark of the Covenant. And the Ark of the Covenant was in the Holy of Holies. And once a year the high priest would go in and offer atonement for the behalf of the people. And this is a consecrated moment.

This is where God rests. This is where God dwells. And inside the Ark were the relics of the law. There was the Ten Commandments and Aaron's staff, everything that represents the old commandment. And above the Ark, there were two angel wings that hovered above it.

This is God's throne. And in between the presence of God and the law of God, the high priest would come in and press blood.

He is in the place where the God who cannot pretend evil doesn't matter and the God who cannot stop loving his people finally meet. Paul transforms the mercy seat from a piece of furniture in a tent to a person on a hill. Paul says, do you want to know when what that space is between the presence of God and the power of the law? It's Jesus Christ. And so I want to make an argument.

We need to keep the old words like sin, redemption, justification, and atonement. Paul uses all four in the space of a few sentences because we live in a culture that would rather psychologize or criminalize sin. I don't know if you've ever heard this phrase. I have. Mistakes were made.

Notice the grammar. That word feels so foreign. Because in English, you cannot create an accident without blaming someone for it. You can do this in other languages, but you cannot do this in English. You can't say the vase fell off the shelf.

You have to blame the cat, the cat did it. You can't say the car wrecked itself. No, it was me. In English, you have to have someone that gets blamed. And that's why when we say sentences like mistakes were made, it sounds strange.

The passive voice is the native language of everyone who would like to avoid a confession. Nobody in that sentence actually did anything. We say I was in a season or that's just how I'm wired. And I need to admit that some of that is true, that there trauma is real and addiction is real, and systems that oppress are real. And some of you that are in this room have been sinned against far more than you have sinned.

And this language has been a mercy to you. And so I don't want to take it away.

But explanation is not absolution. It can tell me why I am the way that I am, but that language cannot forgive me. No one has ever been set free by being told their behavior makes perfect sense.

I think the other habit in our culture is just to criminalize. We are very good at sin when it belongs to somebody else. Man, give me a villain. And the Facebook comments from the Abilene Reporter news, and in a half hour, we have a verdict like that is easy for us right now. Sin is a crime, and the guilty are them.

And the sentence is permanent. But look what happens when that happens. There's nowhere for the guilty to go but deeper into the trees.

One voice says it's not your fault, and the other voice says it's all your fault. And either way, you are still standing in the garden with a fig leaf trying to figure out what's going on and where are you.

God still calls. It isn't a diagnosis. It isn't an indictment. It's a question from the someone who came looking. And that's why the church needs to keep these ancient words.

Sin, redemption, grace, atonement. They aren't harsh words. They call us back to the God whose posture always seeks to find the one that's lost. They name the thing for what it really is. And the only thing that has been named can be Forgiven naming sin opens the door we are most afraid to open.

And that is the door that leads to real mercy. Which brings me to a 16 year old boy in a pear tree. That same theologian I mentioned a while back, Augustine, he was 16 years old, he was living in North Africa and he was running around with a group of friends near his family's vineyard. Now on the other side of the wall of the vineyard was this pear tree and it wasn't a particularly beautiful pear tree and the pears in it didn't taste particularly good. But one night he and his boys decided to jump over the wall and shake that pear tree and take all the pears.

And they tasted them, they weren't ripe yet, they weren't very good. And so they took those pears and they threw them to the pigs, which I don't know if you've ever been around a bunch of 16 year old boys throwing a bunch of parrots at pigs. Sounds like a blast.

But they didn't, they didn't enjoy it. They stole it. And afterwards Augustine feels terrible about it. The pigs were the only ones who enjoyed the night.

Now, nearly 30 years later, Augustine is now the Bishop and he sits down to write the story of his life. It's a book called Confessions. And he spends pages on this night with the pear tree. It's not on the ambition that he faced or the appetites that he has or the years of fighting and following false teachers. He spends a lot of time talking about pairs and he keeps asking the question, why did I do?

Wasn't hunger. He had better tasting and more fruit at home. What he finds unsettling though, is that he loved the doing of it. He loved that it was forbidden. And then a second discovery that alone, he says, I would have never done took the group.

Somebody said let's go. And something in a person that would never say yes says yes. I mean, Eve at least has a reason, right? Genesis says the fruit looked good and it was a delight to the eyes. Augustine didn't have any.

And that's why he makes his story so uncomfortable, because so often we don't either.

I mean, you've probably never shaked a pear tree in your life, but I'm pretty sure you've done some pretty dumb stuff.

Maybe you've padded an expense report because everybody in the office does it. We join the pile on of some stranger on the Internet being shaken to pieces in a crowd comment section.

We sit in a meeting when somebody's reputation is quietly taken apart and we say nothing because it'll cost us if we speak up.

Nobody eats the pears. We just throw them to the pigs. And most of those things were things we would never do alone.

And here's the part I love. If you ever read Confessions, he doesn't. Augustine doesn't talk about this like a theologian. In fact, the whole book is written in the second person. It's written to God.

He's addressing God the whole time. God is addressed as you from the first page. And this professional rhetorician who could argue any side of anything is finally learning to talk to God instead of about him. I mean, the certain serpent taught us to talk about God. Augustine is taking that back.

He's. He's turning what he did out loud to the one who already knew. And what he finds in the pages of his Confessions isn't combination condemnation. It's the same voice from the garden asking the same question. And a man who finally answers.

Here, here I am, here I am. And I'm sorry.

Let's take it closer to home.

I know a man who spent years hiding the truth about the damage he had done to his family. He had been telling himself the usual stress, misunderstanding, the way he was raised. And then on one ordinary night, it was a Wednesday night in this small Arkansan church. It was that devo after the classes where everybody gathers together and somebody sings one song and the preacher gives up and gives a three minute devotional. And then an elder prays.

And this man stands up in the middle of that devotional and he said, I have sinned.

And the room didn't erupt. No one gasped or threw him out. The elder that was about to pray simply said, well, well then you're in the right place because that's what this table is for.

And my friend talked about the weight that was lifted off of his shoulders that night for years. Not because the consequences disappeared, but because a door had finally opened and grace came pouring in. Naming sin is not the end of the story. It's the beginning of the only story that ends in grace. So look again at Genesis, chapter three.

The story refuses to end in pure judgment. God still speaks. The relationship is broken, but it's not abandoned. And right before the gate closes, the text tells us that the Lord made garments for of skin for the man and for the wife and clothed them, trading their fig leaves for something that would be last, something that would be better, and something paid for those garments. The text doesn't say who, but you can't miss that first covering God provides is one that costs something.

And that God provides it himself. Or we can look again at Romans, chapter 3. The same God who could have left us under the weight of our own choosing put forward Jesus the place where justice and mercy meet. Steadfast love is not a soft word in these texts. It is the stubborn refusal of God to abandon the creatures who abandoned him.

And so here we are, under the same wide sky, still wearing the garments that God provides, still hearing the question, where are you still invited to stop hiding and come into the light? Brothers and sisters, the ancient words are still true. Sin is real, but grace is more real. And the God who walked in the garden at the cool of the day is the same God who met us at this table, offering us forgiveness not because we've earned it, but because that is who God is.

Thanks be to God. Would you please stand for our benediction?

Hyland, I want to challenge you this week to reflect the grace that God has poured on you and to someone else. Find a chance this week to be merciful to someone, whether they deserve it or not, and just see what happens.