Eve And The Garden Tensions
Sermon
FORMED BY A DREAM
First Lesson Sermons For Sundays After Pentecost
There is an old rabbinic legend about Lillith, the first wife of Adam. According to the story, she refused to be obedient to Adam and insisted on being an equal. When Adam refused, Lillith stormed out of the garden. God tried to persuade her to return, but she wouldn't come back. Several months went by and the rumors started. People said that Lillith had become a kind of monster and a sexual temptress, preying on babies and unsuspecting men. She roamed the forbidden but fascinating territory outside the garden, looking for innocent victims.
So, according to the legend, God made another wife for Adam. This one is called Eve. She is much more agreeable. After some early, happy days in the garden with Adam, Eve became disillusioned. Adam had become preoccupied with work and with God. Neither seemed to pay any attention to Eve, except when there was work to be done. For years Eve had heard gossip about the frightening woman named Lillith who had left the garden. Eve had begun to think Lillith had a good idea! One day, after Eve had been given her assignment for the day and was left behind again by Adam and God, she decided to rebel. She climbed up an apple tree next to the garden wall and dropped down on the other side. Off she went in search of Lillith. Eve had always wondered if the gossip was true, so she was nervous and more than a little afraid of Lillith. But her curiosity prevailed. She rounded a corner. Suddenly there before her was Lillith. Eve was stunned. Lillith was strong and beautiful, a warrior--woman, not an ogre or a cannibal as the rumors had suggested.
After a hesitant beginning, Eve and Lillith became friends. They went on meeting outside the garden and discovered they had some important things in common. One day, after a long talk, they came to a decision. It was time for Lillith to come back to the garden. They walked through the garden gates together, arm in arm, determined to change a system that had been difficult for both of them. God and Adam looked on, quaking in their boots.
There is truth in this legend. Lillith is the paradigm of the rebellious woman: courageous, adventurous, determined. Some of us have wished we could be more like her. As a legendary character, she is so compelling that she haunts the tales of generations of storytellers. The spirit of Lillith is reflected in a piece of prose titled, "If I Had My Life To Live Over" by Nadine Stair.
If I had my life to live over, I'd dare to make more mistakes next time. I'd relax, I would limber up. I would be sillier than I have been this trip. I would take fewer things seriously. I would take more chances. I would climb more mountains and swim more rivers. I would eat more ice cream and less beans. I would perhaps have more actual troubles, but I'd have fewer imaginary ones. If I had my life to live over, I would start barefoot earlier in the spring and stay that way later in the fall. I would go to more dances. I would ride more merry--go--rounds. I would pick more daisies.1
Some of us wish we could be more like that, freeing up the Lillith part of us we have packed into a dark little corner inside and forgotten. We dream of liberating the creative, risk--taking, dangerous, pushing--the--limits part of us. We wish we had the courage to challenge a stagnant institution or destructive policy or just walk barefoot earlier in the spring. The tension between our natural caution and pushing back the boundaries is a familiar one for many of us. Eve certainly experienced it. It can be a very creative tension. Maybe even a necessary one.
The garden story is loaded with tensions. Perhaps the primary tension is the one between the divine plan and the disorderly nature of human behavior, a tension between God's will and its apparent failure to be fulfilled. It's a tension that cannot be avoided and cannot - ought not - be resolved. It is a necessary tension and a genuine aspect of human nature. The biblical scholar, Robert Alter, suggests that the tension between divine plan and the disorderly response of human beings may well have served as a criterion for deciding which narratives were approved for the canon.2
According to Rollo May, a psychologist and writer, creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations. Limitations, like the banks of a river, force the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the production of art.3
Heraclitis, the Greek philosopher, said, "Unwise people do not understand how that which differs with itself is in agreement: harmony consists of opposing tensions, like that of the bow and the lyre."
Therapists tell us that the urge to be spontaneous is important. People simply must recover the lost aspects of their personalities - lost under a pile of inhibitions - if they are ever to become integrated in an effective sense.
Back to Eve. Eve is a combination of opposing tensions. For centuries, Eve has been blamed as a temptress and the reason for the fall of humankind. She has been called both seductive harlot and faithful wife and mother. However, this tension in Eve is viewed quite dispassionately by most ancient Bible scholars. The tradition of blaming women - or Eve - for the sinful condition of the world only became a crystallized teaching in the Greek period, around 300 B.C.
Perhaps what we see in the garden is Eve taking initiative. She certainly is the active partner in seeking wisdom. She wants to know things. She is curious. She is criticized for this, for not following orders. Eve doesn't want to simply take commands. She wants to understand them. She exercises her God--given free will to weigh her choices and make a decision. (Freedom to choose can also mean not choosing well.) Perhaps Eve was acting out of love for God. If God is wisdom and Eve is seeking wisdom, perhaps she is seeking God. Maybe it isn't that she wants to be like God. Maybe she just wants a greater closeness to God. Whatever the case was, Eve was exhibiting familiar human qualities: curiosity, testing, risk--taking, wondering, seeking, taking a chance, wanting to know.
When Eve bit into that apple, when she let her curiosity, her need to know, take over, she gave us the world as we know the world ... beautiful, flawed, dangerous, full of being and full of meaning. Even the alienation from God some of us feel as a direct consequence of her act of subversion makes us beholden to her, because out of it comes the intense desire for God, never completely satisfied, arising from our separation. It is this desire for God that makes us perfectly human. Our desire arises out of the mingling, melding, braiding of good and evil in every human soul, the fusion and tension of the good and the bad, the Eve and the Lillith, the careful and the courageous. It's what makes us recognizable - and delicious - to one another. Without the genetically transmitted knowledge of good and evil that Eve's act of radical curiosity sowed in our marrow, we might not experience the intense desire to know and to love God. We wouldn't even need God. We wouldn't need each other. Eve, who is the occasion of our fall from grace, is also, in a sense, the nudge toward our salvation. From her first issued need ... the need to know, the need for wisdom, the need for God, she set in motion the wheels of salvation by her act. Without her - and the tensions she embodies - there would be no utopias, no imaginable reason to find and create transcendence, no need to ascend toward the light, to desire, to seek, to be curious, to stretch and risk and hope and, with everything we are, reach out toward God.
Eve and Lillith's stories are our stories too. The tensions they embody are our tensions. Those tensions may just drive us toward God, as in our fumbling, imperfect way we dare to be more curious, to challenge the limits, to take more chances, wanting to know, willing to risk, determined to change the world, and desperate in our need for closeness to God. Amen.
____________
1. Nadine Stair, "If I Had My Life To Live Over" (California: Papier--Mache Press, 1992), p. 1.
2. Robert Alter, The Art Of Biblical Narrative (BasicBooks, A Division of HarperCollins, 1981), pp. 33--34.
3. Rollo May, The Courage To Create (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., Inc., 1975), p. 119.
So, according to the legend, God made another wife for Adam. This one is called Eve. She is much more agreeable. After some early, happy days in the garden with Adam, Eve became disillusioned. Adam had become preoccupied with work and with God. Neither seemed to pay any attention to Eve, except when there was work to be done. For years Eve had heard gossip about the frightening woman named Lillith who had left the garden. Eve had begun to think Lillith had a good idea! One day, after Eve had been given her assignment for the day and was left behind again by Adam and God, she decided to rebel. She climbed up an apple tree next to the garden wall and dropped down on the other side. Off she went in search of Lillith. Eve had always wondered if the gossip was true, so she was nervous and more than a little afraid of Lillith. But her curiosity prevailed. She rounded a corner. Suddenly there before her was Lillith. Eve was stunned. Lillith was strong and beautiful, a warrior--woman, not an ogre or a cannibal as the rumors had suggested.
After a hesitant beginning, Eve and Lillith became friends. They went on meeting outside the garden and discovered they had some important things in common. One day, after a long talk, they came to a decision. It was time for Lillith to come back to the garden. They walked through the garden gates together, arm in arm, determined to change a system that had been difficult for both of them. God and Adam looked on, quaking in their boots.
There is truth in this legend. Lillith is the paradigm of the rebellious woman: courageous, adventurous, determined. Some of us have wished we could be more like her. As a legendary character, she is so compelling that she haunts the tales of generations of storytellers. The spirit of Lillith is reflected in a piece of prose titled, "If I Had My Life To Live Over" by Nadine Stair.
If I had my life to live over, I'd dare to make more mistakes next time. I'd relax, I would limber up. I would be sillier than I have been this trip. I would take fewer things seriously. I would take more chances. I would climb more mountains and swim more rivers. I would eat more ice cream and less beans. I would perhaps have more actual troubles, but I'd have fewer imaginary ones. If I had my life to live over, I would start barefoot earlier in the spring and stay that way later in the fall. I would go to more dances. I would ride more merry--go--rounds. I would pick more daisies.1
Some of us wish we could be more like that, freeing up the Lillith part of us we have packed into a dark little corner inside and forgotten. We dream of liberating the creative, risk--taking, dangerous, pushing--the--limits part of us. We wish we had the courage to challenge a stagnant institution or destructive policy or just walk barefoot earlier in the spring. The tension between our natural caution and pushing back the boundaries is a familiar one for many of us. Eve certainly experienced it. It can be a very creative tension. Maybe even a necessary one.
The garden story is loaded with tensions. Perhaps the primary tension is the one between the divine plan and the disorderly nature of human behavior, a tension between God's will and its apparent failure to be fulfilled. It's a tension that cannot be avoided and cannot - ought not - be resolved. It is a necessary tension and a genuine aspect of human nature. The biblical scholar, Robert Alter, suggests that the tension between divine plan and the disorderly response of human beings may well have served as a criterion for deciding which narratives were approved for the canon.2
According to Rollo May, a psychologist and writer, creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations. Limitations, like the banks of a river, force the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the production of art.3
Heraclitis, the Greek philosopher, said, "Unwise people do not understand how that which differs with itself is in agreement: harmony consists of opposing tensions, like that of the bow and the lyre."
Therapists tell us that the urge to be spontaneous is important. People simply must recover the lost aspects of their personalities - lost under a pile of inhibitions - if they are ever to become integrated in an effective sense.
Back to Eve. Eve is a combination of opposing tensions. For centuries, Eve has been blamed as a temptress and the reason for the fall of humankind. She has been called both seductive harlot and faithful wife and mother. However, this tension in Eve is viewed quite dispassionately by most ancient Bible scholars. The tradition of blaming women - or Eve - for the sinful condition of the world only became a crystallized teaching in the Greek period, around 300 B.C.
Perhaps what we see in the garden is Eve taking initiative. She certainly is the active partner in seeking wisdom. She wants to know things. She is curious. She is criticized for this, for not following orders. Eve doesn't want to simply take commands. She wants to understand them. She exercises her God--given free will to weigh her choices and make a decision. (Freedom to choose can also mean not choosing well.) Perhaps Eve was acting out of love for God. If God is wisdom and Eve is seeking wisdom, perhaps she is seeking God. Maybe it isn't that she wants to be like God. Maybe she just wants a greater closeness to God. Whatever the case was, Eve was exhibiting familiar human qualities: curiosity, testing, risk--taking, wondering, seeking, taking a chance, wanting to know.
When Eve bit into that apple, when she let her curiosity, her need to know, take over, she gave us the world as we know the world ... beautiful, flawed, dangerous, full of being and full of meaning. Even the alienation from God some of us feel as a direct consequence of her act of subversion makes us beholden to her, because out of it comes the intense desire for God, never completely satisfied, arising from our separation. It is this desire for God that makes us perfectly human. Our desire arises out of the mingling, melding, braiding of good and evil in every human soul, the fusion and tension of the good and the bad, the Eve and the Lillith, the careful and the courageous. It's what makes us recognizable - and delicious - to one another. Without the genetically transmitted knowledge of good and evil that Eve's act of radical curiosity sowed in our marrow, we might not experience the intense desire to know and to love God. We wouldn't even need God. We wouldn't need each other. Eve, who is the occasion of our fall from grace, is also, in a sense, the nudge toward our salvation. From her first issued need ... the need to know, the need for wisdom, the need for God, she set in motion the wheels of salvation by her act. Without her - and the tensions she embodies - there would be no utopias, no imaginable reason to find and create transcendence, no need to ascend toward the light, to desire, to seek, to be curious, to stretch and risk and hope and, with everything we are, reach out toward God.
Eve and Lillith's stories are our stories too. The tensions they embody are our tensions. Those tensions may just drive us toward God, as in our fumbling, imperfect way we dare to be more curious, to challenge the limits, to take more chances, wanting to know, willing to risk, determined to change the world, and desperate in our need for closeness to God. Amen.
____________
1. Nadine Stair, "If I Had My Life To Live Over" (California: Papier--Mache Press, 1992), p. 1.
2. Robert Alter, The Art Of Biblical Narrative (BasicBooks, A Division of HarperCollins, 1981), pp. 33--34.
3. Rollo May, The Courage To Create (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., Inc., 1975), p. 119.
