Sometimes when I walk in here I have this notion…that I should take off my shoes and socks. Don’t worry I’m not going to . I’m old and I have ugly feet and nobody needs to see that. But I feel like this is holy ground. 

Years ago some men got together and poured a foundation and put in place stuff for plumbing and electric and stacked one brick on top of another and made a building and slapped up a sign that said church and it was holy ground right? No! 

This has become holy ground for me because Jesus is here! Amen? So many stories about Jesus in the bible are about Him healing people and just a little side trip here. Have you ever noticed how in the healing stories – there is usually no name given to the person. Just their gender and their issue. The paralytic man, the woman with the blood issue, the lame man. Maybe that is intentional. How often do we label people not by their name, but by their issue? We see the issue. But Jesus? He sees their faith. He sees their need for forgiveness. 

So how does that healing happen? Jesus always always goes where the pain is! So you got pain tonight? Jesus is here. Worship happens here. Praise happens here. Healing happens here. We become a community! In the breaking bread, in our conversations, our praying for each other and listening to each other, in our laughter and our singing to Jesus together we become a family! We worry and encourage when one falls and we celebrate when one overcomes because we don’t just see their issue. We see them and in them we see ourselves. Jesus is here. The Holy Spirit is here. That makes this holy ground! 

So how did we get here? Let’s go all the way back to creation. We’re gonna be here for awhile…

It all began with a family. A Father and a Son, the Holy Spirit… and man, created in their image. Oh, How it must have been, walking with the Lord in the garden. Every single need provided for and no space – an intimacy between us and God. Knowing God and being fully known.

And then what happened? I think Eve must have been different from us. I mean, NO woman I know would ever even get close enough to listen to a snake. (Except Emily if she is here. If you are here Emily I apologize…this analogy won’t work for you..I know emily loves critters) But here we are, maybe Eve had gotten herself isolated. Maybe it had been awhile since she took a walk in the garden with God and she had been living in her own head too much. That happens to me all the time and I need to come here. I need to be around my Jesus family and get reminded of how much I need that community, I need accountability partners. maybe that was Eve – she needed an accountability partner! 

I did hear a story that said If Adam and Eve had been Cajun they would have eaten the snake instead of the Apple and saved us all a lot of trouble…

Maybe she was jealous of the relationship between God and Adam. I don’t know. But we have to be careful about who we spend time with don’t we? When we keep ourselves with family – actual family, church family, I don’t care what it looks like for you – it’s who YOU consider family, those who love us and have our best interests at heart, we are stronger. But when we isolate ourselves, man, we tend to listen to the first snaky voice that comes along. So maybe the trouble started because of a separation from family or community. 

Then what does the snake say to Eve? Genesis 3 I love to imagine bible stories unfolding like a movie. Just picture it.

He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”

The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden,  but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”

 â€œYou will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman.  “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

Now keeping this in context, In Genesis 2:9 it says ⁹ The Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. 

All the trees. It wasn’t like all the trees but one were spindly little trees with nothing but dried up wrinkled up fruit.  No. All of them. God wasn’t holding something back from them. He was protecting them. They had never known evil.

So this conversation with the snake -here is a sign of trouble. A lie! She was created in God’s image.  If Eve had been connected to her family, if she had remembered who she was and WHO’S she was, she might have responded “I already am like God because He created me in His image, thank you very much – and grabbed a hoe, chopped off his head and kept walking. But she believed the lie and rather than go to God and walk and talk and ask Him her questions, she went with her own thinking and decided the fruit was good to eat and for gaining wisdom. Then she shared it with Adam maybe because when we sin it doesn’t look or feel so bad if we hang out with others that are doing the same thing right?  (I can hear my mama saying “If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?) And then what happened next? 

Adam and Eve realized they were naked and made themselves coverings – they had shame. Then fear –  (and this is actually funny) they heard the sound of the Lord and they hid. Seriously? You can’t hide from God! I mean…he’s God! 

So when God questions Adam, Adam says Eve gave him the fruit and Eve says the snake tempted her and now? Now we have blame. 

So we have isolation from community, a lie, shame, fear, and blame and now no one can own their stuff. They can’t fix the problem. They don’t even acknowledge that they have a problem! Adam and Eve – the first example of denial!

 And now we spend all our time trying to find things to fill that isolation hole that we have dug for ourselves. 

It was a series of small steps that took us from the garden. We piled on layer upon layer of stuff. 

There is a quote from Thomas Aquinas that says “no one intentionally does evil, you always choose an apparent good” Which is just a fancy way of saying we tell ourselves that the dumb choice we make is ok and then we look for reasons to support it. It’s like we have Jesus talking right in our ear – right to our heart and we switch the channel and now all we can hear is the snake.

We are stuck in the snaky domain.

But what does God say about that snake?

“Cursed are you above all livestock

    and all wild animals!

You will crawl on your belly

    and you will eat dust

    all the days of your life.

And I will put enmity

    between you and the woman,

    and between your offspring and hers;

he will crush your head,

    and you will strike his heel.”

It might not seem like it at first glance, but this is a picture of such compassion and love. Eve (the woman) will carry the promise of rescue through her offspring  and evil will bruise the heel of that offspring – Jesus who will be crucified but that crucifixion and His resurrection will defeat evil once and for all and make a way for us to go back to the garden – back in to relationship with God. But first Jesus will have to be born – He will be the promise through offspring of Eve. You think God can’t use you? The person through whom sin entered the world is the person through whom God will work to achieve our salvation!

And just think about this. God didn’t wait. He didn’t have to think about it or hesitate. Weigh the pros and cons….No. He immediately made a solution. Just like that. God is good yall! As soon as you sin. As soon as you relapse. As soon as you do that thing you think is unredeemable, God already has a way back in place for you to walk in. And that plan at the beginning? It was wild! It happened with a family. A father – Joseph, a mother – Mary, and a baby. Community. 

Now I’m not saying being alone is bad. Solitude is needed sometimes. Even Jesus needed to go off and be alone with God sometimes. But then He would come back to people. Jesus will always lead us back to people. He is not afraid of our stuff, of our messes, of our pain. He’s not. He’s just not. And he knows that all of this life is just a process of us being undone. All the layers. The lie, the shame, the blame, the separation. We have to be willing to be messy and vulnerable with God in order to see the grace. 

The promise is not at the end. The promise is IN the process.

I think about every time Bobby stands up here and he says to trust the process.  I think about listening to Toby talk about relapse. I think about Melba asking the question in step study – What is your way forward?. Yall that was like the clouds opened…I mean, I am the worst about getting stuck on something in my head…We all have all these layers of stuff we need to work on and we need space and grace to work on them. This world is so loud sometimes and the road can be so long and so full of potholes. So we need our family, our Jesus family, to remind us that we are so loved! Every single person is powerless. Every one. It’s just that in here? We wear it on the outside where it is visible.

But here is what my heart tells me. That visibility, that being known, those moments when I see the love of Jesus in your eyes, where I hear one of you say something and the Holy Spirit convicts me. When one of us trips and falls in one of those potholes and they climb out with all the muck and yuck on them and we say here, take one of these blue chips – Let’s get you cleaned up. Here is some grace… and the steadfast love of God is lived out in front of me….THAT feeds my spirit. None of us will be completely undone until we stand face to face with the father. Life IS the process. God isn’t worried about the outcome. He has that all under control. He wants our yeses. Every single little yes to God helps to undo another layer, breaks another chain, erases another lie, and brings us closer to who we were created to be. We were created to be part of an unbroken circle, not stuck in a cycle of brokenness.

If we ask Him to heal us and we say yes to one thing at a time? He will heal us. I believe that. But I also believe that He has so much more for us. He wants to transform us back to who we were in His image. And when we worship?  Oh….We remember the garden, the intimacy. We reconnect. We return. What does God do? He refreshes our spirits! He restores our relationship with Him and with others! 

I want to take another little side trip here. In the New Testament there is a scripture I want to share with you. Listen to the Word from

John 5:1-18 

Some time later, Jesus went up to Jerusalem for one of the Jewish festivals.  Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda and which is surrounded by five covered colonnades.  Here a great number of disabled people used to lie—the blind, the lame, the paralyzed.  One who was there had been an invalid for thirty-eight years.  

38 years ya’ll! If you have been in a mess for what seems like a long time? This guy laid on his mat in the middle of his problem for 38 years. Laid. On. His. Mat. In 38 years he never even rolled or scooted or scooched? I mean in all that time? 

When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, he asked him, “Do you want to get well?”

Jesus didn’t ask the man what was wrong with him. Jesus didn’t say hey I’ll sit here with you on your mat. I’ll be a friend and love on you right here the way you are. There is a difference between sympathy and compassion. Jesus had compassion. Now watch what the man answered!

“Sir,” the invalid replied, “I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me.”

After 38 years he didn’t say yes! That just astounds me! But no, he launched into an explanation of why he was not able to get to the pool that would heal him.

So?

Then Jesus said to him, “Get up! Pick up your mat and walk.”  At once the man was cured; he picked up his mat and walked.

The day on which this took place was a Sabbath,  and so the Jewish leaders said to the man who had been healed, “It is the Sabbath; the law forbids you to carry your mat.”

But he replied, “The man who made me well said to me, ‘Pick up your mat and walk.’ ”

So they asked him, “Who is this fellow who told you to pick it up and walk?”

The man who was healed had no idea who it was, for Jesus had slipped away into the crowd that was there.

Later Jesus found him at the temple and said to him, “See, you are well again. Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you.” The man went away and told the Jewish leaders that it was Jesus who had made him well.

Now two things you can notice here. One is who took him to the pool? Did he live there all the time? Did he have family or friends that picked him up and carried him to the pool every single day for 38 years? If so, why didn’t they hang around and make sure he got to the pool? And the church leaders? Did they praise God that something miraculous had happened when he was no longer lame? No. No one helped him to the pool and no one was celebrating his good fortune with him. Check your circle. Do they want you whole? Or are they fine with you laying on that mat? If so, you need to find you some shove through the crowd, tote you to the roof, cut a whole and lower you to Jesus kind of friends!

Jesus met the man in the temple. Jesus is in the transformation business. This man who laid on a mat for 38 years waiting for someone else to fix his problem is now worshipping in the temple and he is able to rejoin society. But it required him DOING something. He had to get up, pick up his mat, and walk. The healing was there. He had to get up. I don’t know about you but if I had spent 38 years laying on a mat and all of a sudden I could walk, I would have been dancing and jumping around the room like crazy. But Jesus told him to pick up his mat. He was still carrying it when he walked into the temple. Maybe he was supposed to carry that mat so he wouldn’t forget how lame he was before Jesus. 

And ya’ll? We walked in the door here. I may not be in the pool yet. Maybe I just rolled a little bit. Maybe some of us have already met Jesus and we are being healed. But the point is – we moved. We did something! We are all already ahead of the poor guy on the mat!

When we are healed, transformed by Jesus Christ the saviour of the world we begin to live a life that responds with gratitude. I once was…but now I’m…

I once listened to a snake, but now I’m a possibility in God’s kingdom. I once was stuck on a mat, but now I’m carrying my mat and walking with Jesus. I once was a grouchy fisherman named Peter but because of Jesus I got to walk on water and Jesus built His church on me! I once thought I was unredeemable and was trying to do it all by myself but now, I’m part of a family that reminds me I am worth everything to Jesus. 

We are all a mess and we are all on our way back home to the garden and we need Jesus to get there and Jesus shows us that we also need each other. Amen.