Life Outside the Garden

Readings:

Genesis 2:4b-3:24
Ode: Intimations of Immortality - William Wordsworth

Ode: Intimations of Immortality

I
THERE was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;--
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

II
The Rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the Rose,
The Moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare,
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where'er I go,
That there hath past away a glory from the earth.

Sermon

Life Outside the Garden

Eden is a utopia. Utopia is a Greek work, meaning no-place. There is no place such as Eden, nor Shangri-La, nor the Elysian Fields. Such are impossible places, by their very nature, by their place in history, by the ways of power and nature. And yet such utopias exist lastingly in our hearts and minds. We hear of them or we dream of them, we long for them, we aspire to them, we even work for them. And surely Eden has been held over the heads of generations of people in the West, used as an excuse or explanation for condemnation, torture, misogyny, injustice, and suffering both at the hands of people and in the course of Life.

When I was a little girl, I wanted to live in the garden of Eden. More than anything I wished it still existed as an option for all of us. I developed this fervent wish after I read about it in a book in a doctor's office when I was little. It was a picture book that showed all the beautiful animals and people living together in bucolic and lovely peace. There were fruit trees, fields, oceans, everyone together and happy. It told the story of the Fall and concluded with the message that if there was a child who never lied, the garden of Eden would appear on Earth again, open to everyone.

I wanted to be that child who would ransom Eden back with my truthfulness, pulling it back into our everyday world. But already, I am sorry to say, it was too late for me to be that child. Never was I ever so sorry for a lie before or since, as I was at that moment when I realized that if there was any child in the world who could reconnect us with Eden, it already couldn't be me. If only I had heard this before I had told my first lie! I wondered if I never told a lie again, if that would be good enough, and consulted the book, but the rule was quite clear there in black and white - only when there was a child who never, ever, lied at all, would Eden reappear on the earth again.

My opinions about a lot of things have changed since I was that little, but I can still remember how crushed I felt at the loss of Eden. It stands out in my life as one of the few times that a Judeo-Christian doctrinal message, in this case the loss of Eden and the Fall of humanity, resonated in my heart and soul. Eden has been a complicated concept, with inescapable social and historical ramifications for humanity time out of mind, even for us now. It's worth it to take another look at just what Eden was, what it meant, how it was lost, and what all that really does or perhaps does not mean to us now. What is life outside the garden for we who are liberal, religiously pluralistic, thoughtful and rational participants in Unitarian-Universalism, a denomination rooted in rejection of the concept of the inherent sinfulness of humanity, of that original sin back in the garden?

Notice how real the garden is understood to be in the Bible. God creates the garden as a real place, existing on this plane. Geographic markers in the text tell us Eden was north of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, etc. That would place it north of the cultivated valley that became ancient Babylonia, in what is now called Cappadocia in modern Turkey.

For we liberals who wrestle with concepts of god as we do or don't experience the divine in our own lives, rereading the story in Genesis gives inescapable rise to a surprising question: Does God lie? He says to Eve and Adam, "Freely eat of every tree of the garden except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil for in the day that you eat of it you shall die." But it is not true that they will die in that day, they don't die that day, indeed the majority of their punishment is not death but life: to live out long lives burdened by cares, pain and woe

Some would argue that this is another kind of death, becoming mortal, plagued by mortal pains - pain of childbirth, toil, no longer eating found fruit from divine orchards but working to raise food from fields, living out the command that "by the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, dust unto dust." But while on its most dramatic level this can be interpreted as a kind of death, pragmatically it just sounds like another experience we're all familiar with: growing up. As we grow up we grow away from the irresponsibility and short-sighted vision of childhood when most things are given us by parents, who early on seem God-like beings whose rule is absolute (or so they would like us to believe), beings who are tall and mighty and seem all-knowing. And though taking on responsibility for one's own life is frightening and often wearisome, not to mention downright painful, as we live out our choices and encounter life's vagaries, life on one's own is also rich, as rewarding as it is awesome, as beautiful as it is frightening, as powerful as it is vulnerable, being your own person, able to depend on yourself for the necessities of life, though as the Beatles pointed out, most of us do this always with a little help from our friends, and family. Living life on its terms may be hard, someone once said the ultimate act of bravery is living, but it surely isn't death.

The Genesis story can also leave us wondering, not only is God meant to be understood as a liar, but also: Is the serpent is the truth teller in the story? Remember he is the one who says "you shall not die, your eyes shall be opened knowing good and evil." And of course this turns out to be true. They do not die, and their eyes are opened. It's important to notice that here the serpent isn't identified by the text as the devil, rather it speaks of him just a crafty animal, in fact one made, like all the others, by God. His stake in telling Eve the real situation with the fruit isn't clear, except insofar as we might expect that all crafty beings, footed or otherwise, enjoy being contrary and subversive by their very natures. Is the serpent just supremely alienated by his nature from enjoying God's plan as it is manifest in Eden? Or, much as he seems aware of Eden's nature and so one might expect him to be more appreciative, does he just not care about the jeopardy he is placing Eve and Adam, not to mention himself, by pushing the fruit on Eve? Because the serpent is such a confusing character in this legend, early ecclesiastical tradition incorporated him into other serpents they were concerned to condemn, (like the Pythian Oracle at Delphi, and the serpent assistants of the Greek deities of health, Asclepius and his daughter Hygeia), and interpreted him as an aspect of the devil. But craftiness alone does not the devil make, and the serpent's raison d'etre is for us to decide because the story does not make it clear.

The Eden story also raises the issue of the nature of God and his power - is what makes him mighty that he knows good and evil? Traditionally humankind has conceived that what makes God mighty is his power, especially his power of creation and of life and death. Yet the serpent says that people will become like God, knowing good and evil and that this is what God is afraid of. Why should God even wish to keep them from knowing good and evil? On its most fundamental level, isn't that what religion is all about? And do Adam and Eve truly know good and evil after they eat? The story says their eyes are opened and they know shame and nakedness, but is that the same as good and evil? In Genesis, it seems that it is, because God later says that man has become like him, eyes opened, knowing good and evil, and now might live forever thus. But if so, was their naked state inherently bad, or cause for shame? Or did their nudity become bad after they disobeyed God and were losing their state of grace? Or was their nakedness a test, by which God could see whether they continued obedient to his word? If Eve and Adam don't know, can't know, good from evil prior to their taking a bite of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, how can God or anyone hold them responsible for their actions? How can they know it is wrong, bad, to disobey God?

These are questions to which many people have assumed answers, and many have interpreted answers, for millennia, but the truth is that we don't know almost any of these answers. Much of what we think about the story comes from what we think is implied, but implications that seemed clear to the West in the 9th or 19th or 20th century were often very different from those of the Biblical-era Near East. Remember that elsewhere in the Bible, and much later historically, King David dances naked before the Ark of the Covenant on its way into Jerusalem, and though David's wife is appalled, God seems to see no sin in it.

One element of the story that is not often discussed at length, though it is clear in the text, is that this story is not just about original sin, its also about the original passing of the buck. Man says 'the woman gave me the fruit to eat,' and the woman says 'the serpent tricked me and I ate.' Adam doesn't directly admit the truth, he makes an excuse for it, and the woman claims the serpent tricked her though of course he didn't. He promised her she would have her eyes opened and would possess greater knowledge like God, and apparently because of that promise, and because she herself saw the tree as a thing of wisdom and beauty, she ate.

Whe God finds this out, he says the distinctive sentence mentioned before: "'See the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever' - therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken." Who is the us? Although we hardly ever hear of them early in Genesis, God seems to be speaking to what we might call angels. In this part of the Bible, God is understood as having a retinue, a divine court populated with lesser beings than himself, who although not gods, do possess mighty powers and serve to help God and his creation. Shortly after this in the Bible a chapter begins with the growing spread of humanity. It tells of the appeal of mortal daughters to what are called the 'sons of God' who join with the daughters and take them as wives. Clearly the line between mortal and divine was understood much more fluidly in early Biblical times than later came to be the case. Though the sons of God, angels, etc. are not apparent in the Garden when God is talking, he clearly considers them together with himself as one of a level of being to which humanity is not intended to ascend.

This brings us to the Punishments; the serpent will be despised by and inimical to humanity. The woman, who until now has been nameless in the story, gets named Eve by her man, who himself continues nameless. She also gets downgraded, from having been the helper and partner, she is now cursed to be subject to man. The man is cursed with toil, and he and woman together are cursed with mortality. It is not entirely clear whether if they had stayed in the Garden they would have lived a very long time, or just longer than outside the Garden, but God's words which we just discussed above clearly show that however long the first couple might have lived in Eden, not having eaten of the tree of life, they would not have lived forever.

The last thing God does for them before He exiles them is he makes them clothes of skins. Then he sends them out, closing the garden of Eden forever and guarding it against them. It is a bleak ending to a chapter which has given humanity many of our questions, answers, beliefs, rationales, hang-ups and clichés ever since.

We probably don't agree with many of the principles the story sets out, or with its depiction of divinity. But it still has an essential theme that is necessarily relevant for us: the nature of life in the real world. Adam and Eve go from a protected and idyllic existence, to one that is harsh and unsure. I want to go back to the idea I mentioned early in this sermon, that the story of Adam and Eve is really a coming of age story. Notice that it is only after they leave Eden that they have children, and humanity begins to propagate. Before they eat of the tree they have no sense of good or evil. That means that they can not appreciate goodness nor evil. What could be the joy of living in Paradise when one has no capacity to understand that it is in fact Paradise? When one cannot feel or think about the goodness of sunshine or rain, of animals peaceful and mighty and beautiful by your side, of sweet and plentiful fruit to hand, what is the point? Eden was never so precious as when we lost it, that is the point of the story. It would never have been so precious had we not lost it. Eden is only precious because there is also the arctic and deserts and islands and prairies and mountains.

But deserts and the arctic and prairies and mountains are also Edens to many who live there. We have lost nothing but our innocence, which though painful to lose and painful to observe being lost, is often a good thing to lose. Innocence doesn't accomplish much. It doesn't move mountains. It doesn't save people. It is never self-sacrificing or patient. Rather, it is worldliness, together with the compassion we learn from experiencing the pain of life, that changes the world, that helps people, that works to make things better, to ease suffering, to care for those who need our care. Life outside the Garden isn't Paradise, but in knowing good and evil, we can truly know wonder and hope, and with wonder and hope, anything is possible. Maybe God was right to be worried. Though Eden was lush with life, human life in the Garden was pretty sterile. Outside the Garden, anything is possible. With freedom, good and evil, wonder and hope, anything is possible.

Amen.