I preached this sermon on Sunday, February 22, 2026 at St. Anne Episcopal Church. The lectionary text cited is Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7.
One of the truest things I have learned in life is that we don’t fully appreciate home until we have to leave it.
Now, I’ve moved around a lot—at one point I counted that, thus far in my 42 years, I’ve lived in approximately 28 different dwellings. Which means that on many, many occasions, I’ve engaged in that moving-day ritual of taking one final walk through the now-empty rooms you’re about to vacate.
You check the corners and the closets, making sure you haven’t forgotten anything. You see the nail holes in the walls; you notice the small cracks and scuffs that will soon be the only traces of you left behind. And you realize, in these final glances, that you will never again see that particular slant of light through the window pane ; you will never make dinner in that kitchen or hear familiar footsteps stomp down those stairs.
And, in my experience, it is always in this moment I feel that maybe I didn’t ever truly appreciate all the life that was lived within these walls. Maybe we just don’t know how to appreciate something fully until it’s time to let it go.
And so it’s right then, in the moment of departure, that we finally understand the preciousness of what we must now leave behind.
Why am I going on about this? It’s true, Matt and I are hoping to find a house at some point in the near future, so maybe I’m thinking about move #29. But it’s more so because of our Scripture readings this week, and especially that reading from Genesis, which I think is one of the most fundamentally misunderstood sacred texts there is. Stick with me a minute and you’ll see what I am getting at.
For millennia, this ancient story of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden has been used to try and explain all of our problems, all of our pain, all the reasons why we need a holy Lenten season and why we are looking for a Savior in the first place.
And the familiar interpretation of the story usually goes something like this: Eve and Adam did a very bad thing. They disobeyed God’s instructions; they ate the fruit that was not for them, and they were punished accordingly. And we, as their descendants, apparently still bear their punishment in every fiber of our being. It’s the notion of original sin, as St. Augustine called it.
Because of that one primordial mistake, so this interpretation goes, all are inherently guilty and blameworthy, forever and ever. Bad news for us, and so we’d better pray that the God who made us will rescue us from a place of punishment which God also made.
I confess that this take on the story has always left me unsatisfied, like a phrase that doesn’t quite rhyme. I acknowledge the power of sin, but I also believe that love is the stronger force at work upon us.
And I especially struggle with the conventional approach to this text and its emphasis on original sin because it has been used, variously, to stereotype women as tempters who lead men astray; to depict creation as something flawed or suspect; and to make people feel guilty for simply being born or for daring to be who God made them to be.
So here’s the thing, and I am probably going to ruffle some theological feathers with this, but so be it: what if there was another way to understand Genesis?
Because I don’t think that original sin or crime and punishment are the primary lenses through which we should view the story of Eden or, frankly, anything else in the Christian story. We can respect them as one lens to consider, but I think we would do well to remember that some of these theologies were developed centuries after the gospels were written, millennia after the origins of the Hebrew Scriptures, and that there are other ways we can engage this text.
And I think you know this about me, but I am always looking for the Good News, for the story of God that speaks a true word to our deepest hopes and longings, and not just one that plays into our insecurities and fears.
So I’ve been asking myself, if not ‘original sin,’ then what else is this story of Eden really trying to get at? Why does it haunt us, follow us, shape us, even thousands of years on?
And that’s where my reflections on leaving home come to bear.
Maybe the key to the story is not the snake in the grass, or the forbidden fruit, or the blame game between Eve and Adam. Maybe instead it’s that bittersweet moment when their eyes are opened and God tells his children that they have grown too wise for Eden now. That they must go out and make their way into the the world as it is, with good and evil both.
And I thought of how the two of them, as I myself have done 28 times, must have taken one last glimpse of Eden before they left it. How they might have noticed the cracks in the garden soil or the certain slant of light through the trees. How they might have traced their fingers across the branches and the flowers and the garden gate and realized they would never again call this place home. And that they were therefore the first to understand the preciousness of what we must leave behind.
And I realized that this longing is our true inheritance from those first ancestors. Eden is not primarily a story about punishment. It is a story about leaving home.
This makes better sense to me as a foundational human story. Because let’s be honest, we don’t need the Bible to reveal to us that life is full of hardships and compromises. They are all around us, every day.
But it is helpful to know that, hard as life is, all of us carry within us this lingering sense of something deeper, something more true—not an original sin, but an original home. A place that was ours, once. A shelter whose walls and corners and certain slants of light still haunt our dreams. A place that we are trying to find again somehow.
For me, the Eden story tells us that the deepest issue of the human heart is not depravity so much as it is loneliness and lostness. We just want to go home again. To stumble back through the garden gate and collapse into someone’s waiting arms. And what’s expressed in this story of Adam and Eve is the fear that we never can.
If this is true, then the whole texture of the Biblical story begins to reveal itself in a different way. Suddenly we will see the notion of ‘home’ everywhere: the promise made to Abraham; all the wandering through various wildernesses; the dream of a land of milk and honey; the stories of exile and return; of invasion and liberation; of tumbling walls and rebuilt temples. And finally, the story of Jesus, who stares down the temptations wrought by our deepest insecurities and shows us what home actually is, and where it is: in him.
And maybe someone is wondering: so what? Why would it matter that we set aside original sin for a minute and read Eden in a different way? Greg mentioned in his sermon on Ash Wednesday that part of Lent is reflecting anew on Scripture, and I would suggest that the stakes of the foundational stories we tell are actually quite significant.
Because consider this: a church shaped only by the notion of our original sin will inevitably become a Christianity focused on purgation and punishment and a pervasive sense of unworthiness. It will invite us to look into the eyes of our neighbors (and at ourselves) and ask, are you saved, including from your own self? Are you good enough? Are you pure? Do you actually belong here? Or is the seed of the forbidden fruit still on your lips?
But if our life in the church is about seeking home, about walking each other home, as the saying goes, with Jesus as our guide, then perhaps we can simply look into the eyes of our neighbors, and at ourselves, and say, oh yes, my friend, I know what it feels like to be hungry. To be far from wherever you started. I, too, am trying to find my way back. I, too, am still looking for the garden gate and for that certain slant of light. I’m still hoping there is some place where we can truly appreciate life as we live it. A place we don’t have to leave behind.
So maybe, friends, this Lent, we can look for the way back there together. Maybe we can find home in each other, if nothing else. Maybe that’s what this whole story was trying to tell us all along.
And, call me a heretic if you will, but I think when we can speak less of original sin and more of original home to one another, and believe in it, and try to build it, then wherever they may be, Adam and Eve will breathe a sigh of relief. And they will say to each other: finally, finally, our children understand what it was actually about.
And maybe, just maybe, we’ll make it back to Eden after all.
By Another Road 