Sermons at St. John’s Presbyterian Church

What is Going on in the Garden?

Transcribed from the sermon preached February 10, 2008

 The Reverend Max Lynn, Pastor

St. John’s Presbyterian Church

2727 College Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94705

Telephone 510-845-6830    Fax 510-845-6837

office@stjohns.presbychurch.net    http://www.stjohns.presbychurch.net

Scripture Readings: Genesis 2

To provide "biblical answers to questions about how life came into being, a group called Answers in Genesis constructed a $27 million Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky. These are serious fundamentalists - "young earth" creationists who insist that creation took place in six twenty-four hour days about 6,000 years ago. "Old earth" creationists also reject Darwin, but argue that a day in the Genesis story could be a symbol for a million years. (Byasse, Jason. Dinosaurs in the Garden. Christian Century. Feb 12, 2008) Most of the exhibits focus on refuting some piece of Darwin's theory. When our focus is determined by an issue in our time and place, it may or may not have much to do with the purpose and meaning of the story for its original author and audience. Bob Coote, in his book, In the Beginning, writes, "the less known about earlier times, the more talk about those times will be talk about the present."

          So the problem with fundamentalists is that they don't trust the Bible enough; they don't take it literally enough. I would ask that the Creator and Spirit, which inspires scripture is in favor of truth, and is in fact the author of all truth and thus, in the pursuit of truth some of our cherished assumptions may have to change; our awe, gratitude and faith in God and an adult respect for the Bible will increase.

          There are two creation stories in the beginning of Genesis and they do not necessarily make the same claims. It is fairly easy to tell the difference between the two since in the Genesis chapter one version, in verse 26 and following, we see that humans, both male and female are created after everything else, on the sixth day. In the second story beginning in chapter 2, verse 4, an asexual Adam is created (2:7) right off the bat, before anything else. Only later, in trying to make a partner for Adam does God wind up creating all the other creatures. He brings them to Adam for naming. This has a haphazard, trial and error feel to it, and finally, as if in frustration after creating 37,000 species, God yanks off a chunk of Adam to make an almost clone. Here they are still asexual until they eat from the tree. But I jump ahead.

          If we don't spend all our time trying to reconcile the differences between these accounts or defending them against science, we may be able to get at what this account is trying to say, and we may find that God's truth breaks forth in a powerful way. So we ask, what purpose did the creation story serve its author and audience?

          Traditionally thought to be written by Moses, most scholars today believe Genesis2:4b and following is the beginning of the first creation story for the first edition of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, and was written by scribes of David around 950 BCE. It was written to legitimate David's kingdom in Palestine.

          Put another way, this was King David's interpretation of the history of the world. Naturally the history begins with its creation. David comes along in the ninth century, BCE, so it will be helpful to look at the conditions, which provided the opportunity and need for his rise to power and authoring a religious history.

Archaeologists commonly agree that there was a sudden expansion of village settlement in the Palestinian highlands during the early Iron Age, the period from 1200 to 1000 BCE. Palestinian highlands were inhabited by tribes with distinct local climates and traditions, not a great tradition. Bob Coote points out that the prerequisites for great tradition - an official state religion, an established priesthood, a well-supported scribal class - did not exist in early Israel. These conditions were met with David's reign. (Coote, Robert B. The Bible's First History. Fortress. 1989)

          While conditions for a great tradition did not yet exist, during a period of Egyptian decline, it is probable that there arrived in Palestine a group of people who had escaped from Egypt. With them they brought their tradition of Yahwistic monotheism and stories of peasant revolt. However, it is generally agreed that most people who came to identify with Israel were likely indigenous to Palestine. With the death of Ramses III in Egypt around 1150, Egyptian power waned; and with the proximate fall of Mycenaean and Hittite empires, the thriving trade economy in Palestine fell flat. Traders, mercenaries and bandits had to find a new livelihood and began to expand and then intensify agricultural settlements. Tree crops, requiring many years to become lucrative, called for residential stability if their development was to be worthwhile. It was clearly in the interests of those with the greatest investment to protect their investment through a gradual movement toward centralized rule. (Coote. P. 23)

          By the tenth century trade began to increase once again, providing increased opportunity for wealth independent from Egypt. Saul and then David took advantage of these opportunities to consolidate power. Building on the core store of peasant revolt from Egypt with the aid of Yahweh, David's scribes wrote a history that would consolidate distinct village and tribal interest into a national sentiment under his kingship over and against Egyptian rule.

          Also relevant to our creation story are the stories, which come from large city-states, Babylon and Egypt in particular. These two "superpowers" used people from the lands they conquered to build their cities and to supply the ruling elite with plenty of goods. Each creation story legitimized this system and the injustice its society had created.

          To show you how this worked, and how it relates to the Genesis creation story, I would like to talk more specifically about the creation story of Babylon called the Enuma Elish. The Enuma Elish predated David's creation by about five hundred years, and David's scribes are probably trained in Akkadian cuneiform through copying texts such as these. The Enuma Elish is the story of Marduk, god of old Babylon. In the second half of the creation story, after the heavens have been separated from the chaotic seas, after creating the world, Marduk hears that the worker gods are complaining loudly about all the work they have to do. Marduk then gets together with the other gods and decides to kill Tiamat, the goddess of the sea and the leader of the rebellion. Marduk then makes humans by mixing Tiamat's blood with the dust of the earth. "Henceforth", says Marduk, "humans shall work, so the god's can rest." Marduk created the pounding drum of the heart to increase in speed and volume the harder humans worked, to remind them of what happened to those who last decided to rebel against their rulers.

          In gratitude for being free from labor, the gods build Babylon as a sanctuary for the head god Marduk. So what, you ask. Well, the king of Babylon and the other ruling elite considered themselves the representatives of the gods in their creation story. In fact, the king of Babylon took the name Marduk when he was crowned. Thus the rulers hung out in the gardens of Babylon while the peasants of the world slaved for them. (Coote p. 45)

          So what does this have to do with the creation story in Genesis? Before the Genesis story existed, the people in the area were led to believe that they existed to be slaves and to serve the gods (insert rulers) of Babylon and Egypt. Then, contrary to that viewpoint, David's scribes acknowledged the reality that the poor slave for the rich, but in their version of the story, it wasn't supposed to be that way.

          In the beginning, Yahweh, not Marduk, created humans from the dirt of the ground. Humans were originally created not to work as slaves while the gods hung out in the beautiful garden, but so that they, that is all humans, could live in harmony with God in the garden paradise that God himself created.

          Here I quote Robert Coote in the Bible's First History: "There is a wordplay between Adam and Adama ('ground') which anticipates human labor in the tillage of the arable. Yahweh intended this creature to be his worker, the one who would perform anticipated mild tasks of tending... The RSV misses the point in Gen. 2:15 when it renders the Hebrew avad, meaning to "work," as "till." This is an entirely different concept from "till" in Gen 2:5, which refers to the hard, sweaty labor required to till arable land. In Mesopotamian tradition the gardener of the god is the king, and the king doesn't do hard manual labor. The human whom Yahweh placed in his garden did not sweat in his work until the curse was instituted.

          People are sick and enslaved and exploited and suffer and die, not because that is the way the gods want it, but because certain greedy, self-serving people wanted to be gods. Death is introduced to the Genesis creation story by Cain who murders his brother. Cain is known as the first city builder. The kings of Babylon and Egypt descend from Cain. Later in King David's history of the world, Moses kills one of the city building slave drivers and is later enlisted by God to lead the peasant revolt and escape from this hard work in slavery.

          King David is selling it pretty hard. He wants the people under his rule to believe that they do not suffer the evil constraints of the typical royal order. As it was God's intention that people live a casual life of peace and harmony, so also this is David's goal.

          The Knowing in eating of the tree of knowledge refers to the knowing of several things; each, in David's scribes view, leads to the arrogant system of the ruling elite. What is known is sexuality, but sexuality as it serves kinship and political ties. We tend to think of sexuality as something in and of itself: not so for those in ancient Mesopotamia. Coote says, "It is the whole sex-to-kin-to-power realm that is in view here." It was characteristic for ruling families to be large. Local sons produced a local ruling network, which assisted the ruling family with its territory of dominion. Foreign alliances were solidified through marriages, creating political and economic strongholds. The sin of the fall then is not the enjoyment of the pleasure of sexuality but the use of sexuality toward the misuse of godlike power.

          David is not perfect and not everybody he tried to influence bought his version of history, but he does give us something powerful to work with. He asks the rhetorical question, "was the universe and the people in it created to worship and serve every need of tyrannical bloodthirsty gods in Babylon or Egypt? Or instead, could it be that human beings were created to live in harmony with their creator who is a God of love, compassion, passion and justice?

          You could say David's creation story is like Israel's declaration of independence; and for its time and place, it was incredibly progressive and even radical. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all humans were created equal, and that they are endowed by their creator to live in freedom and harmony with creation. I would say this is a powerful, divinely inspired image upon which to unite a people.

          Now let's step forward again to look at the anti-evolution fundamentalists. If the fundamentalist actually paid attention to the debates within biology about evolution, they may find legitimate criticisms, and stop choking on the gnat and swallowing the camel whole. We know for instance that Darwin's observations in the Galapagos were influenced by his observation and understanding of life under early capitalism, and then used by others to justify individualism, cutthroat economic competition and racial and class oppression as the natural order of creation. The interpretation of the driving force of evolution as the survival of the fittest, or individuals beating out the competition, fits the economic theory and life in 19th century Europe quite nicely. The oversimplification of the Darwinian concept has been questioned by modern biologists and ecologists, frequently women who have demonstrated that those who find a niche, those who learn to cooperate with the ecosystem of which they are a part, are more likely to survive than those who would seek to dominate and eliminate all possible competitors. We may be tempted; we may have the choice and power to take the fruit and eat, to extract and burn oil and coal, to drain the ocean of fish, to rule the world with our armies, but this doesn't mean that it will be good for us in the long run. The fundamentalists support a simplistic capitalist theory hook, line and sinker, while laborers and all those creatures God sent to be our helpers, to be named and cared for by humans, suffer the consequences of our greed and domination. We think this sort of behavior will go unpunished and can go on forever, but the creation story of our bible holds some truth. If Yahweh is the one true God, we are sadly mistaken.

          In this morning's New Testament passage, Jesus, who shares the divine prerogative of knowing, nevertheless resists the temptations to grasp at Godlike powers like Adam, Eve, and the city builders, and chooses love and harmony rather than power over. He, in essence, shows us and provides the way back to the garden. By the grace of Christ may we live toward a future in which we live, as we were created to live, in sustainable harmony.