Scripture: John 9: 1-3,
6-7
(1) As he passed by, he saw a man blind from his birth. (2) And his disciples asked
him, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" (3)
Jesus answered, "It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works
of God might be made manifest in him. (6) As he said this, he spat on the ground and
made clay of the spittle and anointed the man's eyes with the clay, (7) saying to him,
"Go, wash in the pool of Silo'am" (which means Sent). So he went and washed and
came back seeing.
Selections from the Book of Genesis, Chapters 2 and 3
Even though we often merge them together in our minds, there are two distinct creation
stories in The Book of Genesis. The first describes the creation of the world as we know
it in six days, with a seventh day of rest for the Creator. The second describes a
beautiful garden in which the Creator has placed, among other creatures, a man and a woman
and two special trees.
Today's sermon focuses on the second of these creation stories, found in Genesis,
chapters 2 and 3. Listen for the Word of God:
In the beginning, God created an orderly, stable world and filled it with plants,
birds, and animals. Then, as the crown of creation, God created a human being in God's
image, and named him Adam because he had been formed from the earth (in Hebrew the word
for earth is "adama"). God put Adam in a garden called Eden, and told him to
tend it and enjoy its fruits. In the middle of the garden were two special trees, the Tree
of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. God told Adam that he could eat
from any of the plants in the garden, including the Tree of Life which would have made him
live forever, but he was not to eat the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and
Evil, "for on the day you eat of it, you will die."
Seeing that Adam was alone and none of the animals was a suitable mate for him, God
took one of Adam's ribs (or, according to scholars, one of his sides) and made a woman, a
creature formed of the same human substance as Adam, prompting Adam to say when he saw
her, "This one is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh." The Bible makes a
point of telling us that the first man and the first woman were naked but felt no shame.
At this point, the serpent enters the story, described as "more cunning than all
the other animals God had made" and apparently living only to cause trouble. He
tempted the woman to eat the forbidden fruit on the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and
Evil, telling her that God is jealous of her and Adam and wants to keep all knowledge for
God's own self. When the woman saw how tempting the forbidden fruit was, she took some off
the tree and ate, gave it to her husband who was standing right beside her and he ate it
as well. The Bible tells us that immediately "their eyes were opened and they
realized that they were naked." So they sewed fig leaves together to cover
themselves.
Later in the day, God appeared in the garden, looking for the man and the woman. But
the man and woman tried to hide from God, explaining that they were naked. God asked them,
"Who told you that you were naked? Have you been eating of that tree that I told you
not to eat from?" Adam replied, "It wasn't my fault. The woman You gave me, she
talked me into it!" The woman tried to excuse herself, too. "It wasn't my fault,
the serpent talked me into it."
At the end of the story, God told the serpent it will crawl on its belly and lick dust
forever. God banished the man and woman from the garden and told them their life will be
full of pain and hard work. To Adam, God says, "By the sweat of your brow shall you
get bread to eat, until you return to the earth from which you were taken." To Eve:
"I will make childbirth painful. . . . Your desire will be for your husband and he
shall rule over you." To them both: "You shall one day die and return to the
earth from which you came."
Then God made fur skin clothing for Adam and the woman. The man and woman left the
Garden of Eden and settled down outside it to the east. Adam named his mate, Eve, meaning,
Source of Life. Together, they had children, Cain, Abel, Seth, and many other sons and
daughters.
It has been said that "if there existed only a single sense for the words of
scripture, then the first commentator who came along would discover it, and other hearers
would experience neither the labor of searching, nor the joy of finding." (Ephrem the
Syrian, quoted in "Amazing Grace" by Kathleen Norris). As Dr. Jack Rogers said
last evening in his sermon for Steve Neuder's ordination and installation as Associate
Pastor for Children, Youth and Family Ministries, we always read and interpret scripture
through the lenses of our culture and subculture, our language and life experience.
Sometimes the lens through which we are interpreting scripture seems so comfortable that
we don't even realize it exists.
The lens through which the Apostle Paul and others such as Augustine read this story
focused their attention on the sinfulness of humankind. Certainly there is more than
enough sinfulness to go around each of us is a sinner and needs the grace and forgiveness
of God and one another. Each of us needs to practice the disciplines of humility and
self-examination that lead us to change and reflect more and more the love and justice of
God in our life.
Nevertheless, sometimes the lens we are using becomes so thick and clouded that the
truth of scripture can no longer shine through. Such is the case with the way much of the
church has interpreted this passage of Genesis. We were so obsessed with sin and
punishment that we have read these into an important text in which they might not exist at
all. The time has come for a different set of lenses. As Matthew Fox writes, "The
time has come to let anthropocentrism go and with it to let the preoccupation with human
sinfulness give way to divine grace. In the process sin itself will be more fully
understood and more effectively dealt with." ("Original Blessing") Or, in
the words of Meister Eckhart, "Only those who dare to let go can dare to
re-enter." I invite you, today, to let go of what you think you know of this story,
to set your clouded lenses aside, so that you may re-enter it from a different perspective
and hear the Word of God for you.
The story of the Garden of Eden is not a newspaper report of an actual event,
describing the human race as beginning with two full-grown, Hebrew-speaking adults and a
talking snake. Nor is it the story of two people who could have lived happily ever after
if only they had done everything right, but instead were punished forever for making one
mistake. The story does tell us something profoundly true about the emergence of humankind
and our relationship with God but not what most of us were taught that it tells us. This
story is not about condemnation and judgment. It tells us what a wonderful, complicated,
painful, and rewarding thing it is to be a human being. "The story of the Garden of
Eden is a tale, not of Paradise Lost, but of Paradise Outgrown, not of Original Sin but of
the Birth of Conscience." (Harold Kuschner in "How Good Do We Need to Be?")
Set aside the notion that this story is about the fall of Adam and Eve and read it as a
description of the differences people long ago realized exist between human beings and the
rest of the animal world. Try it. It works. What if God's words at the end of the story
are not punishment for eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, but rather a
description of what it means to be human?! When we take off the lens of punishment and
re-read the story, it's as if shackles and blinders had been removed and we're suddenly
free to know the full love of the God who created us.
Could it be that when God told Adam not to eat the fruit of the forbidden tree, God
gave not just a prohibition but a warning, as when you tell a friend, "You know, if
you get that promotion, you'll get more money but have less time with your family. You'll
have to make decisions that will hurt people. Are you sure you want it?"
Human life is infinitely more complicated than animal life because we are alert to the
moral dimensions of the choices we make, and the more authentically human we are, the more
complicated our lives become. Maybe that tree exists in the story because God actually
hoped that Adam and Eve would eat from it, although God knew it would make their lives
painful and complicated and God winced at the pain to which they would be condemning
themselves because God didn't want to be the only One in the world who knew the difference
between Good and Evil?
The story of the Garden of Eden ends not with punishment as we've been taught, but with
an accurate and poetic description of the joy, the pain and the complexity of being human.
First, God says that Adam will have to work for his food, earning his bread by the
sweat of his brow instead of searching for it as animals do. For animals, food may be hard
to come by. They may have to be constantly on guard against predators, but as far as we
know, animals do not have to make moral decisions. When it comes to food, animals are
driven by instinct. Human beings, on the other hand, find issues of supporting ourselves
and our families much more complicated because of creative and moral dimensions.
The statement that we earn our bread by the sweat of our brow describes not only
physical labor but the anxiety that is an inevitable part of a person's earning a living.
First, we have to choose a career from among thousands of possibilities. We spend many
an anxious moment wondering if we've made the right decision and regularly throughout our
life we'll agonize over whether we should do something else instead. Even such a seemingly
basic decision as being a home-maker is made in the face of enormous outside pressure.
Then we all have to decide how hard to work. Instinct does not tell us precisely how to
balance work with family, spiritual growth and recreation.
It is by the sweat of our brow that we make ethical decisions at work: how honest shall
we be? How do we balance profit with community good and fairness to employees? Do we shade
the truth to close a sale? No animal has to worry about those concerns.
Earning our living by the sweat of our brow is not a punishment, no matter how much it
feels like it on Monday morning! Earning our living by the sweat of our brow describes the
creative gift of being human.
Secondly, God says that Eve will find childbirth and child-rearing painful. I can
testify first-hand that this true. But I've seen cows give birth on the Smutny Dairy and
that doesn't look like a piece of cake, either. They bellow loudly enough to wake up the
whole house at night. So there must be something more to God's statement than just labor
pains. And there is. Within two hours of its birth, a calf is standing on its own feet,
and within a year is able to survive on its own. On the other hand, a one-year-old human
child has just learned to walk and it takes years of parental attention and love, the
support of an entire village, and a whole lot of genuine anguish to help a human child
grow into a healthy, whole adult. Yet, as a friend said when Chris was born, most days
they're worth it, and the opportunity to be part of the process of helping Chris and Ken
and the other children and youth I know move from infancy into adulthood is one of the
greatest joys of my life.
The Hebrew word for pain (used when God says Eve will know pain in child rearing) is
the same word used later to describe the pain God feels in the time of Noah at seeing how
badly the world has turned out. Could it be that when God tells Adam and Eve that
sexuality, parenthood and creativity will be painful, God isn't so much punishing them as
saying to them, "You ate of that tree because you wanted to be like God, knowing Good
and Evil? Well, you're about to find out how frustrating it is to be like God, to create
something and then give up control of what you've created, to want something to turn out
as perfectly as you pictured it in your mind and then see how far short the reality falls
of your original intention. There's more pain than you could ever imagine in knowing about
Good and Evil."
The price we pay for our humanity - for being able to feel love, joy, hope,
achievement, faithfulness, and creativity - is that we can also feel loss, dread,
frustration, jealousy, betrayal and anguish. "You'll have pain in
child-rearing," says God. That's not punishment; it is a description of what it means
to be human.
Finally there is the third description of what it means to be human, rather than to be
any other kind of creature: We know that we will die. Is that punishment? Or reality?
Strange as it sounds, I don't want to give up that knowledge any more than I want to
live without the first two dimensions of what it means to be human. I'm not saying that
death is good. Death is terrible, disruptive, and final. But death is not a punishment for
sin -- neither Adam and Eve's, nor yours or mine. At times we might ask, as my father did
in his struggle with cancer last year, "What did I do to deserve this?" But
that's because we feel better if we can identify a reason for what has happened it helps
the world make sense and we want the world to make sense.
The inescapable truth is that people get sick who don't deserve to suffer. We don't
have to be a terrible sinner to die; everyone dies. Humans die and every other kind of
animal does too. Sickness and death as punishment for wrongdoing is not what this creation
story is about. When we are free of that notion, we can be free from thinking that if
we're perfect enough, we will not get sick and die; we can be free from the thought that
the trouble we're experiencing is punishment for something we cannot even remember.
Knowledge of our mortality is a gift not a punishment, and a description of what it
means to be human. Time is precious because we know we have only a limited supply of it
and there is no way we can buy more. When we're young, we can be comfortable wasting time,
wishing it would go by faster in our impatience for the next milestone in our lives,
because we assume we have an endless supply of it. But the growing knowledge that our
years are limited makes our choices matter. If we had all the time in the world, if we
could indeed live forever, what we choose to do would not matter as much. What we didn't
do today, what we got wrong today, the good we didn't do today, we could get around to
doing right somewhere down the line.
Instead, "every choice is a courageous act of ruling out all the things that we
will never do because there will not be time enough for all of them." (Harold
Kuschner) Because we know we are mortal, we invest ourselves in things that will outlast
us. Shakespeare wrote his plays, and Mozart his symphonies, to earn money to feed their
families, but they also did it to be creative, to make use of their talents, to leave
something of themselves behind when their lives ended. We teach children, we discover
scientific breakthroughs, we volunteer in our communities, we raise and give money to
charitable causes and we serve on church committees in order to make the world a better
place and to leave a part of ourselves behind. Only a human being, whose ancestors ate of
the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, can understand why we do that.
The story of the Garden of Eden is not an account of people's being punished for having
made one mistake, losing Paradise because they were not perfect, so that now we must seek
perfection in order to earn the conditional love of God. It's the story of the first human
beings' graduating, evolving from the relatively uncomplicated world of animal life to the
immensely complex world of being human and knowing that there is more to life than eating
and mating, that there are such things as Good and Evil.
Drawing upon Jewish midrash in his book, "How Good Do We Have to Be?", Harold
Kuschner describes eating from the Tree of Knowledge as one of the bravest and most
liberating events in the history of the human race. Yes, its consequences were painful, in
the same way that undertaking the responsibilities of marriage or parenthood or a new job
can be painful and leave you wondering, "Why did I ever give up my less-complicated
life for these problems?" But for the person who has experienced the complex
hard-earned satisfactions of human existence, there is no doubt that it is worth the pain.
Eve is not the villain of the story, enslaved by appetite and bringing sin and death
into the world. She's a brave trail-blazer whose courage leads Adam into the brave new
world of moral demands and moral decisions. She hasn't imposed Sin and Death on her
descendants, but given us humanity, with all of its pain and all of its richness. She's
given her descendants more than existence; she's given us Life. No wonder her name, Eve,
means source of life.
To say that human beings do wrong things, to say that we are capable of cruelty and
deceit far worse than any other creature, to say that nobody will ever lead a perfect life
any more than any baseball player will ever bat 1.000, is an accurate statement about
human beings and the complexity of choices we have to make as humans. To say that we are
destined to lose God's love or be punished forever because of our sins is not a statement
about us, but about a God whose love is tentative and whose forgiveness is conditional. I
do not believe in that kind of God. Nor does the primary witness of scripture point to
such a God. If I am capable of forgiveness, of recognizing intermittent weakness in good
people or good intentions gone astray in myself and in others, how can God not be capable
of at least as much as I?
If the Garden of Eden story is not about rejection and judgement for failing to be
perfect, but rather about the amazing complexities of being human, we are free to like
ourselves better, and not only that, we can stop expecting perfection from our spouses,
our partners, our children and our friends. We can love them flaws and all, and invite
them to love us in the same way. We can accept others' imperfections and love them despite
their flaws even as we believe God loves us despite ours. We know in our inmost being,
that as they say in AA, "I'm not OK and you're not OK, but that's OK," because
underneath, creation is good and we are OK, it's just that being human is so darned
complicated that even God knows better than to expect perfection from us.
Life is not a spelling bee, where no matter how many words you have gotten right, if
you make one mistake, you are disqualified. Life is more like a football season, where
even the best team misses a third of its passes and even the worst team has its days of
brilliance.
Christ lived and died and was raised, not to make right what Adam and Eve had done
wrong, but rather to show us how to live fully as the human beings we are created to be in
right relationship with one another, with the world, and with God. Christ is the one who,
in living the complexities, the joys and the struggles of being human, shows us how sacred
our life really is. In Christ we know God's love, God's forgiveness, God's hope for us.
Jesus Christ is not a club we hold over the heads of a fallen species, but the model and
perfecter of our faith, the one who walks beside us and before us and shows us the way.
In the beginning, in the infancy of the human race as in the infancy of an individual
human being, life was simple. When we ate of the fruit of that tree and gained the
knowledge that some things are good and others are bad, we learned how painfully complex
life could be.
In the end, if we are brave enough to love in the face of inevitable loss, strong
enough to forgive as God forgives us, and wise enough to accept imperfection as the flip
side of the complexity of human life, then we can achieve a fulfillment that no other
living creature will ever know. We can reenter Paradise (Kuschner).
Thanks be to God our Creator and to our Lord, Jesus Christ. Amen.
NOTE: This sermon draws upon "How Good Do We Have to Be?" by Rabbi Harold
Kuschner; and upon the biblical scholarship of Dr. Phyllis Trible (Union Theological
Seminary, New York City).
