2018-06-11
Brooke Strong
Scripture: Genesis 3:8-15
A little boy, maybe three or four, tells his mother he’s going to hide and she has to find him. Off he goes, behind some drapes perhaps, or into a closet, and awaits his mother’s search. Eventually he hears the liltingly asked question, “Where are you?” as his mother patiently and devotedly seeks him. He hides. But he also so very much wants to be found.
Or maybe it’s this: one evening, a man and a woman hear something as they finish up the after-dinner chores. It’s the sound of someone walking in the garden. The leaves rustle, a stone is gently kicked, maybe a tune is softly hummed. And then a question from the one walking in the garden: “Where are you?” And we wonder: do the man and the woman want to be found? Or would they rather remain hidden?
We know the man and the woman, don’t we. It’s you and I, who are also somewhere in that garden. And like those mythological forbears of ours, we too know ourselves to be metaphorically naked. We’ve done some things we ought not to have done; and we’ve not done some things we ought to have done. And we have the sneaking suspicion that maybe a divine eye is watching us, and that maybe there is someone at the heart of all things who knows our nakedness—who sees what we’ve done and what we haven’t done.
And if you’re like most people, you’re at least vaguely aware of the slights and failures you’ve committed. We know we’ve botched things and let others down. We know we haven’t lived up to our potential. And yet at the same time, we’re reluctant to acknowledge it. Nakedness is hard to admit. A little snake whispers in our ear, “You couldn’t help it”—you were distracted, or you didn’t sleep well, or the shopkeeper was nasty to you, so of course you cut the other person off in traffic, or you were justified in dropping the wrapper on the sidewalk, or you disdainfully berated the groundskeeper. Your charged sex talk in the workplace was just a joke, right? Your monochromatic membership at the club is just happenstance, isn’t it? Your jingoistic walling off of foreigners is just innocent patriotism, isn’t that right? Snakes let us rationalize whatever it is we’ve done wrong. They let us think we deserve whatever we can get for ourselves. They tell us insistently that we’re entitled to whatever we want because we’re special—more special, in fact, than any of those “others.”
This isn’t just you. It isn’t just me. It’s all of us. We’d much rather hide the sins and errors we make and live with the illusion that we’ve done nothing wrong. Snakes abound. These proverbial snakes try to convince us that everything is fine as it is, that we are pure and untainted, and ultimately that there is no need to apologize or confess because we’ve never really done anything wrong.
And as we do that, as we live with that illusion of our purity, an insistent voice comes from this God walking in our gardens: “Where are you?” It’s as if this voice is saying to us, ‘You’re hiding again. You’re so far away. I want to see you, even with all your warts and dings and character flaws. I want to have a relationship with you. So why are you running away from me; why are you running away from the truth? Where are you?’ Where are we, indeed?
When human life is created, it’s full of blessing. When God creates human beings, they live in an idyllic garden, called Eden. (And remember, as we talk about this, that this isn’t history. It’s not a literal account of what happened at the dawn of creation. This is a story that conveys narratively something deeply true about life. As someone once put it, this story “never happened, but it happens every day” [Samuel Terrien, quoted in Feasting on the Word, Year B, Volume 3, p. 100].)
So as they go through their days in this garden called Eden, the two characters—who at this point in the story have no names—decide they really don’t need God as much as they might have been led to believe. They decide all they really need is to use their best wisdom and go it alone. ‘God? No, thanks. We have brains, we’re smart, we can talk and think these things through. We’ll be fine without God.’
And of course from one angle they’re right. We human beings have accomplished some pretty astounding things. We’ve put people on the moon, we’ve developed antibiotics, we’ve established a remarkable system by which to govern ourselves. Frank Lloyd Wright and Meryl Streep and Albert Einstein and Misty Copeland have shined in brilliant ways. We have some pretty incredible gifts. So really: who needs God?
Well, as it turns out, those stellar accomplishments are not the sum total of who we are. Along with all those astonishing contributions to life, we’ve also carried out inquisitions, and instituted pogroms and lynchings, and enabled child abuse and misogyny and sexual exploitation. We’ve warred and stolen and cheated. It’s a pretty grim litany. And there are all kinds of psychological and sociological reasons for such gruesome behavior. But at root, it’s always also a theological and spiritual problem. We’ve lost track of the God who is at the center. We have tried to go it alone. The complex interplay between our astounding goodness and our staggering selfishness and evil was summed up eloquently over seventy years ago by Reinhold Niebuhr, when he said about government, “[Our] capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but [our] inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary” (from The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness).
One way of assessing the problem that arises in that long-ago garden is that disconnect and separation become the order of the day. When the first two human beings hide in that garden, they’re turning their backs on the source of their very lives—they’re drawing a wedge between themselves and God. Not only that, though, but they’re not even loyal to each other. When the man is confronted by God about eating fruit from the forbidden tree (by the way, the story never says anything about apples; it just says it’s a fruit tree), what does the man do? He right away looks for someone else to blame: “The woman . . ., she gave me fruit from the tree” (Genesis 3:12). And when the woman is confronted by God, she too tries to deflect the blame away from herself: “The serpent tricked me, and I ate” (3:13). Both of them run from responsibility as fast as they can. Deflect. Blame somebody else. ‘It’s not my fault.’
In their avoidance of responsibility, these first two snakebit human beings represent all of us. Again and again we see people in every setting deflecting blame and avoiding accountability. In a column in Friday’s Plain Dealer, Margaret Renkl talks about how willingly and easily we seek to obfuscate the truth. “Whether or not you accept the notion of original sin in its most literal sense—I don’t—it’s impossible not to notice that we’re all born with a powerful inclination for fault and failure. We lie. We treat others unkindly. We nurture wrongheaded notions because they make us feel a little bit better about our imperfect selves.” This, she says, is what it is to be born a human being.
And the problem, she says, is that the apologies of most wrongdoers are pretty pale and inadequate. They “ring hollow because they almost always involve some variety of self-justification. . . . [T]here is plenty to suggest that almost no one in public life knows what it means to be truly remorseful.” She mentions Roseanne Barr’s defense of her recent racist Tweet as Ambien-induced, as well as inadequate apologies from Matt Lauer, Brian Williams, and Paula Deen.
A real apology, she says, consists of four parts: a) “genuine remorse” (“I am truly sorry I did that.” This is the opposite of what so many of our children did when they mouthed a patently insincere “Sorry.”); b) “the expectation of unpleasant but entirely deserved consequences”; c) “a resolution not to commit the same error again”; and d) “a sincere effort to avoid the circumstances that led to the error in the first place”
(http://plaindealer.oh.newsmemory.com/publink.php?shareid=0c7773be9). Acknowledging and taking responsibility for our errors, for our fundamental and ultimately unavoidable nakedness—which is what those first primal human beings in Genesis don’t do—is a crucial and ultimately beautiful part of being human.
I wish we could pretend such errors and untruths and deflected responsibility were rare. We all know they’re not, though. Lies abound. We hurt each other, sometimes terribly. We devote ourselves to wildly misplaced loyalties. Compromised motivations sully our best intentions.
It happens in our personal lives. And it happens in our public life. I am so struck, as I know many of you are, by the round-up in Sandusky and Castalia on Wednesday of over 100 migrant workers who had been working at Corso’s Flower and Garden Center. Some 100 or more federal agents descended on those facilities in an attempt to crack down on undocumented immigrants. And it’s fair to say that if there has been identity theft and tax evasion, it’s appropriate to put a stop to that.
At the same time, though, there is something about this raid that smacks of a pinched and naked gracelessness. In that ancient first garden, God looks for connection and community and shared responsibility. Workers at Corso’s, mainly from Mexico, have come from poverty. They are working in a U.S. economy in which there is a historically low 3.8% unemployment rate, which means they are not taking jobs from Americans who want them. Their work beautifies the world. They support the local economy and tax base. And most of all—most of all—they are our neighbors. The major crime of which they are accused is simply that they are people who are living in a country in which they were not born. And yes, it behooves us to have orderly immigration policies. But in what real way is what these migrant workers have done a crime? In what way does that justify handcuffs, and officers with powerful weapons, and authorities disclosing little about where those arrested have been sent, and separating spouses from each other, and taking parents from their children? “Historically,” says the Associated Press, “immigrants without serious criminal records were released from custody while they pursued asylum or refugee status” (http://plaindealer.oh.newsmemory.com/publink.php?shareid=18c224b62). Now, though, with the new zero-tolerance policy, they are incarcerated and separated from their children.
One of the many lessons of the Garden of Eden, egregiously betrayed in the sin of those first human beings, is that connection matters. In that garden, two human beings blame each other and fail to stand with each other, and ultimately run from God. The story is a clear indictment of any sort of behavior that doesn’t embrace the other. And if we look at the core of the proud religious tradition in which we stand, we see that concern for the outsider and welcome of the “foreigner” is a paramount virtue. Care for widows and orphans is an oft-repeated scriptural mandate. And when Jesus comes along, what does he do? Over and over again, he welcomes whoever it is who’s left out or disdained. The Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37), the Syro-Phoenician woman (Matthew 15:21-28), lepers, shunned beggars, prostitutes—there are way too many to mention, and every one of them—outsiders all—is welcomed into Jesus’ fold. In the current crackdown on immigrants, I fear that something of the heart of Christian faith has been sacrificed.
As we receive new members here today at Federated, and as we honor those who have been the backbone of this church for countless decades, it behooves us to remember what is at our center as Christians. When God asks us, “Where are you?” might we be able, even in our nakedness, to answer forcefully “Here I am,” and to make a passionate commitment to the moral core that sets us apart: a truth-telling that demands we take responsibility for the sins and errors we make; and a commitment to welcoming and including all people. We are children of God, in whom all of us live and move and have our being. We are called into relationships of trust and love, both in the church and in all of life. And we are called, sometimes, to make hard choices that affirm values that much of the culture denies. May we be faithful disciples of Jesus, devoted to the high calling of building a world of love and acceptance and inclusion. And may we live with others the way God lives with us: forgiving shortcomings, opening arms wide, and embracing everyone with passionate affection. Where are we? That’s where we are: found, finally, by the God who adores us, and living with such affection and care that others who see it will say, “Behold, how they love one another.”