GRACE: THE WIND BENEATH YOUR WINGS
Romans 5:12-19 (The Message)
12/ You know the story of how Adam landed us in the dilemma we’re in -- first sin, then death, and no one exempt from either sin or death. 13/ That sin disturbed relations with God in everything and everyone, but the extent of the disturbance was not clear until God spelled it out in detail to Moses. 14/ So death, this huge abyss separating us from God, dominated the landscape from Adam to Moses. Even those who didn’t sin precisely as Adam did by disobeying a specific command of God still had to experience this termination of life, this separation from God. But Adam, who got us into this, also points ahead to the One who will get us out of it.
15/ Yet the rescuing gift is not exactly parallel to the death-dealing sin. If one man’s sin put crowds of people at the dead-end abyss of separation from God, just think what God’s gift poured through one man, Jesus Christ, will do! 16/ There’s no comparison between that death-dealing sin and this generous, life-giving gift. The verdict on that one sin was the death sentence; the verdict on the many sins that followed was this wonderful life sentence. 17/ If death got the upper hand through one man’s wrongdoing, can you imagine the breathtaking recovery life makes, sovereign life, in those who grasp with both hands this wildly extravagant life-gift, this grand setting-everything-right, that the one man Jesus Christ provides?
18/ Here it is in a nutshell: Just as one person did it wrong and got us all in this trouble with sin and death, another person did it right and got us out of it. But more than just getting us out of trouble, he got us into life! 19/ One man said no to God and put many people in the wrong; one man said yes to God and put many people in the right.
I don’t think any of us set out to be sinners. Do you? I guess I’m willing to say that, when we sin, it is a misguided effort to meet some need or other -- at least, to meet a need as we see it.
I look at the Bible’s account of the original sin, in which Eve yields to temptation and eats the forbidden fruit. What was going on there? Why did she do it? She had no reason to do anything that might hurt God. I think what she did she did to keep herself from getting hurt.
If you listen to the dialog between Eve and the serpent -- remember him? -- you’ll notice that Eve is presented with a desirable offer. Eating the fruit means expanded powers of awareness. Specifically, the serpent says, “Your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:5, NRSV). It was true, in a way, wasn’t it? Eve and then Adam would know “good and evil,” and they would know it in a whole new way! Sadly, they would be entangled in evil and homesick for innocence, longing for the good that had been lost. But Eve could not have known this yet -- not at this point.
What she did know was that God had told her -- and he had told Adam, for that matter -- not to eat of the fruit of this particular tree, because, if they did, they would die. Now, here’s where the serpent lied to Eve. “You will not die,” he said. And then he inserted the tiniest seed of doubt into Eve’s mind: “For God knows that when you eat..., your eyes will be opened.” In other words, Eve, God has lied to you. He knows something you don’t know, and he is withholding from you something you need, something you deserve, something it is your right to have.
Now you can see how Eve might have felt threatened. I suppose it had never occurred to her that God could have been lying to her, holding out on her. But now the thought was there. She could not trust him. That’s the key element in all human sin -- the failure to trust God to meet our needs. Paul says at one point in Romans, “Whatever does not proceed from faith is sin” (Rom. 14:23). In other words, when we fail to trust God, we’re setting ourselves up for sinful means to meet our needs. That’s what happened to Eve. She now felt that she could not trust God, since, she reasoned, if she could not trust him on this one point, she could not trust him at all.
So, her faith wavering, she ate the fruit, and Adam did, too. And when they did, fear was born -- fear of God, fear of judgment, fear of life, fear of death, fear of one another. That’s what was behind the whole “fig leaf” thing -- literally! -- fear of being vulnerable to each other, fear that no one can be trusted and that, therefore, we must hide from one another. And so, one more fear was born -- the fear in each of us that we cannot depend upon God or anyone else to meet our needs. We will have to meet them ourselves. Romans 5:13 says that “sin disturbed relations with God in everything and everyone,” and it is clear that it disturbed our relations with each other as well. We are now entangled in fear, feeling threatened, and not sure whom we can trust. And that’s the mood we’re in when we go trying to get our needs met. No wonder we wind up hurting ourselves and each other. As Paul says in verse 18, we are “in...trouble.”
Angeles Arrien, a cultural anthropologist, describes our situation this way. She says our condition is one of universal addiction. She has written that we are all afflicted with addictions, not necessarily to drugs or alcohol or other substances -- those are merely symptoms -- but we’re addicted to dysfunctional patterns of relating to each other.
She names four of these universal addictions, but let me give you just one as an example, what she calls the addiction to intensity. Here’s what she says. She says: “If things aren’t really intense, I won’t feel alive. So I’ll stir up the pot a bit more. I’ll drink more, take drugs, overdo. I’ll dramatize things. Exaggerating and indulging,” she says, “are also addictions to intensity.”
What she’s describing is what the Scriptures call our sinful condition. Needing to be noticed and to feel important, we exaggerate. Fearing we won’t have enough, we indulge ourselves. Frightened of boredom, as Dr. Arrien says, we “stir the pot.” Lest we be left out, we stage our dramas, and, if that’s not enough, we implicate others in our little plots. We intensify life, and we do it because we’re afraid. We’re afraid that, if we don’t, we won’t have what we need.
Of course, these patterns are repeatedly self-defeating, but that doesn’t seem to matter. We resort to them all the same. It’s part of the sickness. It is like an addiction. We crave more and more of what satisfies less and less. And we’re stuck.
Paul describes this situation as “death-dealing sin.” He calls it “the dead-end abyss of separation from God.” The way they put in medieval times was to describe humanity -- listen to this: humanity was portrayed as a wingless bird, stuck in its alluring conditions, too heavy to fly. Does any of this make sense to you?
The question is: Is there any escape?
The medievalists -- the ones with the picture of the bird -- said there is. Along with their wingless bird, they also portrayed a soaring, winged bird, one which flies to its grounded, stranded counterpart, grasps the disempowered bird, and lifts it to the sky and to freedom.
Isn’t that a great picture! Isn’t it a marvelous image! What does it make you think of? It makes me think of what Paul describes here in Romans as “the rescuing gift,” as “the generous, life-giving gift,” “this wildly extravagant life gift.” It is simply “grace,” and it comes to us through Jesus Christ, who, we might say, is our great, winged bird.
The way Paul puts it is this: He says that “Adam...got us into [the mess we’re in, but Adam] also points ahead to the One who will get us out of it.” In verse 18, he goes on. He says, “Here it is in a nutshell: Just as one person did it wrong and got us all in this trouble with sin and death, another person did it right and got us out of it.”
You know what some people think? Some people think it is unjust that God should declare all of us sinful because of what one human being did a long time ago. It seems unfair.
And it is! Thank God it is. Grace is never fair. It is extravagant; it is abounding. But it is never fair. It never gives us what we deserve. And aren’t you glad? I know full well that, even had Adam not sinned, I would have. Eventually and, likely, early on I would have sinned. And, if you’re honest with yourself, you must admit that you would have, too. So what was God to do? Here is what he did! He declared us all sinners because of Adam, and, even as he did it, he did it because he loved us and wanted us to be free of sin.
It was love, you see, that prompted God to let Adam represent us all. Because, by that means, he could later announce that Jesus Christ, a kind of “Second Adam,” also represents us all. And, if death came to us through one man, life comes to us through the other. That is God’s “extravagant” gift. That is grace. And we receive it through Jesus Christ.
And that’s not all. As Paul says, “More than just getting us out of trouble, [Christ] got us into life!”
Remember how early on we talked about sin being a misguided effort to meet our needs. I suggested that our sin is born of fear and mistrust, especially in relation to God. What about that? Paul is telling us that God is not ignorant of our needs. Nor is he neglectful of them. He has designed us, in fact, to have them, and he has planned for their fulfillment. He wants us to trust him to provide for us, to give us life and, with it, confidence and peace, so that we need never be afraid again.
To return to our image of the birds, we might say he rescues us from our strandedness, from our ineffective ways of trying to meet our needs. He rescues us from being stuck. I want to say, “He gives us wings,” but I don’t necessarily like the association! What I will say is that he restores us to flight. He gives us freedom once more. He empowers us, and we can soar again. And his grace -- this “life-giving, extravagant gift” called grace -- well... Dare I say it? It is the wind beneath our wings.
