June 7, 2015
Genesis 3:8-15
Growing up, my sister and I often would spend time in the summer staying with my grandparents in Oregon. Their house was magical to me. It was small and simple but it had all the things that matter to a kid. A comfy porch swing. A big dining room table where we could all gather for meals and art projects and tea parties and Canasta games.
And a long second floor attic space with soft shag carpeting and dusty curtains that could be pulled to divide the room for privacy. This attic had been where my father and his two brothers grew up, and it became the communal bedroom for whichever kids were staying there a generation later.
The dingy, un-air-conditioned attic I think used to horrify my mother. It was really just a glorified storage area, jammed full of all the stuff that had been collected over the years. But the stuff was so cool! Once we discovered that a piece of the wood paneling opened to reveal a little hidden area that held a decades-old, moth-eaten, waist high Santa Claus doll who became part of our imagining.
We found old leather-bound accounting notebooks that were used as very official props for our very official play-acting. And we found remnants of my father’s childhood, like pencil drawings of animals and war planes with his initials in the corner.
Our Old Testament story this morning is a little like that, I think. At first glance, this story of Adam and Eve might seem old and dusty and irrelevant, like grandma’s attic felt to my mom. But when you really delve into it, you find all kinds of cool stuff - things you could easily miss if you don’t arrive with the spirit of discovery. And things that are somehow still alive.
Like God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze. Here is God who created all things seeking out God’s foible-full creation. It’s such a personal snapshot of a loving God and it makes me wonder about all the places where God walks among us still in our lives seeking us out.
And the man and his wife hiding from the presence of God among the trees of the garden while God calls out longingly, “Where are you?” You can almost picture the man and woman furtively peeking from behind the leaves half-hoping God will pass by without noticing, but maybe the other half wishing to be seen and fully known, even in their weakness and insecurity. I wonder how we hide from God like that? What does living in fear look like for us? What keeps us from coming out into the open, returning God’s longing for us with our whole heart?
When the man says they were afraid because they were naked, God asks, “Who told you that you were naked?” Adam and Eve have become ashamed of their humanness, they have become uncomfortable in their own skin. And I wonder about all the ways we try to be something other than the beloved creatures we are meant to be?
Then the blaming begins. “It was the woman!” protests Adam. “No, it was the crafty serpent!” protests Eve. What started as a bite from an apple has become turning away from God and throwing each other under the bus. How do our own efforts to cover our nakedness turn into estrangement from our Creator, our best selves, and each other?
Now in grandma’s attic, we loved discovering all the stuff, but often even better was how the stuff continued to inspire stories and memories and laughter and sometimes even sadness.
It turned out that the old Santa doll with his worn red satin uniform had arrived as a Christmas present for my dad and his siblings during World War II, along with real army helmets. With Santa came memories of the sacrifices the family had made, and the great uncle who lost an arm but survived the Bataan death march. On one visit my grandmother packed Santa in my suitcase and he crossed the country with me and stands guard in my dad’s house during Christmas, which allows me to retell his history to my kids, adding on my own story of re-discovery.
The accounting notebooks were remainders from when my great-grandfather, who had immigrated as a young man from Wales, had managed the railway warehouse in town called Shaniko. It turned out that the same dining room table where generations of Reeses gathered for buffet meals and card games was actually left over from that time period. It had arrived on a train one day and no one had ever claimed it so it ended up in that storage warehouse. Finally, after long enough unclaimed it became the possession of my great-grandfather. Years later, I went to Wales and visited the village where my great-grandfather had grown up, and the ancient stone church where his parents were buried, and met descendants of his siblings who had remained in Wales.
All of that is part of my unconsciousness when I sit at that same dining room table which now lives in my house, and is used for a whole new generation of card games and gatherings.
With the huge sheets of yellowed paper covered by my dad’s pencil drawings came stories about how he had responded to the offer for art classes-by-mail on the back of a comic book and all he got in return was a little pamphlet of line drawings to copy. His disappointment and disillusionment came through even decades later in his retelling. This comforted me when I sent in my hard-earned $5 for a polaroid camera advertised in the Sunday comics that turned out to be too huge to carry and required film that cost more than the camera.
Even as I share my own family stories with you, I’m cognizant that I might not be getting them right. It’s possible I mis-heard or mis-remembered the details or unconsciously changed the stories to suit my own agenda, and that my own kids will do the same when and if they pass these stories down. Like a generational game of telephone.
The Bible stories work that way too - they started as oral stories passed along, changed and refined along the way to remain relevant. You can imagine parents through the centuries retelling this story of Adam and Eve to their children, emphasizing different parts. Sometimes as preventative moral tale hoping to help new hearers avoid painful mistakes, sometimes as reassurance that nothing is new under the sun and we are all subject to temptation and foible. You can see how and why Paul and the early church turned this into a theology of original sin as they tried to make sense of the evil and hurt they saw in the world. And you can look back and heave a sign of relief that we are learning to get past seeing this story as justification for subjugation of women and predatory relationship with creation.
And if we are doing our spiritual work, these stories will continue to morph as we retell them and make our own meaning from them. Just like my family stories, they are part myth, part truth (sometimes with a lower case ’t’ and sometimes with a capital ’T’).
And just like my own family stories, sometimes the actors in the Bible stories inspire us and sometimes they embarrass us. Sometimes we can see ourselves or someone we love in them, and sometimes they feel foreign. Sometimes we can easily apply them to the here-and-now, and sometimes we have to work with them for a while to see how they’re relevant. Sometimes we go through a time when we want nothing to do with them and we want to set sail on an adventure that belongs only to us, and sometimes we want to get close to them and know that something old and reliable anchors us.
This story about Adam and Eve is part of our family story, and so are the other stories from scripture. They aren’t cold and past, unless we let them be. They are an invitation to delve in. An invitation to learn, be comforted or challenged, and to claim and add our own experiences. Through these stories, we can learn to feel more connected to the cloud of witnesses that have come before us. And to cleave closer to our God who didn’t just long for relationship with Creation back then, but goes on longing for relationship with us, despite our foibles and our hiding.
So listen for God’s footsteps, brush away the dust from some of the old stories, discover the cool stuff underneath, and make them your own. Amen.
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