“Mosaic: Responsibilities” Genesis 3: 12-13 John 14

For the last several weeks we have been talking about God can use all of our lives to bring God glory - even the broken pieces. Last year at Lent, a friend had folks in her congregation build a wooden cross that was at the front of the sanctuary. Week by week, people brought small broken pieces of glass and ceremic and rock and added them to the cross. The end result was a mosaic of brokenness that made something beautiful. We are joining together in proclaiming that God is the great redeemer and that God can use even the sharp, jagged, broken pieces of our lives to bring folks into the Kingdom. 

So far we have discussed how God can use our regret and rejection, which are certainly areas of brokenness in our lives. What we are talking about today, however, on the surface doesn’t look like a broken area - responsibilities. Our responsibilities are those things that we are accountable for. Something that is within our power, control, or I would say choice. 

However, responsibilities can become areas of brokenness in our lives when we start to believe lies about them. Perhaps the first lie around responsibility can be found back in the third chapter of the Book of Genesis. Adam and Eve have been told by God that they can eat of any of the fruit of the garden except from the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. For a while, everyone seems okay with this, until a serpent whispers to Eve one day that God was actually trying to keep the best fruit from her. Some fancy twisted logic later and Eve was eating from the tree. Then she convinced Adam to eat from the tree. But when it came time to own up to what they had done - time to take responsibility - they tried to blame everyone else. Adam claimed Eve made him do it. Eve claimed the serpent made her do it. Which leads us to our first lie about responsibility “it’s not my fault.” 

Try as we might to claim that the choices we made are “not my fault” the truth is, we are all responsible for both the things that we choose to do and choose not to do. We cannot make other people do or not do things, and other people cannot make us do or not do things. A phrase that we don’t hear as much any more, but still comes up from time to time is “The Devil made me do it”. To be sure, Satan is a powerful force in our world, leading hearts away from God and God’s Kingdom, but at the end of the day choices around what we do and do not do, doesn’t fall to the Devil. It falls on us. 

Lie number two about responsibility is also connected to the story in Genesis. The lie that  we don’t need to watch out for one another, or as I like to call it, every person for their self. While Adam and Eve had no problem blaming others for the choices they made, we also don’t see much effort to stop one another from making bad choices. The truth is, we have a responsibility for one another. Now it may seem like I am contradicting what I just said before, and I still stick by the fact that we cannot make other people do things. But think about in families. Parents are responsible for children. Husbands and wives are responsible to one another. Responsibility is a mark of care and concern.

Yet, it seems that Adam and Eve didn’t extend that to one another. They didn’t try to stop one another. They didn’t try to talk to each other about what was happening or what they were doing. In other words they didn’t hold each other accountable. Accountability to each other is a sign of responsibility. 

Now of course we can take that way too far. When I was in seminary I spent a summer as a faith-based community organizer in Texas. I lived in the spare bedroom of the woman who was essentially my supervisor and every day she would come home from her time at the bank and ask me about every minute that I spent working - essentially wanting me to prove that I was working.  That isn’t the type of accountability that I’m talking about. Instead, I’m talking about the type of accountability that I have with some of my dearest friends. I was talking to a friend recently and telling her about some of the struggles I was having and she listened patiently before saying “Here is what I am hearing and seeing in your life.” Before asking questions that got to the heart and soul of where I was. By her listening, observations, and suggestions she steered me a whole different way. She held me accountable. 

We see stories in scripture both of folks who get the idea that we are responsible for one another and those who don’t. One story we find is in the book of Acts of Annias and Saphria. This couple decided to sell a piece of land and give the money to the early church for ministry. Only they didn’t give all the money over, the kept back from themselves, which was certainly allowed, but they lied about it. Telling the disciples that was the amount of money they got for the land. Peter called them each out about their lie. He held them accountable and gave them a chance to confess, but they kept insisting on living in their lie. They missed the point that the church was trying to be responsible for one another. 

Another truth about responsibility is that we all crave for a place to belong. On a very large list of things that Americans fear, based on a survey from Chapman University, twenty two percent of folks ranked being afraid to very afraid of being lonely. Let us take a minute to address the fact that there is a difference between being alone and being lonely. I am an introvert. In order to recharge my batteries after a long day I like to be alone to process. But that does not mean I am lonely - the feeling that I have no companions or company. 

The disciples were afraid of being alone as well. Selections of John 14 are traditionally read at funerals. Jesus is telling his disciples that he is going to die, that he is going to leave them for a period of time, in order to go prepare a place for them. And the disciples start to question where this place is and how they are going to know how to get there. Jesus tells them that they are not going to be alone, even with his absence, because the holy spirit is going to be sent as an advocate for them. But I also tell folks at funeral services that they are not alone because they have one another. 

We have a responsibility to be there for one another, because as the body of Christ we belong with one another. We have a purpose together. And we have a responsibility to keep welcoming one another - welcoming the stranger, the seeker, the person who is feeling lonely, so they can know the love of a Savior. See we don’t just have a responsibility to one another in the body of Christ, we have a responsibility to this community to be the body of Christ, reaching out in love and with a message of Christ.

Here’s the thing about responsibility - we don’t always get it right. The noun “adult” has been turned into a verb in recent years as “adulting” often around how we fail at being adults from time to time. The same as true of the church. The church is not meant to be a stagnant noun, but instead a verb in action, and sometimes we fail at the responsibilities entrusted to us a church. Yet, that is not the final word. Even when we do not live up to our responsibilities or when we try to make it about things that they are not, or we miss the point, God can take our brokenness and redeem it as we are sent back on our mission to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. We are a work in progress - broken pieces and all. Amen.