Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7
15The 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."
3Now 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.
Like many of the people who voted for this year's Oscar awards, I have not had a chance to see most of the movies that were nominated. Still, I could not escape either news reports or comedian's commentary on the best actor award recipient's self-congratulatory comments. Matthew McConaughey did manage to thank God and his parents before launching into a very uncomfortable series of explanations for why he is his own hero.
I want to believe that he is not as narcissistic as he sounded but at the very least this is a good example of why even really good actors need to have a writer to prepare their speeches for them. The story-line of the film, as I understand it, makes a beautiful and wonderful moral point but it is not hard to be deceived into believing that it is really all about you when you see your own face up on the screen and you are receiving accolades from all of the world.
I always find it painful when news-commentators decide to run for public office. They have come to believe, over years of looking into a camera and reading off of a teleprompter that they are no longer just reading the news, that they have become, themselves, the news.
For centuries the Catholic Church has implied that the "original sin" has something to do with sex. That is not what the Genesis narrative suggests.
We may be annoyed when squirrels get into the bird feeder but we do not talk about sinful squirrels. Squirrels just do what squirrels do because that is the nature of being a squirrel. We sometimes hate it when the deer wander into the yard and eat our vegetable garden, our shrubs and flowers but we do not call them sinful. They are just doing what deer do.
Human beings, as naked apes, only talk about sin because we consider ourselves to be aware of what is right and what is wrong and even though we are aware, we still often choose to do what is wrong. The Garden of Eden story says that the narrative of human sin began with hubris.... Arrogance... narcissism.... The desire to be equal with God.
I have often joked that were it not for the church's mastery of guilt and fear that I would not have a job. Clearly, in the progressive church, we are not too easily manipulated by either of those old standbys of religion but I think that we have reason to slow down a bit and give it a moment's reflection.
Like most aspects of spiritual thinking, there is both the macro and the micro consideration... the personal and the social, the individual and the global perspective.
This past week, Rachel Maddow aired a special to answer the question, "Why did we invade Iraq?" Based on recently released documents from the Bush administration, it becomes inescapably evident that our nation used the tragedy of 9-11 to attack a nation whose only provocation was that they were dragging their feet about getting their oil onto the world market.
Like many of you, I was involved in protests prior to the invasion of Iraq carrying signs that said, "No Blood for Oil." Though we suspected that oil was the real reason for the war, if we can trust the honesty of Maddow's reporting on the newly released documents, the indefensible hubris that allowed us to justify killing off our own soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqis to keep oil prices low, now seems to be unavoidably true.
How could we not call this sin? How is this not hubris at a national level? Energy executives, in secret meetings with Vice-President Cheney, with the blessings of President Bush, mapped out a strategy that would use Iraqi oil to bump up the world supply even though it would mean the deaths of so many people.
Now I watch the unrest in the Ukraine with a mixture of sympathy and fear. I am not certain that the people there have not been encouraged to sever ties with Russia and align with the west because Russia has been a major exporter of natural gas which flows through pipelines in the Ukraine.
Now that the United States finds itself awash in natural gas, we're looking to export it and that would be much more profitable if we could cut off the Russian supply of natural gas to Europe. I don't mean to use the pulpit for a foreign policy speech. What I'm trying to point out is that we can do things out of greed, self-interest, out of a narcissistic world view, all the while telling ourselves that we are doing something noble, praiseworthy, even courageous.
Søren Kierkegaard once said that we are objective about others but subjective in our view of ourselves when, in fact, we should be subjective about others and objective in our self-appraisal. That is, we look across the globe and we make ourselves comfortable in portraying Vladimir Putin as and old Soviet style dictator and allowing ourselves to view our own nation as being a beacon of freedom and democracy. What if Putin is really just defending Russia's natural gas trade and we are trying to take it from him?
Can we be objective about our own motives and allow for a bit of subjective view of the motivations of people we do not and cannot know? That the citizens of Ukraine are in danger is a horrible thing.... But I am not certain that the natural gas market is not what is really ratcheting up the national danger of civil war. I feel that it is important enough that we must come down off of our imperial throne of national arrogance this time before we do again what we did in Iraq.
Empire building is bad when Putin does it and, we should be able to admit, it is bad when we do it.
But this is no less true when it comes to taking an objective view of our selves on the individual level. International politics is a complicated, mixed up can of worms but so are our own motivations. No one is pure. No one is without ego. We all have mixed motivations for everything we do and if we cannot be honest about them, the mix can become quite toxic.
It is unfortunate that a great deal of the talk about sin has had to do with piety rather than actual human evil. I hope that the progressive movement is delivering us from puritanical concerns with believing the right things, praying the right way, worshipping the right way.... I hope that we can put distance between ourselves and all of the really mentally ill obsessions with managing the sex lives of others or loathing our own bodies or natural instincts. That stuff is really messed up.
But I earnestly hope that we will not abandon entirely an awareness of personal sin. It is not right to hurt other people, to exploit them, take advantage of them, lie to them, rob them of either their property or their dignity.
Just as we know it would be wrong to stir up a civil war in Ukraine in order to increase our international market for natural gas, it is wrong for us to tear down another human being in order to gain status for ourselves..... or to expect them to work and still be poor.... Or to accept that the well off can have health care and that they need to quietly hurry up and die.
Without a concept of sin we may think that we can return to the unadapted animal state of innocence but do you really want to start growling at the neighbors and licking your private parts in public?
We have eaten the forbidden fruit. We cannot claim that we do not know the difference between right and wrong. We cannot, as individuals nor as a nation, live in the dark as if the harm we do to others can be excused because it tilts the scales in our own favor.
Wars are a human creation. Poverty is a human creation. Racism, sexism, nationalism are all human creations and the only thing that can prevent wars, end poverty, erase prejudice and create justice are persons who have a conscience that they are willing to use.
