Out of the Garden
a sermon based on Genesis 2:15,17, 3:1,7
by Rev. Randy Quinn

 

This is a very familiar text. Probably every person here has heard it before. And that is both good and bad.

It's good because the story has become a part of our lives. It has helped us understand our lives and our world. It has helped us understand God and our relationship to God.

But it's bad because we have not always allowed ourselves to hear the story. Instead, we listen long enough to recognize it and finish it ourselves without allowing the story itself to speak to us. Our familiarity has lured us into a complacency about the story. It has become mundane.

I want to read it for you today in a way that allows you to hear it fresh. I want to invite you to listen for things you had not noticed before. I want you to pay attention to the scripture as if it were the literal and actual words of God being spoken in our presence:

read text

When I listened to this scripture earlier in the week, I wondered about the tree that God had set aside, the "tree of the knowledge of good and evil." I wondered, "what is wrong with us knowing the difference between good and evil?" Don't we try to teach our children the difference between right and wrong because we think it's important? Why does God restrict the man and the woman from gaining this knowledge?

If the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is off limits, how are we to live? Are we to live life without knowing the difference? Or is it necessary for life that we eat the fruit and move on and into life? And if that be the case, why do we always see the serpent as a bad creature? Isn't the serpent simply leading us in a direction that we need to be going?

In fact, sometimes I think the problem with our society is that too many people do NOT know the difference between good and evil. Maybe we need to be more intentional about eating this fruit from this off-limits tree!

These are the questions that I found myself struggling with. These are the questions that I've sought to answer. These may not be your questions, but they're the ones I've heard and am trying to address today.

Maybe we need to step back a little again and look at the setting of our reading for today.

In this account of the creation, Adam is placed in the midst of a lush garden, the Garden of Eden, a word that comes from the Hebrew word, 'edhen meaning delight. When he is placed there, God tells him three things: he is created for a purpose, to till the garden and keep it (Gen 2:15); he has freedom, to go anywhere and eat anything growing in the garden (Gen 2:16); and there are limitations, some things are not for him to do (Gen 2:17).

Then begins the work of creating the other living animals to help Adam, presumably to help him in his work, but perhaps to help him in enjoying freedom and respecting his limitations. In this part of the story, Eve is created.

The point of the story so far, seems to be that God, the creator, has determined what is good, what is good for the man and the woman as well as what is good for the rest of the creatures in the garden.

It also appears that they cannot fully appreciate what God has given to them in terms of their vocation, their freedoms, or their limitations, until they are living in community. These are not individual gifts, but gifts given to the man and the woman in the context of community.

The scriptures don't tell us how long this arrangement lasted. But we do learn when it all ended.

The violation of the limits set by God results in the breakdown in the relationship between the man and the woman.

The command of God has been broken which leads to a breakdown of community, and the end result is that the goodness of the garden is lost. There is no more delight. In seeking knowledge, the knowledge of good and evil, the world they know is denied them.

Rather than gain godliness, as promised by the serpent (Gen 3:5), they lose all they have.

In our scientific world, we are taught to look for objective and verifiable truth. Our quest for knowledge is rooted in a sense that when we learn the truth, we have power and can control things. This is our approach to the physical world. It's our approach to the psychological world. It's even our approach to history.

We spend enormous resources in studying the weather, for instance. It seems the goal is to control the weather rather than allowing weather to control us. Until we have complete knowledge, we are content with prediction, since predicting the weather allows us time to respond to it.

We take the same formula approach with us when we hear the scriptures, when we study God's will for us. We bring with us an understanding that not only history but also theology can be "understood" and in understanding gain some sense of power over our destiny.

But stories like this one in Genesis, are not about objective and verifiable truth in the scientific sense. This story probably will not meet the criteria used in our schools for legitimate history, but it is important. It's important because this story is about truth, truth of another sense.

Joseph Campbell says myths are stories of things that never happened but are always true. This story fits his definition of a myth. It's a myth that continues to proclaim truth. It's a myth, not in the sense that it isn't true, but in the sense that the story transcends our sense of truth and relates a truth about life, and in our case, a truth about God and our relationship to God.

The truth is that God, the creator, gives us important gifts of vocation and permission and prohibition, gifts that are most fully experienced in community. We have purpose, we have freedom, we have limitations, and we need each other to find the proper balance between them.

God, who created us, continues to set before us these gifts. And each of us faces the dilemma of how to find the proper balance. You see, each and every one of us faces the same issues that Adam and Eve struggled with in the Garden.

This is a story that continues to be true. It's true for you and it's true for me. We each seek to know the difference between good and evil. We each seek to gain more knowledge so we can better control our world.

And we forget who gave these gifts in the first place. We forget that God gave us a purpose. We forget that God gave us freedom. We forget that God set boundaries on life. We forget that we can only understand them in the context of community.

You see, the problem isn't that we have the knowledge of good and evil. The problem is that we also forget that this knowledge comes from God as well. And because we don't know the source of this knowledge, we don't know what to do with that knowledge.

We think it's for our own benefit, but the truth is that knowing the difference between good and evil is to be used for the sake of community. It's for the sake of all living creatures in the garden.

It isn't necessary for our vocation to know the difference. It isn't necessary for us to experience freedom or to acknowledge life's limitations.

What is necessary is for us to acknowledge the source of life, the source of our gifts, the God who created us.

Before Adam and Eve ate from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they only knew good. They only knew how to please God. They only knew how to serve God. Their focus was on God and the community that God had created.

After eating the fruit, their innocence was gone. They began to see the alternative to serving God. They became self-focused.

When God went looking for Adam, he used the word "I" for the first time. He became the center of his own world. And God, the true center of creation, was set aside.

And the unfortunate truth is that we all follow the same story line in our lives. We learn to place ourselves at the center of the world early in life. Our human development theorists tell us that with maturity we find a more complete picture of the world, but my own experience is that this is rare.

When we read about proposed legislation, for instance, we begin with the question, "How will this affect me?" We almost always begin the discussion from this self-centered perspective.

That's why it wasn't surprising to see the newspaper article about the "flat tax" proposals. It showed you how to figure out how it would affect you. The news analyst who wrote the article confessed near the end of it that this didn't answer the question of how it would affect the overall federal budget. But no one seems to care about that issue.

As long as we are the center of our own concerns, we will find life to be difficult. Life will be filled with anxiety. We will find ourselves hiding ,, from God, from each other, from ourselves.

Only when we find a way to reclaim and recreate the intended relationship with God, do we find a sense of joy in life, a sense of satisfaction, a sense of meaning and purpose.

And that relationship is possible.

It is possible to reclaim the Garden experience, even when we know the difference between good and evil. We reclaim that experience when we put God again at the center and allow God to define the good and the evil for us, allow God to set our agenda, and allow God to be the focus of our lives.

That is what Jesus came to teach us. That is what Jesus made possible. We can re-enter the garden and experience a new sense of vocation, permission, and prohibition; a new sense of community; a place where we find no shame but only joy, delight, and celebration.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.