SermonStudio

Adam and Eve had an ideal marriage. He didn't have to hear about all the men she could have married - and she didn't have to hear about the way his mother cooked. It is said that after Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden, Adam once took a walk with his sons, Cain and Abel. Cain noticed the beautiful Garden of Eden and said, "Father, that's a beautiful place. Why don't we live there?" "Son," Adam replied, "we used to live there until your mother ate us out of house and home!"

Although we are accustomed to thinking of Adam as the personal name of a particular historical character, the term is actually a collective noun which stands for all men. This is what the surprising grammatical movement from the singular to the plural implies, in the words of God the Creator in this text: "Let us make man (Adam) in our image ... and let them have dominion ..." (Genesis 1:26)

Our human story is written in the drama of the two Adams. The first Adam is of the earth. In Hebrew, the word for man (Adam) comes from the word for ground (adamah). As we read the story of Adam in chapters two and three of the Book of Genesis, we are reading "moral ideas in the form of a story." (Gregory of Nyssa) Adam misused the gift of freedom, failed to trust God, rebelled against his command, and became enslaved by a sense of inadequacy, insecurity, and anxiety. (Genesis 3:10)

The second Adam is from heaven. He is the Word or Son of God who "became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth." (John 1:14) In the first Adam, man said his defiant, "No," to God. In the second Adam (Christ), God's divine, "Yes," has at last sounded, affirming the dignity and destiny of humanity. As John Henry Newman wrote: "O loving wisdom of our God! When all was sin and shame, a second Adam to the fight and to the rescue came."
Amateur

In a certain haunted castle, a ghost was said to appear only once in every 100 years. A group of amateur photographers was determined to get a picture of the ghost. One of the amateur photographers was chosen by the others to take the picture. He went to the castle and sat in the darkness until midnight, when the apparition became visible. The ghost turned out to be friendly and agreed to pose for a snapshot. The amateur photographer was overjoyed, popped a bulb into his camera, and took the picture. Then he dashed to his studio, developed the negative, and groaned with disappointment. It was underexposed and nearly blank. The amateur photographers drew the following moral from the experience: "The spirit was willing, but the flash was weak"!

The word amateur is often used in the sense of something done poorly by an unskilled person. Actually, the word amateur comes from the Latin "amare" (to love). An amateur is, in this root sense, a person who does something for the sheer love of doing it, not simply for money. Sir Winston Churchill, for example, was called an "amateur painter," even though his works had genuine artistic merit. He was an "amateur" because he worked for the sheer love of painting. In the first book of Plato's Republic, Socrates insisted on the difference between the true artist (in any field) who practices his art (medicine, for example) for the sake of its true object (in the case of medicine, health) and the artist who practices his art "as a moneymaker." Of course, it is right the doctor should earn his fee. However, the earning of the fee must not be the directing motive of his practice. Every amateur reminds us you can buy a man's time, physical presence at a given place, and skilled motions per hour, but you can't buy his enthusiasm, initiative, loyalty, and the devotion of heart. These flow naturally from the man who loves what he is doing.