Welcome to Broadway on Liberty! It’s opening day which asks us to trust an old story again. That is one of the gifts of theater, and it is one of the gifts of Scripture. We walk into a room already knowing that somebody has sung this song before, and yet we lean forward anyway because old stories keep finding new ways to tell the truth about us.

Hadestown is that kind of story. It takes two ancient Greek myths and retells it in a way we can understand. One story explains the seasons: Persephone, the goddess connected with growth and renewal. She lives part of the year above ground and part of the year below with Hades. When she is above, the earth warms. When she is below, winter settles in. Ancient people did not have weather satellites or Doppler Radar, but they had a story that told the truth as they experienced it: warmth comes and goes, life blooms and fades, and the world keeps moving in circles.

The other story Hadestown reimagines is the tragedy of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus loves Eurydice so much that when she dies, he follows her into the underworld. His music is so beautiful it softens the cold hearts of Hades and Persephone. They agree to let Eurydice return, but only on one condition: Orpheus must walk ahead and not look back until they reach the light.

So he walks. And the whole way back he cannot hear her. He has only the promise. He has only trust. Then, just before they reach the sunlight, doubt gets the better of him. He turns around, and Eurydice disappears back into the shadows.

That is Hadestown in a nutshell. Mistrust grows cold between Hades and Persephone. That coldness spreads into the world. It leaks into Orpheus and Eurydice. Love is offered. Trust is required. Fear whispers, “Look back.” And the old tragedy happens again.

The narrator knows this story has been told before. “It’s an old song,” he sings, “but we’re going to sing it anyway.” That line stays with me because it sounds like church. Scripture survives because we keep singing the old songs in new keys. We tell the story again because the story is still telling the truth.

And one of the truths these old stories keep telling is this: we keep choosing the wrong tree.

Ecclesiastes understands this. “What has been will be again,” the Teacher says. “There is nothing new under the sun.” History does not repeat itself perfectly, but it does rhyme, because human nature does not change as quickly as our contexts do.

A hundred years ago, in the 1920s, America was living through dizzying change: new technologies, mass media, economic promises, immigration anxiety, political division, and arguments about who really belonged. The 2020s have their own version of the same song. Radio became social media. Automobiles became smartphones. Stock speculation became crypto and tech empires. The costumes changed. The ache underneath did not.

When the world feels unstable, we still look for control. We still look for someone to blame. We still divide the world into the good people and the bad people, the insiders and the outsiders, the enlightened and the ignorant. We keep reaching for the power to decide who is right and who is wrong. We keep choosing the wrong tree.

That brings us to Genesis 3, the familiar story of the fruit. Notice, by the way, that Genesis never says it was an apple. It just says fruit. Somewhere along the way our imaginations filled in the detail, which is what human beings do. We add to the story. We make the picture complete. But the part I want us to notice today is not the fruit. It is the trees.

In the garden there is the Tree of Life, and there is the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. God gives the humans every tree in the garden except one. Life is offered. Abundance is offered. Trust is offered. But there is also a boundary, and the serpent knows exactly where to aim the question, “Did God really say that?”

That is where mistrust begins. Not with a dramatic rebellion, not with horns and smoke and thunder, but with a small suspicion: maybe God is holding out on me. Maybe life would be better if I could decide for myself. Maybe I can be God!

And here is the strange thing. When they eat, they do not drop dead. Their eyes are opened. They become aware. They know. The serpent was not telling the whole truth, but he was not telling outright lies. The fruit does give them something. It gives them moral awareness. It gives them the burden of deciding good and evil. What it does not give them is life.

Genesis says they are sent out of the garden before they can reach out and take from the Tree of Life. That detail changes the story. The tragedy is not that they became curious. The tragedy is that they reached first for the tree that promised control instead of the tree that offered life. They reached for the power to judge before they learned how to trust. They became old enough to know, but not wise enough to love.

For me, the garden has always felt like a metaphor for childhood. Ideally, childhood is a kind of Eden. Food appears. Somebody knows where the clean clothes are. Somebody else worries about the bills. You are held inside a world you did not build and cannot yet understand. And then one day you taste something you cannot untaste. You see something. You learn something. You realize the adults are human, too. You discover that safety is more fragile than you thought.

Maybe it was a family fracture, a diagnosis, a betrayal, a funeral, a headline, a moment when the world suddenly got larger and sadder. Childhood was over, and you found yourself east of Eden, wearing clothes you did not know you needed, carrying knowledge you did not ask for.

That is part of being human. We wake up to ourselves. We hide. We blame. We ache. We love. We labor. We lose. And somewhere in all of that, we keep reaching for the same tree. We want the power to name good and evil for ourselves. We want to know who is right and who is wrong. We want to stand in the center and render the verdict. We keep choosing the wrong tree.

Paul sees this pattern when he writes to the Romans. He is writing to a divided church, Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians trying to figure out whether they belong to one another. In the opening chapters, Paul lets everyone feel the satisfaction of judgment. Yes, those people are a mess. Yes, those people have gone wrong. Yes, those people need grace. And then Paul turns the mirror. So do you. So do I. All have sinned. All fall short. All are caught in the same old story.

Then, in Romans 5, Paul says Christ is the new Adam. That does not mean Jesus simply cancels out one bad choice with one good choice, as if salvation were a math problem. It means Christ enters the old human story and opens a new way through it. Adam reaches out to take. Christ stretches out his arms to give. Adam grasps for the power to judge. Christ embraces the power to love.

That is the heart of the temptation. It is not always the desire to do something obviously evil. Most of the time, the temptation is subtler than that. It is the desire to be the one who gets to define good and evil. It is the desire to look at another person, another party, another generation, another church, another country, another family member, and say, “I know exactly what you are.”

And doesn’t that feel like the air we breathe? We are surrounded by platforms built to reward judgment. Who is right? Who is wrong? Who is pure? Who is compromised? Who belongs? Who should be cast out? We scroll through the world like jurors, handed one case after another, asked to decide in seconds what love understands slowly.

Of course, discernment matters. Justice matters. Truth matters. This is not a sermon in praise of moral laziness. The problem is not that we care about good and evil. The problem is that we keep confusing judgment with life. We keep mistaking the satisfaction of being right for the gift of being alive in God.

The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil always feels powerful in the moment. It gives us a clear story. It gives us villains; the sly snake, the gullible woman, the pushover man. It gives us a place to put our fear. It gives us the rush of certainty. But it does not give us life. It leaves us hiding behind fig leaves of self-protection. It leaves us blaming the woman, the man, the serpent, the system, the stranger, the neighbor, the person who voted differently, the person who prays differently, the person who reminds us of what we fear in ourselves.

We keep choosing the wrong tree.

But the gospel is that God does not abandon us east of Eden. God does not stand at the edge of the garden saying, “You should have chosen better.” In Christ, God comes to us where we are: in our hiding, in our blaming, in our fear, in our endless attempts to prove ourselves right.

Every morning there are still two trees. One promises the satisfaction of being right. The other offers the gift of life. One invites us to sort, label, condemn, and control. The other invites us to receive, forgive, repair, and love. One gives us the illusion of godlike certainty. The other gives us communion with God.

And here is the astonishing mercy: when we could not find our way back to the Tree of Life, God came looking for us. Christ entered the story of Adam and Eve, the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, the story of every human being who has ever looked back in fear or mistrust. Christ entered the old song and sang a new ending.

Adam reached out his hand to take. Jesus stretched out his arms to give. Adam grasped for the power to judge. Christ embraced the power to love. Adam’s choice led us into exile. Christ walks into exile, right to the outcasts, with us and opens the way home.

That is why the cross matters here. The cross is not God choosing violence. The cross is God climbing the tree of death to restore us to the Tree of Life. It is God meeting our worst judgment with mercy. It is God receiving our blame, our fear, our violence, our need to be right, and answering not with condemnation but with resurrection.

The cross and resurrection gives us a new ending to the story. The invitation is to notice the tree in front of you today. Notice the conversation where you would rather win than listen. Notice the person you have reduced to a category. Notice the fear that makes judgment feel safer than love. Notice the old song beginning again.

Yet we’re going to sing it again like it will have a different ending. And it can for each of us who have chosen Christ. We have found ourselves grafted onto the tree of life. Keep choosing that tree. Until one day, despite what our eyes and ears and history tells us about the cyclical nature of things. That maybe, one day, all choose the slower way of mercy. Choose the harder way of trust. Choose the holy refusal to make another human being only the worst thing you can say about them. Choose Christ who does not hand us a gavel, but bread and wine. Choose the one who meets us outside the garden and says, even now, the way to life is open.

On that day, every knee will bow and all will acknowledge, instead of just a select few. That is our old song of faith. It is an old song. But we are going to sing it anyway. Because love is worth the risk. Thanks be to God. Amen.