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The Work of Christmas, Howard Thurman
In the beginning, God created the first two humans, Adam and Eve in a beautiful garden. In the center of the garden was a forbidden tree. Don’t eat the fruit from the tree, God tells the humans, explaining the limit. You can do all these things in the garden but, stay away from that tree. If they crossed the limit it would bring harm and rupture. We know the story: They are drawn to the tree, they cross the boundary, and they eat the fruit.
Shortly after, they hear the Lord God walking in the garden and they hide. “Where are you?” God calls out? Adam pokes his head out and says, “I heard you walking in the garden and I hid.” The Lord is quick to figure things out and says—did you eat the fruit? "
Adam hedges. He deflects: “Not my fault. It was her!” He points. “Her fault. Eve gave it to me!”
God looks at Eve: "What happened?"
“Not my fault!” She says, taking a page out of Adam’s book. "It was the snake. The snake made me do it!" The snake. Nice, Eve. The conversation God had with the snake was not recorded in the bible.
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We do the same thing. We deflect. The fault might be in our circumstances, or the way we were brought up, or our genes. We blame the systems or patterns of thinking. We blame the stars. When lines are crossed, God asks “where are you?” we answer, “It wasn’t my fault.” Rabbi John Sacks explores this story from this angle (1).
God made humans in his image, and gave them the gift of freedom. But it’s a freedom with limits. In this case, the limit was the tree. Thou shalt not eat the fruit. They cross the line, they eat the fruit and they hide. Then, when the line is crossed, God asks, "where are you?" Now what?
The biblical story unfolds from here. How we are to act? What are the moral boundaries and limits? What does the “good society” look like?
As we page through the stories of scripture, we hear of people wrestling with decisions, and of God’s action and judgement. All these people wrestling with problems and questions accross scripture help clarify how we're supposed to act. The stories sharpens the playing field into focus.
A thousand years later after the story in the garden, maybe a million years after, God has a beef with the people, and stamps her holy foot, “I’ve had it!!! Get ye in here and plead your case wih the mountains as our witnesses, we have a problem! she says, “with all the wickedness.”
There are evil landowners, abusive leaders, taking advantage of poor people, people talking the talk but failing to walk the walk and God won’t have it!
There in the court room, God takes the stand, “Don’t you remember everything I’ve done for you!! she howls, ticking All The Things off on her fingers—to say nothing of the time I rescued you from slavery in Egypt!!” The people, are caught with their hands in the cookie jar. They backpedal, deflect—they don’t exactly point the finger elsewhere, but they try to buy God off, or to settle: “Ohhh, sorry about that, Lord, how about we give you a thousand rams for those mistakes? No? how about 10,000 rivers of olive oil?” (v. 7) God is not having it.
“This is on you,” She says: “you know what the Lord requires of you, you know what the boundaries are: to act justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with God. You’re playing out of bounds and it is time to take responsibility.”
Pastor Walter Brueggman, writes that this verse of Micah 6:8 is like a blueprint for right living. (2) What does it mean to live a righteous, moral life? What does the Lord require of us? To do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with God. These are the boundaries. These are the moral lines. And when the people cross them, God issues a courtroom summons. A call to accountability.
In the garden of Eden when lines are crossed, God asks a question of Eve and Adam that will echo throughout the rest of scripture: “where are you?” In Micah, the question becomes this courtroom summons. And it doesn’t stop there. It summons us over and over throughout history. And this question is asked of us now.
There are a lot of problems in the world that demand our attention. And I want to take us, for a moment, to what is happening in Minneapolis.
We are witnessing state power, our state that has crossed a moral boundary and picked the fruit in the garden. There are communities where this kind of action is nothing new—think Black communities. What we are seeing echos a long history of violence, a long history of over-policing, unjust detentions, and then authorities who deflect responsibility. It reflects a long pattern of being told that “what happened on the ground was necessary.” That those “violent actions were justified,” or authorities were “just misunderstood.” Still, looking at Minneapolis, this scale and the level of militarized enforcement is shocking—and new in its intensity and speed.
Brittany Packet Cunningham was a teacher in St. Louis and an organizer at Furgeson and she has commented on the amplified level of tracking and scope of surveillance. Some of are newly disturbed. Some are not. These two understandings don’t compete, they are intersecting. It’s the same machine that is wildly out of bounds, just from a different angle. And it’s amplified.
In our ancient scriptures, we don’t just find a library of old stories. We find familiar patterns of boundaries crossed, harm done and accountability brushed aside repeating across the generations. And—we also find that persistent question when moral boundaries are crossed, where are you?
“Where are you?” God asks, calling us into responsibility.
Minneapolis isn’t the only place where we are asking this question, but it is one place where we can’t ignore it at the moment. There are a lot of awful problems in the world that demand our attention. And then, there are a lot of reasons we deflect or step back from responsibility.
Here’s one reason that I wrestled with this last week: Things are unfolding faster than ever in our world right now. John Sacks explores the impact of speed on our lives. Around the turn of the 20th century, radio was invented. It took 38 years for radio to reach 50 million users. For computers? It took 16 years for computers to reach 50 million users. For the internet: it took 4 years for the internet to reach 50 million years. Don’t even ask me about open platform AI.
The speed with which we can now see things unfolding is breathtaking. The speed does not excuse moral failure. But the tsunami of information does make it tempting to look away or quietly hand responsibility elsewhere. The speed and volume is not a bad thing, video footage can hold people accountable on the south side of Chicago, Minneapolis, or Kiev, Ukrainian a way we could not before. But, the velocity of it all is rattling and when God calls out because boundaries are crossed, “where are you?” we stammer…we deflect. And point: it’s the system! It’s too big! It’s this economic philosophy! It’s the state! Or it’s XYZ’s fault, (who can we scapegoat? Black folks? Latino Folks? Trans folks?)
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Sacks wrote that things are moving fast but we can handle a fast pace right now, as long as we know where we’re going. As long as we’re clear about the guardrails, about the boundaries of ethical living: Justice, kindness, humility. And then love of neighbor, love of enemy. Care for poor folks. All these things that point to that distant and hoped time when all will be well. Jesus teaches about this idea calling it the Kingdom of God. All of these things point to a moral vision that’s woven into our humanity.
I spoke about Lincoln last week, it was that moral vision that enabled him to say “with malice toward none and charity toward all.” Or Nelson Mandela, it was this moral vision that helped him bring healing around the wounds of apartheid. Without the vision, the bible says, the people perish. (And, I might add, the people look to leaders that teach us to cope with uncertainty by blaming other groups—that story shows up in the bible too.)
How do we live the love of God in public right now? How do we live it between you and me, between one another?
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When God asks “where are you?” we want to answer faithfully. And the faithful answer isn’t panic, or deflecting or pointing the finger. The faithful answer is presence. And so we seep ourselves again and again in God’s word, not in the pundits or the posts or the panic but in the stories that have anchored us across the generations. And then, we also remember that we do not live this life alone. We live it in community. We live it with memory. We have folks in our midst who lived through ruptures in their own lives and in society before.
As a child, Dieter’s hometown as bombed during world war II. And somehow he is still capable of tenderness and hope. There are others in the room too who hold wisdom for us on what keeps us steady, what keeps us rooted in God’s love, and what keeps God’s compassionate vision alive? What keeps us human? Because when God asks “where are you?” our faith doesn’t answer with panic, or deflection or blame. It says here we are.
Here, rooted in the Word. Here, braided and bound together as community. Here, honoring and learning from the memory of the ancestors. And Here, as Howard Thurman reminds us Is the work that still remains:
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