I’m with Ellen

One more sign that a lot of people have simply lost their minds.

TV show host Ellen DeGeneres was seen publicly hanging out with former President George W. Bush. The two are friends.

In today’s America it is apparently not possible to be friends with someone you might disagree with about something.

DeGeneres and Bush both were roasted, from both sides of the lunatic fringe, for associating with the likes of the other.

She responded: “When I say, ‘Be kind to one another,’ I don’t mean only the people that think the same way that you do. I mean be kind to everyone. Doesn’t matter.”

That only stoked the fires of rage from the demented ones.

Bush is also known to be friends with Hillary Clinton – an offense even worse than getting along with Ellen DeGeneres.

I don’t know what part of the “Love your neighbor” and “Love your enemies” thing people don’t get, only that politics is supposed to rule everything in today’s America.

And if that is so, it is even worse than Trump abandoning the Kurds to be slaughtered by the Turks.

Deception

We have reached the point in the Genesis narrative that is usually called “the Fall,” with a capital “F,” meaning that this is a major event in human history.

If it was such a big deal, you’d think that the rest of the Old Testament would constantly point back to it and say: “This is where everything went wrong.” But the remainder of the Old Testament never directly refers to it. Maybe that’s because its significance is simply assumed. Or maybe it’s thought that the story is so powerful that it needs no explanation.

That is the general way of scripture. Scripture teaches through story, not through the recitation of points of doctrine. And this is a powerful story.

Certainly by the time we get to the New Testament, the event related here is considered a pivotal point in the drama of salvation. It’s commonly thought that this is what Jesus came to reverse. Writing to the church in Corinth, the Apostle Paul says: “In the same way that everyone dies in Adam, so also everyone will be given life in Christ” (1 Corinthians 15:22, CEB) For Paul, Jesus is the Second Adam who corrects what the First Adam got wrong.

Strictly speaking, according to our story, he’s not Adam yet. He’s still “the man,” and Eve is still “the woman.” But since we all know this as the story of Adam and Eve, and it’s cumbersome to keep calling them “the man” and “the woman,” from now on we’ll call them Adam and Eve.

Their story is fairly simple and straightforward, but it has been complicated by centuries of misunderstanding, misinterpretation and abuse. It begins: “Now the serpent was more cunning than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made.”

We commonly think that this was no mere snake but Satan, the devil, the father of lies, in the guise of a snake. A couple of passages in the New Testament suggest this, and some early Christian theologians say that it is so. Over the years, an elaborate mythology has grown up about fallen angels and one in particular named Lucifer, who is said to have led a heavenly revolt against God. None of this is remotely biblical, though the Bible is often cited as the basis of it. *

What’s at stake is responsibility for the existence of evil. If this is just an ordinary, garden-variety snake, we have to explain why it’s trying to trick Adam and Eve. What’s its motive? But if the snake is actually Satan in disguise, it’s easy to say that, as usual, he’s just up to no good.

In some people’s minds, this shifts the blame from the humans to Satan. But if Satan is a fallen angel, he also is part of God’s creation, and shifting the blame to him tells us nothing about the origin of evil. Most importantly, it does not get God off the hook for creating a world in which evil exists. So the origin of evil remains a mystery.

Ultimately, as theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer says, we must realize that “It is not the purpose of the Bible to give information about the origin of evil,” but rather “to witness to the character of evil.” (Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall, 65)

In its witness to the character of evil, our story says nothing about fallen angels or Satan or Lucifer. The text clearly identifies the snake as one of the wild animals that God created. We can’t quite call it an ordinary snake, though. Two things about it stand out. One, it’s especially cunning. Two, it can talk.

Perhaps the novelty of a snake talking is why Eve is not alarmed but appears to be charmed when the snake begins to speak. You might imagine her saying to Adam, “O look, it’s a talking snake.” Adam is there, by the way. The snake doesn’t speak to Eve alone. You can’t see it in the English translations, but when the snake speaks, the “you” in Hebrew is always plural. The snake is speaking to both Adam and Eve. Though he says nothing, Adam is standing there the whole time.

The snake begins with an apparently innocent question: “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden’?”

I say that’s an “apparently” innocent question because it’s not innocent at all. It’s a carefully constructed lie that subtly calls the character of God into question. In fact, God told Adam and Eve that they could eat of all trees in the garden except one. They shouldn’t even touch that one, Eve says.

God never said anything about touching the tree. Eve adds that part. Probably she does not intend to misrepresent what God said. Rather, she wants to intensify the command, to put a fence around the tree to keep them from coming any closer to it, lest they eat from it and die.

But the snake has now lured Eve into a trap that she could never have imagined was even there. “You will not die,” he says, “for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

What do Adam and Eve know of good and evil? No more than they know of death. How do you discern good from evil? How can you know which is which? You learn in two ways: through personal experience, or through the experience of others distilled in an elusive thing we call wisdom.

They have limited experience. As for wisdom, the testimony throughout the Bible is clear: true wisdom comes from God alone. But the snake tells them that eating from this tree will give them wisdom without God. They will become like God, in that they will know what is good and what is evil. They will acquire wisdom on their own.

Like a finely cut diamond, this story has many facets. Let’s look at a few of them.

First, there is the command of God, “Don’t eat from this tree.”

We all want to do what we’re told not to do. Ever tell a child “no”? I remember when our daughters was maybe a year and a half old. She went to her mother and made a request. Her mother said “no.” She immediately trotted across the room to where I was sitting and made the same request to me. It apparently did not occur to her that I might have overheard her talking to her mom. It also apparently did not occur to her that I also might say “no.” When I did, she went away in a huff.

Nobody likes to be told “no.” Animals don’t like it any more than humans do. Your dog doesn’t like to be told “no.” He may obey, but he doesn’t like the word “no.” Your cat, who is less likely to obey, doesn’t like it either. Neither do other domesticated animals or livestock. They may obey, but be careful when you turn your back on them.

God gives every living creature a great amount of freedom. Animals are limited by their instincts, which are hard-wired in them. But they also enjoy the freedom to want and to choose. God gave us all freedom, and we all enjoy it. We all say, “I want what I want, even if I’ve been told ‘no.’ ”

Giving us such freedom was, and is, risky for God. First, God risks disobedience. God wants what is best for us, so a command from God will be for our good. When we disobey, it is likely to get us into trouble that we could have avoided.

Secondly, but probably more importantly, God risks loss of relationship. When we disobey, we distance ourselves from God. The more often we disobey, the more embarrassing our situation becomes, and the more distance we want to put between ourselves and God, and the more trouble we get into that we could have avoided if we had just obeyed in the first place.

But God will not control us. God will not micromanage our lives. God grants us self-will and the freedom to pursue it. In so doing, surely God knows that we are sometimes going to exercise that self-will and freedom in ways that God judges as unwise. But God is willing to take that risk, because if we do not have freedom, we cannot love.

We can love only if we have the freedom not to love. So if we are going to live with God in any sort of loving relationship, it has to be a free relationship. We have to be free to not love God or ourselves or our neighbors. The Bible’s consistent witness is not only that God loves us but that God also desires our love. But God cannot and will not compel it, because love that is compelled is not love at all.

Just as we cannot love without the freedom not to love, we cannot obey without the freedom not to obey. What keeps us from not obeying is trust based on love. We trust that God loves us. Therefore, we trust that God knows what is best for us. Therefore, we obey God’s command.

What we have here in this story is a failure to trust. Trust is perhaps the central issue of our relationship with God. I’m not talking about faith, which is usually interpreted only in terms of head knowledge and intellectual assent to certain propositions. I’m talking about trust; the kind that means putting your life on the line in a crucial moment because you are certain that God will act in a positive way on your behalf.

Remember the book “The Shack,” which became a movie? What’s the central issue for Mack, the main character? It’s trust. Does he or does he not trust God? Reread the stories of your favorite Bible heroes and heroines, and rethink them through the lens of trust. Trust is always the core issue in their walk with God. Trust is always the core issue in all our lives.

What we have here is a failure to trust. Adam and Eve are curious. They want knowledge. The snake insinuates that God doesn’t want them to have it. God’s “no” then becomes a challenge. If God won’t let them have what they seek, they will get it another way. They will eat from the forbidden tree and acquire knowledge on their own.

The snake’s lie is that God does not want them to be wise. God surely does want them to acquire wisdom. But they must learn that true wisdom can be acquired only from God. Any other source will be polluted. That’s why there’s no child-proof cap on the tree, no impregnable fence keeping them away from it. God wants them to eat from that tree, but only when God has prepared them for the experience. And they’re not ready.

Naïve, innocent, gullible – call them what you want. Lacking wisdom, they make a poor choice. They seek wisdom not from God but from a tree. However, note carefully that our story never calls their act sinful. The word “sin” does not appear until chapter 4 of Genesis, and we’re still in chapter 3.

What they do may be sin. Or it may be simply an innocent mistake. It may be a necessary mistake. It may be something they have to do to grow up as human beings.

However you describe their motives, the fruit of the tree looks healthy and attractive, so

Eve plucks some and eats, and she gives some to Adam, who is standing right by her, and he eats, too. And the eyes of both of them are opened. And their world is never the same again. Their new world is our world, the world we inherit from them, a world in which we all experience good and evil first-hand.

This is not a story of something that happened to two people a long time ago. This is a story of something that happens to each of us in our lifetimes. We want something, and we reach out to take it, because we want it, and before we know it, this small act of rebellion has become a full-fledged insurrection. It’s now a way of being, a way of standing in opposition against God, against others, and even against our very selves.

The snake was right about one thing. After disobeying God, Adam and Eve don’t die – at least not physically. They do die to their previous innocent and naïve understanding of the world. And they do die spiritually, to some extent, because, as we’ll see, their act has profound effects on all their relationships. The simple intimacy they once had with God, with each other and with all other creatures is now gone.

That intimacy is gone because there are some things that you can see but you can’t un-see, things that you can say that you can’t un-say, and things that you can do that you can’t un-do.

They fail to trust God. They disobey a command. They eat from the forbidden tree. And their eyes are opened to a new reality. It’s not a better reality. But it’s our reality, too. It’s where we all live. It’s a reality we cannot escape on their own. But God is faithful to us even when we are not faithful to God. To that and related things we will turn next week.

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* In the King James Version, Isaiah 14.12 refers to the fallen king of Babylon as “Lucifer, son of the morning star,” who is “fallen from heaven” and “cut down to the ground.” In the imaginations of some interpreters, the passage is connected to Luke 10:18, where Jesus says, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven.” The name “Lucifer” is derived from the Latin Vulgate translation of “day star,” or Venus. The passage in Isaiah is about the king of Babylon, who has fallen from a great height. It is not about an angel named Lucifer who fell from God’s grace. There is no need to link this passage and Jesus’ saying in Luke.

“Deception” is a message in the series “Genesis: In the beginning…” preached Oct. 13, 2019, at Edgerton United Methodist Church, Edgerton, Kansas, by the Rev. James Hopwood; Psalm 146.1-10, Genesis 3:1-7a.

We Got Trouble

Oh we got trouble, right here in America, and it starts with T and it rhymes with tater, and it stands for Traitor Trump.

The latest outrage is the betrayal of the Kurds. When Trump first took office, he began abandoning treaties, loudly announcing to the world that a treaty with the United States isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.

Now he’s abandoning a trusted ally, loudly announcing to all who don’t know it already that making an alliance with the United States is setting yourself up to be stabbed in the back.

A few years ago, America had a fair reputation worldwide. Now it’s widely considered a rogue nation. It has become one of those shithole countries Trump is always bashing. It makes me feel ashamed.

The Democrat-led House is right to begin impeachment of this immoral con artist. Would that some invertebrates in both House and Senate would step up to rid us of this menace before he announces that Article Two of the Constitution says he can do anything he wants, so he’s disbanding Congress altogether.

You think he won’t try? He has spent nearly three years surrounding himself with amoral yes men who willingly do his bidding, no matter how unlawful it is. And don’t think, my “conservative” friends, that you will be left unscathed. When real elections are abolished and he no longer needs your vote, he’ll grind you underfoot like the vermin he thinks you are.

Partners

The first two chapters of Genesis tell of the glories of God creating the world. Chapter three is a tragedy.

Or maybe it’s a coming of age story. Or maybe it’s both. Maybe it sounds like a tragedy to us because we mourn the loss of those carefree days before we grew up, just as the first humans must have mourned their loss of innocence in the Garden of Eden.

Most often you’ll hear what happens here described as “the Fall.” But it’s more than if you merely tripped on a tree root and took a fall while walking in the yard. This is “the Fall,” with a capital F. It’s usually called “the Fall of Man,” meaning “the Fall of Humanity.” Women are included, it’s not just men, though women usually get blamed for it.

“In Adam’s fall we sinned all.” That’s what the New England Primer of 1777 says. There may be some truth in that, or maybe it’s just bad poetry expressing theology that’s not much better. Let’s try to scrape off a few centuries of theological barnacles so maybe we can look at the story with fresh eyes.

The man and the woman – they have no names yet – live in what can only be called Paradise. They have been placed in this garden to till it and keep it. They labor six out of seven days and rest on the seventh day, as commanded by their creator. And their labor is rewarded with an abundance of good food.

Conditions are ideal, and all forms of life flourish to their fullest. Later generations will invent a word to describe this idyllic state of life. The word is shalom.

In this state of shalom, all creatures live in right relationship with one another and with God. As one commentator says, the environment of Eden is “so ecologically ideal that in no instance does life feed off the taking of life. Animals eat grass, not each other.” Humans, too, are vegetarian. (Paul Borgman, Genesis: The Story We Haven’t Heard, 27)

No living being has to die for another to survive. Every living creature that is animated by the breath of life from God respects the life of all other creatures that are animated by the breath of life from God.

The two humans, so obviously made for each other, are naked and feel no shame. They have no secrets from each other. They are innocent lovers. Yes – lovers.

Some early Christian commentators – and some still today – maintain that sex is shameful and evil, so the man and the woman could never have had sexual relations at this point in their relationship. Sex had to come after the Fall, they say, because sex is sinful. I think that attitude is hogwash, and it is not supported by this or any other biblical text.

The man and the woman have nothing to be ashamed of, and they are lovers. They feel no shame in their nakedness not because they feel no sexual desire for each other but because their desire has not been corrupted by sin. Yes, that will come later, after the Fall, as it were. But now their desire is healthy and good.

It’s natural for us to interpret this story in light of our own stories, and our own attitudes toward sex. We can’t help but do that, because part of what this story trying to do is explain our story. It explains, for example, that when a man and a woman come together, they become “one flesh.” Not literally, of course, but they are so close sometimes that they feel as if they were one.

In this story, they once were one, of course. Before God separated them as male and female, they were what the narrator simply calls “the human.” God concluded that it was not good for the human to be alone.

We should all remember that. All of us go through periods of aloneness and loneliness; times when we feel disconnected from others and unable to relate to them. As long as these are relatively brief occasions, they can be healthy, because they remind us how valuable connection with others is to our total well-being.

Long-term, though, it is not good for any of us to be alone. I’m an introvert. Where extroverts need time with people to re-energize, I need occasional time away from people to re-energize. But after awhile even introverts know that they need the company of others. Long-term, I am not my best friend. Too much time alone leads to self-destruction.

Remember the wisdom of Ecclesiastes.

“Two are better than one … For if they fall, one will lift up the other; but woe to one who is alone and falls and does not have another to help. Again, if two lie together, they keep warm; but how can one keep warm alone?” (Ecclesiastes 4:9-11)

Having once been together as one, maybe the primordial duo yearns for their original oneness. Maybe they can say to each other, “You complete me,” as if each lacked something that only the other could provide. Or maybe it’s not a lack of something to receive from the other, but rather something each wants to give to the other.

God created humans in God’s own image and likeness. Did God do this out of a desire to be revered by humans? Or did God do it out of a desire to expand the sphere of God’s love to include humans? Didn’t God create simply and freely out of love?

It wasn’t good for the human to be alone because the human needed someone to stand opposite him and be his partner. So God separated man and woman to stand against each other and with each other as partners and as lovers.

Is it so hard to accept that they are lovers? Is it so hard to imagine that they are in love with each other and in love with life itself? For their love surely extends beyond just the two of them. Not only do they get along great with each other and with all other of God’s creatures, they also get along great with God. God shows up early in the evenings, when it’s breezy and cool, and they go for walks in the garden, and they talk. They talk easily, for their relationship is open and easy.

What do they talk about? Well, what would you talk about on a long walk with God? Would you pepper God with questions about why things aren’t perfect in your world? Would you ask God all the “why” questions you could think of? “Why are there wasps? What were you thinking when you created them?” Or would you just open your mind and spirit to God and together discover where a conversation without an agenda might lead? Some people still do that today, by the way. It’s called contemplative prayer.

For the man and the woman, each day ends with a walk with God in the cool of the evening. Each day is a beautiful day in the neighborhood that God created and called Eden.

But the seeds of trouble have been planted. In the center of the garden is a certain tree.

Before God separated them into man and woman, God told them: “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.”

If you’re a stickler for annoying details, you’ll see a discrepancy here. In the great hymn of creation from Genesis 1, God said, “See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food.”

But this version of the story comes from a different hand, and the editors who set these two stories side by side are not bothered by discrepancies in detail. Whatever God may have said before, in that other story, God now says, in this story, “Don’t eat from this tree. Do it, and you’ll die.”

Well, what do the man and the woman know of death? Have they seen any animal die, of any cause, even old age? Having little or no first-hand experience of death, they have no understanding of what death is. They are so innocent in so many ways. They are so naïve in so many ways. They are about to grow up fast.

Each of us has a coming of age story. One day, I am a child, an adolescent. The next thing I know, I’m a grownup, an adult. Maybe I could see the change coming from a long distance. Maybe it took a full season for me to feel the full ramifications of it. Or maybe it just happened, all at once, in one event that was both wrenching and exhilarating, horrible and wonderful at the same time.

Everybody loves a good coming of age story. They are among the most popular stories of all. Think of such movies as “The Lion King” and the Harry Potter adventures, such TV series as “Happy Days” and “That ‘70s Show,” such novels as Catcher in the Rye and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

We relate to these stories because we’ve all been there. We’ve gone through some of the same agonies. We’ve known some of the same triumphs. These stories may be about others, but at the same time they’re also about each of us.

That’s one reason the story of these two lovers in paradise engages us so much. We know that we’re part of their story. This story is out story, too. Maybe it happens just this way in each of our lives. Or maybe it happens in other, similar, ways with the same effect. Whatever the chain of events, we see ourselves in it.

Well, why can’t they eat from this one tree? What’s wrong with it? Why does God forbid it? As we’ll see in next week’s installment of the story, they both eat from it, willingly, knowingly, standing side by side. Having never known temptation before, not even knowing what temptation is, they are easy prey for a tempter. The results are tragic.

Some years ago, a writer named Judith Viorst wrote a book called Necessary Losses. It’s about the losses every person encounters while growing to maturity and how, as painful as they are, each of these losses is necessary if we are to achieve maturity.

Was what happened at this tree in the Garden of Eden a necessary loss? Did it have to happen so that humans could advance in knowledge and in their relationship with God? Do they have to lose their innocence before they can grow up?

I have a pill bottle that I got from my pharmacist. It has a special screw-on cap that works two ways. One way is child resistant. To unlock the cap, you have to push down a tab with the thumb of one hand while you unscrew the top with your other hand. It’s tricky enough for an adult. It’s unlikely a child could do it. But flip the cap over, and it simply screws on and off the bottle with little effort. Any child could do it, it’s so easy.

The Tree of Knowledge did not have a child-proof cap. I wonder why it didn’t. I think that if I were God, and I didn’t want people messing with that tree, I’d put something like a child-proof cap on it, or a big fence or something. But God didn’t do that. Were the man and the woman set up for a fall? Did God make it so easy to disobey that they almost had to do it? Was it necessary for them to disobey so they would grow up?

I raise that question not necessarily because I think that’s the case, but because it’s one of the many possibilities that this story raises, one of the many intriguing things that make it as relevant today as when it was first told many hundreds of years ago.

Today we’ve set the scene. Next week we’ll see the story play out. It starts, amusingly enough, with a talking snake. Does that catch your attention? It catches the attention of the man and the woman, too. And once they’re hooked, they’re easy prey for the catch.

“Partners” is a message in the series “Genesis: In the beginning…” preached Oct. 6, 2019, at Edgerton United Methodist Church, Edgerton, Kansas, by the Rev. James Hopwood; Psalm 19:1-6, Psalm 33:6-9, Genesis 2:16-17, 3:1.

My New Book

Hot off the press, more or less, is my new book: Keeping Christmas: Finding Joy in a Season of Excess and Strife.

It’s available on Amazon at full cover price ($17) or at Cokesbury.com for $12.27. Go Cokesbury!

It’s about how we’ve used and abused the birthday of Jesus for 16 centuries, and how you can still find meaning in the story despite those who want to hijack the holiday for their own agendas.