Presby-Musings

This week I'll be concluding the sermon series, "In The Beginning" the Story of Creation. Over the past several weeks we have been thinking together about the implications of our being created by a creative and loving God...  What it means to be created in God's image, to be created to care for the Creation that cares for us...   Today we are going to be journeying into Genesis chapter 3--the chapter where it feels like everything starts to fall apart in the Creation story.   When I was a kid, this part of the story was often referred to as "The Fall," or the moment when "Original Sin" entered into the world.  It's also the part of the story where lots of misguided theologians have done real violence to the Gospel by blaming women, and reading all kinds of things into the text that aren't there.  What I want to focus on, however, is a bit different.  The one thing I want us to hold on to as learn together today is simply this:  ...

I'm back on my diet.  For the past couple of months, I've eaten and drunk like there's no tomorrow--only there always was a tomorrow, and it arrived to find me needing to lose twenty pounds.   I suppose it would be easy just to chalk up my struggles to bad genetics and use that as an excuse for my rotten habits.  It is easy, to be honest, because I've used that excuse for long stretches of time.   It's also easy to fall into despair, and live in a funk when you realize your life won't be exactly like you wish it could be because you're going to have to watch what you eat and drink for the rest of your days.  Oh, and you might have to also exercise--a lot.  I think that many of the problems that Christians struggle with are connected to something similar.  There's this idea that pervades most of Christian teaching about sin that needs some deeper thought.   I'm talking about the idea that we all inherited some sort of "sin gene" t...