Preview(S): Transformed...You Can't Fix...

    My kids have reached the age where they occasionally ask me about the inexplicably dumb things that humans seem prone to do. In particular, they tend to ask me how to deal with people who seem inclined to do utterly ridiculous and infuriating things.  They want to know how to make the infuriatingly ignorant people of the world behave themselves, to which I find myself increasingly shrugging and answering, "You can't fix stupid."

    I know it is a trite, and more than slightly arrogant answer, but sometimes the world just presents you with such annoyingly oblivious examples of wanton ignorance that there just seems to be no other answer. You can madden yourself trying to take people and force them to face the truth of their foolishness.  I don't know if the comic Ron White actually was the first person to use the exact phrase "You can't fix stupid", but I feel better when I read the great philosopher Plato's works and realize that as he wrote his famous cave allegory, nearly 2,400 years ago, he was basically saying the same thing.  He just did it with flair.   
     The Bible has another word for un-fixable stupidity; the Bible calls it sin. You can't fix that either, which is not the same thing as saying it cannot be fixed.  I am just saying YOU can't do it. Humanity has been broken for a good long time too.  The second chapter of Genesis lays it out this way:

Genesis 2:15-17
The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. And the LORD God commanded the man, "You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die."

   Some days, I feel like this is a set-up.  God put humanity in the

garden and said, "You see that fruit... don't touch it."  Come on! Everyone knows that means touching that thing must be awesome! Sure enough they touched it and ate it.  Boom!  Death, disease, separation from God, sorrow, suffering...here is all of its birthplace.  Like any other contagion there is a "Patient Zero" and in this case it all falls on the shoulders of Adam.  BTW the Bible blames this all on Adam, not Eve, since Adam could have convinced Eve that it was wrong, and stood up for what was right but instead just went along with her and ate the fruit.  So Adam, not Eve, was the final say on adding evil to the world.  On this issue St. Paul points out that:

Romans 5:12-14
Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned- sin was indeed in the world before the law, but sin is not reckoned when there is no law. Yet death exercised dominion from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sins were not like the transgression of Adam, who is a type of the one who was to come.

So, choosing the apple (it wasn't really and apple by the way...the Bible never specifies the fruit) over eternal life in the garden was a really dumb thing for humanity to do, and that ginormous mistake has followed us generation after generation...actually getting worse, not better, with time.  

   Now if you remember I said earlier that YOU can't fix stupid. I was pointing out that after millennia of humanity trying, and failing, to honor God's laws (and human laws for that matter) things don't really look too good with regard to humanity ever becoming perfect.  Thus, the need for me to give up on trying to defend certain examples of humanity and telling my kids, "you can't fix stupid".  I wish that there was a magic wand God could wave and make all of humanity perfect like God is perfect.  But there is a small problem with that:

to do so would require that God remove the self will and freedom from all of his creation and replace it with his own.  I am going to level with you...I find clowns disconcertingly creepy...but I find marionettes far more so.  There is something so uncanny and lifelike about them.  And yet I know that they are, in fact, not alive.  It's just unsettling. If God were to replace our will with his own, robbing us of all our free will, then we would become a planet of marionettes on strings.  That is the sort of thing that nightmares are made of.  

    So, if humanity has willing chosen the un-fixably stupid path of sin, from which we seem incapable of turning from on our own...And God can't sweep our free will aside and "fix" us without effectively killing all seven billion humans on the planet, what do we do?

    It just so happens God has a plan. I should note this plan is no last second "Hail Mary".  No. This has been the plan from the day humanity stepped foot out of the garden. God knew that to save humanity he would have to do something that both allowed for forgiveness and renewal but did so without undoing the work of creation that created beings that thought and chose for themselves. Something grand was planned.  God chose to come down to Earth and live as one of us.  In doing so he would serve as a path for us to enter into the kingdom of God, imperfect though we are.  In this he would have to not only bring the perfect sacrifice...he would have to BE the perfect sacrifice.  As Jesus began his ministry in the fourth chapter of Matthew,  he entered into the wilderness and for forty days neither ate nor drank.  At the end of that grueling period of suffering the Devil took his turn at tempting Jesus.  He tried appealing to his bodily needs with food: no luck.  He tried appealing to Jesus' mission by offering him the kingdoms of the world without sacrifice: no luck.  He tried appealing to Jesus' divinity by offering him a trick that would make the church leaders bow before him as God: no luck.  Jesus had a plan, and was utterly perfect.  No apple for him. 

     By offering us himself as a sacrifice he lent us his grace, mercy, and forgiveness. And because the sacrifice was perfect and of infinite value the grace, mercy, and forgiveness was perfect and of infinite nature as well.  We all, great and small, good and bad (and frankly monstrous even) are blessed with the opportunity to return to the Kingdom of God, even in the midst of our stupidity.  This is all for the price of faith since Jesus in his perfection already paid the price of our failing.  

    As we prepare to enter into this season of Lent may we always remember the sacrifice of the perfect one who gave his all in order that we imperfect creatures might know that while you can't fix sin, Christ can...and has.