THE MOST ORIGINAL SIN
a sermon
by
The Reverend Nick Cardell, Jr.
May Memorial Unitarian Society
446-8920
THE
From selected passages in Chapters 2-4 of the Book of
Genesis in the Jewish Scriptures.
...And
the Lord God commanded the man, saying, "You may freely eat of every tree
of the garden; but 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 subtle than any other wild creature that the Lord God had
made. He said to the woman, "Did God say, 'You shall not eat of any tree
of the garden'?" And the woman said to the serpent, "We may eat of
the fruit of the trees of the garden; but God said, 'You shall not eat of the
fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch
it, lest you die.'" But the serpent said to the woman, "You will not
die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be
opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." So 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, and he ate.
[At this point God confronted
Adam and Eve, but I'm skipping over the interrogation of Adam; it's too
embarrassing. It makes him look like an awful wimp. In effect, he says "It
was Eve, she tempted me; if you hadn't given her to me none of this would have
happened."]
Then the Lord God said to the
woman, "What is this that you have done?" "Because you have done
this...in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for
your husband, and he shall rule over you."
Now Adam knew Eve, his wife,
and she conceived and bore Cain.... And again, she bore his brother Abel. Now
Abel was a keeper of sheep, and Cain a tiller of the ground. In the course of
time Cain brought to the Lord an offering of the fruit of the ground, and Abel
brought of the firstlings of his flock and of their fat portions. And the Lord
had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no
regard.
THE MOST ORIGINAL SIN
Our reading this morning came
from the second of two creation stories that are contained in the first book of the Torah. It is
the second only in terms of placement. Chronologically, it is the older of the
two and is based upon an even older creation myth. This myth as told in the
Torah is the source and foundation of traditional Christianity's views
concerning human sin and human sexuality, dogmatized as the "doctrine of
original sin." According to tradition, the "original sin" was
disobedience and the consequence of that sin was the loss of sexual innocence.
You see Adam arid Eve were virgins prior to their disobedience and, presumably,
would have remained so had they behaved themselves and not fallen from Grace.
Furthermore, in accordance with the traditional doctrine it is through human
sexuality that the taint of that original sin is transmitted generation after
generation. Thus, the old Calvinist dictum: "In Adam's Fall
we sinned all." It was this negative view of sexuality that led to the
idea that sex for pleasure is sinful and is only truly legitimate for purposes
of procreation--in fulfillment of God's command to "be fruitful and
multiply." This is also a source of the idea that baptism is necessary to
wash away the taint of sin derived from the act by which we were conceived.
Otherwise, upon dying, we would go to hell--or at best into limbo.
Most of the mainline
Protestant traditions have modified the doctrine of original sin in significant
ways. (Our Universalist tradition had a great deal to do with that.) Even Roman
Catholicism has softened some of the more negative implications for human
sexuality, although its adamant position regarding birth control, a consequence
of the traditional view, remains intact. It is in the world of Protestant
Fundamentalism that one is most apt to find the doctrine in its generic, pure,
unmodified form. This is due to the fundamentalist doctrine of the inerrancy of
the Scriptures, to the belief among numerous (though not all) fundamentalists
in the literal interpretation of every Biblical word.
For the moment, and for the
sake of this sermon, I would like to buy into their assumption. Let us suppose
that the second and oldest creation story is not a myth, but a literal record
of historical events dictated by God to some faithful scribe. And note that
"original" as in original sin has two connotations: the first
sin, and the fundamental sin. This is where my title sins against
grammar, because I want to inquire about the most original sin which is the
same as asking about the most first and the most fundamental sin.
According to my reading of
the story the first sin was not committed by Eve or Adam or, even, the
serpent. And here I suppose I could be accused of another sin (but surely not
by any of you) because I am convinced, taking the word at its literal face
value, that God committed the very first sin. God lied! It is right
there in the literal word: "...the Lord God commanded man, saying, 'You
may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but 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 surely die. God lied, for is it not written in the literal word
"When Adam had lived a hundred and thirty years, he became the father of
Seth. The days of Adam after he became the father of Seth were eight hundred
years..." I make that out to be nine hundred and thirty years (339,450
days) in all. Even assuming that Adam had been around for some time before
sampling the forbidden fruit, he must have lived more than 293,000 days after
he had eaten of the fruit of that tree. He did not die in the day that he ate
thereof.
And that was not the only
lie. God deceived Adam when he told him that he might eat of every tree
of the Garden except that one. For we discover when he booted Adam and Eve out
of the Garden that there was another tree he wanted to keep their apple-pickin hands off of. "...the Lord God said, 'Behold,
the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now lest he put
forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for
ever...'" therefore, God drove them out of the garden.
A lying God is not the only
troublesome "fact" in this "history." God denied Adam and
Eve any knowledge of good and evil and then punished them because they didn't
know that disobedience was a sin. I ask you is that
fair? Does it even make any sense?
I think God could be forgiven
for committing the first sin and for his deception and hypocrisy were it not
for what I see as the fundamental sin. That was God's, also. For it was God who introduced prejudice, discrimination and the
very idea of inferior/superior into our lives and into the world. It is
right there in the literal word. First, with Adam and Eve what does he do in
punishment? Instead of an even-handed judgment he says to Eve: “...your desire
shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.” There is the
fundamental sin. The establishment of inequality. The suggestion that there is something inherently superior
about one kind of being and inferior about another.
And God did not stop there.
Consider the situation of Abel and Cain. Cain was a farmer, what else would he
bring as an offering to the Lord but the first grains from his harvest? Abel
was a herdsman, what else would he bring but one of the first lambs? And what
does God do? He says to Abel "Hey, that's marvelous. You're a good man
Abel." And What does he say to Cain? He turns up
his nose. He says, “Yech..cereal.”
And we're told it was not only the offerings he rejected, that he had no regard
for. We are told that the "Lord had regard for Abel and his offering but
for Cain and his offering he had no regard."
But there was worse to come:
If we read further in this record of origins, e.g. in the tales of Noah, we
discover that God originated other forms of prejudice and discrimination:
bigotry, racism, jingoistic nationalism, even slavery and genocide.
Some God! That, at any rate,
is the picture that emerges with an inerrant, literal, fundamentalist view of
Scriptures if one is rigorously honest as a literalistic fundamentalist. On the
other hand, when we assume that it was a human mind that conceived these
stories and a human hand that preserved them for us, and when we examine the
mores and beliefs of the time and place in which they were conceived, then
there are many other ways in which to understand them and many genuine insights
in them.
One clear implication of the
story that I accept as valid along with most of my and your religious ancestors
is this: the first and fundamental sin, the most original sin had to do with alienation
from God. It was an alienation resulting not from disobedience, but from a sin
of catastrophic significance. Now if those traditional words trouble you, think
of it this way. In the evolution of human consciousness there arose the fallacy
of separateness, of isolation. And the first value-awareness to follow from
that consciousness was not one of "good and evil" but of
"superior/inferior." The first and fundamental human flaw (the
original sin) was the belief that human beings were separate from the very
source of creation itself; that we were unrelated to Creator or creative
process and, thus, unrelated and likely to be inferior or superior to any
creatures that were different from ourselves.
All of our religions, even
the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, have reinforced
that fallacy. They have encouraged that alienation, that isolation, that
disconnection. Yet throughout those Scriptures, as well as elsewhere there is
another theme, a repeated reminder of the ultimate reality. In the very last of
the prophetic books (last in placement) are words which had a profound affect
on me back when I was wrestling with my war-time experiences and with the
decision to enter the ministry. In the Book of Malachi I came across words to which
I said a silent Amen. It is written there "Have we not all one
father? Has not one God created us."
In the years since then the
patriarchal and anthropomorphic imagery has come to be inadequate for me. But
the essential message remains. We are all children of one creative process; we
are one with all creation. Marge Piercy expressed it
more poetically in her poem "The pool that swims in us." Listen to a
portion of it:
HELP
STOP WETNESS cried the Arrid ads
that
year. I used to leave you
and as
the bus lurched westward on 14th
Street,
from the slack of my pleased flesh
and the
salty damp of my thighs
I
would take comfort.
Wet
is what flows and seeps and comes again:
that
ocean we carry inside,
a tidal
pool cherished from our spawning grounds
bottled to
nourish us among alien rocks.
The
sea is our ultimate ancestor.
Even
trees cup sap that rises and falls.
Wet
and sloppy the mutual joy
of
stirring bodies together
warm as
breast milk.
We
are wet jokes and wet dreams.
A
scalpel slits us open like a busted
bag of
groceries, and out we ooze.
Noses
drip, Armpits sweat. Eyes weep.
We
are born from a small salt pond,
yet
immersed in our own element we drown.
We
have no natural habitat, we have
no home.
We build shelters of trees
and
stones and clay to keep us warm.
..........
Our
wise cousins, a million years past,
went home
again. Dolphins have no houses,
no coins,
no tools or tolls, no warehouse,
no
armies, classes or taxes.
Dolphins
in the sea help one another.
People
among rock and cement
fear each
other worse than the cyclone.
..........
How
can we feel part of one another?
How
can we count the children of the trout
and the
coyote and the humpback whale
as our
relatives, when we cannot
believe
somebody who makes half what
we do has
as many feelings, that when small
black-haired
people bleed, it's blood.
..........
We
must feel on our collective nerves the great pattern,
how the
same water drifts in clouds across
our sky,
blows on the rain in gauzy drifts,
gushes
down storm drains. Swells the cabbage,
lengthens
the grass blade the cow chews.
The
same water rises from the well, runs
through
us and falls to rush through sewers.
We
carry in the wet cuneiform of proteins
the long
history of working to be human.
In
this time we will fail into ashes,
fail into
twisted metal and dry bones,
or break
through into a sea of shared abundance
where man
must join woman and dolphin and whale
in salty
joy, in flowing trust.
We
must feel our floating on the whole world river,
all
people breathing the same thin skin of air,
all
people growing our food in the same worn
dirt, all
drinking water from the same
vast cup
of clay. We must be healed at last
to our
soft bodies and our hard planet
to make
fruitful conscious history in common.
The catastrophic
consequences, the products of the most original sin are still with us. All of
the forms of it exhibited in the scriptures have been with us all along. The
snobbery, the sense of superiority about material possessions, the chauvinism,
the bigotry, the jingoism, the racism, you name it. I've been reading Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States.
Listen to some of the attitudes our forbearers brought to the founding of these
lands of ours: This is from English Law in 1632 and it can be found reiterated
in other forms in the early history of the colonies:
...It
is true, that man and wife are one person, but
understand in what manner. When a small brooke or
little river incorporateth with Rhodanus,
Humber or the Thames, the poor rivulet looseth her
name...A woman as soon as she is married, is called covert...that is
"veiled"; as it were, clouded and overshadowed; she hath lost her
stream. I may more truly, farre away, say to a
married woman, her new self is her superior; her companion, her master...
We are still struggling with
such assumptions. There was a letter in the
All
communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are rich and
well-born, the other the mass of the people. The voice of the people has been
said to be the voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted
and believed, it is not true in fact. The people are turbulent and changing;
they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a
distinct permanent share in the government ...
There was much sympathy for
those views among the creators of the United States Constitution. They weren't
very overt in their expression of it, but they found subtle ways to incorporate
those assumptions of inequality. Thus, as Zinn points out, "Four groups...
were not represented in the Constitutional Convention: slaves, indentured
servants, women, men without property" and, of course, Native Americans.
We are still struggling with
the consequences of the most original sin. We may express it in different
forms, but it is still, tragically, with us. We see it in the continued
prevalence of violence in family life. One F.B.I. report I remember indicated
that wife battery occurs every sixty seconds in the
I spoke of the other theme
that appears in the scriptures, a theme that theologian Matthew Fox has called
"Original Blessing." In a book with that title he has given
contemporary voice to Malachi's ancient words: "All humans are born from
the earth, are nurtured from it and are destined to return to it. What is more
universal than that. All religions, when they are true
to themselves celebrate this truth."
This is a part of what Fox
calls the "Original Blessing." Yet, throughout the history of Western
religion--especially in Christianity--we have focused on original sin and that
is the most original sin. Instead of emphasizing our universal kinship, the
dignity and sacredness of all creation, we have focused on alienation, on
inferiority. Is it any wonder we constantly strive for some imagined
superiority and wish to believe that some gifts are more worthy than others,
that one sex, one race, one nationality, one economic system is inherently
superior-all to overcome an assumed inferiority and alienation. Is it any
wonder that we exploit and brutalize vulnerability wherever we find it; all
because we lack the wisdom to comprehend that we are all children of one
creation. We are all brothers and sisters to each other and to all the earth.
To be true to itself a
religion needs, as Fox suggested, wisdom as understood in the Native American
tradition: "that the people may live." This understanding of wisdom,
Fox wrote:
...encompasses
the breadth and depth of cosmic and human living and I believe it names what
God the Creator wants for all her children: that the people of this precious
earth may live.
AMEN!
THE BENEDICTION
A benediction is, literally,
a good word. Author Adrienne Rich has written many good words, among them
these:
My
heart is moved by all I cannot save:
so much
has been destroyed
I
have to cast my lot with those
Who
age after age, perversely,
With
no extraordinary power,
reconstitute
the world.
May we unite, joyously, in
such perversity.
NOTE: The contemporary
sources of quotations used in the sermon are as follows:
Marge Piercy,
Stone, Paper, Knife, Knopf, 1983 (paperback)
Howard Zinn, A People’s
History of the United States, Harper Colophon Books, 1980 (paperback)
Matthew Fox, Original
Blessing, Bear & Co.,
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