Sin

The message of Genesis is that times have always been perilous. Man’s destructive tendencies, coupled with the unbridled power of creation keep us continually hanging over the precipice of annihilation. We are inveterate apocalyptic knob-twisters. God created the building blocks of matter; we figure out how to split them and blow things up in the process. God created genetic coding; we can’t wait to fiddle with eggs and chromosomes. We have sown the biological and environmental and nuclear win...and now we’re praying we don’t reap the whirlwind.
The Bible has always been concerned about the end. This morning we look at a time when the end almost came for us before we even had a chance to really get going. As amazing and upsetting as our own capacity for self-destruction is, it seems even more unsettling that long ago, in the time of a Noah, God chose to wipe out almost all people on earth. Does that strike you as strange?...somehow out of character for God?

This evening, let us speak of the cross. Crosses that pass our inspection and are approved of for worship settings and as fashion accessories are, of course, less like the realistic, bleeding crosses of Christ's passion and much more like this cross in my hands: trimmed down to size, machine-shaped and sanded, or gilded, certainly with no sign of blood or use. This cross in my hand was probably not the image that the women who made their way to the tomb in the hour before dawn had burned into their tortured minds.