February 10, 2008

Lent I

Year A - RCL

The Rev'd Lloyd Prator

New York City

Today I want to talk to you about a question that springs from a lie and a threat that was not made. Both of them have to do with the way in which we think about a teaching of Christianity called original sin.

Along the same lines as the dishonest question and the unmade threat, here are some untrue allegations about original sin.

Today’s first reading is the locus classicus for the way we think about original sin. It is the story of temptation and the fall from Genesis, the famous “apple in the lady’s hand” story.

You all know it, or you think you do, but let’s take a closer look at it today.

After creation, God placed the man and the woman and put them in the garden. The garden was filled with things that were good to eat, and they could eat what they wanted, except for the fruit of the tree in the center of the garden. It was called the tree of the knowledge of Good and evil. That they could not eat. The serpent spoke to the woman and said roughly, “Say, I hear you cannot eat any of this good fruit. Why is that?” The woman said no, they could eat of anything except the tree in the center. “Ah,” said the serpent, “if you eat that tree you will be like God, knowing good and evil. And god is jealous and that’s why he does not want you to eat that fruit.” That seemed unfair, and the fruit looked good and so she plucked a nearby piece, ate it, and saved some for her husband. Then their eyes were opened and they saw thy were naked and made some little loincloths to cover up their private parts, which was probably the first invention of that particular phrase, come to think of it.

In order to understand this story, at any level, you need to know the meaning of the phrase, “the knowledge of Good and evil.” Good and evil is a Hebrew euphemism for everything that is. And only God is the one who knows everything that is. This was not a matter of fruit giving you the power, say, to perpetually forestall an audit by the IRS, or to program an old-fashioned VCR, or to solve quadratic equations – or any of the other things that have puzzled and frustrated the intellect of man through the centuries. To eat the fruit of the central tree was to pretend to be God himself. It was to put oneself at the center of the universe, to claim for oneself the power of wisdom which belongs only to God. And that leads to disaster.

Even in contemporary history we know that. In the last century we have faced two major movements that put themselves in the place of God – National Socialism and communism, and in both cases the claims of man to be God created murderous, savage disasters.

So, when the church talks about original sin, it is talking about the tendency to put oneself in the place of God, and, along with that, to downplay the role and place of everyone else. Original sin is the “Me first” acclamation of men and women down through the ages.

Note, please, that it does not have anything to do with a second role for women – both people ate the fruit. Not that it does not have anything to do with sex. Sexual sins are significant, to be sure, but no more significant than, say, sins which cause us to abuse and put down our neighbors, or to gossip, or to tell lies to advance our positions. Nor is original sin something that we inherit like the tendency to have blue eyes or freckles. That would be hereditary sin. Original sin is the sin that lies at our origins, at the foundations of our beings. Original sin is an assessment of what is “out of kilter” down at the core – no pun intended – of our being. It is the basic human problem – if you want a tamer definition.

And it has its origins in a lie that was told to us – the lie of the serpent who got us suspicious when he said that God would not allow us to eat anything in the garden. It began with a dishonest question.

And, then, after the story of the eating of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, we are told that our eyes were opened and our ancestors saw that they were naked and so they sewed fig leaves together to cover up. Now, who told them that they were naked? Or more deeply, how did they come to understand that there was something wrong with being naked? In a sense the opening of the eyes and the beholding of nakedness is another lie, because it is based on the assumption that there is something wrong with us when, in fact, no one has told us that there was. There is no line in here about God encountering the man and the woman on the garden path, and exclaiming, “Good God guys, get some clothes on!”

And that is the second definition of original sin. It lies in the assumption that there is something wrong with us that is not actually wrong. I spend a lot of time with people who are seeking to understand God more deeply, or to develop a mature sense of the Christian faith. One of the first thins, to a person, that they seem to need to know is that there are many things that they thought were wrong that were not. Women who feel bad because they are not men, perfectly nice looking people who feel they are not handsome, people with adequate intellects who feel they are dummies. One of the biggest jobs of a pastor is helping people to see that one large problem is that they are created in the image of God but don’t appreciate the beauty of that potential. “Who told you that you were naked? Who told you that being naked was such a bad thing?”

Now, understand, please, that this is not a pitch for the glories of the fresh-air life. With what most of us have done to and with our bodies over the years, it is probably better to cover up a bit. But think of the question in a deeper way.

If we were to search for a new definition of original sin it might be, therefore, this: Original sin is that fundamental problem of the human race that leads us to put ourselves first. Original sin is also that fundamental problem of the human race that causes us to deny our potential.

Both need to be got out of the way before God can work with us. And in today’s reading from Romans, Paul tells us how God gets rid of the human problem of original sin. He does it by creating anew Adam. When each of us is baptized, we are made a new creature, of the same kind of creative act that brought the first men and the first women into being. In other words, he gives us a new start, a new life. And that is what we call the resurrection. Our starts in to that new life will be fitful and partial this side of heaven, because this is still the realm when the old assumptions hold sway. But in another life, we will all be new Adams and new Eves and the only thing present will be new possibilities.

And in that new life, there will be nothing which we need hide from God, because the one who created us will know us perfectly from left to right and top to bottom. Nakedness or elegant clothing will no longer have any meaning at all. There will never be anything else to hide.