Light Work. Where are you? FMC

Intro/scripture

Genesis 3:8–13 NIV

Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?” He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.” And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?” The man said, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.” Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”

Pray.

Illustration….

Part One: What Hiding Actually Costs Us

Before we can understand God’s question, we need to understand what the hiding actually is. Because the hiding in Genesis 3 is not just physical — two people crouching behind some shrubbery. It’s the first portrait of what shame does to us.

Psychiatrist and author Curt Thompson, in The Soul of Shame, makes a distinction worth sitting with: shame is not the same as guilt.

Guilt says, “I did something bad.”

Shame says something far more devastating: “I am something bad.”

Guilt is about behavior.

Shame is about identity.

And while guilt can motivate change, shame almost always motivates hiding.

This is exactly what we see in the garden. Adam and Eve don’t just feel guilty for what they’ve done — they feel exposed for what they are. They sewed fig leaves together before God even arrived. The hiding started before the footsteps. Shame had already gotten to work.

Lewis Smedes, the theologian who spent decades writing about grace and the human condition, described shame as “a vague, undefined heaviness that presses on our spirit, dampens our gratitude for the goodness of life, and slackens the free flow of joy.” The people in the garden were experiencing the world’s first case of that heaviness — and their response was entirely human: get away, cover up, don’t be seen.

Curt Thompson argues that shame operates neurologically — it literally rewires the stories we tell about ourselves. What begins as a moment of exposure becomes a narrative: I am not enough. I am too much. I am the kind of person God would not want to find. That narrative is a lie. But it is a very old one.

Part Two: Understanding Sin — A Wesleyan View

If we’re going to understand why the hiding happens, we need to be honest about what sin actually is. And the Wesleyan-Methodist tradition gives us a remarkably full picture — one that is neither too soft nor too narrow.

John Wesley distinguished between what he called inward sin and outward sin. Inward sin is the corruption of the heart — the bent will, the disordered desires, the deep inclination toward self over God that we are all born with. Wesley described this as originating in what the tradition calls original sin: not primarily as a legal verdict inherited from Adam, but as a profound spiritual wound that touches every human being. He preferred the term “inbeing sin” to describe this inward corruption — something closer to a disease of the soul than a courtroom charge.

Outward sin is the fruit of that corruption: the choices we make, the actions we take, the ways we willingly transgress what we know to be true and good. Wesley defined sin most precisely as “a voluntary transgression of a known law of God.” This definition matters for Wesleyan theology because it opens space for grace to do its full work — sanctifying us progressively from the inside out, not just forgiving us legally from the outside in.

But here is where the Wesleyan tradition goes further than many others. Wesley insisted that sin is never merely a private matter. There is no holiness, he wrote, but social holiness. What he originally meant by this was that we cannot grow in grace alone — we need community, accountability, the body of Christ. But the logic of his theology runs deeper than that. If sin is inward corruption turned outward into action, then sin that is organized, institutionalized, and embedded in the structures of a society is not less sinful for being collective. It is more dangerous — because it is invisible.

Individual Sin

Individual sin is the most familiar category. It is the lie told to protect yourself. The grudge held long past its reason. The addiction fed in secret. The relationship betrayed. The moment you knew what was right and chose differently. This is what most of us think of when we hear the word “sin” — and it is real, and it matters. The hiding in Genesis 3 begins here. Adam and Eve make a personal choice, and that choice immediately damages their relationship with God, with each other, and with themselves. Individual sin is always first a rupture in love.

Wesley understood that individual sin is not merely moral failure — it is a turning away from the love of God and neighbor that is the heart of Christian holiness. When he defined Christian perfection as “love of God and neighbor filling the whole heart,” the corollary was clear: sin is whatever displaces that love. Pride displaces it. Lust displaces it. Fear displaces it. So does indifference. The Wesleyan tradition holds us to a high and demanding standard of personal holiness — not as a burden, but as the fruit of genuine transformation.

Systemic Sin

But the garden teaches us something else too. When sin enters the world in Genesis 3, it doesn’t stay contained. By Genesis 4, a brother is dead. By Genesis 6, the earth is filled with violence. Sin has a way of scaling up — from the heart of one person to the relationships between people to the structures that organize entire societies.

Systemic sin — sometimes called structural or social sin — is what happens when the patterns, policies, laws, and institutions of a society are organized in ways that consistently produce injustice, harm, and dehumanization, often without any single person needing to intend it. It is sin that has been baked into the architecture. And the Wesleyan tradition, rooted in Wesley’s own fierce engagement with the social conditions of 18th-century England, has always taken it seriously.

Wesley himself went to the coal mines and the slums and the prisons of Bristol and London not only to preach personal salvation but because he understood that poverty, exploitation, and degradation were not merely the consequences of individual bad choices — they were the product of systems that needed confronting. He organized lending libraries and loan funds for the unemployed. He campaigned against the distillers not primarily over alcohol but because they were exploiting the poor. And most powerfully, he wrote Thoughts on Slavery in 1774, which argued that the slave trade was a monstrous systemic evil — not just the sin of individual slaveholders, but of every society and economy that benefited from it.

“Freedom is unquestionably the birth right of all mankind, Africans as well as Europeans: to keep the former in a state of slavery is a constant violation of that right, and therefore also of justice.”

— John Wesley, Thoughts on Slavery (1774)

Wesley did not separate the gospel of personal transformation from the demand for social transformation. For him, they were the same thing, seen from two angles.

Examples of Systemic Sin in Our World

What might Wesley name today? The following are not exhaustive — they are starting points for honest reflection:

Racial injustice.  When policies, practices, and assumptions in housing, education, healthcare, and criminal justice consistently produce worse outcomes for people of color — regardless of anyone’s individual intention — this is systemic sin. The disparities are documented, persistent, and traceable to decisions made across generations. A Wesleyan ethic asks: who bears the cost of these systems, and who has benefited? What does love of neighbor require of us in response?

Poverty and economic inequality.  When economic structures consistently reward the already wealthy while trapping others in cycles of debt, low wages, and limited opportunity, the Wesleyan tradition does not allow us to simply attribute this to individual laziness or bad choices. Wesley’s own ministry was defined by material engagement with the poor — not charitable sentiment at a distance, but presence and advocacy. His general rules instructed Methodists to “do no harm” and to practice “works of mercy,” and those rules were never merely about personal piety.

Exploitation of creation.  Wesley’s theology of holiness extended, in his own words, to “environmental relations.” When the economic systems of a society routinely extract and degrade the natural world for profit — with the costs borne disproportionately by the poor and the vulnerable — this too is a form of systemic sin. The Wesleyan vision of holiness is cosmic, not merely personal.

Structures that silence and exclude.  Wesley was remarkably progressive for his era in his commissioning of women as lay preachers and his insistence on the spiritual equality of all people. When the structures of a church or society are organized in ways that consistently exclude, silence, or diminish people on the basis of who they are rather than how they live, that too falls under the Wesleyan critique.

None of this is to say that systemic sin excuses individual responsibility. The Wesleyan tradition holds both in tension: you are personally accountable for your choices and you are also embedded in systems that shape those choices, and the church has a responsibility to name both. Personal holiness and social holiness are not competing values in this tradition. They are the same root, growing in two directions.

Sin and Hiding

Here is the thread that connects all of this back to Genesis 3. Whether sin is inward or outward, personal or systemic, its signature is always the same: it hides. It hides in the heart behind rationalization. It hides in behavior behind habit and justification. And it hides in institutions behind policy, tradition, and the defense that “that’s just the way things are.”

God’s question — “Where are you?” — is addressed to all of it. It is asked of the individual hiding in shame. And it is asked of every community and society that has organized itself around injustice while insisting it has nothing to hide. The light of God’s question exposes what we’ve been covering. That is not punishment. That is the first condition of healing.

Part Three: The God Who Walks Into the Garden Anyway

Here is what the text refuses to let us miss: God came anyway.

He didn’t wait for Adam and Eve to come out. He didn’t post a notice that forgiveness was available upon request. He walked into the garden — the same garden, the same cool of the same day — and he called. The pursuit is immediate. The question is immediate.

Edward Welch, in Shame Interrupted, writes that the cross is the fullest expression of this pursuit — God not just walking into a garden but entering all the way into our shame, taking it on, being stripped and exposed and mocked so that we would never have to earn our way back out of hiding. The question “Where are you?” in Genesis 3 is the first word of a very long sentence that ends at Calvary.

“God’s grace not only cancels the legal guilt of sin — it also breaks the lingering power of shame.”

— Edward T. Welch, Shame Interrupted

Notice too that when Adam answers, God doesn’t immediately move to punishment. He asks another question: “Who told you that you were naked?” This is perhaps the most searching question in the whole passage. Behind every person who is hiding, there is a voice that told them they were too much or not enough — a parent, a failure, an enemy, a lie whispered in a garden. God’s question cuts right to it: where did that story come from? Because it didn’t come from me.

The Wesleyan tradition’s great gift here is its insistence that grace is not merely forensic — it does not only declare us acquitted. Grace is therapeutic. It heals. Wesley used the language of “curative grace” — the Holy Spirit working within us to restore the image of God that sin has distorted, not just to pardon the record of what we’ve done. This means that God walking into the garden is not just a legal transaction. It is a doctor entering a ward.

Part Four: The First Step Out of Hiding

Coming out of hiding is not a single dramatic moment, though sometimes it is. More often it is a series of small, terrifying decisions to be a little more honest — with God, with another person, with yourself — than you were yesterday.

Adam’s answer to God’s question is incomplete. He tells God where he is, but he buries the real answer inside an excuse: “I was afraid.” He doesn’t say “I disobeyed.” But he does answer. He steps out of the trees. And the conversation begins.

This matters for us. The invitation of this sermon is not to have it all together before you come to God. It is simply to answer. To stop running the calculations about whether you’re acceptable enough to be honest. God is already in the garden. The question is already in the air. Coming out of hiding doesn’t require you to have resolved everything — it just requires you to take one step toward the voice.

And if your hiding is not only personal — if it’s the comfortable silence you’ve kept about injustice, the systems you’ve benefited from without examining, the structures your community has built or maintained without questioning — the same invitation applies. The light of God’s question falls on all of it. Coming into that light is not comfortable. But it is the only direction in which healing lies.

“The lightness of grace does not lift all the sandbags that drag the spirit down. It lightens life by removing one very dead weight in particular — the weight of anxiety about being an unacceptable person.”

— Lewis B. Smedes, Shame and Grace

Application

Before Sunday becomes Monday, sit with these questions:

1.  Where am I hiding personally?

Not in general — specifically. What part of your interior life have you been keeping out of the light? What habit, what fear, what wound, what failure? Name it before God. The naming is the beginning of the conversation.

2.  Who told me I was naked?

What voice — real or internal — defined you as too broken, too far gone, too shameful to be found? Name it. It needs a name before it can be challenged by a truer voice.

3.  Where am I hiding collectively?

Are there injustices in your city, your workplace, your community, your church that you’ve grown comfortable not seeing? What would it cost you to bring those into the light? The Wesleyan tradition does not allow the answer to be silence.

4.  Can I take one step out of the trees?

This could be a prayer. A conversation with someone you trust. An honest look at something you’ve avoided. Simply saying — to no one but God — “I’m here. I’m afraid. But I’m here.” That’s enough to start.

Conclusion

The first question in the Bible is asked in the dark, to people who are frightened, who are hiding, who have every reason to believe the answer to their situation is judgment.

God asks it anyway. And he asks it not as a prosecutor building a case but as someone who made this garden, who walked in it every evening, who knew the sound of their breathing, and who is not willing to let shame have the last word.

“Where are you?”

It is asked of you. Not of the version of you that has everything together. Of you — right now, as you are. It is asked of our communities, our churches, our systems. Of every place where something has been covered that God’s light is trying to reach.

Come out of hiding. The light is on. And it is not there to expose you. It is there to find you.