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“Where are You?”
Genesis 2:4b-3:13
A Sermon Preached by the Rev. Douglas M. Donley
First Congregational Church
Here we are at our third week looking at recreation themes. Two weeks ago, we looked at the opening sentences of John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word…” Last week we looked at the first creation story in Genesis. Next week, Hilary Martin-Himan will look at Revelation 21. This week, I get to look at Genesis 2-3. I invite you to look at it again with new eyes. Put aside the doctrines that are built around it. Let’s first look at the story and then find out how it speaks to us. Then in good freedom for which Congregationalists and Baptists are famous, we can decide what it is we believe. Once we discover that, then we can decide what difference our belief makes in the world.
There are three creation stories in Genesis, if you count the flood. The first one is where God creates the world in six days and then rests on the seventh. It’s familiar. Creation begins as God brings order out of the primordial soup. Light, darkness, heaven, earth, plants, animals and finally humanity are created by the dramatic word and work of God who art in heaven hallowed be thy name. Everything is good. Nothing is bad.
But there is a second creation story, most of which we read earlier this morning. Unlike the first story, God is not far off. In this story, God is the planter of a garden who exists nearby. God actually walks in the garden, like a breeze. Into this garden, God creates more complexity. Not everything is good about creation. There are good trees and bad trees. Good fruits and forbidden fruits. There are serpents about calling the first creatures to forget the rules and eat the forbidden fruit. What we see in the second story is humanity moving further and further away from God until we can no longer live in the garden of paradise. In the garden is mutuality and equity. Out of the garden is control and distortion.
We cannot look at the Bible as simply fact or fiction. It is a mirror through which people have searched for and have wrestled with God. Myth was a form of psychology. That is the language of the Bible. The second creation story is about the relationship between God and humanity and humanity with itself. The larger agenda is what does knowledge do to human community?
In order to understand this story, we need to know that there are a few word-plays in the original Hebrew. The first person is formed out of the earth. The word for earth in Hebrew is adamah. The first person is adam which really means earth creature.
The first earth creature is not male. For there is no distinction between the genders until the second is created. At that point the man is ish and the woman is isha. To say that Adam was created before Eve is not biblically accurate. They were both the essence of the first earth creature adam.
Another thing we need to recognize is that Eve saw that wisdom and creative action is part of the creative process. Eve chose to eat the fruit so she could have wisdom. Adam ate because Eve gave him some. Beverly Harrison calls biting the fruit “Eve’s act of radical curiosity sowed in our marrow.” (A Mediation on Eve” in Out of the Garden)
The writer of Timothy turned Eve’s creative searching into a justification for misogyny saying, “Let a woman learn in silence with all submissiveness. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over man; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet a woman will be saved through bearing children, if she continues in faith and love and holiness, with modesty.”(I Tim. 2:11-15) If we have knowledge of good and evil, we might be able to show how Paul’s writings and interpretation of Genesis is flawed. As Bess sang, “the things that you’re liable to read in the Bible, it ain’t necessarily so.”
Some of the loonier theologies said that the knowledge Adam and Eve gained was carnal knowledge and the only way to undo the sin or Adam and Eve was to practice celibacy, even in marriage. The Shakers believed this, which is why they shook so much. It’s also why there aren’t many around anymore.
Until
Then along comes Augustine. He believed that the eating of the forbidden fruit irrevocable changed human nature and made us unconsciously and naturally hell-bent on sin. Western Christianity followed right along in lock-step, taking us off the hook in our moral responsibility to choose between good and evil.
But does such an interpretation accurately describe what we see in Genesis? Walter Brueggemann in his commentary on Genesis says that the text is not interested in theoretical or abstract questions of sin/death/ evil/fall/sex. Brueggemann and Claus Westermann both remind us that the OT does not assume a fall. Instead, the OT assumes that we have the ability to choose life so that we and our descendants may live. We can choose life. We can choose between good and evil. The text also gives no explanation for evil. Genesis is not interested in the origins of evil. It’s interested in how we cope and faithfully respond to temptation.
In the popular mystical book, Conversations With God, God addresses the fall in the following way, “What has been described as the fall of Adam was actually his upliftment—the greatest single event in the history of humankind. For without it, the world of relativity would not exist. The act of Adam and Eve was not original sin, but, in truth, first blessing. You should thank them from the bottom of your hearts—for in being the first to make a “wrong” choice, Adam and Eve produced the possibility of making any choice at all. (Conversations with God, 1995:56.)
What we see in Genesis 2 and 3 is people making choices and living out the consequences of those choices.
Creation starts out good, just like in the first story from Genesis 1. There is harmony and beauty in the garden. It’s what Phyllis Trible calls Eros, life. But then comes the discord. A serpent dares talk theology with one of the creatures. The serpent opens Eve’s eyes to the possibilities out there. And she eats and hands the fruit to Adam and he eats, too. There is no temptation of the man from the woman. The text even notes that the man was with her at the time of the discussion with the serpent, but said nothing. Phyllis Trible notes “…the woman is intelligent, sensitive, and ingenious, the man is passive, brutish, and inept.”(God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, 1988:113)
When they ate of the fruit, their eyes were opened, but they did not receive wisdom, what they received was helplessness, insecurity and defenselessness.
Adam and Eve emerge as adults, but when they are expelled from the garden, they act like children, unable to cope with their new powers or responsibilities. They shift blame. “The woman gave it to me.” The serpent tricked me.” They hide from the one from whom there is no hiding. They hide their beauty from each other, from God by creating fig leaf fashion.
“Where are you?” is the question of God to Adam. Adam doesn’t seem to know. We often hide from God, from each other. It’s a rhetorical question, really. God knows where Adam is. The question is, does Adam know where Adam is? Do the earth creatures know where the earth creatures are? The answer is, “you are in paradise. You are in a garden surrounded by my creatures and plants and alongside your lover. But you don’t see that, do you. You know the distinction between good and evil, but now you are hiding out from that very knowledge. The fact that you ate of the tree means that you now can answer ‘where are you?’ You can discern whether this is a good place or a place rampant with evil.”
Rabbi Marc Gellman said, each Biblical hero and heroine was flawed. “Answering the question of “Where are you?” brought them humility and courage, not humiliation and grace.” (First Things, May, 1996)
God asks all of us all the time: “Where are you?”
“What is your place in the world?”
“What are you doing with your life?”
And we since we have the knowledge of good and evil, then we ought to be able to answer. But not only that, our answer ought to mean something.
Where are you?
I’m not talking about where you are physically. But where are you emotionally? Where are you spiritually? Where are you existentially? Where are you psychically?
It’s hard sometimes to know where you are.
It takes discernment. It takes wisdom, the integration of information. It takes perspective.
Adam was a victim of institutional sin. He wasn’t tempted. He simply ate because everyone else in the garden was eating. We do this, too. We are no longer tempted, or at least we don’t see it that way. We fall into line because that’s what we’re supposed to do. We stand and recite the pledge of allegiance. We sing the militaristic Star Spangled Banner. We say the Lord’s Prayer. We pay our taxes, we tithe, we invest in the stock market even though we know it is subject to corruption and accounting irregularities. Most of us buy tainted clothing and tainted coffee, unless you attend FCC. We get our reality from “Real TV” and corporate sponsored “news” outlets. It’s just too dang much work to look for every single little sin and try to avoid it. So most of us don’t even think about it. We are not tempted, we are drunk by the wine of the beast, as Revelation would say. Yet we dutifully pray at least once a week, “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”
So where are you?
Where are you ?
Where are you in relation to reading the text as a rulebook and then once you read it find out it doesn’t say what you have been taught it said?
Where are you in relation to misogyny?
Where are you on your spiritual journey? Are you where you want to be or is there something more you need to do/something more you long to discover?
Alan
(Leach), as you leave
God asks Adam and Eve’s descendants to exercise our knowledge of good and evil. God asks us to know where we are. Because if we know where we are, then we know what our response ought to be towards good and what our response toward evil ought to be.
We need to be better than pitiful Adam who explains himself by excusing himself. God can see all and only wants us to articulate how we are to be.
Where are you?
Many of you know I am a huge admirer of Gandhi. Gandhi had all of the privilege of a British education as a lawyer. He rode in first class and took full advantage of the status he had earned. But when he realized that others were not treated with respect because of their race or skin color, Gandhi realized that he was in the wrong place. He answered the question of “where are you?” by devoting his life to making South Africa and India places where people of all races could live and work together with respect.
We feel God walking past and we wonder how we can hide. And yet when we answer the question in honesty, then we find our way in the world.
We find our way out of the wilderness of despair.
We find our way to live a faithful life.
We find our way to recreate ourselves and maybe even recreate our world.
We know good and we know evil.
And we are not let off the hook to try to do good. Unlike Adam, we are not to skirt or placate the truth away.
We are to know the truth and be set free by the truth.
We are to know good and know evil and choose the good which leads to life so that we and our descendants can live.
In response to the question, Where are you? I hope during the time of silence following these brief words or in the silences you might find in the coming week, or month, that you might reflect upon where you are in today’s world. I invite you to reflect on your call as a person created in God’s image.
Remember that knowledge is the divine power to discern good and evil. Once you have discerned it, reflect on the ways you might recreate yourself, or your corner of the world. Your answer to the question, Where are you? Is the first step in recreating ourselves and recreating our world. May it be so for all of us.
Maybe the spiritual can help us as it poses a similar question:
“Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
Oh sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.
Were you there when they crucified my Lord?”
Amen.