Return to Eden

Brad Sullivan
7 Easter, Year A
Sunday, June 1, 2014
St. Mark’s, Bay City, TX
Acts 1:6-14
Psalm 68:1-10, 33-36
1 Peter 4:12-14, 5:6-11
John 17:1-11

On Thursday, the church celebrated the feast of the Ascension. Today, we heard the story in Acts of Jesus ascending into heaven and the angels telling the disciples, “what are y’all doing standing around looking up at Heaven. Go. Live the way of Jesus.”

Thinking about Jesus’ ascension made me think about why Jesus came here. Why did God become human? Why did he teach us and minister to us and heal us? Why did he let us kill him? Why was he resurrected, and why did he ascend into Heaven. I hear the answer in our reading from John’s Gospel this morning. “Father, protect them in your name you have given me, that they may be one as we are one.”

Jesus came to make us one with God and one with each other. Jesus came to return us to Eden.

In Eden, we lived in union with God and each other. Adam and Eve were naked and unashamed. They walked with God. They shared vulnerability and knew each other intimately without shame or fear. Then came the fall.

They decided the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil looked tasty and that they wanted knowledge more than intimacy and union with God and so they ate, and what was the first result of their disobedience? Shame.



Adam and Eve immediately hid themselves from God and each other. The results of the fall were shame, isolation, fear, which quickly led to anger, hate, desires for vengeance. Murder wasn’t long to follow, and all of this together, went out into the world.

I believe we all start in Eden…whether in our mothers’ wombs or just after birth, I don’t know, but we all start in Eden. We are born good and pure and innocent. Then as we go along, the world breaks us. It’s a broken world, and we get broken by it. We are broken people, and even when trying to do good by each other, we often end up breaking each other a bit. How can we not? We’re broken people living in a broken world.

Now Jesus said he had conquered the world. Last I checked, I’m pretty sure the world killed Jesus, and yet he conquered the world. Jesus was unbroken by the world. On the cross, his prayer, “Father forgive them,” was a prayer of love, not a prayer for vengeance or hate. Jesus lived in this world and was left unharmed by the world. That is how he conquered it.

In the prayer we heard today, Jesus said he did not pray for the world, but for his disciples. He did not pray for the broken world. I’m pretty sure Jesus could have said, “poof” and fixed everything in the world. All the brokenness could have been gone, but Jesus didn’t do that.

There is something in us that needs to strive. Something in us, maybe the image of God in which we were made, something in us needs to try and work and strive for that which is worthwhile. Jesus could have simply removed our brokenness, but he didn’t. Jesus didn’t pray for the world, he prayed for his disciples, that they would follow him and be one as he and the Father are one.

He tells us to follow in his way, and sometimes we do, and other times we think, “ah, Jesus’ way requires a lot of discipline, and I don’t want to have to stop doing things that I know I need to stop doing in order to walk in Jesus’ way, so I’ll just walk over here, near to Jesus way. I’ll keep his way in sight. I like the one with God bit, so I’ll stretch a toe over to Jesus way every now and then…”

It doesn’t work. We can’t live in ways that are harmful to ourselves and others, and expect to be one with them and God.

We follow in Jesus’ way, and Jesus’ prayer is that we will be one with God and each other. We’re gonna mess up as we follow in Jesus way. We even promise that we will sin, that we will stray from the path in our baptism. “Whenever we fall into sin, we will repent and return to the Lord.” We promise that we will mess up, and we promise that when we do and we realize it, we’ll make our course corrections and follow again in Jesus’ way. We ask Jesus to help us and heal us as we go.

When we stray from Jesus’ path, we don’t end up having shame about it. We may have guilt when we harm others, and that guilt leads us to healing the harm we’ve done. We don’t become ashamed. Shame has no place in Jesus’ way. Shame is the way of the fall. Guilt tells us we have done wrong. Shame says we are wrong, and that has no place in Jesus’ way.

As we follow Jesus in his way, Jesus prays for us. “Father, make them one and you and I are one, and I will lead them back to Eden. Amen.