Sermon 06-17-2018 • What Have You Done?
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Genesis 3:13 • Doug Dortch
“What Have You Done?”
Series: “Questions God Asks”
Some years ago, around the time I was born, the movie “Bridge on the River Kwai” garnered the Academy Award for Best Picture. I remember seeing it on television late one night during my college years. Those of you who have seen it remember it as a riveting depiction of a group of British prisoners of war who have been ordered by their Japanese captors to construct a railroad bridge for the Japanese cause. The senior British officer thought that working on the bridge would be good for his men’s sagging morale; it would give them a sense of purpose. So, they built the bridge. They built it well. They built it so well that when the Allied forces began closing in on that part of enemy territory, they had to organize a special expedition to blow the bridge up. But when the senior officer sees what is happening to his bridge, he is outraged. His first thought is, “How dare they do such a thing?” But then, when he realizes the surge of angry emotion that has just come over him when the enemy’s bridge his men and he have built has been blown up, there is this moment when the officer buries his face in his hands and cries out to the heavens, “What have I done?” “What have I done?” The officer realizes that he had become so busy in succeeding in his enterprise that he had totally lost all sense of the bridge’s larger meaning and its value to the enemy. “What have I done?” “What have I done?”
I think the reason that movie has continued to receive acclaim even today is because of how so many of us relate to the storyline’s struggle where good people wrestle with their wrong actions, in large measure by initially projecting the blame on someone or something outside of ourselves. “Look at my life. Look at my situation. Look at the people around me. What else could I have done?” And we continue to be mired in our rationalizations and self-justifications, all of which are designed to protect our fragile egos, until something happens or someone comes along to snap us out of our false narratives and force us to face the blunt truth that so much of what is rotten in our lives is something for which we are responsible.
In a nutshell, that is the storyline of this part of the Genesis story, where God has called Adam and Eve out from their hiding place so that they might own up to their rebellion, which had sent them into the bushes in the first place. These questions that God poses to the first couple – they are not for God to get caught up to speed on what has gone wrong with His human creation. God knows exactly what has taken place and why it has taken place. These questions are instead intended to help Adam and Eve understand what they have brought upon themselves so that they might be open to the remedy that only God could make possible.
There is an interesting sidebar to this story that points to the tendency each of us has with acknowledging our complicity in all that has gone wrong in our lives. It is the element of blame. Look at how difficult it is for Adam and Eve to be open to their responsibility for their rebellion against God. God has placed them in the Garden of Eden and has provided all that they need for them to flourish. There’s only one thing that God asks them not to do. Don’t eat from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the tree that would deprive them of their dependence upon God. On the day that you eat of it, you will surely die (Gen. 2:17). So, what do Adam and Eve do? They eat from that very tree, and they die to their innocence and dependence. But what’s most interesting is their response to their new situation. First, Adam says, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me from the tree, and I ate.” In other words, in Adam’s way of thinking, it’s ultimately God’s fault that things went sideways. And then, when God poses this third question, “What have you done?” Eve replies, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”
This question that is before us this morning – “What have you done?” – has a certain forcefulness to it. There’s no other way to put it. Up to this point in the Genesis story, God has not been unduly harsh with the first couple. But now, things have become a bit testy. The question can actually be rendered, “How is it that you could have done such a thing?” And that’s when things go off the rails in the story. Adam blames Eve. Eve blames the serpent. And the serpent ends up not having a leg to stand on.
The story makes me wonder, “What might have happened if Adam and Eve had simply confessed to their wrongdoing?” How might their story have then been different? Might it have been possible for Adam and Eve to have escaped banishment from the Garden if they had only confessed their sin and cast themselves upon God’s mercies? Might a real apology, without the lame attempts to shift the blame for their sin, have changed the course of history, not only for Adam and Eve, but also for you and me? I think it could have. And, more importantly, for you and me I think that it still can.
What this story is telling us is that confession is the first step on the road to redemption. Nothing will change until we own up to our responsibility for the vast majority of what’s wrong with our lives. Granted, not everything is our fault; there are some bad things that happen to good people. But the bulk of our struggles in life are self-created ones. We have no one to blame but ourselves.
I don’t say that to make you feel guiltier. That’s not even what this story intends to convey. God’s question – “What have you done?” – isn’t a question to determine the facts of a given situation, especially the fact of our sin. God knows our sin; He is fully aware of it. His question, “What have you done?” is, therefore, one that enables us to come to a place where we no longer live in denial to our sin so that it still controls us. His question permits space to be formed in our souls where grace may abound and mercy may silence the shaming voices within.
What about you this morning? Are you willing to own up to the wrongdoing in your life and the rift your wrongdoing has brought about in your relationship with God? Or do you prefer to look for some cause or circumstance outside of yourself to project that responsibility?
Hear the good news of the Gospel: Contrary to popular belief, God does not expect perfection from you, because God knows that perfection is something only one person has ever attained, that person being in Jesus, who lived a sinless life so that he could offer a perfect sacrifice for sin. No, God expects and demands honesty from each and every one of us so that, as the first letter of John tells us, “when we confess our sins to God, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9).
The part of West Alabama where I grew up is timber country. The only thing more numerous than paper mills where I grew up are Baptist churches. As a boy, I was well-acquainted with what we locals referred to as “the smell of money.” The log ponds, the fermenting pine pulp, and the chemical baths all combined to create these noxious odors, which the winds managed to blow over into surrounding communities. When my wife Judy and I first married, when we would go over to visit my parents, Judy, who didn’t grow up in timber territory, would just look at me and ask, “How could you have stood this?” And my standard reply was, “You just get used to it.” “You just get used to it.”
But if you drive over to West Alabama today, the air is much better because of how not too long ago those paper companies installed scrubbers into the mill stacks so that the air is cleaned from the inside before it escapes out into the open skies. Scrubbers work because they don’t try to cover up the bad smells, like some industrial strength perfume. Scrubbers neutralize the odor by eliminating the molecules that create the offending smell.
You don’t have to get used to the stench of your own soul anymore. Neither do you have to find an outlet to cast blame for it. You can own what you have done, and in owning it, you can experience the fresh air of God’s spirit sweeping through your soul and know a grace that eliminates that stain of your sin and in the process makes all things new.