Dissonance: Why is life so fuzzy & elusive?

New Teaching Series
Searching for Eden
Understanding and navigating our culture’s cries for life
• Gender Wars: What does it mean to be male and female?
• Sexuality outside the garden
• Consumerism
• Amusing ourselves to death
• The Overload Syndrome
• Going Global

Dissonance
Why is life so fuzzy & elusive?
Genesis 2:15-25

Dissonance – “Lack of agreement, consistency, or harmony; conflict.”

The Genesis
“The LORD God formed the man out of the dust from the ground and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils, and the man became a living being. The LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there He placed the man He had formed…The LORD God took the man and placed him in the garden of Eden to work it and watch over it…Then the LORD God said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper who is like him…So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to come over the man, and he slept. God took one of his ribs and closed the flesh at that place. Then the LORD God made the rib He had taken from the man into a woman and brought her to the man…This is why a man leaves his father and mother and bonds with his wife, and they become one flesh. Both the man and his wife were naked, yet felt no shame.”
-Genesis 2:15-25

The Design
• Come to life
• A garden
• Work & Care
• Dependence on God
• Interdependence with others like us
• Nakedness…vulnerability…known & valued for who we are
• NO SHAME!!!

The Distortion
• Fear death
• A battlefield
• Work is a dirty word
• Independence is valued
• Others are a threat to us
• Must disguise or cover the real us…no one would celebrate the real me…
• SHAME!!!

God created dissonance to be…
• The language connecting heaven and earth.
“He has made everything appropriate in its time. He has also set eternity in their heart, yet so that man will not find out the work which God has done from the beginning even to the end.”
-Ecclesiastes 3:11

“When God wants to carry a point with His children, He plans His argument into the instincts.”
-Ralph Emerson

“Our deepest instinct is heaven. Heaven is the ache in our bones, the splinter in our heart. Like the whisper of faraway waves we hear crashing in the whorls of a conch shell, the music of heaven echoes, faint, elusive, haunting, beneath and within our daily routines.”
-Mark Buchanan

“For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now. And not only this, but also we ourselves, having the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our body. For in hope we have been saved, but hope that is seen is not hope; for who hopes for what he already sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, with perseverance we wait eagerly for it. In the same way the Spirit also helps our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words;”
-Romans 8:22-26

“Groaning is the lexicon and grammar of our dislocation. Groaning is our default language, our mother tongue.”
-Mark Buchanan

Some ways you might feel the dissonance…
• Fear of failure & inability to take risks
• Frustration with futility at work
• Shame over the real you
• Disgust with chaos in life
• Shallow relationships
• Confusion about your identity & calling
• Others?

I feel the dissonance when…

God created dissonance to…
• Lead us back to Himself.
“These all died in faith without having received the promises, but they saw them from a distance, greeted them, and confessed that they were foreigners and temporary residents on the earth. Now those who say such things make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been remembering that land they came from, they would have had opportunity to return. But they now aspire to a better land – a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for He has prepared a city for them.”
-Hebrews 11:13-16

I feel the dissonance when…

Next Week
Gender Wars: What does it mean to be male and female?