This is a sermon that I preached on Sunday, 02/22/26, at Berkeley Friends Church. The scripture reading for this sermon was:
Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7 & Romans 5:12-19.
I was a pretty weird kid. At least, I felt like I was weird. My mom definitely thought I was weird. My mom likes to tell a story about how, before I was six years old I didn’t sleep through the night. She’s got stories about her adventures attempting to put me to sleep. One night, after an hour of trying to get me to go to sleep, she thought that I was finally unconscious. She was sneaking out of my bedroom, and right as she went to close the door, she says that I bolted straight up in bed and asked, “Why do our eyeballs need to be wet?”
I was a strange kid. In some ways I was a normal kid, too. Because, you know, I believed the stuff. When we went to church on Sunday morning and when I went to Sunday school, I took all the Bible stories I was learning pretty much face value.
And I took it seriously. You know, as a very young kid, it was age appropriate. I took it all quite literally. But I also took it seriously. I thought it mattered. I still remember being maybe seven or eight years old at an Evangelical Friends church camp, Camp Quaker Haven in Kansas. And apparently, at one of the evening chapel services, someone in the adult leadership up front had said that the devil rules the world.
Now, I think that’s just not a great thing to say to a child. And having studied the Bible and having been to seminary, I also don’t think it’s a scripturally sound or accurate statement. But I think I understand now as an adult what they were talking about. I think I know what they were trying to communicate. But it’s just a really strange, age-inappropriate thing to say to a young child.
And I think some kids might have just accepted that kind of statement and said, “Okay, I guess the devil rules the world. Moving on!” Other kids might have been traumatized by hearing something like that. They might end up having nightmares for years about, you know, if the devil rules the world, maybe he’s hiding under my bed and maybe he’s gonna eat me while I sleep.
But my reaction was neither to blindly accept it or to be traumatized by it. My reaction was curiosity. I can remember vividly walking back to my bunk after that service and seeking out my camp counselor. I asked him, “So, Michael: if the devil rules the world, do you think that just applies to the earth, or do you think the devil is also in charge of the moon?”
So maybe that’s a little weird, but I was curious. I took this stuff very seriously. I thought it mattered.
I’ve been through a long, winding road in my faith journey. As a kid I was raised as a Christian. Then as a teenager and a young adult, I stopped being a Christian for a while. I believed a lot of different things. Eventually I came back to Christianity with fresh eyes, and as the result of my curiosity and exploration, I believe the stuff in a more adult way. I believe that Jesus really is who he says he is, and everything that he is about is really important. I want to follow him.
But now that I’m an adult, things are a bit more complex. I can’t always take everything in the literal way that I did as a child. Of course, some things I do take literally. Some parts of our faith really are supposed to be taken literally, and as an adults we have to discern which parts of our faith, which parts of the Bible, which parts of the Quaker way, are more metaphorical, and which ones need to be taken quite literally. And the deeper I go in this journey, the more I find that the metaphors support the facts, and vice versa.
In our scripture readings this morning, both from the book of Genesis and from Paul’s letter to the Romans, we are firmly in the realm of stories that are very important and also not necessarily literal. They help us understand reality through imaginative stories and striking imagery.
In our reading from Genesis, we hear the story of what is now called the Fall. This was the moment at which human beings decided to defy God and go their own way and do their own thing. We messed around. We messed around and we found out. And we human beings have been dealing with the consequences of that decision ever since.
Whether or not you take this story literally as history or whether you take it as being a parable, in either case, this story is one of the primary places we go to to understand our human condition – what on earth it is that is happening to us right now. This is important stuff.
As I got older, as I became a teenager and a young adult, I drifted away from the Christian story. I wasn’t convinced. I was an adolescent. I was rebellious. I felt that I needed to go my own way for a while. I wanted to figure it out for myself. Kind of like Adam and Eve did.
But I still took it all so seriously. Maybe you did too. I mean, can you remember what it was like to be a really young person? Can you remember when you were 18 or 19 years old? Maybe starting your first job, or maybe you’ve gone off to college and you’re beginning to make your way in the world? You’re learning what it might mean to be an adult and to be responsible for yourself. Do you remember the intensity of feeling, how every moment, every joy, every challenge felt like it had an exclamation point?
That’s how it felt to me. I felt like everything was absolutely urgent. The world was on fire and I had to figure out what was going on. I could sense that there was something deeply wrong with this world. And as time went on, I became increasingly convinced that there was also something wrong with me.
I had such big dreams and yet I kept running up against the limitations and the brokenness of the world I lived in. I was beginning to see the limitations and the brokenness of my own self, my own inability to get out of my own way and to do what was right.
It was this haunting sense of my own limitations and the brokenness of the world, coupled with dramatic experiences of God’s power and love in my life, that drew me back to the Christian story, back to the Quaker church, back to the Bible and to Jesus.
It’s that journey of urgency and disappointment; it’s that commitment to taking all this stuff seriously at an existential level that led me back to our faith as an adult. I’ve become someone who is taking it seriously, even though I no longer take everything literally like I did as a child.
The story of the Fall, the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden with the snake that asked Eve such tricksy questions and that tempted them to defy God and eat the fruit that God told them not to eat. The tree that gave them the knowledge of good and evil that God didn’t want them to have. The act of disobedience that led God to cast Adam and Eve out of the garden into a world of thorns and toil and painful childbirth. This is a story I’m taking seriously. I’m convinced that this story is essential to understanding what it is that is really happening to us in our world today.
The Apostle Paul was convinced of this too. He looked to the person of Adam as the type of humanity that we are when we stray from God and decide to go our own way and play by our own rules and live by our own wisdom rather than trusting God. Rather than following the plan that he has for our lives.
Paul contrasts the type of Adam with the type that we find in Jesus. He says that through Adam, “death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned.” But in Jesus we find the great reversal. We find the new man who speaks a better word than the old man, Adam.
Where Adam and Eve brought death into the world through their refusal to stay away from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, Jesus brings life back into the world through his willingness to submit himself to the will of his father, to suffer and die for us on the tree of the cross.
It is an amazing image, isn’t it? It’s one grounded in history and amplified by metaphor. Jesus really did die on that cross 2,000 years ago, and he really did pay the price for our sin and nullify it. He defeated sin, death, and the devil. He ended the reign of the Serpent. He undid the rebellion of Adam and brought life back into the world.
My imagination takes hold. I see death spreading to all from this primeval rebellion of Adam and Eve. And in the same way, I imagine life spreading to all through this act of humility and submission that Christ accomplished for us on his own tree.
I imagine that life spreading out from Jesus like a shockwave. It’s filling us with the Holy Spirit, with real life, with his way. I imagine that life passing out from each one of us and into all the people who are in our lives. It’s spreading.
Just as death spread from Adam, life is spreading from Jesus into to us, and into everyone around us. The world is being restored through our lives. We are the vessels of God’s grace, the vessels of his Holy Spirit. We are the recipients and the agents of this new life that comes through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
And I’ve got to take that seriously. I’ve got to be like that eight-year-old Micah at Camp Quaker Haven, asking my camp counselor all sorts of silly questions, because I want to understand better.
I’ve got to take it seriously. Because if this is true, if Jesus really has spread life back into a dying world. If Jesus really has turned around the situation that Adam and Eve put us in and now has set us on course for life and for a new garden. If it’s true that we are an essential part of this plan and that life is spreading through us. That’s an earth-shaking message. I’ve got to take it very seriously.
The world needs this life. The world is literally dying for this life. So am I. I need this life to keep spreading in me. You need this life to keep spreading in you. Our children need this life to keep spreading through us, out into our whole society. We are, and we must be, the light of the world. Our lives must shine before others so that they see our good works and glorify our father who is in heaven.
This isn’t easy. This isn’t something we can do in our own wisdom or strength or power. But we’re called to it. We’re invited. Jesus is giving us power, as we open ourselves to his Holy Spirit.
That’s why we’re here this morning, in this place. That’s why we have been gathered by Jesus in this community. We are here to find and be found. We are here to be filled with the Holy Spirit, filled with the life that spreads out of Jesus, nullifying the death that comes from Adam. We are here to be transformed and to become blessings so that we can heal the world through God’s power and love in our lives.
We find the truth in this beautiful mix of historical facts and poetic stories. It helps me to live in the metaphors – of life, and power, and Spirit, and redemption – to understand what God is asking of me. It helps to ground me in the concrete, everyday actions that make these metaphors complete. When we invite people to stay with us when they have nowhere else to go. Feeding people when they’re hungry. Caring for people when they’re lonely. When we’re living together and eating meals together and sharing our lives. When we act like a family.
This church is meant to be a family. Not an institution, not a club, not a charity. A family.
We are the family of God. That’s why we’re here. Jesus has given us the free gift of life through his resurrection. In the same way, our lives are a gift to those around us. We are a community of that gift – the gift of love, of mutual support, of shared life together.
The gift doesn’t wait for us to be ready. It doesn’t require us to have it all figured out. It doesn’t wait for our schedules to be clear. It just asks to be received, and lived, and shared.