Strangely Familiar--The Fall: Genesis 3:8-15
Third Sunday of Ordinary Time
Picture this: three
and a half days of sitting with a laptop on a Zoom webinar with 1,000 other
people around the state of Michigan worshipping, arguing, asking, clarifying,
calling for final votes, and wondering what on Earth is on the bishop’s tie
today.
Welcome to
virtual Annual Conference.
To those just
joining us it may seem like you picked the one day of purely internal business
but this is part of who we are. We United
Methodists are a connectional church, so when you get St. Luke’s you also get
Michigan, and you get the Northcentral Jurisdiction, and you get The United
Methodist Church as a global body. We
lean into each other, tapping the deep roots of shared mission and resources
that crisscross the world. It can be
really, really cool. And, it can be
pretty awful.
Because organizations need, well,
organization, every year we hold the Annual Conference—which, for us, is the
geographical state of Michigan. For just
under a week, all the pastors and at least one lay delegate from each church in
Michigan gathers to hash out not only how we run but who we are and what we
believe God is calling us to together as more than 800 congregations around the
state.[1]
This was our
second year doing this virtually and there were plenty of “you have to unmute”
moments and “we need to try that again” grace periods, but we managed to do
what we came to do. Along with the
inclusion statement and the laity session Edythe mentioned, the body passed
items to provide cross-cultural training and anti-bias anti-racism training for
pastors, support for anti-bias and anti-racism training for congregations, financial
agreements about benefits and housing for retired clergy, and the budget for
the conference for another year. We
celebrated and renewed our partnership with ministries in Haiti and with the
Liberia Annual Conference. We condemned
the pairing of Christianity and nationalistic fervor that raises patriotism
beyond pride and into idolatry; we heard about our delegates’ hopes for General
Conference, the global body that has now been postponed to 2022. We raised, as of yesterday, $31,447 through
the conference 5k to combat child hunger in the state of Michigan.[2] And we ordained twelve elders and one deacon,
recognized five transferred clergy, and commissioned three deacons and fifteen
elders—including me.
This may feel
insider-y, but it’s important for us to name this because it sets the tone for
who we are at St. Luke’s and who we are as United Methodists in Michigan. Our corner of Christianity is actively
working toward inclusive and mindful faith in a diverse world and that’s pretty
neat. If you have any questions about what
came out of Annual Conference or what this means moving forward, feel free to
ask me; I’ll be talking more about this over the summer because the bishop has
challenged congregations to take on deliberate diversity studies around racial
justice over the course of the next year, so look for that especially here at
St. Luke’s.
The Michigan
Conference set these great statements of who we want to be, but I can tell you
right now that we’re not always going to live up to them. I know this partly because I am, myself,
human, but I also know this because I have met other humans and have discovered
that we are not, actually, perfect.
Shocking, I
know.
But before we
get too far in the “humanity is terrible” conversation, let us turn to today’s
Scripture and listen in on where this got started:
Gen. 3:8–15
8 And they heard the
sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the
day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of
the Lord God among the trees of the garden. 9 But
the Lord God called to the man and said to him, “Where are
you?” 10 And he said, “I heard the sound of you in
the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid
myself.” 11 He said, “Who told you that you were
naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” 12 The
man said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the
tree, and I ate.” 13 Then the Lord God
said to the woman, “What is this that you have done?” The woman said, “The
serpent deceived me, and I ate.”
14 The Lord God
said to the serpent,
“Because you have done this,
cursed are you above all livestock
and above all beasts of the field;
on your belly you shall go,
and dust you shall eat
all the days of your life.
15 I will put enmity between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and her offspring;
he shall bruise your head,
and you shall bruise his heel.” (ESV)
This is a
familiar text to many, whether we’ve actually read it or we’ve just seen lots
of paintings of Adam and Eve with strategically placed leaves and an apple. We have thousands of years of Christians
talking about a perfect paradise from which we got ourselves exiled—this text
has been used to slander women as the cause of all suffering, but also to bear
the doctrine of “original sin” that we all have inherited the consequences of
this one terrible choice. If only they’d
left the tree alone—they had one job!
But what we’re
going to be doing over the next several months is taking familiar texts and
peeling back what we think we know.
This, for example, seems common, almost memorized, but then when we read
it we can see there is no apple (they actually don’t grow well in the north
Africa/near East part of the world because the temperature’s all wrong[3]) and the word “sin” is
never once used. Neither is “fall,” or
“grace,” or “Satan,” or “perfect.”
So why is this
text here, if not to explain why everything is terrible? Well, it is to explain—Frank Yamada points
out that “Like many stories in Genesis 1–11, the Eden tale is an etiology. That
is, the story helps to explain important questions about certain realities in
life–why is there pain in childbirth, why is the ground hard to work, why do
snakes crawl upon the earth, etc. Genesis 2–3 suggests that knowledge, a
necessity for human life, is something that is acquired painfully. Ignorance
may be bliss, but it is certainly not the mark of human maturity. When humans
understand what it means to be fully human–that is, when they have complete
knowledge–the realities of life come into full relief in all of their
complexity and difficulty. Knowledge is both enlightening and painful.”[4]
Beyond the
explanation, however, this text shows us that the story doesn’t end here. Adam and Eve break God’s trust by eating of
the one tree God had said not to, and not only that but then lying about their
complicity in having done so, compounding their mistrust in the One Who made
all of creation and put them in charge of tending to its goodness. But when God gets this “it wasn’t me!”
go-round from the humans, God doesn’t toss everybody out and say that
everything is cursed. Going beyond
today’s pericope to verse 21, we find that God made actual clothes from animal
skins for Adam and Eve and made sure they didn’t die of the elements outside of
the protected cocoon of Eden. We also
get the conversation with the angels that turning the humans out of the garden was
not because they were terrible but because they might also eat of the other
tree that brought immortality and God knew they were not ready to handle that.
God cared for
these creations—these humans who had distrusted God, who had lied to God, who
had thrown each other under the as-yet-uninvented bus without blinking. And when Adam and Eve had kids, God showed up
to be part of the family. When those
kids hit their own failings, God was there, and was there for their kids, and
theirs, and theirs, and so on all the way to those of us who spent Annual
Conference bickering with each other about who is welcome in Christ’s Body the
Church, about whether it was somebody else’s fault that we’ve gone sideways.
It’s been a
couple thousand years, but we don’t get to look at Adam and Eve and say “if
only you hadn’t” as though we wouldn’t do the same, as though we’ve
never made the choice to pull back from God instead of leaning forward in
trust, as though we’ve not said it was someone else’s fault to save ourselves. But we do get to recognize and hold onto the
fact that God is there every single time, making us proper clothes, learning
our kids’ names, protecting us from the things for which we’re not ready,
staying in relationship because that’s Who God is. God is a God Who comes and lives with us, for
better—and, well, not.
Annual
Conference, like any organizational gathering, brings out the best and the
worst in us—it can be some of the most soul-feeding worship, for one
thing. Did anybody join in last week’s
worship with Rev. Dr. Cynthia Wilson?
That voice! I am blessed to
listen to that voice calling me back to the reason why I sing, and I’m glad
that y’all were able to hear it, too. It
is the best of us to gather from all around the state and worship together as
one Body, the Church.
But Annual
Conference is also a showcase of some of our most petty and spiteful
moments. To pass an inclusion statement
like Edythe read or a declaration that this conference commits itself to the
work of being anti-racist was not a smooth ride, and I don’t think I need to
explain to you that having 1,000 people seeking God’s will when sometimes it’s
hard enough to get our committees of thirteen on the same page can make for a
messy, tough process.
The thing is,
the Church is made of people. It was
people that God breathed into when they were simply mud creations, and it was
people who learned of God’s love for them, and it was people who took the fruit
from the tree and said it was somebody else’s fault, and it was people who did
not want to be found by the God they had betrayed—and it was people that God
dressed, and people that God loved, and people that Jesus came to hang out
with, die among, and live for. We may no
longer be in Eden, but we are still people.
So it is people who snipe at each other, and people who come together in
worship to claim this common faith, and people whom God calls good.
It is God
Who calls to us, we beautifully imperfect people, and says let us stay in
relationship. It is God Who teaches
us again and again to reach out to each other; to love self, neighbor, and the
Holy; to build a place that isn’t Eden, where we did not know, but a kingdom
where we know and are known, fully, marvelously, grace-fully.
Where in your life
is God standing with you outside of Eden, handing you a leather jacket? Where in the life of St. Luke’s is God showing
up after a difficult harvest to say that the land is tough to work but the
relationship continues? Where in The
United Methodist Church is God calling out, “Where are you?”, giving us the
chance once again to say here we are, these are the choices we have made, we
trust You to see the fullness of us and love us because it is Your nature.
There isn’t a
“happily ever after” here because the story is still unfolding, thousands of
years later, here in this sanctuary and on your computer screen and on a TV
miles away and over your phone. The
story will keep unfolding because God is still at work in the world, standing
alongside to say I am here, even until the end of the age.
Thanks be to
God for every new chance to be reminded that we mud creations are good, made
good by a good God Who never abandons us or casts us aside, even at Annual
Conference.
May we have
the courage to bring our whole, honest selves to the God Who knows us truly;
the faith to accept God’s hand outstretched in love; and the hope to recognize God
at work in each other, one day, one moment, one new conversation at a
time. Amen.
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