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[Sermon] The Illusion of Self-Sufficiency

Pastor Hector Garfias-Toledo



Lent begins with an honest inventory of our shards. In the wilderness, we confront the deep human impulse to live out of sync with God—to grasp, to control, to fix, and to prove we can make ourselves whole. This illusion of self-sufficiency promises strength but leaves isolation in its wake. Shame convinces us that brokenness must be hidden or repaired alone. Yet Genesis reveals a different story: God moves toward vulnerable humanity, not away. The desert becomes the place where the illusion cracks and grace begins to shine through.


Sermon Transcript

From YouTube's automatic captions, lightly edited by AI for readability.


Grace to you and peace from God—ABBA, Father, Mother, Creator, our Parent—and the Lord Jesus Christ, our Savior, our Lord. And we said, Amen.

 

The inventory of the shards. As I was looking at these pieces that David was showing earlier, I was wondering if we can think of what may be that which, in the past few days, has smashed our lives—or at least makes us feel that way.

 

And as our lives are maybe looking like that, I am wondering: how many of us have ever tried to fix someone? To fix a spouse? To fix a child? To fix a parent? To fix a friend? How is it working for you? How?

 

Last Wednesday we were reflecting about Lent and this Lenten journey—a journey of self-discovery, a journey where you and I come to honesty about our cracks, about embracing death—physical death, but also the deaths that we experience in our lives: broken relationships, hopes that are smashed, and so on. But also the importance and the need that we have for each other, the interdependence and interconnectedness of all of us as the body of Christ.

 

This journey of Lent, this time, this pause that we are making, is a time when we remember that this is a journey to be tempered. And tempering, my siblings in Christ, you are aware, takes time and takes trust. And trust needs to be cultivated and requires patience. And patience is not—this trust is not—just a rational decision or conclusion of saying, “I am trusting now.” It is not that easy. I think it is a matter of the heart. It is a matter of really being vulnerable and being willing to be open to the reality of who we are, whose we are, and how we are connected with others.

 

Today, in the reading from Genesis, chapter three begins with this verse: “Then the Lord God took the earth creature and settled it in the Garden of Eden, so that it might cultivate and care for the land.” God entrusts the earth creature—not only to take care and to be a servant, but to co-create and to partner with God in creation. God entrusts this earth creature with the stewardship of God’s economy.

 

And this story in the book of Genesis, for many years and centuries, has been taken or read or interpreted as God blaming humanity—and especially blaming women—for giving the man the fruit. It turns into a story about blame. But it is truly a story about God’s love for all creation. It is sad to see how this story has continued to be used to blame, to continue to play the blame game against each other. It is a story that we like to use to fix our own brokenness by seeking others’ imperfections to be fixed.

 

So how is it working for you—trying to fix someone? When we take an attitude of trying to fix others, what we are really doing is turning inwardly to ourselves, coming to believe in this self-sufficiency, our own humanity, and to be self-righteous.

 

Walter Brueggemann, this theologian of the Old Testament who passed away not long ago, says we humans are propelled in ways that we do not understand to live in willful self-assertion or in willful abdication, refusing the covenantal invitation to be God’s partners in the life of the world—refusing the covenantal invitation to be God’s partners in the life of the world.

 

This refusal, my siblings, leads us to believe that brokenness in the world is the result of an incapable, passive, and indifferent God who allows injustice and suffering in the world.

 

But the passage in the book of Genesis brings to us two aspects that are important for our own human existence and that have to do with God’s relationship with all creation: how we see ourselves, how we relate to others, and how we relate to God.

 

The first thing that I see is that this passage reminds us of the lack of trust that leads to shame—but also of the abundance of gold and grace that surpasses that shame.

 

And we know that shame is one of the things that is flowing and running freely right now in our world. Shaming has become the best, most profitable power, because in shaming we are destroying one another.

 

When I read the passage of Genesis for today, something new came to me—something that I had not really seen, something that I probably read but never really paid too much attention to. The earth creatures, as they are named in the translation we experienced today, experience both guilt and shame.

 

Let me make the difference between guilt and shame. Guilt is the feeling that we have when we do something wrong, when we make those sad decisions that I talked about to the young worshipers last Wednesday for Ash Wednesday. It is, to some degree, some sort of remorse for the actions that we take. But shame is deeper. Shame is believing that we are never whole and that we are bad. And that is a different thing.

 

In the story, we see that the first thing the earth creatures experience is shame.

 

Gabor Maté, who is a doctor and a survivor of the Holocaust—a Hungarian Jewish man—tells the story that when he was a baby, his mother gave him away in order to save him from the Holocaust. He is now a professor in British Columbia, in Vancouver. I like to follow his work. He talks about shame, and it is interesting to hear him say that a child is not born with shame. Shame in a child comes from being cut off from human contact—separation.

 

This shame is quiet. The separation and lack of attention that a child experiences makes the child develop a perception of being rejected. And when the child feels rejected internally, the way we as human beings work is that the child starts making conclusions. One of the conclusions is: “Something is wrong with me. That is why I am rejected.” And in order to counter that experience, the child creates this self-defense mechanism. As the child grows, the child starts developing this need to work harder in order to fix what is wrong with the child. And not only that—the child also starts finding what to fix in the lives of others.

 

So you can think of the cycle that is created in the life of a person who lives in shame.

 

In the story that we read today in Genesis, the humans experience that shame. They realize that something is wrong with them. They realize that they are not dressed properly—when actually they had been like that for who knows how long. But in that moment, they realize that they are not dressed properly, which makes them ashamed of each other and afraid of God.

 

They see themselves as exposed, inadequate. They are ashamed—and that is the knowledge of evil. Because shame separates. Shame brings a lack of trust—or shame is the product of a lack of trust.

 

We are living in a time when we are cutting off from each other. We are widening the gaps between us for whatever reason—you name it. Just this morning, I mistakenly turned on one of the news reports, and the first thing I heard made me wonder how low we human beings can get. We are now pulling against each other over two Olympic competitors, turning it into a political circus, trying to shame one another—whether you support this girl or these Olympic winners. And the world goes on shaming one another.

 

We live in a world like this, inflicting shame. We are trying to fix each other. This cycle, this isolation, leads to this idea of autonomy, self-sufficiency, and the illusion of individualism—this illusion of individualism that is engraved and instilled in the structures and institutions that we are part of.

 

This perception that others need to be fixed—or that we need to help God because God cannot fix the problems that we identify—is a clear example of the lack of trust that we human beings have. That is why we want to take things into our own hands.

 

This deep, insatiable human propensity to live out of sync with God, through an uncontrolled desire, leads us to live illusory lives of self-sufficiency, despising others, and believing that we need to prop up God’s inability to make things whole.

 

Shame isolates, but reconciliation reunites.

 

God gives consequences to the creatures—for what they did. They have to leave the garden. Even when the man and the woman try to fix things, they use leaves to cover themselves. But if you continue reading the chapter, God takes the time to make clothes for them.

 

In other words, just like we as parents—how many times? Or maybe think of a loving relationship. How are things going when you try to fix your spouse, your child, your friend, or anybody else? But when we love one another in a loving relationship, we are able to say, “I love you, but I do not like what you are doing right now. Because what I see that you are doing right now is hurting you and hurting others.”

 

Love is the capacity to tell others, with compassion and care and graciousness, for the sake of the person, to grow and to live in that loving relationship.

 

If you read chapter three, verse 21, it says, “And the Lord God made garments of skins for the man and for his wife, and clothed them” before they had to leave the garden.

 

The picture that came to my mind—I like stories, and I like to imagine them—was of a loving God, with a golden thread, bringing together the skins, stitching clothes together for God’s children, God’s creation. Maybe with a tear in God’s eye, and yet making clothes for them so they could continue to go on.

 

God sees their shame, makes things right, moves toward them. God does not abandon them. And this story, then, is a declaration of God’s first step in a pattern of reconciliation made visible through our cracks, shards, and the scars of our journey.

 

In this journey that we are walking together, this is a story about God’s reckless love from the beginning—to repair, restore, reconcile, and mend. And that, to me, my siblings in Christ, is the good news for today.

 

May this same God continue to put our pieces together, as God continues to repair, restore, and reconcile. This is the knowledge of good.

 

Amen.

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