The Great Cover-Up

May 14, 2006                                                                                                      Rev. William “Buck” Day

The Great cover up.  This book that Dan Brown wrote, The DaVinci Code, is covering up the truth of history.  And cover ups we know can be a dangerous thing, just ask any of those associated with the Watergate and Lewinsky messes and they will tell you that.  But we are talking about a more fundamental cover up today.  A literal, if you will, cover up from our scripture, a cover up that echoes through our lives each day.  And so what I want you to do is I want you to listen to our scripture today and think about how life has changed for Adam and Eve since the last verse of chapter two where it says, “they were both naked and they were not ashamed.”  I pick it up at the very next verse.  Here’s the word of God:    

(New Living Translation) 1Now the serpent was the shrewdest of all the creatures the LORD God had made. "Really?" he asked the woman. "Did God really say you must not eat any of the fruit in the garden?" 2"Of course we may eat it," the woman told him. 3"It's only the fruit from the tree at the center of the garden that we are not allowed to eat. God says we must not eat it or even touch it, or we will die." 4"You won't die!" the serpent hissed. 5"God knows that your eyes will be opened when you eat it. You will become just like God, knowing everything, both good and evil." 6The woman was convinced. The fruit looked so fresh and delicious, and it would make her so wise! So she ate some of the fruit. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her. Then he ate it, too. 7At that moment, their eyes were opened, and they suddenly felt shame at their nakedness. So they strung fig leaves together around their hips to cover themselves. 8Toward evening they heard the LORD God walking about in the garden, so they hid themselves among the trees. 9The LORD God called to Adam, "Where are you?" 10He replied, "I heard you, so I hid. I was afraid because I was naked." 11"Who told you that you were naked?" the LORD God asked. "Have you eaten the fruit I commanded you not to eat?" 12"Yes," Adam admitted, "but it was the woman you gave me who brought me the fruit, and I ate it." 13Then the LORD God asked the woman, "How could you do such a thing?" "The serpent tricked me," she replied. "That's why I ate it." 

23 So the LORD God banished Adam and his wife from the Garden of Eden, and he sent Adam out to cultivate the ground from which he had been made.

Our scripture this day. 

Will you join me in prayer. 

Mighty and holy God have mercy on us, allow us to hear what your Spirit is saying to us this day.  Lord give us ears to hear this day.  We ask it in Your name. Amen.

Well the perfect marriage didn’t last very long, did it?  There was an email that had been sent around recently and I want to invite you to follow along with me as a group.  It is an email with a tricky joke at the end so I want you to envision that you’re at a computer screen and you’re scrolling down through this email.  As you read this is what you are going to read:          

Once upon a time there was a perfect man and a perfect woman and they met.  They had a perfect courtship and a perfect wedding.  Their life together was perfect.  One stormy Christmas Eve the perfect couple was driving the perfect car winding down a snow covered road when they noticed that someone was along side the road and needed help.  Being the perfect couple, of course, they stopped to help in any way they could.  Well low and behold Santa Claus was there with a bundle of toys.  Not wanting to disappoint the children, the perfect couple helped Santa into the car with all of his toys.  And it wasn’t long after that that they were delivering toys.  Unfortunately the road conditions continued to deteriorate and the perfect couple and Santa had an accident.  Only one survived the accident.  Who was it?  Well it was the perfect woman that survived because she is really the only one who existed in the first place.  Everyone knows that there is no Santa Claus.   And there is no such thing as a perfect man.  Woman stop reading here the joke is over.  Men keep scrolling.  If there is no perfect man and there is no Santa Claus then we know that the perfect woman was driving, right?  Which, of course, would account for why there was an accident.  And oh by the way, women if you are reading this, this just illustrates another point.  Women never listen. 

The perfect marriage from Genesis 2 crumbles before their eyes with a little temptation and a couple of bad choices.  It is a cover up that we are still living with today.  The openness, the nudity, the intimacy of Genesis 2 was covered up in one bite and replaced with avoidance, separation and ambition.  I want to take a look at each one of those and see if there is any commonality between them.  Then see if there’s some ways that we can perhaps begin to restore maybe just a little bit of what we lost in the garden.  We want to start by saying that the Fall caused us to move from openness to avoidance.  There was freedom and there was openness end of chapter two where they say, “they were naked and they were not ashamed,” they enjoyed being around each other.  They were comfortable with the way they were.  There was this easy going attitude between the man and the woman and God.  And yet, they now realized they were naked and they were even ashamed it says in verse seven so they made coverings out fig leaves to cover themselves up.  When God calls them on it in verse eight they hide from Him.  And when confronted Adam blames Eve, Eve blames the serpent and the serpent doesn’t have a leg to stand on.  Sorry. 

Adam and Eve avoided taking the blame.  We continue to do that today.   We avoid taking any blame that is associated with us.  We don’t like to admit we’ve made mistakes that we’ve done wrong.  That we have some how messed up, so avoidance turns to blaming someone else just like in the garden.  For far too many marriages we think that if we admit our weaknesses that somehow our spouse will reject us, that they’ll ridicule us that they’ll laugh at us and perhaps worse of all hold it over us and use at some point in the future.  As a result we don’t say anything.  We don’t say anything about what we’re thinking or what we’re feeling and we move to blaming to push it away from us so that we can avoid telling our spouse who we really are.  “It’s not my fault we’re out of money. It’s not my fault we’ve maxed out the credit card,” we say.  Or perhaps we say, “If you were a better wife I wouldn’t have to run around behind your back.”  Too often we dance around the elephant in the corner of our marriages out of fears of facing our own faults, one of the things that happened in the Fall as we move from openness to avoidance.   

Another thing that happened as a result of the Fall is that we move from unity to separation. Men this question is for you.  How many of you know your wife’s secret weapon to get you to give in every time?  For many of you it is crying, isn’t it?  If your wife cries you will do anything, you will do everything to try and get her to stop.  You will confess to things you didn’t do.  You will bend over backwards.  You will take the dog for a walk every night just to get her to stop, whatever it is.  Why? Because, most men don’t like to deal with emotions.  They don’t understand them.  They don’t understand their own let alone their wife’s.  So they don’t know what to do with them so they want to get them behind them any way they can.  That’s because men don’t cry.  So in our marriages when we’re confronted with an emotional scene, what do we do?  We disconnect, don’t we?  We try to back off.  We close off and we become distant and that distance is one of the ways we have separation.   

There is another way we separate many times and it begins with the statement, “You never talk to me.”  How many times has that been said or heard in your marriage?  Communication is another way we create separation in our marriages.  Every couple I spend time with counseling before they get married, I tell them, “The most important thing you can do in your marriage is talk with each other.”  I give them an assignment to spend just five minutes a day talking to each other about what’s going on in their lives, what they’re feeling, what they’re thinking.  Poor communication skills get more marriages in trouble than any thing else.  Poor communication causes the separation that we’re talking about here.  If Adam and Eve would have talked about the apple, who knows what would have happened. 

Communication at its deepest and most productive level is all about sharing our feelings.  When we start talking about sharing our feelings there it goes again all that fear begins to come up for so many people. “If I tell you who I am and you don’t like what I’m feeling I’m dead.  I got nothing else. That’s all I am., so maybe its better.  Maybe it’s better if I don’t reveal myself.  If I hold on to who I am and not let you see.”  In general, sharing our feelings is much easier for women, they’re better at it than most guys.  But it is a learned skill for everybody, a skill that needs to be practiced over and over and over for the health of the marriage.  One of the books that has helped me tremendously is a little book called Straight Talk. It’s a great learning tool to build better communication into your marriages.  For when we fear our feelings we become separated.

The other thing that happens as a result of the Fall is that we move from intimacy to ambition.  “If you eat the apple you will be like God.”  Darryl returned from a seminar on assertiveness and he was resolved to become the man of the house.  He walks through the door and he wanted to make sure that his wife understood that he was now the boss.  He said, “From here on out you will respect and obey my every word.  You will make me dinner tonight.  After dinner you will draw my bath because I am going to go and read the paper and soak in the tub.  And then after that guess who is going to dress me and comb my hair?”  To which the wife replied, “The funeral director?” 

One of the effects of the Fall is that we now have a struggle for control.  Part of the passage that we didn’t read today God tells Eve, “your husband will now rule over you.”  This is the first time they talked about a hierarchy or anyone ruling over anybody in this relationship.  And that ambition for control continues today, “Who’s in charge of our marriage? Who’s going to control the marriage?”  We have two insecure people doing everything they can to get their way, demanding their rights, rebelling at anything that smells of control.  That is the norm for too many marriages.  That kind of insecurity is based in fear.  Fear of not being in control.  Fear of being out of control.  And if I am out of control then somebody else is going to make the decisions for me and that scares me because what if they don’t make the decisions that are best for me. 

Have you noticed through this avoidance, separation, ambition there’s been a common thread that has been running.  It is the thread of fear. Fear fuels our avoidance.  Fear fuels our separation.  Fear is what fuels our ambition.  And we see that in our scripture in verse 10 where Adam says to God, “I heard you in the garden and I hid because I was afraid.”  Fear is the foundation for our cover-ups in our marriages, in our relationships and much of life.  Fear can destroy a marriage and yet scripture continually admonishes us to not be afraid, perhaps with good reason. 

Recently in the Journal of Science there was a study of the biology of dread which is the biology of fear.  At Emery University there is a new field of study called neuroeconomics and as part of this study the doctor and his team used brain imaging to study the way people make decisions.  In one particular research they evaluated a group of participants who were given electrical shocks to their foot while their brain was being analyzed by an MRI.  The intensity of those shocks varied but it was the anticipation that made the big difference.  Each volunteer was told how long it would be before they would receive their next shock and the level of the intensity.  Those who handled the situation worst were those that stayed fixated on the impending shock.  Given the choice between a milder jolt twenty seconds from now or a more intense jolt tree seconds from now those that were extreme dreaders, those who were overcome with fear inevitably picked the worst shock right now rather than wait for the milder shock later on.  As a result of it the doctor and his team made a couple of observations.  First one is that fear causes us to make bad decisions.  And secondly, simple diversions can alleviate much of our misery.  So when we focus on our fears we often make poor choices.  But if we could divert our attention, perhaps to God through prayer, our misery could be drastically reduced.  And is it is any wonder that Jesus said so many times, “don’t be afraid.”

I want to give you three ways to tame this monster, to face our fears.  But before I do that I want to ask you if you noticed that I didn’t talk a lot about our relationship with God.  I spent a lot more time talking about human to human relationship.  But I want to encourage you to have a conversation about how avoidance and separation and ambition plays into our relationship with God as a result of what happened in chapter three of Genesis. And then maybe add on top of that, how trust and God’s love plays into that equation, something for you to talk about in the upcoming week.  We are called to face our fears.  One of the ways that we can face our fears is to be honest with ourselves.  Admit it.  We all make mistakes, we all blow it.  Be willing to own up to your role in it. Be willing to own the satisfaction or dissatisfaction that you bring to your marriage because we all bring both good and bad to our relationships.  Be honest with your feelings.  Be honest with your feelings even if they scare the bee jeepers out of you.  Maybe some of you feel underappreciated.  Maybe you feel like you have been taken for granted.  Or maybe used or manipulated, and that’s not right.  Get those feelings out.  Admit that each one of us try to control our spouse in our own little ways.  We all do it in some little way. 

Honesty is the foundation that we have to lay in our marriages and in all relationships.  Proverbs says we can’t solve our problem until we admit it.  In first John it says that if we think we have not sinned we deceive ourselves.  We’re just fooling ourselves if we think we don’t have problems, if we don’t make mistakes and we don’t cause issues to come up in our relationships.  Perhaps a good word for us, a good prayer is Psalm 19 where it says, “Forgive my hidden faults,” to allow that to come and work into our lives.  The three hardest words for us to say in our marriages are, “I was wrong.”  The second three hardest words are, “I need help.”  David was one who was in need of help.  Maybe we can use his example from the many times he talks about it in Psalms but in particular he says, “I sought the Lord and He heard me and He delivered me from all my fears.” It is the Lord who will release us from our fears but we have to face up to them ourselves. 

Another way we can face our fears is to be honest with God. Confession is good for the soul, its true.  Confession is simply nothing more than acknowledging what God knows about us, “God, yes you were right, it was wrong, I was wrong.”  As we do that, as we confess God has given us assurance that He will forgive.  First John 9 is a verse you should commit to memory, “If we confess our sins He is faithful and just to forgive.”  When we admit to God that we make mistakes that it was a mistake whatever it might be.  That it is a failure, we are agreeing with God.  We’re not excusing what went wrong we are just saying it was wrong.  When we confess we’re not going to surprise God.  God knows what’s on our hearts much better than we do sometimes.  So confess knowing that He will not condemn and that he will forgive.  Confession is simply admitting to God that He knows what you know.  Be honest with God. 

And finally, be honest with your spouse.  Be honest with your faults, “I’m stubborn, I admit it, I’m wrong, I apologize.”  When we admit our faults many times we fear that somehow we will be looked down upon by our spouse.  But the truth is it is just the opposite, that we will actually be endeared to our spouse when we admit our faults, when we admit our imperfections.  It is pride that drives us away.  So be honest with your feelings with your spouse.  Talk about them.  Talk about how they scare you.  Be honest with whatever it is that is on your heart.  That is stepping out.  That is being vulnerable.  And that is love.  It helps us take a huge step back towards the perfection in the Garden before the Fall.  If you want a satisfying marriage it means dropping the fig leaves.  It means quit pretending, be honest. Honestly has the power to remove the power that fear holds over us.  For once we are out in the open about our fears it looses the power to control us.  Honesty does one other thing as well, the thing we most desire in our lives.  That is intimacy.  Yet intimacy frightens us a lot as well.  But we will not get better at it until we face it.  I encourage you to do it.  I know you can with God’s help.  Let’s try to restore our relationships and marriages back to Genesis 2.  Shall we?  Amen.

Let me pray for us.

Lord God, we ask that you would watch over us.  You would deal tenderly with us broken people.  And we ask that you would take these words and drive them into our heart as you see fit.  We ask that in your name, amen.