Paradise, Once Lost, Now Regained - Sermon for the Ascension of Our + Lord

Eve of the Festival of the Ascension of Our + Lord
May 25^th, A+D 2022
Our Redeemer Lutheran Church
Paradise, Once Lost, Now Regained.   
Genesis 3:8-23, Acts 1:1-11, Luke 24:44-53
Custer, South Dakota

    I ruined everything.  Everything was so good, very good.  But I,... we, wrecked it. 
God had placed us in Paradise, and put us in charge of caring for it.  He made me His right-hand man in Eden, charging me to look after and take care of and enjoy every good thing.  God had given us each other; the woman and I had a beautiful life and future.  But we ruined it.  We lost our idyllic home, and were driven out to find a place to live in a world we had just made hard and dangerous.  An angel with a flaming sword blocked the way back.  But after what we had done, I’m not sure I could have endured the pain of seeing every day that used-to-be perfect garden, now scarred by us.   

   I am Adam, and so are you.  You and I are connected; we are all one man in a sense, one humanity.  We are connected, and I know you have some faint idea of what I did, what the woman and I did.  I am the first Adam, and you have some of me in you.  You share my capacity for ruin. 

    You didn’t wreck Paradise.  But you know that experience, the gut wrenching feeling that comes when something good and beautiful and whole gets broken and destroyed, and you are the cause.  It can be simple, like Mother’s favorite vase, passed down to her from her grandma, who brought it from the old country.  Irreplaceable.  But you just had to play ball in the living room, even though you knew better.  You ignored your mother’s instruction, and you broke it.  You shattered it into a hundred pieces, her favorite heirloom, ruined.  There’s no hiding it.  You feel sick to your stomach, and you hear Mom coming down the hallway.  You ruined it. And you cannot fix it.

   Shattering Mom’s favorite vase or some other precious possession is bad.  But not the worst, not by far.  None of us are perfect, but many people are beautiful, souls with whom you share a precious, wonderful relationship.  Unity and wholeness, with your husband or your wife, with a brother, a child, a friend.  And yet, we wreck things.  The relationship was good, precious, until you ruined it.  You didn’t mean to have an accident, but you did, and your child gets hurt, their body or their mind is damaged for the rest of their life, and you didn’t prevent it.  You love your husband, or your wife, and you never meant to betray, but it happened.  You lost your temper and said ugly words that cut your best friend deeply, and your friendship never quite recovers. 

   Sometimes the ruin spins out of control.  As you’ve seen in Uvalde, Texas this week.  Such wanton evil, such destruction of life.  What brokenness leads a young man to hate and destroy in this way? 

   That is a category apart.  Be thankful to God if such gut-wrenching violence has never touched your life or your loved ones.  And yet, we share this world, and none of us is innocent. 

   You’ve broken things, and relationships.  And you’ve had relationships broken by others.  Sometimes you can patch it up, but the scars and memories remain.  It is one of the sad consequences you inherited from me.  Hurting others, being hurt, ruining things.  Whatever way it goes, whether you are the sinner, or the one sinned against, or whether the ruin is mutual, you know the sickening sadness that follows when a beautiful thing is scarred.

   There is so much scarred beauty in the world that the woman and I left you.  God’s good creation was completely changed.  An environment meant to foster life is now filled with life-threatening weather and dangerous animals.  A human race made for community and love is now threatened by violence, deceit and betrayal.  Beautiful bodies made to live forever now suffer from injury and disease.  There were no death threats in Paradise, in Eden.   But I ruined that. 

    We so much wanted to go back to that horrible moment, and undo what we had done.  To regain our wonderful home and go back to faithfully following God’s instruction.  But we could not.  The way back was barred, and even if it weren’t, we had no way to fix what we had broken.  Indeed, if we had eaten from the Tree of Life while sin still ruled over us, we would have been doomed to an eternity apart from the Lord, forever with the serpent.  So God mercifully barred the way. 

    Our way forward was out into a world filled with pain and struggle and death threats.  But we did go forward, despite the difficulty, forward day by day, with God’s help.  You see, the only reason I can even bear to tell you this story is because God gave us a Way forward, a Way to eventually get back home.  Back to a better home than you can imagine.

   This is why you have gathered here tonight, to celebrate the reopening of Paradise, the final step in the restoration of God’s good creation.  I am the first man, the first Adam.  But not the last.  When the Lord drove Eve and me out of the Garden, the only reason we could go on was because of the promise of a second Adam, a New Man.  God didn’t say the words “New Adam” in the Garden.  That language came later.  But the New Adam is what He meant when He spoke of the Seed of the Woman. 

    And God didn’t even make the promise to Eve and me.  God promised the serpent, the deceiver to whom we listened.  God told the evil one about the Coming Seed; the woman and I just overheard the conversation.  We didn’t completely understand, but we heard the promise, and it gave us hope.  There would be a Seed, One born from woman, the One to bruise the serpent’s head.  In these words, we found hope. 

   In this promise of a Savior, God set me free from my anger against the woman.  Freed by the Promise to love her again.  She had given me the fruit, and I ate, and so we ruined everything.  Part of me so wanted to blame her, forever.  But now I knew from the Lord that she would bring forth a Seed, who would strike back at the Evil One.  We found hope in these words, even though they were hard to understand. New life would come from my wife.  So I named her Eve, mother of all the living. 

   Our promise-created hope survived, even through the curses which the Lord declared to us.  We could endure our expulsion from Eden and face the burdens of living in the world we had ruined only because of the promise of the Coming Seed, the New Man, the New Adam, who would come to set things right. 

   This is the Good News of the Ascension:  The Seed of the Woman, the New Adam, has finished His course.  God’s Son stepped into our course, the way of death, in order to reverse it, with His own suffering and death.  Now, risen from the dead and finished with His 40-day intensive course with the Eleven, Christ Jesus the New Adam re-opens Paradise to humanity.  Jesus ascends to God’s right hand, His rightful seat from eternity.  But now He goes there not just as God’s Son, but also as the Man, the New and Greater Adam, who bears in His body the scars of the serpent’s final bite, the bruises that destroyed Satan’s power over you and me, by the forgiveness of all our sins. 

   Rejoice, the New Adam, God’s Son and your Brother, rules over all things, and prepares a place for you.  The Tree of Life and every good thing awaits you, in the New Eden, God’s heavenly Paradise.  This Promise also carries you today.  Through joys and struggles, despite the brokenness that is still all around you, by trust in Jesus you continue on in Godly faith, hope, and love, because the New Adam has rescued you.     

Praise be to Christ, our Ascended God and Savior, Amen.