a sermon based on Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7

February 10, 2008 at Palm Bay, FL

by Rev. Scott Elliott

Ahh, the Genesis creation story of humankind in the Garden of Eden. This little story has been the source of much controversy over time. Today you can hear folks arguing whether the story represents a factual account of the way humankind began, or if it is myth or metaphor.

Whichever side you may be on in the debate it’s important to understand the story is ultimately meant to help us understand God and our relationship with God.

Often lost in the debate about it’s factuality is the depth of the story’s meaning. Whether factual or not the story is simply packed full of meaning, and I gotta tell it also has a lot of humor. The whole creation story was originally told aloud and was never meant to be heard as a dry and somber expose’ on humanity. It’s a very clever story woven with meaning and humor.

There is more meaning and humor than I could preach on in fifteen minutes. I thought I’d just go ahead and preach for three or four hours, but, Shelle and Kim pointed out that even my beautiful voice might get tiresome in that amount of time, plus we’d have to move the time of Sunday school and second service. I am not sure about my voice getting tiresome, but I saw their point on moving things, so relax, the sermon will be short, and only touch a small portion of cool things.

For starters did you know that the Hebrew word for the ground, for dirt is “Adamah.” 1 The name Adam is a play on that word. It’s like saying humus is human. 2. In modern English the first human made from the ground might have been named Clay 3, or Dusty, 4 or Sandy, or Rocky. We tend to miss that the story is supposed to include humor from the start giving the first human a rather punny first name that is also self-depreciating. From this story we learn our name is Mud.

Some folks argue that Adam is one person either from history or mythology. Others argue Adam is an allegorical representation of all men. Still others assert that before Eve, when Adam was first made, Adam represented all of humanity so that Adam has been seen as either a combination of both sexes (placed back to back kinda like conjoined twins) or just asexual. 5

Here we are three minutes into the sermon and Adam is already a muddy multi-sexual being, I am sure I could preach an hour on that alone. But thanks to Shelle and Kim you’ll have to wrestle with it on your own, for now.

Just before the Lectionary cutting for today’s reading Genesis 2 provides that:”[T]he LORD God formed a man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. Thus the man became a living creature.”

However one chooses to see Adam, it cannot be doubted that in the story God takes a bit of ordinary molecules found on earth and does something utterly fantastic. God breathes into humanity the very breath of life. Our breath is not only a gift from God it is in fact God’s very own breath. Adults take on average about 15 breaths a minute, that’s nearly 2200 breaths a day. That’s a lot of God daily coming in and out of our life. Truly, as the book of Acts basically asserts it is in Christ we live and breath and have our being– meaning that our lives are extraordinary if all we do is live and breathe and just be!

Once God had made the breathing living man from mud, only then does God plant a garden in Eden.

Eden is not in reference to the seminary that I attended– I am not that old! Eden is either a mythical place, or a place of unknown geographic origin, depending on whether you think the story is fact or metaphor. Eden in Hebrew literally means “delight;” in the land of delight God planted a garden for humans, and put humanity there to live and dwell delighting in the world and, as we are told earlier in the story, humanity is free to eat of the tree of life.

But God, aware of the potential of humans to know – and to choose– both good and evil, also placed in the garden the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

God knows humanity was made with the potential, the ability and the freedom of mind to choose. Knowing the dangers that lurk with the power to choose God forbade eating of that tree: “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.”God seems to have intended, and apparently hoped, that humanity, while being able to choose otherwise, would remain innocent and live in delight.

Let me ask you this: isn’t that the very same hope most parents hold on to as long as they can for their children? We long for our children to live in delight innocent of the difference between good and evil, because once you know the difference you cannot live with only good in your life, by definition you have to face the reality that evil is there as well, and also figure out which is which and choose between them.

In this story humans are God’s children and like any loving parent God has the same longing to avoid what surely must happen: the loss of innocence .

The Lectionary reading sets out God’s command to Adam to not eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil but then skips Genesis 2:18-24, which has pretty interesting stuff: God says

In fact the story tell us God was trying to make a partner 6 to be by man’s side not beneath him or behind him, not a junior partner but an equal partner. God did not use a foot bone or a backbone. It is no accident that God took a rib from the middle of man to make an equal partner. She is purposefully not out of something higher or lower 7 than Adam’s side, but, from middle ground. Ground. Adam. Get it? Make no bones about it Eve is someone Adam can stand with side-by-side throughout life (In fact we can honestly say she took his side from the start).

The first commandment is not don’t eat of a tree. We are kind of prudish and so it’s not much talked about but, God’s first commandment is found in Genesis 1: 28 which reads: “Be fruitful and multiply.” 8 Forgive me for saying so, but, that is a commandment surely intended to be fun to follow. 9

But the commandment in the garden to not eat of the tree of good and evil is impossible. As humans grow they cannot help but partake of it. And like the serpent claims we do not literally die when we ingest that knowledge, but it is true our innocence as children dies, our childhood is put to rest.

On behalf of Adam and Eve I want to point out that since the story indicates that like young children Adam and Eve had no knowledge of good and evil when they decided to eat of the tree, they lacked all culpability for their conduct.

Think about it. We do not hold young children responsible for their acts because they don’t appreciate right from wrong. If Adam and Eve did not have knowledge of good and evil how could they know whether obeying God was good or disobeying God was evil? They couldn’t.

You can put a dish of cookies in the middle of a table two toddlers are at and command them all you want not to eat the cookies while you go to another room. However, since they don’t have a grasp of what good and bad is, of right and wrong, they will eat of the cookies. The same can be said of Adam and Eve. The story tells us they did not know good and evil, it stands to reason they could not knowingly commit either until after they ate from that tree.

Despite what many think Satan is not in this story. The serpent we are told, though, is crafty. In Hebrew the word for crafty is “arum” and the word for naked is “arom.” So there is this great play on words. The best I could come up with is that it is like saying the “bad” serpent caused Adam and Eve to know their own “bod.” Humans are born naked, but, they are not crafty until they have knowledge of good and evil. And once knowing good and evil they must work at covering up their craftiness. The story then has the humans craftily hiding their craftiness after the crafty serpent causes them to lose their innocence.

And notice how the serpent is crafty. First the serpent questions what God said 10 “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden?’” (Gen 3:1). After Eve explains the commandment about not eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil or they would die, the serpent contradicts God’s edict and undermines the trust the original children had going with God. The serpent says: “You will not die. God knows that as soon as you eat it, your eyes will be open and you will be like God knowing both good and evil.” 11.

The craftiest part of the serpent’s contradiction is that it is true – they did not die and ended up knowing good and evil as God did– but the serpent fails to disclose all of the truth. God also knew that once these first children’s innocence is poisoned with the ingestion of the knowledge of good and evil life will be hard. They will know they are naked, they will have to hide their craftiness from themselves, from one another, and even try to hide it from God.

In the garden of delight Adam and Eve were innocent children made to be equal partners while absorbing life. It was inevitable one day they would know good and evil.

Try as God might God could not stop the choice given humans at creation. Humans one day would long for knowledge and then knowledge itself would mean choices between good and evil– and inevitably craftiness, if only to hide or hold back thoughts of evil acts. Adam and Eve’s only–only– mistake was to disobey God. And no matter what we may have been taught about this story that mistake was innocent because to do evil one must know what evil is and at the time they ate the fruit the story clearly tells us they had no inkling of what evil was.

So why this story? And why now at Lent?

Well Lent is a time of reflection. It’s a time about choices to follow God’s call or follow the crafty call of other things in life– calls to live differently than what God calls us too. Like a parent God longs for us to remain innocent as a toddler, but once we know good and evil the innocence of a babe is not possible.

We are moved out of the garden of our childhood delight and into the real world covering up, working at hiding our propensity for craftiness. You see since we all have knowledge of good and evil, our knowledge of good and of God, calls us away not from knowledge of evil, but from acts of evil.

The Garden of Eden story ends with God sending humanity out of that garden “to till the ground from which he was taken.” The word “ground’ is adamah in this verse and the word “till” means “work” or “labor.” This phrase is usually heard to mean “work the earth hard like a farmer.”

But I want to go back to the adamah-adam (that is the humus-human) pun and suggest it can also mean that Adam was sent out to work on Adam. Humans as adults leaving the innocence and delight of childhood, are meant by God to work on humanity, that is ourselves individually and collectively.

Once we have knowledge of good and evil we must continually work on choosing between them. God always, always, calls us toward good. There is little doubt that is our calling from God. The choice though is still ours to make! We must work at making the right choice, the good choice.

AMEN.

1. Rosenberg, David, Book of J, trans, Harold Bloom(New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990) 126; Trible, Phyllis, “Not a Jot, Not a Tittle: Genesis 2-3 after Twenty Years,” in Eve & Adam, ed. K. Kvam, L Schearing, V. Ziegler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999),440.

2. Trible, Phyllis, 440.

3. Brothers, Greg, QuickStart to the Books of the Bible,( Nampa: Pacific Press Publishing Association, 2002), 47. Rev. Brothers is a very funny man. He gave me this particular Seventh Day Adventist study book that he authored and I thought I would see if he had any funny ideas to the Garden of Eden story, and sure enough he did.

4. Borg,, Marcus, Reading the Bible Again for the First Time, (San Francisco: Harper, 2001),69.

5. The idea is from a Jewish tradition which imagines the first human as one being with two body fronts which God severed and “two backs resulted, one back for the male and another back for the female. See e.g., Levi, Rabbi, “Leviticus Rabbah14.1,” in Midrash Rababah in Eve & Adam, ed. K. Kvam, L Schearing, V. Ziegler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 78. This tradition supports a present feminist argument that Adam and Eve came into existence at the same time out of a single being who was either both genders or neither. Trible, Phyllis, 432; 440-443.

6. Gen. 2:19.

7. Cf., Aquinas, Thomas, Summa Theologiae, 229.

8. Gen 1:28

9. See, Gen 3:16.

10. Texts for Preaching, Year A, p. 184

11. Gen 3:4-5

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