What is original sin?

Reinhold Niebuhr, a 20th century UCC pastor said, “Original sin is that thing about man which makes him capable of conceiving of his own perfection and incapable of achieving it.”

What is original sin?

One commentator quipped that original sin is what most teenagers wrongly assume their parents never thought of doing!

What is original sin?

Today’s reading from Genesis has traditionally been the text used in explaining original sin, and that Adam and Eve, through their choice to eat of the prohibited tree against God’s wishes, brought sin into the world and created the Fall, a shorthand term for this episode on our Bible.

But truthfully the words “original sin,” “the Fall,” “satan or the devil” or “bad snake” are not in this passage. Those are all labels and later interpretations layered on to the text. So this morning I want you to lay those aside for a moment as we try to see what this text has to say without those layers.

So what happened? This is the second creation story in our Bible. The first story is about the seven days of creation. This one starts in a very different place. God creates this great garden and all these animals and then creates a human creature—the Hebrew text adam actually means “mud creature” (God scoops up dust or mud and breathes into it bringing the adam to life).  This creature is to servein the garden—this point is really important and we’ll get back to it in a minute.

Then the mud creature gets bored and wants a companion so God takes a rib and creates another creature called Eve which means “life bringer” or “bearer of life.”

Then God sets down the rules:

            Serve in the garden.

            You can eat anything except for the one tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Sometimes we get this mixed up and think they ate from the Tree of Life, another fantastical tree in the garden.

So here are these happy, free, sinless creatures bounding around in the garden of paradise, right? Wrong. First they are called to serve in the garden and this word has been unfortunately translated as to “till” the garden meaning they just have to hoe a few weeds now and then. No, to serve means both to tend to it agriculturally, to be a steward of it, and it means to serve meaning the garden is not theirs. They are servants or slaves in the garden. The garden is God’s. Period.

Most of us have also been taught that Adam and Eve were free from sin. But that is not what ancient audiences would have assumed. “An ancient Israelite, however, would have assumed quite the opposite. In the ancient Near East, human beings were often portrayed as a rebellious group, seeking to assert their authority over/against the gods.” (Frank M. Yamada, Preaching This Week, WorkingPreacher.org, 2009.)

“A number of texts (from 1 Kgs 8:46 to Jer 13:23 to Psalm 51) claim that sinfulness is a universal experience of brokenness at every level of existence; in that sense, sin is “original.” This idea of sin is not peculiar to the Bible, but is part of a general theology in the ancient Near East, long before Israel. Listen to a Sumerian wisdom saying: “Never has a sinless child been born to its mother.” Or, this thanksgiving to the Egyptian god Amun-Re: “If it is the nature of the servant to commit sin, it is the nature of the Lord to be gracious.” The idea of “original sin,” indeed a profound confession thereof, is nothing uniquely biblical, let alone Christian. We are inheritors of a rich theology of sin from the ancient world.” (Terence Frethiem, Is Genesis 3 a Fall Story? Word & World 14/2, 1994)

What happened over time, however, is that early Christian writers like Paul and then most influentially St. Augustine took this story of Adam and Even in the garden and re-interpreted it as the pivot point. From then on humanity was doomed. God was wrathful and could never forgive human beings and that this act of disobedience was a mark, a stain, on every human being ever born because humans have to have sex to create new humans. (Augustine had some real hang ups about sex.) So every human born was sinful and unable to change this sinful condition until a perfect sacrifice came along: Jesus. Jesus was God’s solution to this unbridgeable gap of original sin.

But is that interpretation faithful to this story standing on its own? Not really. In fact our story really tells us about unoriginal sin if anything.

These inherently human--thus inherently sinful--humans live in the garden by God’s allowance. So far, so good. Then the snake shows up.

Traditional Christian interpretation is that the snake is evil, really just a stand in for Satan or the Devil. But the story doesn’t really support that. The snake has a role to play, a character in the development of this drama. “The snake actually doesn’t do anything. He just talks. Interestingly, the snake is not associated with the Devil until much later (see Wisdom of Sirach 2:24; Revelation 12:9, 20:2), and after this episode, he thoroughly disappears from the history of Israel. (Streetprophets.com)

The snake is not evil despite his crafty words. No more evil than Eve or Adam. Far less really in that the snake actually asks some pretty important questions: You aren’t really going to die if you eat the fruit, do you think? The snake doesn’t eat anything. He doesn’t threaten Eve. He gets punished in the end just as they do—he is certainly party to the act—but one wonders if he actually is speaking truth God doesn’t want heard.

I mean, the humans don’t die from eating do they? They just worry about being naked. Which if you can read Hebrew you realize is another inside joke. The snake is called “crafty” or more accurately “clever” which in Hebrew sounds very much like the word for “naked.” Thus an approximate take on what this sounds like in Hebrew would be “the snake was shrewd while Adam and Eve were nude.” (John Holbert, Patheos.com)

This assumption of snakes being evil incarnate still resonates, though. In many developing countries  it causes environmental mismanagement as folks kill off all the snakes even those beneficial for pest prevention. And for you Harry Potter fans: it is not a coincidence that author JW Rowling made the villain a man turned into a snake.

So if it’s not the snake’s fault, it must be Eve’s fault, right? She picked and ate the fruit and seduced Adam into doing it too, thereby proving unconditionally the wickedness of women.

But is that what happens?

This is what I read: The snake says, “hey Eve, what’s up? How’s it in the garden. You enjoying all the fruit, here?”

And Eve replies, “well, there’s one tree we can’t eat the fruit or even touch the tree or we’re dead.”

Now here’s a question: did God say that? Nope. God didn’t say anything about not touching the tree, just not eating from it. But then again God gave these instructions to Adam who said it to Eve. Was the message lost in translation? Or is it that “she may be so anxious to eat of that one tree that she makes the command stronger for her: why, we can't even touch that tree!... If she touches it, she fears she will surely eat.” (Holbert)

Thus the discussion begins. To eat or not eat. Will she die or not? Will she learn things she wants to know?

Remember this is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; it is not the tree of life. Let me give you an image for our techno-saturated world. Imagine you are in the garden and there is no technology. Just you and Adam and the animals. And you wonder about things and have questions. And there is this tree covered with laptops all plugged into the Internet. If you just take one down you’ll know everything, maybe even as much as God. How tempted are you? Animal husbandry the rest of your life or the future unlimited?
Do you pick the fruit?

Eve does and eats. And then gives it to Adam. This is important. She taste tests it first. I mean he gets to wait and see if she keels over dead before he starts eating. Does it look like Adam was seduced? Did Eve force him to eat? Adam doesn’t even say anything. One commentator said that Adam seems to be quite “belly oriented” while Eve is the one having the theological conversation.

But traditional interpretation lays the blame at Eve’s feet and the later punishment for Eve with pain in childbirth, the snake killing her children, and a life of servitude to her mate Adam seems to make it clear that she is at fault. This text has been used throughout centuries to explain misogyny, discrimination against woman, why women can’t be pastors, why women should accept battering husbands, why women should not be given pain medication at birth because otherwise they are avoiding their due punishment from God. It can be used as an argument against birth control for if you avoid having children you avoid the punishment of Eve.  It hasn’t been that long since this was common practice in this country.

So having peeled back these false assumptions about the text:

            No, they weren’t sinless

                        The snake wasn’t the devil

                                    It wasn’t all Eve’s fault

What are we left with?
One modern interpretation is that what happened was inevitable, not because we are sinful creatures but because we had to grow up. We cannot live in an infantile state forever. Rebelling against rules and restrictions is a normal part of maturity as any parent of a two year old or sixteen year old will attest to.

“Genesis 2–3 suggests that knowledge, a necessity for human life, is something that is acquired painfully. Ignorance may be bliss, but it is certainly not the mark of human maturity. When humans understand what it means to be fully human—that is, when they have complete knowledge—the realities of life come into full relief in all of their complexity and difficulty. Knowledge is both enlightening and painful.” (Yamada)

Adam and Eve lead us out into what lies beyond the garden, the complexities and difficulties and agonies of human life.  We could even say that to stay in the garden would be the sin, as sometimes we are tempted to do when politics and community strife and suffering besiege us.  “Oh, I’ll just go live in a cabin somewhere in the woods and be self sufficient.” We are trying to recreate Eden while the world howls outside.

Another faithful interpretation is that Adam and Eve were striving to become God themselves. They wanted the knowledge of good and evil which is what supposedly separated them from God. Once they had that, they thought they would be God. But the problem is that knowledge and wisdom are not the same thing.

There actually is a joke about this in the text. The story says that after they ate, "The eyes of both were opened and they knew that they were naked . . ." Before their nakedness was not a problem, but now it clearly is, for they scramble to solve the problem. "And they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves."  This sounds fine to us but ancient Hebrews knew all too well what fig leaves feel like—scratchy!; we might say something like number 2 grade sandpaper! When this grand tale was spun around campfires and in homes, they all broke up laughing at this point. They sewed what together? Sandpaper underwear!”  (Holbert)

Indeed knowledge is not wisdom. As one of my jokes from last week read, “Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.”

But this has a more serious side, too, one we are familiar with. We push to the edges of knowledge to learn more and more and more. We are certainly still propelled by the drive behind Eve’s act. But we don’t always have the wisdom. Nuclear science is beautiful in its purely scientific form—but that’s not where we take it. We now have nuclear weapons. Cloning is incredible in its complexity and discovery about the human genetics. But where does it lead us? Are we striving to become God on this fragile planet when what we were asked to be was servants?

At its heart I agree with several commentators who believe this text is about broken relationships, and our damaged relationship with God. That is the true sin.  God gave Adam and Eve a garden and the task of being stewards of that garden.  To live within the limits that were set. To live within the covenant they had with God. And they violated that.

“This is not so much the story of Original Sin as it is the story of the primal difficulty of human awareness, of how misunderstanding and internal contradictions doom the creature to be separated from the creator.”  (Streetprophets.com)

In the midst of the conversation with the snake, when Eve had doubts, she could have said, “hmmm, I’ll ask God about that.” Or “let me think about it” (always a very handy phrase to have handy when temptation comes along).  The greater sin was the broken relationship with God rather than the bite of fruit. “Rather than turn to God to take up the issue with God, the humans silently—and the lack of communication speaks volumes—turn to the possibilities the tree presents.” (Streetprophets.com)

Terrence Fretheim says that this story isn’t really about the Fall but instead a “falling out.”

In Lent, this is what we are most mindful of: broken relationships. We reflect on our choices to avoid real, though painful, conversations. We think about our choices of convenience rather than honesty.

Lent asks, what are you going to do about it? Our Genesis story is an invitation. This is how we got into this mess, this is a part of the human condition. Broken relationships, a broken relationship with God. You are sinful. I am sinful.

Lent gives us our opportunity to change. What are we going to do about it? Let’s take the next 40 days to work on it.

Amen.