It took six weeks for them to speak of it, but last week the nation’s air traffic controllers went public. They had sat helplessly before their monitors on September 11. Danielle O’Brien was working the tower at Dulles Airport in Washington, D. C., on a morning like the first day of creation: crisp, clean, clear. The last thing she said after clearing American Airlines Flight 77 for takeoff was, Good luck! She doesn’t know why she said that. Have a good flight! or Good day! is what she usually says. They would have no luck. Within minutes she watched in horror as the plane turned toward the White House and then suddenly changed course, crashing into the Pentagon building. Ms. O’Brien has dreamed about it over and over. In one dream she sees a green pool in front of her. That was part of the radar scope. It was a pool of gel, she says, and I reached into the radar scope to stop that flight. But in the dream, I didn’t harm the plane. ‘I just held it in my hand, and somehow that stopped everything.’

Wouldn’t it be great if you could do that? Just reach out your hand and stop everything. Wonder how many times Adam and Eve dreamed of reaching out to hold that fruit in their hands and stopping everything? How many times have you or I relived a moment in the past that seemed to change things for the worse. If only we could just reach out our hand…. But no, the past is not within our grasp. We can’t go back; we can only bear the memories of what was and what might have been.

We’ve come to the last scene now in the Garden of Eden story. The first six weeks, we followed the plot of how we came to be and how we came to be the way we are. For all the ideas the world has offered about who we are, where we have come from, and why we are the way we are, Jews and Christians have gone back to this account of things to gain our bearings. What’s the Story? we’ve asked. Well, it begins with a good start. We are made in the image of God, men and women. We are given life and freedom in a world remarkably fit for us. But we overreach ourselves, wanting not just to be like God but to be gods ourselves. We want to replace God, don’t you know?! We wanted to know it all, but we aren’t made for that. We are made to depend upon God and live out our lives in harmony with God, one another, and all creation.

The downfall of Adam and Eve is the downfall of all of us, however we conceive the relationship. We all pick the forbidden fruit, and we all know the painful consequences of living now with relationships gone bad. Something is perpetually broken in us, and we struggle to find our way. The questions are: What is our way? Where do we head for hope? Is freedom ever again possible?

Joni Mitchell wrote the song "Woodstock" that Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young made a hit. Here’s the line: We are stardust, we are golden… and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the Garden. But here’s the thing, as the closing note in our text makes plain. We can’t get ourselves back there. There are cherubim there now, flaming swords and all, turning in every direction to keep us out. And bad luck–none of those angels looks like Roma Downey!

The point is, we can’t fix ourselves. We can’t get back there on our own. We are all tied up by our actions– bound. But–and here’s the good news–we are not bound for nowhere, and we are not bound for the purpose of being forever bound. We are bound for freedom. And God is out in front of us, calling us to it; and within us, freeing us from our bonds.

Forward to Freedom

So the way to freedom is not back but forward. Notice not only that God has placed angels to guard the Garden against our trespassing, but that God drives us out of there. It’s a strong word. God boots us out. God shoves us out. God evicts us from the Garden.

It’s hard to plumb the depths of this moment in the text, but it’s not hard to plumb the depths of it in me. It tells me I don’t get to go back to the place of my failure and sin for a do-over. I can’t live there any more because God has made that impossible for me. But it also tells I’m not dead because of it. Which means I’ve still got a crack at something. My life isn’t over. I may have messed things up royally, but I haven’t lost my shot at a crown.

I have a counselor friend who always asks his clients when they come for help: What outcome do you want from our time together? It’s a good question, since most of us go to therapists because in one way or another we are feeling trapped by our past or in our past. I don’t know about you, but sometimes I kind of like the idea of loitering at the east gate of the Garden of Eden, trying to figure out how to get past the homeland security guard with the flaming sword, stupidly thinking my only hope is to regain Paradise Lost.

If only I hadn’t taken the money. If only I hadn’t said those things. If only I hadn’t allowed my affections to slip from my spouse to my addiction. If only I had studied when I had the chance. If only I had said no or said yes at that one critical moment. If only, if only, if only!

Well, you can’t go back. The freedom you once had to make those choices are gone. You are bound by those choices now. But the good news is that while those choices are off limits, all choices aren’t. God has let you live, and God is sending you forward to freedom. The way back is blocked, but the way forward is open.

Bound but Not for Good

They’ve made Beverly Donofrio’s autobiography into a movie. Riding in Cars with Boys is a story you wouldn’t want to live, but you get the feeling you do live it one way or another. She tells of growing up in a small Connecticut town where her father was a policeman and she a wannabe writer. Mostly she wanted to be noticed by boys. One noticed her enough to make her pregnant at age 15. Her father made it very clear her life was over, her dreams dashed. Actually it was his dreams for her that were dashed. But the movie shows the consequences of one act that shaped the rest of her life. Dealing with a young son and a no-good junkie husband, trying to get a high school diploma and a college scholarship. It was such a struggle. She was bound by the consequences of her sin. But her father was wrong about her future. She may have been bound by her choices, but not all her dreams were dashed.

God takes what’s left of us and provides one thing after another for us to drive us forward to freedom. We cannot do it on our own, but we don’t have to, either. Verse 21: God makes clothes for the man and his wife, clothes made from skins. They had tried to clothe themselves with fig leaves, but apparently that wasn’t warm enough for the cold they were about to know. God does for us what we can’t do on our own. And God’s gifts are better than our achievements.

Judy Yarbrough was telling me about what a seamstress her mother was. When she was in junior high and high school, she would take her mother to Neiman Marcus or Lord & Taylor to look at clothes. Her mother would study them carefully, buy the fabric, and make the very dresses for her daughter that she couldn’t have bought. We have here an image of God as seamstress. But more important is the image of God making possible for us what is impossible by our own hands.

This is Reformation Sunday. On Halloween 1517, as Martin Luther tacked his 95 theses onto the door of the Wittenberg church, he also drove the first nail into the coffin of religion as a self-help exercise. Luther knew he was such an incorrigible sinner he could not free himself to please God. He had to be freed by God.

At the heart of the debate was this point. On one side was Luther’s sometime admirer, the humanist scholar Erasmus of Rotterdam. Erasmus said God would not require of us what we could not do, that it would impugn the goodness of God to set things up like that. Luther felt like Beverly Donofrio’s no-good husband Ray in the movie. He’s a heroin addict and he tells Bev he can’t beat it. It has such a hold on him that all he can hope to do is to try to live with just a little bit of it instead of a lot of it. Right. I wouldn’t mind having a hall pass like that; any of you? The Apostle Paul says the same thing in Romans 7. He knew himself all too well. He knew that every time he set out to do good, he would end up at war with himself. His spirit and his flesh were in combat with one another. He could not overcome it through willpower alone.

Luther believed this was the whole point of the gospel. Even God’s gift of clothing to Adam and Eve showed that all natural intimacy with God and one another was lost forever. Every time men and women want to know each other deeply, they have to peel through layers of protection to get to the mystery. Same with God. God has to lead us and free us if we are ever to arrive at a place of freedom and joy. God has to act upon us and in us to free us from our bonds.

The true and final liberator of all humanity is Jesus Christ. He lived the life God intended from the beginning and he lived it by the power of God’s Spirit working in him and on him at every moment. By overcoming the false powers of human bondage, he alone unties the shackles that keep us from our freedom. The resurrection of Jesus from the dead is the first morning of the new creation. It is the dawning of the Garden to come. And all of us who live in him are enabled to draw upon his liberating power.

The Roman poet Virgil described the horrible practice of war in his time, when a conquering army would take a vanquished general and tie him to body of a dead corpse, until the toxic effluvia of the deceased so filled his lungs with poison that he too would die. The living and the dead at his command/ were fastened face to face and hand to hand./ Till choked with stench, in loathe embrace tied/ the withering wretches pined away and died.

Lovely, eh? But what if you have to be bound to the living or the dead? What if the choice is to be tied to a decaying corpse or a living Lord? With the one you are bound to futility and death, with the other to freedom and life. If you’ve got to be slave to one or the other, wouldn’t you want to be bound for freedom?