Hide & Seek
In the Beginning - Part 3
Sunday, September 5, 2021
Genesis 3:1-13
They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.
Genesis 3:8
Listen to this week’s sermon here:
We know we’ve messed up. We know we’re not perfect. But maybe somehow if we can just sew enough fig leaves together to look as good as everybody else, we can go on about our lives without anybody noticing that we are naked. Maybe we can even stamp a designer label on them and all of those people who got their fig leaves second hand at Goodwill might actually be impressed when they see us.
But God is another story. God knows us too well. He knows we forged the label to make ourselves feel better. He can see how bad our sewing is and how hard we are working to keep our leaves from falling off. We cannot hide our fear and anxiety and insecurity and self-doubt. God sees right through the masks we fashion for the rest of the world. We have worn those masks for so long that when we look in the mirror, we may even believe that this is how we really look. But God has seen us without the makeup, without the mask, without the leaves. God knows who we really are even if we have forgotten.
And that is why we must tell our story. That is why we must remember. Because we were not always this way. We didn’t always feel the need to hide from others, from ourselves, and even from God. Once we were naked and unashamed. Once we were vulnerable and yet we had no fear. Once we could be ourselves, just as God created us, and that was enough.
But now we never seem to have enough. We never seem to be enough. We are always discontent. Deep down we are always ashamed of some piece of ourselves we wish we could change, some part we are always trying to keep covered with fig leaves no matter how futile our effort may be.
Do we dare to dream that Eden could once again be our reality? Do we believe that we could truly be naked before God, before one another, and even before ourselves and feel no shame? Do we even want to believe it, or is the idea of such a paradise so foreign that we are terrified of even the possibility that we might be that vulnerable?
God is still walking through our world, asking the sons of Adam and the daughters of Eve the same question…
“Where are you? Who told you that you were naked?”
How will you answer?