March 13, 2011
The Missing Piece to the Puzzle - Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7
Pastor: Luke Maybry
DownloadI have been amazed lately at the incredible breadth of human knowledge. I was sitting in my back yard last Friday doing two things that I do most every Friday: playing with my children and craving Mexican food. Leah and I had a tried out a new Mexican place for Valentines, actually a Tex-Mex place, in South Park. I wanted to go there again, but I had forgotten the name of it and I knew that I needed to make a reservation. Given where I was at the time, though, swinging my ten-month old and keeping an eye on his two sisters, I was in no position to go inside, find the phone book, find the number, and make a reservation. So I picked up my handy-dandy blackberry and called my wife, who naturally was not there. So this is what I did, which I think is just brilliant on my part. I got my handy-dandy blackberry and typed “Mexican food, South Park, Charlotte” in its little search engine. Sure enough, the place that I craved came up, with a phone number, which I then called and made a reservation. I did all of that without ever so much as getting up from my back yard. Five years ago, that would not have happened. It’s amazing how much we know.
But something else happened this week that reminded me of how much that we don’t know. Lainey Caldwell is the two-year-old daughter of a childhood friend of mine named Andrew. Andrew Caldwell is one of the finest people that I have ever known. He and his wife teach the same Sunday School class in my home Church that I teach in this one, the young couple’s class. Their little boy named Owen is about 4 years old now. Owen was born very prematurely and suffers from numerous side effects of that. They had another little boy, Gray, just a few months ago. Lainey started having some problems with her balance recently, and after being misdiagnosed several times, Lainey was finally correctly diagnosed with cancer on her adrenaline gland. She is having surgery tomorrow. I’m not sure either how much the cancer has spread or what her prognosis is. I hate to think what that family is going through now, and this is the second time they’ve had to face this. Or, a little closer to home, think about Jerry Corbett, who has cancer all over his body. His prognosis is not good.
Now obviously, medical science will be able to help Lainey and Jerry tremendously. But, something is still missing that knowledge or reason simply cannon address. There’s obviously a missing piece to the puzzle, and for the life of me, I just cannot understand it. The question is who has that piece, or better yet, who controls that piece? Or, does anybody control it? Is there some knowledge out there that would answer our questions, and, if there is, who knows it?
Well, this serpent in the Garden of Eden told Adam and Eve that God knows, that God has the missing piece. God created Adam and Eve and put them in this beautiful garden called Eden. They could have everything they wanted there, except the fruit of this particular tree. Why they could not eat that fruit, though, never made any sense. To be honest, it still doesn’t make sense. God just told them not to mess with it. And all the serpent told them (and it was them as opposed to just Eve), was that God knew. First of all, everything that the serpent said was true. They did not die when they ate the fruit, at least not initially, and, according to verse 22, they did indeed become “like God, knowing good and evil.”
And, finally, the serpent was right in that God did indeed know. God held the missing piece to the puzzle. God knew something that Adam and Eve did not. And even though the serpent never said this (some messages are louder if left unsaid), he at least implied that maybe God could not be trusted with that knowledge. Maybe God was holding something back. Maybe God was pulling a fast one. There was a missing piece to the puzzle, and God held that piece, and maybe God had something other than Adam and Eve’s best interest. It was possible, the serpent implied, that Adam and Eve were on their own, and would have to fend for themselves.
Adam and Eve’s story in the garden of Eden is different than what I mentioned earlier. But the similarity is that something doesn’t make sense. There’s a missing piece to the puzzle, and maybe lots and lots of missing pieces to it. Maybe we’re missing more pieces than we actually have. And so the question, it seems to me, is do we trust God with that? Or do we think that God even has those missing pieces? Or do we even know? Can we even know?
Atheists say that nobody has those missing pieces. There is no God, which settles the question. Polytheists say that there are thousands of gods, none of whom have absolute power but all of whom have more power than we do. So they mess with one another all the time and then they mess with us, which again settles the question of why the world is so chaotic. Agnostics plead ignorance. They cannot possibly know heady, eternal things like that, which I personally think is a cop out. But what do you say? Who holds the missing piece of the puzzle and, if it’s God, then what is God doing with that missing piece? I’m basically tempting you with the same question that tempted Eve.
Don’t blame me that I am tempting you with a very dangerous question. We’re tempted with that question every day, almost every second of every day. We can go out on our fancy little blackberries and act all cool with all that we know. And we can go to school and get all sorts of titles, like Doctor and Reverend, in front of our names, and we can get a whole lot more 0s added to the right side of our bank accounts. But for all we think we know, we don’t know a whole lot more. We don’t know most of the important things in life, and neither money nor knowledge will ever change that. Should you marry the person you’re dating? Should you divorce the person you’re married to? If you have employees who work for you and you’re losing business, should you lay people off or fire them for performance reasons or just keep losing money? Should you take that promotion, even if it means more and more time away from your family? Should you keep your parents or grandparents on life support? When do you stop life support? When you’re preparing your taxes this year, should you really tell Uncle Sam about everything, I mean everything? When you’re tired, and hurt, and vulnerable, and angry and resentful (for very good reason), and you’re tempted with something (who knows what?) should you cave in? Why not? Because maybe, just maybe, God is wrong this time, or God doesn’t want you to have fun, or maybe God doesn’t even exist. Or maybe God does exist, and God has all this knowledge and power, but God doesn’t give a flip about you, so why should you give a flip about God? Forget God, because God has likely forgotten you, so eat the apple. Look at the porno, cheat on your wife, cheat on your taxes. Kill your brother. Okay, that’s harsh, but that’s exactly what happened in Genesis Chapter 4.
Have you ever thought that maybe God doesn’t care about you, or doesn’t have your best interest at heart, or maybe is too weak to do anything about it? If you’re a normal, thinking human being who is honest, then the answer is yes. There’s something out there that we don’t know. We trust as Christians that God does know, that God knows everything, and that God cares very deeply for us. And even though some situations in life call that seriously into question, we doggedly believe it. I’m not saying to be intentionally ignorant. Ignorance is not bliss. I’m not one of these guys who says that it’s wrong to question things. So much of what we have come to believe about God came about because somebody was faithful enough to ask a few hard questions. This text is not calling for ignorance and neither am I. Yet it’s not necessarily calling for knowledge, either. Knowledge is not the answer to all of our problems. Our problems consist of something more than knowledge can address. This text is calling for faith. There’s ignorance, which is bad, knowledge, which is good but very limited, and then there’s faith. I believe that God is calling us in this Lenten season to focus on faith.
I guess maybe because of Andrew Caldwell’s situation, I have been thinking about my home church lately. That church, like this one, has some real saints in it. Andrew’s grandmother, Alta Caldwell, is certainly one of them. Another lady named Mavis Fulbright comes to mind, too. I still am amazed at their indelible, rock-solid faith. They and their generation experienced a lot of pain. I know, for example, that both Mavis and Alta each lost one of their children. That church, like most churches, went through somewhat of a division around the time that I was born. It was very difficult time that threatened the entire life of the Church. The Mavis Fulbrights and Alta Caldwells held that church together. It wasn’t that they had all the answers. In fact, that was the problem, as it almost always is, that both sides were certain that they had the answers. The Mavis Fulbrights and Alta Caldwells knew that they didn’t have all the answers, but they had this fundamental faith in the One who did have the answers. And that faith held things together.
You may be in the pit right now. You may be walking the valley of the shadow of death. And you’re wondering where God is and what God is doing. Or, you may be on top of the world right now, snug as a bug in a rug. Most of us are somewhere in the middle. All of us are missing some significant pieces to the puzzle. There are some things that just don’t make sense. All the money and knowledge in the world will never change that. We don’t need more stuff. We need more faith, in the One who is all powerful, and all knowing, and yet who has lowered himself for our sake and become a servant for us, and who went to Calvary’s Cross for us. In this Lenten season, we’re not supposed to give up everything, just those things that we don’t need anyway. And maybe that will help us focus on what we do need. And that is faith.
In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
