Summary 

The main contention of our series in the beginning of Genesis is that these "origin" stories (Genesis means "origin") have ongoing effects and relevance in our lives. We were made to be seen by God and by other people, seen clearly and looked upon lovingly and intimately. Of all things, before sin entered the world, God says that something is not good, and that something was human isolation. Out of that, God made the woman to be an accompaniment and they were naked and unashamed. They saw each other perfectly and were perfectly seen by God. But when they sinned, they hid. They covered themselves up and hid from one another and from God. These facts of being made to be seen and sin creating distance are ongoing in our lives today to our detriment and the detriment of our world. What we need is to recover a sense of how significant and awful sin is and the awe and praise that comes from knowing the grace and care that God has for us as he calls us out of our hiding ("where are you") and covers our shame. 

Transcript

I want to say at the beginning here that I am going to preach Genesis 3 again next week and next week we are going to look at the allure of sin and also at the effects of sin in these curses here, but today I want us to consider a significant movement that happens because of sin. And that is the movement from being seen and known to hiding to being seen again. 

I want to beging with a little story and then I want to do a quick exercise with you all.

In 2006 a high school English teacher, Ms Lockwood, gave this assignment to her: they were to write a famous author and ask for their advice. Only one author responded to the students letters, it was Kurt Vonnegut. This was his response: 

“Dear Xavier High School, and Ms. Lockwood, and Messrs  Perin, McFeely, Batten, Maurer and Congiusta:

I thank you for your friendly letters. You sure know how to cheer up a really old geezer (84) in his sunset years. I don’t make public appearances any more because I know resemble nothing so much as an iguana. 

What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money or fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside your, to make your soul grow. Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives. Draw a funny or nice picture of Ms. Lockwood, and give it to her. Dance home after school, and sing in the shower and on and on. Make a face in your mashed potatoes. Pretend you are Count Dracula. 

Here’s an assignment for you tonight, and I hope Ms. Lockwood will flunk you if you don’t do it: write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possibly can. But don’t tell anybody what you are doing. Don’t show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood. Ok? 

Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash receptacles . You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what's inside you, and you have made your soul grow.

God bless you all! Kurt Vonnegut

Ok, now I have an exercise for you. And if you don’t want to do this, that’s ok, but maybe you should try. I want you to look into the eyes of the person sitting next to you for the next 20 seconds. I’ll tell you when to start.

Ok. Thank you for participating.

I share the Vonnegut story with you not just because it is great advice, but because it is part of what we are told to do from the beginning. We are told to go out, to act in and on the world. We are to create and to leave our mark. I said last week when we were looking at the idea of being created in God’s image that part of what we know about God is that he is creative and communicative. And so when humankind, male and female, are made in his image, he says “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it”, part of what he is saying is be creative and leave your mark. 

It’s probably helpful for you to know that kings in the ancient near east would have statues of themselves made and placed around their land (think of the great statues described in the book of Daniel). It was a way of marking out where their rule extended to. And God is telling them, you are my statues and you are to go out into the world as my image bearers to be known and seen and so that I can be known and seen. Go out. Create. Subdue. Leave your mark. Image me. Be seen.

But I would think that the exercise I gave you was harder than it ought to be. Some of you probably didn’t do it. Maybe that was because you don’t know the other person and you don’t know if they are safe. Maybe it is because the other person is your spouse and Friday night you had an awful argument that there has been no healing from and so to look in their eyes that long would imply a connection and an intimacy that is not presently there. Maybe you simply don’t want to be seen, maybe by anyone. Sure, they can see you somewhat, but eyes are too intimate and you have spent most of your life hiding, maybe because you were hurt, maybe because hurt someone else so badly and you never wanted to do that again, maybe because you were never looked on in love and trained to look on others. There are a lot of reasons. 

But you were made to go out. You were made to create. You were made to leave a mark. You were made to be seen. 

Look. Look down at your Bible with me. If you don’t have one with you, maybe look it up on your phone or grab one of those Bibles in front of you. Turn to page 2. While you are doing that, let me say that if you don’t have a Bible or you know someone who would like one, please take one of these with you and keep it and read it or give it away. Alright, look at the very last verse of Genesis 2. Verse 25: 

And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.
And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.

The original creation before sin comes into the world is a creation of being known and being seen in your nakedness. 

You were made to be seen. 

And while I do think that this text is speaking to the idea of physical nakedness what you need to first hear is that you were made to be seen completely. Unfiltered. Unvarnished. Barrel proof you.

You were made to be seen.

You know, it’s kind of wild that before that phase about being naked and unashamed and before there was any sin in the world, God actually says that something is not good!! What? I mean, I mean, it’s almost jarring to hear that. Really. Think of it. all throughout chapter 1 what we hear again and again and again is “good”, “good”, “good”, “good”. Then you get to verse 18 of chapter 2 and it says this: Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone”. In the middle of this creation narrative and before any sin is present in God’s good creation something is said to be not good and that is isolation and loneliness and a world where you are not seen! 

You were made to be seen. 

Curt Thompson, the Christian psychiatrist and author says this, “We all are born into the world looking for someone looking for us, and that we remain in this mode of searching for the rest of our lives.”

And there have now been many studies done that have shown the benefits of a care-giver, whether that be a biological mother or another, who gives skin-to-skin contact with a baby and eye-to-eye interaction can have massive long-term effects on that child’s ability to regulate emotions and to engage in the world outside themselves. In fact, one study from Yale regarding what they called “synchrony” showed that the not only do child and mother hearts beat together in such seen and felt intimate interactions, and not only do their oxytocin levels rise (the happy hormones) but also their brain alpha waves track together. We could go into this more, but suffice it to say that we were made to be seen. 

God says it’s not good to be alone and what you when humankind was not alone before the entrance of sin into the world, we were in a state of being entirely seen and with no shame. Taken and unashamed. 

You were made to be seen. 

But the exercise was probably pretty hard, like I said. 

And we do not offer to one another our unfiltered selves. We don’t. We put all the varnish on. We put all of the makeup on. 

This can look really funny. You know, one of the very funny things that happens when you travel is you try to fit in. Some of you know that I was able to spend a little time in Scotland this summer and I can tell you that it was very tempting a few times to just break out with my Scottish brogue. “Aye, that sausage roll was delicious”! Why would I do that? Lot’s of reason, but probably to not just be seen as some outsider. Cover up.

But it can actually of course be a lot more serious. 

We were made to be seen, but sin creates distance and we want to hide. 

So, what happens here in Genesis 3 is that the man and his wife eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and both Satan and God say that they have become like God knowing good and evil. Now, we don’t know exactly what is meant by that. There are lots of theories, as you might guess. What we are told is that it is forbidden and, like I said last week, the fact that it is forbidden in this great world that is so overflowing with goodness and fecundity would indicate that it is a statement of dependence on God. I think the best understanding of what the knowledge of good and evil is is to say that one could attain the knowledge of good in withstanding the temptation or one could attain to the knowledge of evil having given into temptation. But the temptation is self-sufficiency self-determination and God knows both, he knows the effects of both and now Adam and Eve have a knowledge of how evil evil can be. 

Well, either way, what is the effect of sin? 

God will tell them other effects of sin that we will look at next week, but the immediate effect of sin here is hiding. 

If you were made to be seen, what seen does is make you want to cover up and not be know and not be seen. Sin creates distance. It always does. It creates distance between you and other and it creates distance between you and God. 

Right? That’s what we see here. 

⁷ Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths. 

There is a part of me that I don’t want you to see. 

Whether you think this story is a true telling of how sin entered the world, which the Bible does say that it is, but whether you think that is true, what I think you can see is that this is getting at something we all know to be true. 

Sin makes us want to hide. We don’t want to be seen. If a friend of your’s took something from you, if, say, you had a package on your front porch that had been delivered and your ring video doorbell caught a friend sneaking on to your porch and taking a package, you would not want to go down to Mad Moose and grab a beer with them until you talked with them about how they took your package and they apologized. Or, think about it, it is nearly impossible for a marriage to have true intimacy when one spouse has been harsh and unkind to another. You have to repair the rupture before you can have intimacy. 

Sin creates distance. Sin makes us want to hide. And as much as we want to be seen by others, sin also creates a world where we are not seen for who we are and what we bring into the world. 

A friend of mine from seminary who is a pastor now over in Western PA said that while he has experienced a good amount of truly traumatic and sorrowful times in his life, one of the most difficult times in his life was between college and seminary. He had applied to a number of jobs and didn’t get any of them and his relationships were tenuous at best. He called them his aimless years. Year’s that he felt unseen. 

We were made to be in a world where we are seen and loved. Not seen and shamed. Not seen and rejected. Seen and loved. 

And sin creates distance. It creates hiding. It creates in us the desire and the actions that accompany that desire to to make things that don’t allow others to really see us. We get so busy with work that we don’t sit around a table with our children or join a small group at church. We entertain ourselves to death with football after football game or whatever it is for you so that you don’t have to sit across from someone and really share your heart. 

Sin creates distance and it creates in us the desire and the actions of hiding. 

But it is in this place of hiding, it is in this sinful state, that God comes to us and searches for us. 

We were made to be seen and sin causes us to hide and not be seen, but God comes to us in our hiding and covers us in our shame.

We see this in two ways:

We see God call them out with a question.

We see God cover their shame with a sacrifice. 

Look. Verse 8.

⁸ And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.

I mean, how crazy is this. You have the man and his wife and you have God who made all things. And they think, “this bush will hide us!” It’s comical, but also deeply sad because we do the same things. 

But let’s continue: 

⁹ But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you?”

I think this is one of the wildest and most beautiful verses. 

What would have said if you were God? “How dare you hide from me?”  “You’re hiding! I know why you are hiding!”  “Do you know what this is going to cost me?”But God invites them out of their hiding with a question. “Where are you?” Which is him saying, “I still want to be with you.”

And that is one of the most powerful statements ever. Some of you have known a human love like this. You have hurt someone so intensely and they have said, “I still want to be with you.” That is a type of divine love.

But the other thing we see from God here is that he covers their shame with sacrifice. 

Look down at verse 21: ²¹ And the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins and clothed them.

The Bible never diminishes sin. It doesn’t make lightly of it. And some of you really need to hear that because we have all been sinned against and we all know that that sin created distance and sometimes other people didn’t take that sin seriously, they brushed it off. God never does. We might try to just cover ourselves up with some flimsy leaf, but God says that sin is so serious that something he loves and declares good, a part of his good creation, has to die because sin is so serious. 

And the only way that relationships can be healed when there is great distance is that the sin or the offense that created the distance has to be given the proper weight that it deserves. 

Think about this. Why did Jesus die? I mean, that is a good question. I remember there was a student who came to RUF when I was leading that student ministry before coming here. I asked him what he thought of our meeting and he said “You guys sing and talk about blood a lot!” And if you are new to Christianity it would make a lot of sense that you might think that is weird. 

But think about this: God desires for you to be what you were made for! He desires you to go out into the world and leave your mark and be his image and for intimacy with others and with him. And sin messes all of that up and it invites us to hide and to not go out and to not be seen. And the only way thing will be right is if sin is actually given the weight that it deserves. 

God kills one of his good creatures here in Genesis 3 to show the love he has for Adam and Eve even after they sinned. But God himself in Christ will die because sin has created such a great distance between us and God and he longs for you to be close to him and to come out of your hiding. 

Here is good news. This is gospel. While we are still far off, he runs to us like the loving father of the prodigal son. He comes to us, like the sheep that had wanted away from the flock. While we were still sinners he dies for us to make us sons and daughters. 

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