Scripture: Genesis 2:8-9, 15-17 and Chapter 3.
I’ve been thinking about loss. I’ve been thinking about loss probably for lots of reasons that have nothing to do with the scripture for this morning. But I am aware that what I am thinking about in other areas of my life has a heavy influence on the kinds of questions I bring to a passage of scripture, and so I bring that concern to the story of Adam and Eve in the garden, which I had been planning to preach on for several weeks. But I also do think it’s an appropriate way to think about this passage. Adam and Eve lost something, and maybe in thinking about how to describe their loss we will stimulate some thoughts not just about them but about us.
Often this part of Genesis is referred to as “the fall”, and that has usually meant something like Adam and Eve’s falling out of favor with God, their fall from grace, their fall from living in a state of grace to living in a state of sin. In this line of thought what Adam and Eve have lost is their innocence, their innocence in the sense of their moral purity. They were bad. God told them not to do it, but they did it anyway so that now instead of being innocent they are guilty. And they are about to be punished, and so they try to hide from God, and they try to cover themselves because they are ashamed. And of course in the story what they seem to be ashamed about is their own bodies, so that one whole huge body of thought coming out of this has been that our physical, bodily life is by nature sinful and that our bodies and our desires, especially our sexual desires are by nature shameful.
Then, on top of all this, there have been the discussions about who is to blame for Adam and Eve’s misfortune. The main candidates have generally been the devil, who as we know can seduce us into doing all kinds of evil things, and Eve, who has been sometimes blamed for being so gullible, or for being by nature seductive, like the devil, or for exercising a bit too much initiative and leadership in bringing this to Adam’s attention and interfering with his decision making and cajoling him into doing this thing that he didn’t really want to do.
Now in all honesty I have to tell you that what I have been describing to you are interpretations that I have not actually encountered too much first hand. I don’t read that kind of literature. What I have encountered first hand both in writing and in person from friends and colleagues is ample testimonies of people who have had to spend a good deal of effort getting over what someone taught them about what Genesis had to say, or maybe what they themselves thought Genesis was saying about sin or sex or Satan or women or God.
As I was saying last week, for me to approach these early passages from the Bible with any kind of freshness at all requires that I find my way through an awful lot of clutter and thorny weeds that have grown up around these readings over time. There have been a great many words written and spoken about these passages that have arrived at conclusions that I not only do not agree with but don’t want to even take the trouble to refute. I told you something about my approach to the subject of sin during Lent, which incidentally is when this passage is usually read, since it seems to have so much to do with temptation, and with being bad, or at least being naughty, doing things we’re not supposed to do. As you know, I am not someone who believes we should stop talking about sin or pretend there is no such thing. I am not even someone who thinks it is depressing to talk about sin, but…I have almost always found that when people use this particular Bible passage to talk about sin, it turns out to be unhelpful, at best. This sermon is not about sin, original or any other kind.
So let me get back to loss—if not the loss of innocence in the sense of guilt and innocence, then the loss of…what? Maybe the loss of home. In a society where homelessness continues to haunt us, and in a world where there are hundreds of millions of people living as refugees, living somewhere that they do not feel is home for them, it is hard for me not to be touched by this story at that level. It’s not that it has a point necessarily, just that here is a story about the first exiles. That is a large part of what it means to live out here, east of Eden. Some have said that this is part of the human condition: that we live as people who have been exiled from our true home, from paradise, where we belong and where our souls long to return. That is a thought I have not always found myself totally in tune with but at least have found it to be an idea worth thinking about as a way of thinking about our lives—that in a certain sense we are exiles.
But I have a different way of thinking about this too. I was talking last week about poetry, saying that one of the questions the first chapter or so of Genesis raised for me was “Where is the poetry in my life?” I had been thinking about the need to read the creation stories as poetry and in the process found that I wasn’t thinking only about the Bible but about myself and our need to read ourselves as poetry, or to see the poetic aspects of our lives. I said all this but I didn’t really go too far into what I meant by this, even in my own thinking I didn’t go too far into what it might mean to have poetry in our lives.
I think one of the things I might have been thinking about is the need I think we have to find places or times or things to do where we are able to just become completely wrapped up in something, to give ourselves completely 100% to something, to absolutely lose ourselves in whatever it is we are doing or wherever we are at some moment. Maybe that is when we have poetry in our lives.
Honestly, I think this is something that’s pretty rare, at least for most people, having something, some part of our lives that we can give a hundred per cent of ourselves to and lose ourselves in, even for a short time. I have been told by people—these are not activities I have ever lost myself in—but I have been told by some people that they can lose themselves in fly fishing, others have said running, or horseback riding. I’m not talking now about things we may have fun at. It’s more than having fun. It’s when you get good enough at something that you don’t have to try any more, when you’re running maybe and it doesn’t matter how fast you’re going, and it seems like you could go on forever, and the only things you’re aware of is the sensation of motion and of wind and sight. Like I say, I’ve never had this sensation while running, but I’ve had people try to tell me what it’s like why they were in love with running. It was their poetry.
But it doesn’t have to require special skills or abilities. We can enjoy a beautiful sunset. We can appreciate and admire it. But on some rare occasions we can actually lose ourselves in it. Or a piece of music, certainly there must be times for musicians when they are able to forget about technique and lose themselves in the music they are playing, but even for those of us who can only listen it may be possible sometimes to just lose ourselves in the music, not just to listen to it but to lose ourselves in it, where we’re not doing or thinking about anything else and it just sort of takes over our souls. For me, I find it easiest to speak of the example of prayer. There are a lot of things I am not, but I am a pray-er. Most of the time for most people, I suspect, certainly for me, prayer is not poetic in the sense I am talking about it. It is very self-conscious. I am trying to think of words to write down or to speak out loud or even just to say silently in my own mind. I am trying to remember things I wanted to pray about, and I am trying to remember what I am forgetting and I am all of a sudden thinking about things I have forgotten to do and what will be the first thing I will do when I am done praying and I wonder if I should take some aspirin for the headache that’s just beginning and I wonder what I should preach about in August and …so on. I had the best intention when I started to pray but somehow my mind and spirit got distracted and my attention got divided and I not only didn’t lose myself, I lost the prayer I had started out to say. But there are times, there have been times that I can speak about from my own experience, when it happened, that I did lose myself in prayer when in a way my whole being for a few moments anyway became a prayer.
Maybe all that has something to do with what I was thinking about last week when I was asking about the poetry in our lives. It definitely has something to do with what I am thinking about this week, because I am thinking that maybe what Adam and Eve lost was, among other things, their ability to be whole-hearted, their ability to give themselves completely to something, or to lose themselves completely in something.
I don’t know too much, anything at all really, about life in Eden, but I know something, as we all do, about life in this non-Eden we live in, what people have called the land East of Eden, because in the scripture it describes God as setting up guards to the gates on the East of Eden which presumably is where Adam and Eve found themselves after they were banished from the garden.
One thing I know—feel—about life in non-Eden is that it is very hard to be whole-hearted here, very hard to have a whole heart, to devote oneself body and soul to something, to be completely un-self-conscious, to lose all consciousness of self. It’s so hard to be this way that we aren’t even sure that it’s a good thing to be this way. It’s so hard to be really whole-hearted in this world we live in that for the most part we have given up trying and for the most part I am comfortable with that, but there’s a voice inside me that says there is something we have lost.
Let’s think for just a moment about the whole matter of religious belief. You know Jesus says in the gospels, when someone asks him what the greatest commandment is, he says “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength, and a second is like unto it, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Of course Jesus is quoting the Bible he knew at the time, our Hebrew scriptures, so this is a thought that comes from both the Hebrew scriptures and the Christian gospels, and it seems so basic and simple and right-minded, and yet I’ve always had trouble with this.
This business of loving God. Loving God. Not believing in God but actually loving God. Not praying to God, not trying to get something out of God, not trying to understand what God’s will might be for my life, not trying to lead a Godly life, or a goodly life…those are all things we try to do, don’t do perfectly, but try to do and have some kind of a handle on. We know what those things are all about. But loving God. I have always felt that that is something else again. What does it mean to love God, to just love God? I have had to sit with that question, to let it sit with me, because I am not sure about the answer. What would it mean for me to be in love with God, and not just a little bit, sort of maybe, but madly in love, with all my heart and soul and mind and strength, in love with God?
I’m not sure, but I think we may have lost that ability to love God with a whole heart and a whole soul when we took up residence East of Eden. I know Jesus calls us to that but I think he is calling us to go someplace else, some other world, because the way I am hearing him what he is asking me to do is something more difficult than loving my neighbor, which can be hard enough, God knows, more difficult even than loving my enemy, which can be even harder.
In this non-Eden world our hearts are divided. We find it hard to love anyone with whole hearts, much less God. And there is this whole question faith and doubt, different but somewhat the same. Even to believe with all our heart and soul and mind and strength, which is less than what Jesus asks of us, but just to believe with our whole being is a tough proposition, to say the least.
Mostly, I think, we tend to be suspicious of people who know what they believe, I mean really know what they believe. People who are really confident of what they believe, and present themselves as knowing the truth, appear to people like most of us as arrogant, self-righteous, maybe even a bit dangerous, certainly complacent and unwilling to think for themselves. We would prefer the company of sojourners any day, people who are not so settled or so sure of themselves, and therefore people who have room in their faith for some doubt and for some questions, and for some turbulence and growth and movement. When I originally was thinking about this sermon, I was planning on taking some shots at the fundamentalists for being so sure of what the Bible said and what they believe and indeed what all Christians ought to believe. And I guess I’ve done that just now, but I had originally intended to vent about fundamentalism at a little more length.
But then I thought fundamentalism is not the issue, not for me or for you. The issue is the divided hearts we live with, and while I believe that being a sojourner with a small s is the only authentic way to be in the land East of Eden, whole heartedness of belief and of love is still something we humans may feel, I will even say should feel, as a loss. There is something here worth recovering, even if we can only recover a little bit of that whole-heartedness that I imagine being present in Eden. It is fine to be sojourners, it is wonderful to be sojourners, but there also needs to be somewhere inside us some whole-souled belief that we know for us to be true. We distrust that kind of faith certainty, that kind of assuredness, but we need it too.
There’s something else about our loss of whole-heartedness. It’s not just that our hearts are divided between belief and doubt, divided between certainty on the one hand and a stance of openness, growth, and creativity on the other, divided among all the different commitments we have and demands made on us.
It’s not just that our hearts are divided. It’s also that our hearts are broken. They’ve been broken along the way by…well, no, it’s too late in the sermon to start in on the various ways our hearts may be broken. You know what they are. You know how hearts can be broken. Yours has been. So has mine. And here, East of Eden, our hearts will never be whole again. But hearts that are not whole, hearts that are divided, hearts that are broken, can still be pieced together, pieced together enough to carry a pretty good amount of love.
This story, for me, is not about human sin or human failure, and therefore it is also not about blaming, not about assigning responsibility for who caused things to go wrong or decided exactly what it was that went wrong. Yes, I know the story ends with Adam and Even getting punished for being bad. But for me this is not a story about how we fail, but about how we survive.
I admit that I have to imagine something that is not in the Bible. I have to imagine that Adam and Eve, having just been expelled from paradise, having lost that perfect oneness they enjoyed, having lost their ability to be devoted whole heartedly to God and to each other without feeling any conflict or competing demands, having lost their ability to be completely without any consciousness of self, having lost all of this, I imagine Eve and Adam walking out of the garden, and I imagine that they at the exact same instant turn their heads to each other, look into each other’s eyes, hold out their arms, take each other’s hand, and smile.
Our hearts may be divided. Our hearts may be broken. But they can still carry a lot of love. Amen.
Jim Bundy
July 16, 2000