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Boy Scout Tr #240

Scripture: Genesis 3:1-13

Last Sunday you heard some of my story about myself, my family, where I came from, my call to ministry. Telling our stories to each other is important. Every family has its stories: tragedies, comedies, tall tales, legends, secrets. The good and bad. My family history matters because it helps explain who I am. Our family stories help us find our places in the history of the world. They tell you, these are my people and this is how they lived. They help me understand why I am the way I am. It’s about rehearsing the family virtues and revealing the family flaws. It seems like that each time I tell my story I discover things new about myself. But then there is this one thing I have found out in particular: that even when I think I have the stage all to myself and I am acting on my own, that no one else has experienced what I have experienced--I find out--there really is nothing new under the sun. I am simply just one of the most recent actors in the age-old drama of life and death that unites me to all of you and every other human being who ever walked the earth.

This first story from the book of Genesis is an ancient family story that seems to tell us some true things about ourselves: about our ambition, our appetite, our curiosity, our risk-taking, about how blindly we can make life-changing decisions and how sorry we can be once we see what we have done.

I, like many of you, I’m sure, learned this particular story at a young age It’s the story of the fall--about how Adam and Eve fell from the grace of eternal life in paradise to everyday hell on earth through their disobedience. For me, it was one of those stories that ruled my young life--so my Sunday School teacher probably did a good job of adding the moral of the story. A moral something like this: if you do not want to be like Adam and Eve, then obey God, or obey your elders who are representatives of God. I always was a little scared of my teachers or others in authority. You wouldn’t find me raising my hand in class saying, “I don’t understand what you are trying to teach me.” I always thought to myself, if I wasn’t getting it then it was probably my problem not the teachers’.

I also learned that the Garden of Eden story was the story of how original sin came into the world. The interpretation I learned went like this: Because Adam and Eve made the decision they did we are somehow contaminated by our kinship with them. Because of Adam and Eve, we are infected with congenital germs of evil and death that are always waiting to break out in us if we are not very stern with ourselves, if we do not remain on our best and most holy behavior. Or, if we do not try to be like Jesus who withstood temptation. If only we lean on Jesus, then, we too can withstand temptation. A pretty tall order for children to follow, but I did my best and the few times I did get in trouble, I felt extremely guilty. I took the consequences of my actions to heart. Then, I tried really hard to be a better person.

But this story in Genesis is not about original sin or the fall of humankind. Do I need to say that again? This story is not about original sin or the fall of humankind. Why do I say that? Because nowhere in all the Bible, in fact, are the words “fall” or “original sin” ever used to refer to this story. “The Fall” and “Original Sin” are labels that were applied much, much later, in an effort to make sense of the story, to discover its meaning and learn its lesson so that humankind would not keep on falling forever.

But the story itself is not concerned with such things. It is not a thinly disguised piece of systematic theology. It is a story about God and about human beings, about a choice and its consequences. It is one of the family stories that tells us things about ourselves we need to know. It tells us not only how we fail--we already know that very well--but also how we survive. Because that is part of the story too, you know. Adam and Eve did not die at the end of it the story They went on, but how? How did they go on after they had defied the God who was not only their creator but also their only friend? How did they fashion a future from such a short and sorry past? And how in the world did they live through the loss of paradise?

Paradise? What would that look like? Blue skies, bright water, cool breezes---peacefulness and plenty of it, plenty of everything, including the strong, gentle presence of God. For Adam and Eve, paradise was that place where there was no fear or shame, where there was nothing to hide and nothing to hide from. It was a place where nothing had ever been broken, where there were no scratches, dents, or scars, a place where everything was still whole and holy and pleasing to God.

The best way the writer of Genesis could think of to describe it was to say that paradise was the kind of place where you could skinny-dip to your heart’s content. It was that safe--so safe, in fact, that it might never even occur to you to do anything else, at least, as long as you stayed away from the fruit of that one particular tree.

And we know the story well. Eve came along. She and the serpent then engaged in the first religious debate recorded in history, after which she took a bite out of the fruit of the one particular tree and nothing was ever whole again. Paradise was lost, and there was no going back.

You know the feeling, I’m sure. Something like this. Your muscles are on remote control, your mind is a buzzing hive, your heart is on hold. You take, you eat, and it is very good, but before you can swallow it things have already begun to change. The light has gone dull. The wind has stopped. Your hands are sticky, and heavy. You look down at them--and then you try to cover yourself or run, but it is no use. You are stuck, rooted to the spot, exposed for anyone who passes by to see.

Actually, for Adam and Eve, they managed to cover themselves and then they ran away and hid, so that when the Lord God sought their company, as usual, in the cool of the day, God had to look for them. “Where are you?” God asked and the alibis began to fly. Adam blamed God for giving him Eve, and then blamed Eve for handing him the fruit, while Eve blamed the serpent for tricking her. Nothing was sacred, apparently. The two were willing to sacrifice their integrity, their relationship, and their position in the garden in a frantic effort to cover themselves, all of which got them nowhere. The Lord God delivered their sentences: beginning with the serpent, pain for Eve, toil for Adam, dust to dust for them both.

It was a colossal loss, a mortal blow. You give into one crazy, selfish desire, you look away from the light for one moment--and the car crashes, the job vanishes, the relationship ends, and there is no going back. Paradise is lost and what was, or what could have been, is gone forever. How do we survive something like that? Isn’t that the real question here? How do we survive and move on?

There’s a few of ways. We can, as we see in the story, find someone else to blame for what has happened. That way we can get angry instead of hurt and afraid. We are also able to remain the victim. If someone else has ruined our life, after all, then it is up to someone else to repair it, which does not leave us much to do but sit around and wait to be fixed. We can blame others.

On the other hand, we can blame ourselves, punish ourselves in a number of different ways. Like keeping track of our failures, for instance, withdrawing from life a little more with each one of them until we are afraid to come out of hiding long enough to try anything at all. Or, you can take the opposite course of action, driving yourself even harder to make up for your losses, settling for nothing less than perfection in yourself and those around you. We can blame ourselves.

Here’s a third one: You could blame paradise itself, convincing yourself that it was not so great after all, or you can blame God, pointing out that God was the manufacturer, after all, and that if God expected us to be different then God should have made a different world in the first place-- without that tree, and that serpent. We could blame God. But survival isn’t thriving, is it? How do we get beyond being stuck or just surviving the loss of paradise? How do we move on and thrive?

There are legends about what happened to Adam and Eve that never made it into the Bible, whole books about them that were not respectable enough to become Holy Scripture. (See Note below)

Stories with a ring of truth in them. In one of them, God gave Adam and Eve a cave to live in just east of Eden, where they sat in shock for months after their eviction from paradise, reciting every detail that they could remember to each other: the shade of the trees, the warmth of the sun, the beauty of the land. Eve offered to kill herself if God would let Adam back into the garden alone, but Adam would not hear of it, although he tried to end his own life soon after by jumping off a cliff. When both of them had failed to die, they wept and beat their chests and both together begged God to let them return to Eden. But God said, with enormous divine sadness, that it was impossible--that once God had given God’s word it could not be taken back.

So God sent them angels. And they sang to them and sprinkled scented water on them to cool them. God reconciled the beasts of the earth to them, telling the animals to be gentle with them. Still, Adam and Eve could not be roused from their despair. For eighty-three days, the legend says, they languished, refusing all food and drink for fear they would sin again. God gave them a fountain of living water to drink, but took it back when they tried to drown themselves in it. God sent them figs from the garden to eat, big as watermelons, but they left them for the crows to eat.

Finally, as the legend goes, when their bodies were stained from exposure and they were speechless with heat and cold, Adam and Eve let God teach them how to sew, using thorns for needles and sheepskins to make shirts for themselves to cover their skin. It was a big step. Having lost paradise, having run out of bushes and alibis to hide behind, having all but killed themselves through guilt and exposure, Adam and Eve decided to let God clothe them. “Fear not,” an angel sang to them that night, “the God who created you will strengthen you.”

And so God did. Although the snake continued to plague them all their days, Adam and Eve decided to live. The days of peace and plenty were gone for good, but they got by. Using all the scraps at hand, they managed to build first an altar and then a home, to bake bread from the wild wheat of the field and to bear five children. Using the pieces of their broken past, they made a future for themselves and for their descendants in the world outside of Eden, a world we continue to live in today. It is a world full of dents and scars. Even where we have glued it back together we can still see the cracks, but in its own way it is beautiful, a mosaic of many colors, a mended work of art, a testament to the God who is willing to work with broken pieces and who calls us to do the same.

That is our story, a story with everything in it--promise, failure, blame, guilt, forgiveness, healing, hope--a story about us and a story about our God, who did not create us just once but goes on creating us forever, putting our pieces back together so that we are never ruined, not entirely and never for good.

Amen.

(Note: Legend from Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life).