The Episcopal Diocese of Tennessee



The First Sunday in Lent, Year A, February 10, 2008, Christ Church Alto

“Therefore just as one man's trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man's act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all” (Rom. 5:18).

To trespass is to cross a border or boundary, a subject that’s much in the news these days. In the world of “Homeland Security” we’re concerned about our borders and who crosses them, while at the same time politicians debate illegal immigration and what to do about it. Underlying the notion of the boundary, the boundary that’s trespassed, is the idea of “them” and “us”, a primary division between the “in” group and the “out” group that inevitably breeds hostility between the two. God created a world in which there were no insiders and no outsiders, but only the human race; no barriers between people and no sign of any hostility. Of course, that’s not how things turned out. In a fallen world, good fences may indeed make good neighbors, but it would be much better if there were no need for fences at all.

We come back to trespassing, however, as we go back to the origin of evil, and how we got into this fix. Before they turned against each other human beings turned against God. God did set boundaries of a sort in Paradise, and it was in trespassing them that the human race came to grief. Adam and Eve were the first trespassers, eager to discover the knowledge of good and evil, and to be like God. The serpent’s promise came true, but not in the way they were counting on. Adam and Eve came to know good and evil, but they learned it through death. They had crossed a boundary by seeking to be like God, and the end result was exile. God ejected them from Paradise, and set an angel with a flaming sword at the gate to see that they wouldn’t trespass again.

So let’s return to the notion of the boundary. There are boundaries that exclude, that keep “us” separated from “them”; but there are also boundaries that lend proportion and give us perspective. The man who puts barbed wire around his garden has one thing in mind, while the person who surrounds it with a box hedge is after something else. Any gardener, especially an ornamental gardener, can tell you that boundaries serve a definite purpose, in part simply the purpose of definition! That’s where proportion and perspective come in. Boundaries helps us to distinguish one thing from another (remember proportion and perspective), and the result is pleasing, a little work of art. The boundary is a edge that gives definition to a thing, and an “edge” is the very soul of art.

You don’t need to be a gardener to understand this; a wood-working shop or just the ability to draw or to distinguish one note from another can tell you everything you need to know about boundaries, perspective, and proportion. The boundaries that existed in the Garden of Eden were not of the barbed-wire type, created by God to keep us away from him; but borders created to give the human race proportion and perspective, giving us the “edge” we need to define ourselves as creatures. God, the original Gardener, knows the value of a box hedge. When human beings trespass this border, they’re not breaking and entering, but depriving themselves of the very boundaries that give them their own definition and meaning. We’re works of art, able to erase our own outline. It’s an act of cosmic vandalism, a trespass that takes the human race right over the cliff.

If the trespass of Adam and Eve destroyed proportion and skewed our human perspective, erased the outlines as it were, then Jesus Christ comes to restore what has been lost. “Therefore just as one man's trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man's act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all.” The identity that we lost is replaced by another, as Jesus’ brothers and sisters. In fact, the angel with the flaming sword gets new orders since there is no need to guard Paradise any longer. Our trespass is forgiven; our sin is put away. “We have not loved you with our whole heart. We have not loved our neighbor as ourselves.” Lent is an opportunity to reclaim for ourselves the proportion and perspective and outline that come with being creatures of God, and brothers and sisters to each other.

The Rt. Rev’d John Bauerschmidt, Bishop of Tennessee

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