3 Pentecost, Proper 5
6 Jun 2021
Genesis gives us two, not one but two, stories of creation. What better way to start those ordinary Sundays than at the very beginning!! Today we hear from Adam and Eve and Mr. Snake and even God own’s self. All the big hitters are in this story. Creation has happened; all the players are in their idyllic setting. And along comes Mr. Snake and ruins everything by tempting Eve, and I might add Adam, and they get thrown out of the Garden and its been downhill every since, at least until Jesus stepped on stage to make things right. Women are evil tempters; men are dull witted and gullible; everyone is naked and unhappy and they all get pitched out of the Garden.
Stop!!
This is one of the most ridiculous stories in the entire Bible. Entirely implausible in so many ways. Yet it speaks to so much of what we fail to do and what we assume to be true. It is time we took a good look at Genesis 3.
Our story starts at the point where the culpable couple have eaten from the wrong tree and discovered they were naked (although why they didn’t notice that fact earlier is not explained) and decided this was a bad thing (once again, no reason given.) Given that much of the rest of both Hebrew and Christian scripture assume humans have and need a knowledge of good and evil (do the right thing), why was it so wrong to learn good from evil? This is the only place in the entirety of scripture where it is considered a bad thing to know right from wrong. Could it be we are NOT meant to take this story on face value but to understand it as sarcasm or as a farce?
As John Goldingay says:
Or might God be sponsoring a story which we are expected not to believe, a story designed to jolt us into thinking out what God is really like, because God is clearly not like this? God is not the sort of person who prohibits access to a key resource, who wants to keep us like children rather than like adults, who asks for obedience without thought to commands without reason, or who keeps special gifts such as good-and-bad-knowledge for people such as kings and denies them to ordinary people. God is not the sort of person who has to try out patently unworkable ideas before arriving at a sensible one, who says one thing and does another, or who regards scrumping (Stealing apples) as mortal sin. So God sponsors a story in which the creator behaves in all those ways, to jolt its hearers into seeing such obvious facts afresh. The Garden of Eden story requires a health warning, “This is not the story of the origins of heaven and earth. It is not a portrait of what God is like. It is not an account of how sin came into the world. But read it and turn it upsidedown and you may find a true understanding of these matters.”
(From The Goldingay Bible Clinic https://johnandkathleenshow.com/)
In short, this story from Genesis may be a deliberate work of fiction with the intent of using what everyone would have known was patently false to make a point; portraying God exactly as God is NOT so that we may see God as God IS and the world as it is meant to be. Perhaps this story from Genesis is there as a work of fiction to remind us of the true nature of God and of the true nature of our work as human beings. In short, God gives us understanding from the very beginning. As humans, despite growing up in disparate times and places, we have some common sense of good and evil and of wholeness.
Sadly, this whole story of original sin has been twisted and turned in a myriad of ways that hurt and deprive human beings of their very humanity, let alone their divinity, whether in the myth that if you are not baptized you have sin that will lead you to eternal damnation, to the idea that women are the original source of sin and therefore inferior to the male. We are left with a large pile of theological manure.
What if, just what if, we look more cosmically. What did God create and what is our role in creation? These are questions that, in an almost perverse way, the story addresses. We are not God, yet we are created in God’s image.
I would start with the idea that God created the earth and all of creation. How is for science to determine; why is for theologians to determine and that means all of us, for we are all theologians. Perhaps the garden of Eden (that is earth itself) was made for us to enjoy, to supply our needs, and as something for which we are to care. Sin, sadly attributed to the failure of two people, enters the world because we humans are just that: human. Adam’s sin is not something we inherit; it is something we repeat because we are human. And as Christians we believe that Jesus lived, and died, to show us how to restore that wholeness. The fact we are still struggling to do so after 2000 years and that the world is still a pretty messed up place tells us just how difficult a task it is.
In the Gospel reading from Mark Jesus is facing that difficult task. He has gone to the place where he lives and cannot even break bread with his followers. His followers, his family, are that riff raff, if you will, who believe the Word he preaches. He preaches a strange message indeed; one that attracts those who are often on the margins and leaves him at odds with his own family and the authorities. He does not say his family or the authorities are bad; he redefines what it means to be a follower of God. Radical inclusion, which seems to be a concept we still struggle to realize as a church.
Yet I want to leave all of you with the Good News: even though we struggle at times to discern the will of God, the fact that our goal is to do just that means we have taken not only the first step, but many. Remember that who does the will of God is a brother or sister or mother to Jesus.
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