The book of Genesis has a really special place in my heart. As a freshman at Indiana University, I took a course called Genesis in Literature, a seminar taught by the sainted James Ackerman, a faithful Presbyterian as well as a professor of religious studies. We read Genesis closely, analyzing details of the text; we looked at parallel texts from other ancient peoples; and we read literature that uses narrative motifs from Genesis – like Steinbeck’s imposing novel East of Eden. As a senior, I got to be an undergraduate teaching assistant for the same class. Though I’d grown up in church, that class might have been the true beginning of my deep love for the Bible. The moment when I began to learn that we can take the Bible seriously without taking it literally; that its strangeness can be an invitation instead of an alienation; that even when historical, literal truth is uncertain or unlikely, deeper truths can be embedded in holy text.
You may be relieved to know that the Episcopal Church does not expect you to take the creation story – and this story, sometimes called the Fall – literally, as the way things actually came to be. But it doesn’t follow that we find this story meaningless. In fact, I find it bursting with meaning.
In Genesis chapter 1, we get the seven-day creation story, culminating with God creating humanity, male and female, in God’s image, and then resting. Here in chapter 2, we get a somewhat different story. God makes Man first, and places him in a beautiful garden, called Eden. Every tree that gives edible fruit grew in the garden; there were also two special trees – the Tree of Life, and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. As we heard, God warns Adam not to eat from the tree of knowledge: “for in the day you eat of it, you shall die.”
Now, the garden is very nice, but Adam gets lonely. God makes a bunch of animals, but none of them quite seem to be what Adam needs. So God creates Woman, Eve, from Adam’s rib. Adam is delighted! And listen, this bit is important: “The two of them were naked, the man and his wife, but they weren’t embarrassed.”
Then the serpent decides to stir up trouble. (Note that the text doesn’t identify the serpent with the Devil, though people often have.) The woman tells the serpent what Adam has told her: “You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.” But the serpent says, “You will not die; God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” And she sees that the tree is to be desired to make one wise. And she eats, and her husband – who is right there with her! – eats too. And their eyes are opened, and they know that they are naked. They hastily sew leaf loincloths for themselves.
That evening, God comes walking in the garden. Adam and Eve hide from God, in shame and fear. God calls out, Where are you? The man says, I hid from you; I was afraid, because I am naked. God says, Who told you that you are naked?… And then the whole story comes out, and consequences follow. The man and the woman are sent forth from Eden, to a life of heavy toil to get the ground to yield them food.
It’s a story about the loss of innocence. There was a time when life was easy, when we didn’t have to work for food or worry about right and wrong. We just played, and rested, and then played some more. We were naked, and we didn’t care.
And then… we grew up, right? As individuals, and perhaps as a species. We grew up. We wised up. We learned more and more, and the more we knew, the more complicated things got, and the more there was to worry about. Instead of sneering at our younger selves and their ignorance, their innocence, we kinda wish we could go back.
Who told you that you are naked? The thing is: God and the serpent were both right.That’s the deep truth this story offers us – or one of them, anyway. Adam and Eve don’t drop dead on the spot when they eat the fruit, but there is death, there is loss, in what follows. Knowing good from evil turns out to be a burden that they can’t put down. The sweetness of their early days becomes a cloudy, wistful memory. Never again will they be naked, unashamed, and free.
It’s Lent. And in Lent the church talks a lot about sin. There’s a sort of overview of some core church teachings in the back of the Book of Common Prayer, called the Catechism; it’s not, like, the official core doctrines of our church, but it can be a useful teaching tool. The Catechism says, “Sin is the seeking of our own will instead of the will of God, thus distorting our relationship with God, with other people, and with all creation.” The church speaks of sin in our confessions, too: “We confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.” Or: “We have sinned against you, opposing your will in our lives. We have denied your goodness in each other, in ourselves, and in the world you have created.”
All of this tends to reinforce a sense of sin as something I do (or possibly, fail to do). As individual action – and discrete action: something that happens today, or yesterday, or last year.
That is one form sin can take, for certain. But Christianity has often over-focused on individual sin, and failed to grapple with systemic sin. With the ways our greed and fearfulness and smallness of heart have accumulated over centuries and millennia, have fossilized into social and economic and physical realities, so that we live and move and have our being within a fallen world. We’ve eaten the apple; we’ve taken on maturity, knowledge, shame, civilization and all its ills, politics, complexity, violence, inequality, the whole concept of morality, right and wrong, good and evil – for better and worse. We can’t just go back to the garden.
One of our Confessions gestures towards all that: “We repent of the evil that enslaves us… and the evil done on our behalf.” At my seminary, our work understanding God’s call in our lives included trying to surface how race, gender, socioeconomic status, and so on, shape how we see the world and understand ourselves and others. Our professors used the metaphor of a fish that can’t see the water in which it swims. On other Sundays in Lent we’ll begin worship with a litany that names some of the toxins in our cultural waters: the pride, hypocrisy, and impatience of our lives; our self-indulgent appetites and ways, and our exploitation of other people; our intemperate love of worldly goods and comforts; our prejudice and contempt toward those who differ from us; our waste and pollution of your creation.
None of these are matters we can mend through individual action. These are evils that bind and enslave us, and evils done on our behalf, in which we are complicit in countless ways, large and small. The writer Francis Spufford makes the case that the word sin has been corrupted by capitalism – sinful is something that advertisers say about chocolate!
Instead, he proposes that we think in terms of the Human Propensity to Eff Things Up, or the HPtFTU.
I appreciate the way that framing – the HPtFTU – encompasses both the individual and the collective, and the interrelatedness of the individual and the collective. I spoke recently with someone who was struggling with a perceived failure. In conversation, we unpacked the way that failure stems from things that are unresolved in their life and heart, things where God and their own deep self have something to say that’s going unheard. Stuff like that happen all the time. We miss the mark, we fall short of our intentions, we do things we later wish we hadn’t done, because something in us is hurt or broken or fearful or drained or unresolved. Now, we also sometimes mess up out of selfishness, pride, or sheer cussedness. But either way, our individual sins are bound up with, beholden to, our collective sins.
This Lent I’m leading some folks from our diocese in reading and discussing the book Biased, by social psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt; some of us read it together a couple of years ago. It’s a book about implicit bias – about the way our culture shapes our thoughts, perceptions, and actions. Eberhardt writes, “Our experiences in the world seep into our brains over time, and without our awareness they conspire to reshape the workings of our mind” – making us, for example, more likely to associate black people with criminality and danger. Implicit bias is a good example of the ways the water we swim in, and can’t even see, conditions us towards certain kinds of sin – like biased perceptions that lead us to accept systemic racial injustice as normal and natural.
God calls us to righteousness. Righteousness as “trying not to do bad things” is a fine starting point. But learning to see the water is another path of righteousness. Working on this sermon, I found myself visualizing the burrs that grow on many parts of our church property. Raise your hand if you’ve gotten burred at some point! … You’re just walking around, weeding or playing with friends, and suddenly your pants or shoelaces are COVERED with burrs.
It takes ages to pick them all out, and they leave tiny slivers of plant matter that continue to scratch and irritate. What if we think about righteousness as being someone who’s doing the lifelong work of trying to pick off the burrs of all the ways the HPtFTU clings to us? And! Those burrs are seeds, so we also have to make sure we don’t drop them where they’ll grow more burrs.
I recall a moment within my own recent past where someone was hurt by something downstream of something I did. There was no moment where I chose to do something that would hurt somebody, but sometimes unexamined good intentions can end up accidentally aligning with dynamics in our common life that harm, belittle, and exclude. When I realized what had happened, I had to work so hard to just ride out the waves of defensiveness inside of me – I didn’t mean it that way! I couldn’t have anticipated that! I’m too smart and kind to hurt somebody like that! – until I finally washed up on the shore, ready to own what was mine in the situation, and seek to make amends and do better next time. To try and pick off the burrs, even though it can seem like there are always more…
In this part of his letter to the Romans, Paul is trying out some complicated stuff with Jesus and Adam, and I’m not going to get into it. But he is, here and elsewhere, wrestling with the fact that he really believes Jesus has in some ultimate sense freed us from bondage to sin, but also: we still mess up a lot. Paul is convinced that the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ means that the things that divide us, and put some in power over others, are abolished: In Christ we are no longer male and female, slave nor free, Jew nor Greek. He spends his life striving for a Christianity that reflects that transformation. A church, a world, liberated from the HPtFTU. Two thousand years later, we’re still working on it.
Lent always begins with Jesus being driven out into the wilderness by the Holy Spirit, for a time of solitude and struggle. Lent can be our wilderness, if we choose to use it that way: a season for reflection and wrestling with ourselves.
Alessandro Pronzato wrote this about the inner journey into the wilderness: “If you therefore go to the desert to be rid of all the dreadful people and all the awful problems in your life, you will be wasting your time. You should go to the desert for a total confrontation with yourself. For one goes to the desert to see more and to see better. One goes to the desert especially to take a closer look at the things and people one would rather not see, to face situations one would rather avoid, to answer questions one would rather forget.” (Alessandro Pronzato, Meditations on the Sand)
May we dare to enter the desert, and meet ourselves there.
May we learn to see the water in which we swim.
Amen.
Source for Pronzato quotation: