THE FIRST UNITARIAN CHURCH OF HONOLULU
A Unitarian Universalist Congregation
THE FRUIT OF THE TREE
OF THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOOD AND EVIL
Sermon by Rev. Mike Young
Preached at the First Unitarian Church of Honolulu, March 4, 2002The story of Adam and Eve in the garden is one of the foundational stories for both Judaism and Christianity. The story is, quite probably, far older than the Old Testament. There have been found, in archeological digs in the Iran-Iraq area, little clay cylinder seals that were used to seal clay jars filled with oil, grain or wine. They were sealed, of course, to keep the rats out, to identify it as yours, but also so that you could tell whether someone had stolen some of it. When you sealed it with wax you took this little cylinder of clay and rolled the cylinder across the wax leaving a pattern there that identified it. These seals are wonderfully diverse. Several different variations have been found showing one tree or two trees, a naked man and woman holding hands, and a snake wrapped up the tree. Sound familiar?
Well, according to the story, when God had created Adam and Eve he told them they could eat any of the fruit in the garden except the fruit from that tree in the middle of the garden. He said, "If you eat of that tree then surely you will die." Eve happened to be going by that tree one day and, depending upon whose version of the story you believe, one of the fruit fell off the tree and rolled out from under it. Well, now, that wasn't eating from the tree, was it? Besides, there was this snake there that said, "Behold, Eve, it's a beautiful fruit and I can tell you that it's delicious. God didn't tell you the truth. You won t die if you eat of it." The serpent goes on to tell her that it is the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God didn't tell them that; the serpent did. God just said, "Don't eat it!"
In the story you will notice that it is the serpent who is telling the truth. When they ate of it they didn't die, and only after they eat of it does God admit what it is.
Some interesting things happened after Eve took the fruit to Adam and had him take a bite. The first is that they discovered that they were naked. Does that suggest to you what the first fruit might have been?
In any case, when they discovered their nakedness -- and these old storytellers have a wonderful sense of humor -- they did an interesting thing. They made for themselves aprons of fig leaves. Are you familiar with fig trees ? I was raised down in the southern desert valley of California and we had fig trees. If you climbed into a fig tree you'd get this white sap all over you. It would make a fairly serious alkaloid burn. You could actually take a fig leaf and split it so that it oozed real good and make tattoos on your arm that would show for several days, except that they'd start itching in about two hours, really badly.
What Adam and Eve did to cover their nakedness was to make for themselves aprons of fig leaves, covering their nakedness with something guaranteed to remind them constantly what was covered.
God came along and noticed that something was haywire here and said, "Adam, what have you done?" And Adam said, "Why, t'waren't me, Lord, t'was that woman you gave me." He turned to Eve and said, "Eve, what have you done?" And Eve said, "Why, t'waren't me, Lord, t'was that snake you put in the garden." The snake had no dog to kick. And so, among other strange things, God took away his legs so that he would crawl upon his belly.
Some years ago I asked my wife to make me a sculpture of Eve in the Garden of Eden. I failed to specify at what point in the story this sculpture was to be a likeness of Eve. She made this rather lovely Eve sitting with her legs slightly to one side, and climbing up over one thigh is what looks for all the world like a horny toad looking lustfully up at her. I said, "What's with the horny toad?" And she said, "Well, that was before God took away his legs."
God then throws them out of the garden and the lines are very interesting. He throws them out of the garden, "Lest having eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they should stretch forth their hands and eat of the tree of life and become like us" -- become gods. So they're thrown out, an angel with a sword dangling keeps them out.
Judaism never identified that snake as Satan. It was only very much later into Christendom before the snake ever got identified as Satan. The salient piece of this story as a foundational story for Judaism is that it introduces you from the outset to a god who gives rules. I have always felt that there was something curious about this rule-giving notion. My suspicion is that one of the ways to get human beings to take responsibility for themselves, to actually make decisions and pay attention to the consequences of their decisions, was to give them an absolutely irresistible rule that they could not but break.
In any case, you are introduced at the outset to a relationship to the universe that is based on rules and regulations. You are all familiar with the Ten Commandments. Those of you who were here two years ago for the series on the Ten Commandments will recall that they are a whole lot more than just ten injunctions. They are part of a whole system that involves some 637 separate laws. My Rabbi friend says that there are a total of about 13,000 laws and regulations as to how one ought to behave.
It was a system based on the assumption that God is just; God expects us to be just; and God tells us exactly how to do it. And, not too terribly surprisingly, we're pretty lousy at it.
As a foundational story of Christianity, it's St. Paul who, for the first time, points back to Adam and says, in effect, in Adam's sin we all sinned. God had to create a new Adam. Paul understands Jesus is the new Adam who was obedient where the first Adam was not, therefore rescuing us from the wrath of God for violating God's justice.
In both cases, we are looking back at this story as the source of what you and I have come to call evil. In the case of Judaism, the evil being identified is that disgusting human propensity to be unable to resist the temptation to put at least one toe over the line. In the case of Christianity, to recognize and teach that somehow in that seminal beginning primary story--at least mythically as a description of what each of us coming to consciousness goes through, if not in some metaphysical sense that we actually inherit from Adam and Eve--that at the very core of the human experience is our willfulness.
Now the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is an interesting image. For, once you have eaten of this fruit, you know good from evil. Some Christian teachers have said that what is being talked about here is the acquisition of the knowledge of good and evil consequences. The basic tragedy of the human experience is that, having eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, we lack the power to engage in the behavior that produces good consequences and does not produce evil consequences. Because we have the knowledge without the power our decisions inevitably are ambiguous. As St. Paul says, "The good that I would I do not; the evil that I would not do -- that s exactly what I find myself constantly doing."
It seems to me that what is left out of the doctrines on both sides is that one of the characteristics of the human species is that we just keep right on eating that apple! We don t seem to be able to resist the obsession to label everything good or evil .
It may be that one of the greatest things that the Internet will bring to the human species is lower case type; because we keep putting a capital E in front of the evil. Once the human brain has got that capital E there, Evil somehow has a power, an existence, a reality all of its own. "T'warn't me, Lord, t'was that Evil you let come into the garden." The fascinating fact is that we consistently and constantly label Good and Evil by essentially one criterion -- our own convenience.
There is an interesting additional way of looking at all of this which is to ask the question, "How many of you are glad you're here?" I don t mean at this particular place, but how many of you are glad you're here at all, as opposed to never having been? How many of you are, on the whole, glad that you're you as opposed to somebody else? (Most hands went up.) Now, I want to point out to you that without the long list of things we are in the habit of calling evil you wouldn't be here. You would not be you.
My parents would not have met, but for the Second World War. In the days preceding the Second World War my grandfather went to Mexico City as military attache to the Mexican government. If not, he would not have become the Commandant of the Immigration Service in El Centro, California. My mother would not have come to the Imperial Valley of Southern California, where my father was raised. Without the Second World War and the evils that led up to it, my mother and father would never have met. Let's hear it for the wonderfulness of the Second World War. For if my parents hadn't met, I wouldn't be. If they had met under somewhat different circumstances and had me on a different occasion, it would have been a different egg and sperm meshing, and I would have been somebody else.
This is a good Sunday for the topic of the suffering in the world. In India human beings are engaged in some incredibly stupid, violent, evil, vicious behavior. They are not alone. Similar kinds of behavior are going on, have been going on, will continue to go on around our world; behavior that we look at and inevitably say, "That's not good." The question is often raised in discussions between those who are believers in the traditional Western concept of God and those who find certain problems with those ideas, even by serious and committed believers themselves: If God is so omnipotent, why could he not have created a world that did not contain evil?
Well, let's not even be quite that demanding. Does there have to be so much suffering built into the human experience? There is a whole literature referred to as "Theodicy" attempting to justify and explain just why it is that the evil that we so clearly experience in the world is absolutely necessary.
Judaism and Christianity have, in the story that I began with, one set of explanations. Buddhism has a somewhat different explanation. You will find at least one variation of that explanation in the poem at the end of this sermon (originally used as a Call to Gather in the service). Buddhism starts in a very different place; in the recognition that we human beings come to consciousness, as Buddha said, pratitya samutpada, already co-dependently co-arising. We come to consciousness already imbedded in all of the history that has gone before us, with equipment for understanding what is happening to us, our six senses, unsuited to the task.. Six senses, you say? Yes, Buddhism holds that your brain is your sixth sense organ which, in many ways, makes a lot of sense. We come to consciousness with that equipment badly designed for accurately understanding the nature of the reality we are embedded in and how to appropriately respond to it. We must go through a very serious, difficult development process before we come to see, taste, hear more rightly.
Buddhism begins with the assumption that you are not responsible for your behavior but you can become so; whereas both Judaism and Christianity insist that you are already responsible for your behavior, despite the fact that you have amply demonstrated that it is not so.
I submit to you, this morning, that there are six causes of evil. Some of you may argue that some of these are corollaries of one another, but I will insist they are six separate causes of evil.
1) The first is that human knowledge is inherently limited, a fact that we are stuck with.
2) The second is that each generation must acquire that inherently limited knowledge from scratch, and this is always going to be an uneven process.
3) The third, and perhaps at times one of the largest causes, is that there appears to be no correlation between wisdom, skill, knowledge, judgment on the one hand, and access to power on the other.
4) The fourth is the sad fact that there are glitches in the human genome. Some of us are born screwed up. Now, what if this were not the case? Imagine that DNA was perfect at reproducing itself. Every time those helices uncurled themselves and unzipped themselves to make new copies of themselves, they always reproduced perfectly. Then, the whole earth would be covered at about the level of six miles with nothing but a layer of green goo which would never have evolved past the green goo.
5) The fifth is that the universe is not designed for human convenience, and we have one heck of a time conceding that fact. We keep behaving as if, somehow, it is. Indeed, every time we humans attempt to redesign it for human convenience, three fascinating phenomena immediately kick in. The first is Murphy's Law -- if anything can go wrong, it eventually will go wrong. The second is the law of unintended consequences. The third is captured in chaos theory, which says that very small initial conditions create very large consequences over time.
6) The sixth is that we human beings insist upon behaving ideologically. We insist upon behaving as if the world were the way it's s'posed to be, no matter how many times we are slapped in the face with the reality that it is not designed that way. We commit ourselves to an ideology that says how it's s'posed to be, and insist upon at least attempting to behave in the world as if that ideology were so. Having looked back over our own history and seen how many rather interestingly strange ideologies we have insisted were so, we still continue to insist that, "Well, but, this one s the correct one."
I submit to you that moral evil is almost always a consequence of one or more of these six causes and that we can do lots of things about them, and we can do nothing about them until we acknowledge their reality.
I close with a line that I am sure is part of the original story of Adam and Eve. As Adam and Eve were leaving the garden, Adam turned to Eve and said, "My dear, we're entering a transitional period."
We are still in it.
Every time we try to grab and hang on
We tear something loose.So long as we continue to crave,
To grasp and hoard,
Just so long shall suffering continue
And healing elude us.Every time we try to pull away
And withhold ourselves from one another,
We break our own connectedness to life.So long as we submit to fear
And volunteer for anger,
Just so long shall violence continue
And peace be absent from our hearth.Whenever our mind strays from the moment,
Leaking into a past of if-only,
Of resentment and guilt and nostalgia;
Into a future of striving and pretense,
Of anticipation and anxiety;
Into re-run and preview;
We come unplugged from who we are
And cut ourselves off from life.Every time we start to grab
And each time we withhold,
We will notice, let go, and return
To be centered again in the awakened now.Every time we start to grab
And each time we withhold, we will let go,
Opening the folded fist of striving,
And return once more to the moment.Fully present to this moment,
Permitting it to flow through us
And slip away; here,
Possessing nothing at all,
All is ours.-Rev. Mike Young