I want to tell you a story about Richard. Nothing too personal! A number of years ago, Richard spent some time in South Africa – he was in Cape Town during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings. While he was there he learned something that a lot of us don’t realise – and that I certainly didn’t know. He discovered that apartheid was originally introduced as a biblical concept. It was the brainchild of the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa. Richard wanted to meet the people who could come up with such an abhorrent way of reading the Bible – he figured they must be a pretty self-serving, hypocritical bunch. When he met them he discovered they were delightful – but more importantly, they were deeply Christian. They were pious and prayerful and full of integrity, and they knew their Bible better than he did. Genesis 1 told them to ‘be fruitful and multiply’ so they asked ‘with whom should we be fruitful and multiply’? They went to the stories of the Tower of Babel and the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, that Dave preached on just a few weeks ago, and they read that at Babel God dispersed the people and gave them different languages, and that at Pentecost everyone heard in their own languages, so they reasoned that God must want to keep groups of people separate, and they came up with apartheid. And Richard learned something else that I didn’t know. When apartheid came to an end that was a result of biblical interpretation too. The men (mostly) of the Dutch Reformed Church went back to those same stories and said, ‘we read them wrongly’. The stories don’t have to mean what we thought they did.
Richard found all of this extremely disturbing. Apartheid had been relatively easy to understand when he assumed that the men who invented it were self-serving hypocrites. Now that he knew how devout they were, and how much integrity they had brought to their reading, he had a real problem. How do we read and interpret the Bible, and apply it to today, and avoid making a mistake as big as apartheid? So he asked them why they thought they had got it so wrong, and why they’d stuck to their guns for so long. They told him that their mistake was that they didn’t listen to the people who disagreed with them. If insiders disagreed they excommunicated them. If outsiders, like Desmond Tutu, disagreed with them, they called them ‘heretics’. So Richard went on to do a lot of work building an approach to ethical reading of the Bible that ensures that the voices of everybody affected are heard. It’s a book – it’s really accessible and I can give you the details if you want them!
But that brings me to this morning’s story from Genesis 3. It is the end of the story of Adam and Eve in the garden. It is a story we all know very well. And to show us how well we know it I want to play a game we sometimes have here at St Luke’s – a Bible Quiz. So, please, stand up if that’s comfortable for you.
1. What type of fruit did Eve give to Adam? If you think it was an apple put your hands on your head. If you think it was some other type of fruit, or you’re not sure, put your hands on your hips.
In fact, the text doesn’t say what type of fruit it was, only that it was fruit. If your hands are on your head, please sit down.
2. How many times does the word ‘sin’ occur in the story? If you think it is three times or more, put your hands on your head. If you think it is fewer than three times, or you’re not sure, put your hands on your hips.
In fact, the word ‘sin’ doesn’t occur in the story at all. The first mention of sin in the Bible is in the Cain and Abel story. If your hands are on your head, please sit down.
3. What is the correct name of the garden story? If you think it is ‘The Fall’ put your hands on your head. If you think it is something else, or you’re not sure, put your hands on your hips.
In fact, there is no official name for the story, and the word ‘fall’ doesn’t appear anywhere in it. If your hands are on your head, please sit down.
Congratulations to all those still standing. Please feel free to sit.
What you will see from this little quiz is that there have been all sorts of things added to the stories in the Bible over time, including ideas about what they mean. We think we know them, and what they mean, but when you scratch the surface we find that there are a number of details that are sketchy at best, and that meanings can be elusive. And yet stories are powerful - the impact of the story of the garden of Eden in our world has been at least as great as that of apartheid and probably much greater. It has been especially tough on women. Here is a story that tells us that God wanted something better for us humans – that God wanted us to live for ever in a garden paradise, but that we screwed it up and that, actually, it was the woman’s fault. Women have been thought of as temptresses ever since. Have we read the story properly? Or well? If the story has been read by men for most of its history, in institutions to which women have not been admitted, and in which they’ve not much been listened to, is it any surprise that the woman has been painted as the baddy? But in fact it is not only women for whom this story has been difficult. It has had an impact on everyone.
Jews haven’t read the story in the same way as Christians. Genesis 3 has been important in Judaism, but not as important as it has been in Christianity. Jews don’t have any concept of a ‘Fall’. They do read the Garden of Eden story as being about sin, but not in quite such a dramatic way as Christians have tended to do. One of the reasons that Christians read the Garden of Eden story as they do is that it has got caught up with the Jesus story. Theologians asked exactly what it is that Jesus’ death and resurrection saved us from, and the answer is that it saved us from the consequence of our sin in the garden. The stories become like two bookends. In each there is a man, a tree and a garden, so Jesus is called ‘the new Adam’ and said to have ‘hung on a tree’. ‘Through one man came sin and through another came eternal life’. In a moment the choir is going to sing the anthem ‘Walking in a Garden’. If you listen carefully you’ll hear that the anthem picks up on this. The first verse is about Adam and the Garden of Eden and the rest are about Jesus and Gethsemane.
But, of course, Genesis 3 wasn’t originally written to be part of this pair. The story of Jesus has influenced how we’ve read the story of the Garden of Eden. Feminist scholars, in particular, have begun to re-read the Garden of Eden story. I’d like to share one reading with you that shows how it is possible to open up the meaning of the story by approaching it in a different way. A scholar called Lyn Bechtel has come up with a striking new reading of the story that fits remarkably well. Bechtel argues that we’ve misread the story because ours is a ‘guilt’ culture, but the story was written for a ‘shame’ culture. That means that we’ve focussed more on sin than the story does itself. She thinks about Adam and Eve becoming ashamed that they are naked, and asks ‘when are humans naked without being ashamed?’ The answer is when they are children. The shame comes later, when children enter puberty. The Garden of Eden story, she argues (with a lot more detail than I’m going to share with you!) is a story about growing up. Adam and Eve begin as children, growing in a garden, and their disobedience is the disobedience of children, rather than the sin that must change the rest of human history. In fact, the eating of the fruit, she argues, is inevitable - it is part of the normal testing of boundaries that all children and teenagers must do if they are to grow up and become independent of their parents. In the story, she argues, God has the role of the reluctant parent who knows that his children must grow up and find their way in the world - he wants to keep them safe and close to Him - but he knows he must eventually let them go. So he tells them what adulthood will be like, gives them clothes and sends them on their way. The gate of the garden is barred to them - they have become adults and can never return to childhood.
Whether you find Lyn Bechtel’s reading persuasive or not, it does suggest that there are other ways of reading this story – other ways that allow for the love of God, rather than the sinfulness of humans, to be at the centre of our theology and our lives. We see here a God who loves us to much that He wants to protect us from pain and hardship, but who knows that He must allow us the free will we need to become adults, even though sometimes it will be costly.
One of the greatest temptations for us as Christians, I think, is to underestimate the power of stories, and especially biblical stories to shape our world. We can be tempted the think that the Bible is irrelevant today. But if you ask black South Africans, if you ask indigenous Americans who lost their countries to Spanish Catholics, if you ask gay teenagers and if you ask disenfranchised women, you are likely to be told that the Bible is very powerful indeed. That means that we need to know its stories. And we need to read them carefully – listening out especially for the voices of those we disagree with.