Genesis 2:5 - 3:24 & Matthew 6:25-33 and

“Put your hands in the clay” by Wendy Thompson

Put your hands in the clay
Put my hands in the clay
Let the heat of our hands
the heat of our histories
sculpt the cool amorphous mass
Let the heat of our hands
our fingers
curl, stretch, dig,
unfurl our lives
sculpt our love

Let the heat rise above the coolness
of fear and unknowing
Rise and shape the new
now

A little boy opened the big family Bible. He was fascinated as he fingered through the old pages, then suddenly something fell out. He picked up the object and looked at it closely. It was an old leaf that had been pressed in between the pages. "Mama, look what I found," the boy called out. "What have you got there, dear?" his mother asked. With astonishment in his young voice, he answered: "I THINK IT'S ADAM'S UNDERWEAR"

Today’s story from Genesis is probably the most joked about, misunderstood and abused text in the whole Bible. Many a joke has been told about the Bible’s first couple, and many a church doctrine has declared that because Eve was the first to sin, women in general still need to pay for it. One church’s official statement declares that ‘the fact’ that Eve sinned first is a principal reason that women cannot be ordained.

And then there’s the whole Original Sin thing. Somewhere along the line, someone decided that the eating of the apple lead to sexuality, which is, of course — The Worst Thing Ever, a.k.a. ‘Sin’ with a capital S, and that ‘Sin of Adam & Eve’ is like some kind of genetically transmitted bad seed that all of humanity is born with. It’s all about sex and it’s all Eve’s fault, or it’s Adam’s or the snake’s or whoever it is that you want to blame.

But anyone who has taken the time to read the whole story more carefully will notice that the concept of sin doesn’t figure in this story at all! As a matter of fact, there is no mention of sin in the Bible until we get to the story of Cain and Abel, who we’ll take a whack at next week. Contrary to popular opinion, ladies & gentlemen, Eve was not seduced by sin… Eve was enticed by wisdom…

Like most of the early Genesis stories, this is a great archetypal story, hence all the jokes. Because the 1^st 11 chapters of the Bible are made up of ‘prehistory’ stories, stories that were told to build a particular world view, they are among the most memorable tales in the Bible yet because they are so long, they are often the least scrutinized.

Now, there are a lot of ways to think about — and preach about — the scriptures. The approach I'm taking with all these Genesis stories is simple – it’s just all about why: why it was written, and what that ‘why’ of a faraway people from some 3,000 years ago has to do with us.

So the first thing you need to get about this story is that, like the one we talked about last week, it’s a creation story. It is a story told to explain how the world began and where we fit in — and most importantly, what kind of God is at work in the world. These stories do not pretend to be scientific explanations of creation or anything else. The scribes who wrote them down did not need to understand how the world began, they needed to come up with some idea of why the world is like it is and they needed to explain the Creator’s connection – Yahweh’s connections — to the people of Israel. It was a theological issue to them, not a scientific one.

Last week, I also talked about how people all around the world have their own stories about creation, but what I didn’t say is that many cultures, like the Israelites, have more than one. Like the 1^st Genesis story, about half of those stories begin in darkness. In the other half, a deity (or two) fashioned human beings and other creatures out of clay. Our dual stories of creation are, in many ways, not particularly unusual. What is funny is the order of the stories. Most biblical scholars agree, that while it follows the story of the 7 days of creation, the story of the Garden is really the older of the two creation stories. Yet like the creation story of Genesis 1, the ‘why’ of this text is born out of the context of the people lives.

This scripture emerged about 3,000 years ago, during the golden years of King David and his son Solomon. The wisdom of those 2 kings was widely famous. David is credited as the author of many a psalm as well as leading Israel into its most prosperous and stable era ever known. And the wisdom of King Solomon was a source of endless awe and appreciation. He gets the acclaim for writing Proverbs and Ecclesiastes – and of course the Song of Songs, which is another kind of wisdom altogether. So it seems to me highly likely that the story of the events in Eden was crafted because the people of Solomon’s time wanted to connect human wisdom to God’s plan for creation. And I think they wanted to know something even more basic: if God is all-knowing and all-powerful and all loving and intentionally created humankind, why is life not perfect — and why do we keep screwing things up? The answers lie in the Garden of Eden.

Eden was a world of utter paradise, a garden filled with good things: flowing rivers, wonderful plants & animals, and a loving creator who would take walks with you. Humans were without greed or guile and God gave them good work to do there – they were to till and keep the garden. What could be better than great plants and no weeds?

But, well, there were those mysterious trees in the middle of the garden: the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. We are not told why the trees were put there, but there they were – a set up if there ever was one. We don’t hear any proscriptions about the Tree of Life, but God told the human creature early on, “You may eat as much as you like from any of the trees of the garden­ except the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. You must not eat from that tree, for on the day you eat from that tree, that is the day you will die.”

Now, let’s imagine that you are a guest in someone’s home and she or he tells you, “Make yourself at home. Help yourself to any food in the house, feel free to root through the cupboards, the pantry, the refrigerator. Except for one thing: in the fridge, on the bottom shelf in the back, right behind the dill pickles, there’s a blue Tupperware container. Don’t even think of looking in there, let alone eating what’s in there. If you eat it, you’ll die.”

Don’t you think at some point you might ask a few questions? Like, ‘What’s up with the blue Tupperware?’ And maybe, ‘Why would you keep something so dangerous in your refrigerator?’

It makes me think that Adam had an amazing lack of curiosity. He asked no questions, and no explanation was given as to why the tree was to be avoided. But the prohibition was unambiguous – this was God’s world and God’s rules. Okay, so the scene is set, now...enter the serpent.

The serpent, well, it was a crafty critter, way more cunning than any other animal that God had made. It told Eve that if they were to eat the fruit, they wouldn’t die! It said, “Your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods, knowing good and evil!” You know, there may have been some things Eve could have resisted, like maybe the ability to run a marathon or hit a fastball or play the clarinet. But Eve found the prospect of wisdom to be simply too enticing. So she bit into that apple and – boom – wisdom began to seep into the human head.

Now let me ask you – Do you think God was wrong to put that blue Tupperware in the fridge? What do you think God was up to?

Give me a break…If the fruit was really dangerous, do you really think that a sensible loving God would have planted it? Even we humans know better than to put a bowl of candy on the coffee table and simply tell our kids to keep away from it. Most of us have more sense than that; we know it’s just too much temptation for them.

Now, if we are that smart, consider for a minute how much smarter God is! Somehow this whole forbidden fruit thing must have had a purpose. God must have known that sooner or later, we humans would get around to doing do what we did. Somehow that had to be part of the plan.

“The woman knew that the tree was enticing to the eye, and now saw that the fruit was good to eat, and that it was desirable for the knowledge it could give. So she took some of its fruit and ate it. She gave some also to the man beside her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized that they were naked.”

That doggone snake was right. With that one bite of apple, Adam and Eve attained the first level of wisdom – they became self-aware. The text says ‘they saw that they were naked’ – but you have to understand that this nakedness isn't about the dawn of sexual shame, it’s about seeing ourselves for who we truly are.

With that bite, Adam & Eve became aware of what they were: vulnerable little creatures who can make choices. But that wasn’t the end of it. Oh no. Here’s the really aggravating part of that apple snack: Once you become self-aware, you become aware of the whole world in an entirely new way.

Having eaten from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, Adam and Eve found themselves transformed, and, I think, more than a little shocked. They thought “to be like God” meant they would know everything. But in truth, “to be like God,” meant something else entirely. It meant being confronted with endless possibilities, and having to make decisions without really knowing what the outcome will be.

“To be like God” didn’t mean being all powerful. And it didn’t mean choosing casually between figs or dates for breakfast. It meant having to do things like wrestle with troubling ethical issues, and having to choose between the least of any number of evils, and having to live with regret at not having chosen more wisely. It was the beginning of what my mama used to call ‘the human predicament’.

You know, it was a set up there in the garden, and it was one we had to walk into. God didn’t wanted us to remain automatons in Eden, God wanted us to have to make hard choices and grow into real human beings, knowing who we are and who God is. And God wanted us to become creatures who make choices, choices that bring us closer to God, trusting God, rather than pushing God away, either inadvertently or intentionally.

But for Adam & Eve (& for us), “To be like God” didn’t turn out to be all it was cracked up to be. Here’s the final news flash from the apple eating incident: it wasn’t just self-awareness that Adam & Eve attained, or even world awareness. It was the realization that choices have consequences. They got wisdom all right, but they lost the garden.

And so, out here in the cold cruel world, human beings have to make choices. All the time. And like Obi Wan said to Luke, we must ‘choose wisely’. For we can choose to remember God or we can choose to forget God. We can choose what serves God’s purposes or we can choose what serves our own interests. We can choose evil or we can choose good. We can cheat others or respect others, we can blame others or we can take responsibility for our actions. Life is a constant parade of choices: to take or to give, to abuse or to treasure, to hate or to love, to trust God or to try to do it all ourselves. It’s exhausting, the choices we have to make…

But happily, the teaching of Jesus found in the Gospel of Matthew can help us out a bit. Jesus said, “Don’t worry about your life, what you’ll eat or what you’ll drink, or about what you’ll wear. Isn’t life more than food, and the body more than clothing?

“Can you add a single hour to your life by worrying? Don’t worry — seek first God’s reign and God’s justice, and all these things will be given to you as well.”

God made us to be happy and do good work, and to make choices (and bear the consequences), but you know, God also wants our trust. We were created to be in relationship with our Creator. And that relationship is essential to our being able to live fruitfully, as we strive to make good choices.

When we stop trusting that relationship, when we try to act like we are God and in control, we simply can’t live like God created us to live. Without a strong relationship with God we become overwhelmingly preoccupied with ourselves and our own self-centered activities. But when we remember our relationship with God, as Wendy Thompson says in her poem: we are free to rise above fear and unknowing and begin shape the future in a way that can guide us back to the Garden. The Garden, the Kingdom of God, the CommonWealth of God, where we will indeed get to walk again with our Creator. May we choose wisely. Amen.