Two Traditions, One Text · Week 1
Where are you?
Genesis 3 · Lutheran and Pentecostal
The story
Adam and Eve eat the one fruit on the menu they were told to leave alone, and the first thing they invent is hiding. God comes walking in the garden in the cool of the day, as he apparently did every evening, and calls out, Where are you? He knows. The question is for them. Adam answers with the oldest speech in the world: fear, then blame, then blaming the woman God gave him, which manages to blame God in the same breath.
Two readings
Lutherans hear God's question as law and gospel in one voice: the hiding exposed, and the same God already on his way to make them coats of skin. Pentecostals hear the ache of a nearness that has become something to run from, and point ahead to Pentecost, when the Spirit would fill people so hiding no longer had to be the pattern. Both hear pursuit, not distance: a God who comes looking rather than waiting to be found.
A prayer both could pray
Lord, you come looking for the ones who hide. Find us where we have been answering with silence, and bring us out into your presence rather than away from it.