Sermon: Original Sin or Original Blessing?
From Wellington Cathedral of St Paul
30 May 2010, am
Bishop Richard Randerson
- Genesis 1:1-6, 26-31
- Romans 5:1-5
- John 16:12-15
A parishioner was once sent to meet a visiting preacher at the station. Not knowing what the visitor looked like, he approached a stranger to ask if he was their visiting preacher. “Oh no,” said the man, “it’s my ulcer that makes me look like this”.
The story reflects a rather common caricature of religion that it is a recipe for a life of soberness and gloom, bent on escaping the ravages of sin and evil, and with a sense that life is too serious to enjoy. Always a headmaster-type God is looking over our shoulder ready to bawl us out for having done something wrong. It’s a style of religion that can leave people with
• a sense of worthlessness
• preoccupation with being cleansed from sin
• a somewhat passive goal of not doing anything wrong
• a feeling of self-satisfaction and pride if you get to be particularly good at being good.
Under this sin-obsessed regime we constantly operate in the red. Confessing our sins may bring us briefly back to zero before we sink into the red once more. Some report leaving the Church because they feel it is psychologically unhealthy for them to remain. Much of the wording of the old Book of Common Prayer undergirds such an approach. We are “miserable offenders”; “there is no health in us”; and even after receiving communion we are still in the following prayer reminding ourselves that we are “unworthy through our manifold sins...”
In 1983 an American priest and theologian, Matthew Fox, published a life-changing book called Original Blessing. Fox says our theology has for too long focused on original sin, drawing heavily on the sin of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden as set out in Genesis 2 & 3. Matthew Fox asks why we ignore Genesis 1 with its magnificent account of the creation of planet Earth, the land and sea, sun, moon and stars, the trees, wildlife and humanity itself.
This is God’s gift to us, a call to celebrate, live passionately, and enjoy our life in relationship with God and all Creation. The NZ Prayer Book catches this spirit with words like “So now we offer our thanks for the beauty of these islands, the wild places and the bush, the mountains, the coast and the sea; our thanks for marae and the cities we have built, for our life together”.
Fox writes that “if we savoured life more we would communicate more deeply, relate more fully, compete less regularly, celebrate more authentically”. His theology of God is not one of theism, which tends to see God as a separate, even remote, figure, but panentheism – God in all things. This is different from pantheism which equates God with Creation. Panentheism affirms the special identity and mystery of God, but a God who is fully engaged in all the activities of humankind and the Creation.
But seeing life as a blessing and gift to celebrate does not deny the reality of sin. Sin, says Fox, occurs when “the flow of creative energy is dammed up by greed, corruption, boredom, injustice”. This happens when our relationships with God, people and Creation become broken. Instead of being in tune with the creative word of God, we become isolated.
Rather than seeing Creation as family, we begin to live life in a subject/object manner. Instead of being linked to others we seek to control them, or exploit them to our own advantage. We do the same to the earth, so that the gift of God is damaged through environmental degradation and abuse. Fox describes this as living egologically instead of ecologically.
Repentance involves confessing our personal wrong-doings but must also seek to restore broken relationships. “Salvation is about healing, and just as the cosmos itself can be ruptured and torn apart by injustice, so too it can be healed by all human efforts to restore justice. Harmonious living and lifestyles of simplicity represent salvific action on humanity’s part”.
Fox writes: “Creation-centred spirituality is not naively optimistic; it is too much in touch with the pain and tragedy of existence for that. But it is hopeful, and cosmically passionate about the blessing that life is”. And, “if we were more passionate about the blessing of life, then we would be more in touch with moral outrage because our love of life would increase so dramatically that we would become less and less tolerant of death forces.”
Today is Trinity Sunday, the day when we recall that God is three but God is one. This can often seem a very philosophical and lifeless formula, but in contemporary theology the Trinity has become a symbol of diversity in unity: God is expressed in three activities (“Persons”) of creating, redeeming, and giving life. While each “Person” is different, yet they live in dynamic interaction with each other. A Greek word perichoresis expresses it: peri (around) choresis (a dance). The three Persons dance together, hence the modern hymn “I am the Lord of the Dance”.
This divine and trinitarian community becomes the symbol of all of human existence. Each of us is called to be part of the dance, with God, with each other and with the Earth itself. The Body of Christ, the Church, is an interactive community, working together to cross the divides of cultural, racial and credal difference to build peace and well-being for all. We see all people as members of God’s family, and reach out to them with love and compassion.
The relationship with the Earth is expressed movingly in the words of Anglican priest, the late Maori Marsden, who writes of Papatuanuku, the primordial Mother: “Papatuanuku is our mother and deserves our love and respect. She is a living organism with her own biological systems and functions creating and supplying a web of support systems for all her children whether man, animal, bird, tree, grass, microbes or insects”.
Original blessing, then, calls us to a life of passionate celebration of God’s gift to us in Creation, and to see our salvation as having a cosmic dimension, one that takes place in consort with all of Creation as God’s healing power in Jesus overcomes broken relationships, and restores hope and life, justice and peace and ecological sustainability.
