The Mathematics of Sin

I've been substitute teaching math at the Jr. High a couple times this week. That and Todd Wilken's close of the show Thursday got me to thinking.
  In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth and everything that is in them, saw that it was very good and said so. The man and his wife were the pinnacle of this creation and they had the freedom to do anything they wanted and it was good, except to eat from one single tree out of the whole garden. It wasn't a garden in the sense that is staked out in ones back yard but more of a living grocery and feed store for all living creatures of whom the man and his wife cared for, that is both plant and beast. (Hard for us to imagine but Eve likely thought the spiders were all cute as a bug.) Everything they did was good and right. There was no wrong. But there was one prohibition. "Do not eat from the tree that is in the middle of the garden. For the day you eat of it you shall surely die." -God.
  One thing not allowed. Everything else imaginable was o.k.  I suspect that things we consider off limits in all or limited contexts the two in the garden would have never thought of anyway. But that is besides the point. All things were permitted in the sense that they could do no wrong because they were created good and perfect. The contrast comes in after the temptation and Eve's choosing to listen to the serpent rather than the words of her God and Father. It was not just a single event that she pondered and decided never to do again. One sin leads to another. (Perhaps I should have titled this the "Dominoes of Sin" or "How Lays Potato Chips Got it's Advertising Started" I am a self identified chipoholic) "She gave some to her husband who was with her and he ate it." The man chose to follow the example of his wife rather than listen to the Word of his God and Father. Before they could fulfill their blessing to be fruitful and multiply they added one sin to another to equal a less than rich inheritance for all the world's children to follow, death. Not just lack of breathe or rotting, but a separation they and we have consistently blamed the creator for when all the evidence points back to us for fault and blame. It is us who have missed the mark, crossed the out of bounds line, taken rather than given. We blame God for making one food rule when more than we could eat was free just for the picking.  We had true wisdom and traded it for a lie and we keep doing the same thing over and over and for each additional sin we commit we blame God again.
  What was once one prohibition that was easy to honor has now become a life of full death.
Food was to keep us nourished and alive. Now we have limited choices in many places, lack of good food, food borne illness, tooth decay, cholesterol, obesity, anorexia diabetes, hypoglycemia and just plane picky eaters at our tables. But is more than that. We fight over water rights and food laws. Sin is more than just an eating disorder among us. Sin permeates every aspect of our lives because food wasn't the issue in sin. It was whose word we were  listening to, the devil's, our own or our God and Father?
  There is no activity in the world in which we are involved that is not stained and ruined by our sin. Of all the things that we can do with modern technology and careful planning there is nothing we can do that is completely right. At best we are left with the lesser of evils. "There is not one who does good, no, not one."
While this means utter destruction, God the Father isn't about to let his creation destroy itself. He will do that himself. (and creatively at that) Yet He started over without destroying anything. The world was going to go his way even if it killed him.
  Enter the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity. That is Jesus enters our equation. The separation of sinful man and God has an new element in the problem. The Son of God has always been active in the world but when he took on human flesh to be borne of the Virgin Mary the multiplication of sin and sinners was about to meet the 'greater than' sign >.  God in the person of Jesus the Christ came into this world of chaos. He did not come as a chaotician. He came as the second Adam. Borne of a virgin conceived by the Holy Spirit he was a flesh and blood human who was not stained by sin and listened to his God and Father instead of a word that would promise him personal glory. "If I glorify myself, my glory is nothing. It is my Father who glorifies me, of whom you say, 'He is our God.'" He did not come to teach us how to add up the good works for God and subtract all the evil deed from our life. He did come to divide the believers from the unbelievers, but that is more of a faith issue rather than a mathematical one. That kind of division is just plain hell.
  Jesus as the second Adam is the first one to live out a perfect life. But perfection alone isn't enough here, because he came not to live perfectly for himself but in place of all. One in place of every single person ever. And this was accomplished by his life being greater than ours. And then being greater than ours> he took our countless sins and infinite guilt to his one death on the cross. He became death for us. His death was not a simple matter of joining us in the life ending process by means of asphyxiation or blood loss or trauma or even the trite, 'It was his time', but having to cry out to his heavenly Father "Why have you forsaken me." and not hearing an answer. I suspect he said these words for our understanding of the atonement full well knowing that his God and Father wasn't listening to this one full of the world's sin. He went from the favored of the Lord to being the disfavored. An eternity of separation from his God and Father with whom he had already spent an eternity was placed into 6 hours of agony before those wonderful words of Jesus, "It is finished."
  Our sin, all our sin is subtracted by Jesus. Yet we are not left with a zero either. All his life, the wholeness of his life, every good work, every good thought, his very perfect person is added to us. In God's accounting ledger we are complete. This the Holy Spirit continues in us through Word and Sacrament all our days in this life until we carried by Christ into the grave and out again into the life in heaven where there is the freedom to do without there being any sin ever.