Dr. Roger Ray, Pastor
March 13, 2011 LENT 1
Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7
15 The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. 16And the Lord God commanded the man, 'You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; 17but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.'
Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, 'Did God say, "You shall not eat from any tree in the garden"?' 2The woman said to the serpent, 'We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; 3but God said, "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." ' 4But the serpent said to the woman, 'You will not die; 5for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.' 6So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. 7Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.
I received word via e-mail while I was in Belize this week that Peter Gomes, the famous chaplain and Biblical professor at Harvard, had died. He was an amazing man.... Both brilliant and entertaining. I took a class on Biblical interpretation from him in 2004. On the first day of class, he stood before the class and announced, "There will be no questions asked during our lecture sessions this fall because I have a great deal to say and you have a great deal to learn so it's best if we just accept that fact and get started."
It seems pretentious but I feel a great deal like that today because I have a great deal to say to you today and precious little time in which to say it and evidently what I have to say is not commonly known.
I need to also add the caveat that I am not all that comfortable talking about it because I want to talk about the relationship between women and theology which makes me fairly uneasy for several reasons: not the least of which is that I am not a woman and because the relationship has very often been an abusive relationship, and, honestly, because my own history with women should readily demonstrate that there are serious gaps in my knowledge.
Still, it has become painfully obvious to me that the conversation sorely needs to be had. I keep meeting women who are either out and out afraid to get involved with the church or who are so angry at the church that they would rather burn it down than set foot in it.
I had allowed myself the luxury of believing that the bad old days of religious oppression of women was a part of a distant 19th century past. And if not that, at least the current generation of young educated women would have to learn about religious discrimination against them the way a young African American now reads about the institution of slavery..... as something they have heard of but never experienced.
The truth is that while many mainstream Christian denominations have been trying to eradicate the lines of gender prejudice for generations, most more conservative expressions of Christianity have been doing their best to erect higher and higher walls to divide the genders.
And, it should be obvious, where you can establish a foundation of discrimination in religion then you preserve a justification for discrimination in employment, economics, legal structures and domestic relationships. It is hugely important and the ravages of gender discrimination is a dragon which should have long since been relegated to ancient mythology but it yet breaths fire into the hearts and minds of women in the present day.
Where better to start than at the beginning, literally, Genesis? The casual reader may step gingerly along the first eleven chapters of Genesis and not be able to tell that it is not a literary whole. By that, I mean that the stories collected there are not only not written by the same hand but they in fact were not written in the same century or the same nation. There are different hands, different cultures and different subsets of languages involved in the composition of these stories.
There are two different creation narratives in the first and second chapters of Genesis. The stories of the creation, the garden of Eden, the murder of Abel, the flood, and the tower of Babel were never intended to be ancient accounts of either science or history. They are religious stories, parables of sorts, intended to both teach a moral lesson and to account for the way the world is, what cultural anthropologists call an "etiology."
The story of the tower of Babel explains why there are so many languages among the nations and the story of the Garden of Eden explains why women are afraid of snakes..... most of we men are afraid of snakes too but we didn't want to see that in print in the Bible.
Biblical scholarship is not a matter of personal opinion any more than any other field of serious study. We don't have time to explore all of the reasons why we know that the Garden of Eden text is intended to be understood metaphorically but let's just remember that the narrative revolves around a magical tree which is inhabited by a talking snake. Anyone who wants to interpret this text literally should first be able to produce a snake which can not only talk but one who is able to win an argument with a woman. Nuff said.
What these Genesis narratives actually are is both wonderful and complex. They are stories which define the society in which they were created and every word is packed with meaning, more so than in most poetry.
In the narrative, the first man is created by God out of the dust of the earth. Dust, in Hebrew, is "adamah." The man is named "Adam." Which is a play on words. Then we see this almost comic play in which God wants to give the man a fitting partner. God returns to the dust of the earth and makes one animal after another.
It is like a dating service gone crazy. God is trying to make the perfect companion for Adam and in order to be that, the companion must be an equal to him. And, in the humor of the story, it is as if God just can't get it right. Every creature, when presented to Adam, is not adequate to be his partner and so he names it. In that ancient society, to give something or someone a name was a sign of ownership and more than that, a sign of domination. When Adam named the animals it was a form of condescension, a statement that he was superior to them. You cannot have a full partnership with someone you are superior to.
And so, it is then as if in desperation that God gives up on trying to make Adam's partner from the same muddy stuff Adam was made from. God causes Adam to fall into a deep sleep. And here the text is a bit rough. There is no word in ancient Hebrew for rib. The word used here is "side." The presumption in later interpreters was that the text meant to say that God had surgically removed a rib from Adam and managed to make another person from that small part.
A better understanding of the text is to take it as it is written, God took one side of Adam, literally dividing the first human into two parts, one of which was a man, the other was a woman. Even the word used in the Hebrew for the creation of the woman is subtly different.
In the creation of Adam the word used was the same as the word used for construction. Adam was built of dirt and named for dirt. The woman, we are told, was created, and the word used is the word normally referencing art. The woman's creation was God's first work of art.
And you'll notice, especially since I am pointing it out to you, that the woman is not called Eve here. She is not named until after the nasty incident with the snake. Adam names Eve after the fall as a sign of their broken relationship. In the perfect creation, the man and the woman were to have been equal, partners, two halves of the same whole. In the fallen and sinful state of humanity, the two are no longer considered equals.
Now, if you'll recall, this whole matter of looking for a partner for Adam was because he was lonely and God saw that it was not good that he should be alone. In the fall, when they are no longer equals, the woman must suffer from male domination but the man has not won anything here, in winning domination over the female, he has become isolated again.... he is also being punished, being made lonely forever.
There are wonderful things to take note of in the unfolding of the text. The forbidden fruit in the garden is wisdom. It was not the man who was tempted to become wise, it was the woman. And the man does not engage in dialogue here.
It is the woman who is interpreting the word of God, literally playing the part of a rabbi in debate with the serpent.
The man doesn't say a word. He just shows up with his knuckles dragging the ground, scratching himself and wondering what was for supper. He eats of the fruit of wisdom only when the woman has first had her eyes opened. There is so much exalting of women in this text that it is tempting to believe that its original author was female.
Either way, if you are willing to let the text be properly understood, it lifts up equality as the ideal, and inequality as the sign of sinful and fallen humanity. Male domination was a fact of human existence for most of history but it was not the ideal. It was the result of sin.
Standing up here in this big black dress demands honesty. There is no way to publicly read the Bible every week and not admit that it contains hundreds of examples of religiously justified and legislated male dominance and totally unequal treatment of women.
In Genesis Abraham is stopped by God's own hand from sacrificing his son Isaac. And if the story ended there we could trumpet the ancient rejection of human sacrifice.
But the truth is that later, in the eleventh chapter of Judges, we encounter the story of Jephthah's pledge to God in which he ends up sacrificing his own daughter and the story is told in a way to lead you to believe that we are to admire his faithfulness and sacrifice.
The Levitical code includes condemnations against women for nothing more than their basic biological makeup.
Punishments are unequal and blessings are decidedly tilted towards men. The Bible does not speak with one voice only. There are messages of compassion, images of equality. There are stories of victorious female leaders and commandments to disregard gender and race prejudice. But the bad stuff is there too.
In the past decade we Westerners have allowed ourselves to take a pretty dim view of the Muslim religion and we have especially pointed out passages of the Koran which institutionalize the unequal treatment of women. However, my friends, a literal reading of much of the Old Testament would be more harsh than a literal reading of the Koran. Fundamentalist Christians are faced with either enforcing male dominance or trying to simply not read more misogynistic passages of scripture.
The way our church is structured I, of course, cannot speak for what everyone thinks, but I can tell you what I believe. I can say, as a Biblical scholar who has lived every day with these texts, that there are things, especially in the Levitical code and the most ancient strata of the Old Testament, which simply do not apply to us.
All of scripture, all of religion, every sermon, every prayer is an attempt on the part of women and men to reach up to the mind of God. Like learning to ride a bicycle, there are a lot more falls than progress in the early days and even a pro will occasionally fall. Do a Google search on "Lance Armstrong falls" and you get quite a list. The best cyclist in the world isn't above making mistakes.
What I believe with all my heart is that the direction of sincere spirituality is always in the direction of liberation, of discovery of greater and greater truths, and always in the alleviation of oppression, bondage and prejudice. The church along with governments, banking systems, corporations and armies has been guilty of violence and oppression towards women.
What I can tell you that I believe without the slightest shade of doubt is that God has never been behind any of those abuses. Any religion which seeks to discriminate against women for being women is blasphemous.
In the past generation we have tried to change the way we talk in order to help change the way we think. We've tried to reinterpret male centered language to be more inclusive but the sins of the abuse of women go deeper than any symbolic change.
When I preach in Central and South America I never fail to remind my congregation that men must never hit or sexually attack their spouses or any other women. I have failed to say that often enough in my own pulpit. We too passively walk through a society which turns women into objects of decoration and sexual desire and I find it too easy to simply accept that role without question or pain.... until it involves my daughter.... and that too is matter of male ego.
If women would just gain the self esteem to stop attending, contributing to and cooking and cleaning for churches which discriminate against them the face of Christianity would change tomorrow. Even the current pope would be happy to start ordaining women as priests by the end of the month if they just stopped attending the Catholic church, running Catholic hospitals and teaching in Catholic schools. Oppression continues as long as the oppressed will put up with it. Haven't well all had about enough of it?
And from the perspective of the dirt party, every son of Adam will continue to be lonely until we fully accept the daughters of Eve as equals, partners, the other half of our very souls. Believe what you will but I will tell you what I believe. I believe that the religious liberation of women will be the spiritual healing of men.
