The Rev. Dayle Casey
The Chapel of Our Saviour
Colorado Springs, Colorado
February 10, 2008

1 Lent – Year A
Genesis 2:4b-3:7
Romans 5:12-21
Matthew 4:1-11

In his Bible story book for children (Does God Have a Big Toe?), Rabbi Marc Gellman tells the story of Adam and Eve a different way. He calls the story “The Tomato Plant.”

Now the Garden of Eden had everything. Bears and monkeys, fish and butterflies – everything. Even the first man and woman, Adam and Eve, were there. Nothing ever died in the garden, so of course nothing was ever born to replace it. The Garden of Eden had everything, but everything was always just the same.

One day Adam and Eve came upon a crack in the big wall that surrounded the garden. Looking through the crack, they saw that in the brown dust outside the garden a tomato plant was growing. At first they could hardly recognize it, [because] in the garden all the tomato plants were tall and full and green, with many big red tomatoes on each stem. What they saw [outside the garden] through the crack in the wall was a puny and shriveled up little thing with just one tiny green tomato barely hanging on to one of the stems.

Every day Adam and Eve would come to the crack and peep through to see how the only thing growing outside the Garden of Eden was doing. One day the little tomato plant drooped over and turned brown. Adam looked at Eve and said, ”Whatever could have happened to it?”

They sat there for a long time, peeping through the crack in the wall at the little tomato plant that had drooped over and turned brown.

After a long while, God spoke to them, saying, “The tomato plant is dead.” Adam and Eve cried. They asked God, “Why did it have to die? Nothing dies here in the garden.” But God would not answer this question, no matter how many times they asked.

So they became angry with God. They demanded that God let them out of the Garden of Eden so they could take care of the tomato plant. God said to them, “You can leave, but you cannot come back.”

Well, Adam and Eve got up and walked right out of the garden, and right over to the little tomato plant that had drooped over and turned brown. Inside the garden, nothing needed help. And even though outside the garden everything needed help, they were not sorry that they could not return.

Adam picked up the tiny green tomato, and Eve planted it in the brown dust. For many days they watered the ground, kept the weeds away, and waited.

Then it happened! A green shoot poked up through the dusty ground, and in a few days it became a tomato plant! Full and green, with many big red tomatoes on each stem.

In the days that followed, when the man and the woman looked at the strong new tomato plant, they would also think of the scraggly little plant they had once peeked at through the crack in the wall. It was a funny feeling. They were happy and sad at the very same time.

Why was it a funny feeling? Why were Adam and Eve happy and sad at the very same time? Were they happy, perhaps, because they could now make decisions and make things grow, just as God made decisions and made things grow, but sad, perhaps, because outside the garden, plants and people die, and sad, too, because they knew that they could not return to innocence? Was is that the thrill of freedom brought the burden of responsibility? Were they happy and sad at the very same time because of that?

Rabbi Harold Kushner (in How Good Do We Have to Be?) says that he believes the story of Adam and Eve is not a story of the origin of the sin of all mankind, but an inspiring, even liberating story “of what a wonderful, complicated, painful, and rewarding thing it is to be a human being,” a story of the difference between human beings and all the other creatures God has made, a story of the birth of conscience, a story of how human beings came to both the necessity and the glory of having to make moral decisions.

It is a story, Kushner says, of how we human beings became aware of the moral dimensions of the choices we make, and of how ”the more authentically human we are, the more complicated our lives become,” because of our freedom, which is also our necessity – the freedom and necessity to make moral decisions.

“Could it be,” Kushner asks, “that when God told Adam not to eat of the fruit of the forbidden tree, He gave not just a prohibition, but a warning, like the person telling a friend in line for a promotion, ’You know, if you get that job, you’ll have more responsibility, [and] less time with your family. You’ll have to make decisions that will hurt innocent people. Are you sure you want that?’”

In other words, you can live outside the garden, Adam and Eve, but it’s not going to be a piece of cake. You will now have to work by the sweat of your brow, not only to put food on the table, but also to decide what work to do. You’ll have to work to plan for the future. And there will be pain, not only in the bearing of children, but in the rearing of them, pain in worrying about them when they learn to drive and stay out late, pain in seeing them through the anxieties of illness and school and the discovery of themselves and their vocations. There’s a lot of responsibility in living outside the garden.

But, Kushner asks, aren’t things like work, vocation, parental responsibility as well as parental joy, an awareness of mortality, and the knowledge of good and evil precisely what separate us from the animal kingdom? These things that come with living outside the garden – things like work, vocation, parental responsibility and joy, the knowledge of our mortality, and the awareness that some things are right and others are wrong – aren’t all these things the sources of the creativity that make us authentically human?

“Might it be,” Kushner asks, “that God knew that a life of freedom and responsibility is the true home of the man and the woman he had created and that God wanted Adam and Eve to eat the fruit [of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil],” because the knowledge of good and evil is their true home as persons made in his own image? Might it be that God wanted Adam and Eve to eat the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, because, although “God knew it would make their lives painful and complicated, and [although] He winced at the pain they would be condemning themselves to, He didn’t want to be the only One in the world who knew the difference between good and evil?” Could it be that God wanted some personal, moral companionship?

Kushner says that the story of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden is God’s way of telling us the story of our becoming aware of who we really are as children of God, the story of our becoming aware that as human beings created in the image of God “there is more to life than eating and mating and that there are such things as good and evil,” and that this knowledge is good. Outside the garden is where we discover what it is to be human beings, persons, not beasts. Outside the garden we discover that we can be sad as well as happy, sometimes at the same time, and that we can be conflicted as well as blessed, because we have entered a world where the choices that confront us have difficult moral dimensions, and where we will inevitably make mistakes. But this freedom to choose is an essential part of the process of how God made us in his own image.

Inside the garden, we could, like other animals, be only useful and obedient, and maybe cute. Now, outside the garden, as persons who know the difference between good and evil and who know that we can choose the one or the other, we are able to choose the good for ourselves. And that makes it possible for us, like God himself, to be sad as well as happy, because freedom makes it likely that we will grieve, but it makes it possible for us to experience blessing and joy as well.

St. Paul reminds us that “everything is permissible for us, but not everything is beneficial.” And that is the source of our internal conflict, because in our freedom we know that we can do anything we want, but we also know that not everything we want is good for us. Outside the garden we are aware that we have the freedom to choose life, and we are also aware that some of the things we choose bring death.

Kushner wonders what it would be like if God had locked us up in the garden and made it impossible for us to leave? Would we have been better off, having neither the desire nor the freedom to choose?

Kushner doesn’t think so. Neither do I. Because then, although we wouldn’t have the freedom to sin, the freedom to choose what is evil, we also wouldn’t have the freedom to choose what is good. Without freedom, we wouldn’t experience sadness or grief, but neither we would we be able to experience the blessedness or joy.

As John Riker put it in his baccalaureate address at Colorado College a couple of years ago, Adam and Eve are the first graduates, the very first to be expelled from the nest of Paradise to experience life as God intended it beyond the nest.

That’s why Kushner suggests that we consider a different ending to the story of the Garden of Eden. “What if?” he asks. What if – instead of the ending to the story that we find in Genesis – what if the story had ended this way:

So the woman saw that the tree was good to eat, and a delight to the eye. And the serpent said to her, “Eat of it, for when you eat of it, you will be as wise as God.” But the woman said, “No! God has commanded us not to eat of it, and I will not disobey God.”

And God called to the man and the woman and said to them, “Because you have hearkened to My word and not disobeyed My command, I shall reward you greatly.” To the man He said, ”You will never have to work again. Spend all your days in idle contentment, with food growing all around you.” To the woman He said, “You will bear children without pain. They will need nothing from you. Children will not cry when their parents die, and parents will not cry when their children die.”

To both of them, He said, ”For the rest of your lives, you will have full bellies and contented smiles. You will never cry, and you will never laugh. You will never long for something you don’t have, and you will never receive something you always wanted.”

And the man and the woman grew old together in the garden, eating daily from the Tree of Life and having many children. And the grass grew high around the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, until it disappeared from view, for there was no one to tend it.

Would that ending be better?

God knows what is good for us, and God knew it when he created us – that it is good for us to know both good and evil, and that it is good for us to choose the good for ourselves. So God, in his wisdom, gives us the freedom to risk evil and death, because it is the only way to give us the freedom to choose what is good. It is in freedom that evil and death are risked, because it is in freedom that obedience and goodness and grace and love and the moral life are possible.

And that is why the Spirit led Jesus, as the Spirit led Adam and Eve, outside the garden, and it is why the Spirit leads us still, as the Spirit led Jesus, outside the garden – out into to the wilderness, there to struggle, as Jesus struggled, with the gift of freedom that God has given us.

The Spirit leads us, as the Spirit led Jesus, to test us. The Greek word is peirasmos, and “a peirasmos, a ‘temptation,’ [as Rowan Williams reminds us], is an experiment to find something out, and in the Bible that is the main force of the word. When we are subject to peirasmos we are being tested so that ‘what we really are’ – [and ‘who we really are’] – is allowed to appear....”

So the Spirit does not lead us into the wilderness to despair: “Wretched man that I am,” as St. Paul cried out, ”who will rescue me from these choices, where I am doomed to make wrong ones?” Instead, the Spirit leads us out into the wilderness of freedom with his help. He leads us out into the wilderness with the help of religion, with the help of God’s commandments. That’s what God’s commandments are; they are God’s help for us in our freedom. God’s commandments are the voice of God, saying, “I will guide you through this minefield of difficult moral choices, sharing with you the insights and experiences of the greatest souls of the past....”

And the Spirit also leads us into the wilderness of freedom with the support of God’s grace. The Spirit leads us into the wilderness of freedom with the answer to our question: “Wretched man that I am, who will rescue me from these choices, where I am doomed to make wrong ones? Thanks be to God, through our Lord Jesus Christ! For we know that nothing can separate us from the love of the One who shared our freedom in the wilderness and who chose life and goodness, and chooses it still, offering us comfort and forgiveness when we are troubled by the painful choices we make.”

The freedom of Jesus in the wilderness, his testing, is precisely the freedom, the testing, that became available to us when we ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. And the Spirit leads us outside the garden to test us, as Jesus was tested in the wilderness, so that what we really are and who we really are might be allowed to appear. The wilderness is the test of what kinds of sons of God we really want to be; it is the place where Jesus chose not to claim the privileges of the divine nest, but to struggle with us in the world of possibility that attends responsibility, and prevailed.

It’s all God’s fault in the first place, of course. God could have locked us up in the garden. But he didn’t, and that’s that. There is no going back. And anyway, would we really want it any other way?

So here is some homework for a more-than-trivial Lent: In the weeks ahead, consider the freedom that God has given you; consider the choices for life and the choices for death. Weigh the benefits along with the risks, the happiness and the sadness you feel at the same time, and the possibilities for life and joy and grace and love this freedom makes possible.

Then, in the wilderness of real life this Lent, ask yourself the question Jesus asked himself in the wilderness: What kind of child of God do I want to be?

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.