Poolesville Presbyterian Church
03.09.14; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7
It’s a saying that has never made much sense to me.
I want to be my true self, it goes. I want to find out who I truly am.
This gets said a whole bunch as we’re heaving our way through adolescence, trying to figure out who the heck we’re going to be as adulthood comes barreling towards us like a driverless monster truck.
It gets said a whole bunch when we suddenly wake up after that truck has hit us, and realize that we’ve spent the last twenty years sitting in a cubicle sending earnest emails to other members of our departments as we try to organize the weekly meeting to discuss the protocols for interfacing with the task force established to review the procedures for sending email within our departments.
Or we wake up, and we’re sitting in traffic on a Friday afternoon in a minivan, having just dropped off one kid at taekwondo and another at violin and the third has just demonstrated in no uncertain terms that they have come down with the stomach virus that’s been going around school. You think back to when you used dream of music and dance, and that novel seemed in reach.
Our true self, we think. I just need to find that true self. This can’t really be me. Surely, surely, there’s more to me than this. I just need to find out who that is. But how?
We imagine ourselves wandering out into the wilderness on a vision quest, our faces painted blue with leftover tempura paint from when the kids were in preschool. Oh, sure, they’re off in college now, but really, it’s hard to find time to clean out those closets? We will find that person we are meant to be. We will find that true self.
I wonder about this, because truth, as a category, is a little bit neutral. It can mean best, sure. But really, what it means is “our real selves.” Truth has to do with something that is real, that is not a fabrication or a falsehood. This hunk of wood in front of me is a pulpit. It is the thing it is. It is its true pulpity self. Truth is our reality, the thing that we actually are.
When we talk about truth, and about finding out what is real about ourselves, just saying we are “truly ourselves” seems borderline meaningless. We can be truly many things. Our true self is the person that we are.
If we decide to get a second mortgage our house, go out to Vegas, and blow our families’ future at the high stakes penuckle tables, that self is our true self. It’s been a while since I’ve been to Vegas, clearly. If we are horrible to our kids, cutting to our spouses, and are consistently making sarcastic comments to our dog, that person is who we genuinely, truly, actually are.
The truth, about ourselves, about the reality we inhabit? That is not the same as the good.
As we listen to the ancient story from Genesis this morning, and listen to the words of the serpent, it’s good to keep that in mind. Because though the snake may be many things, what it is not is a liar.
That’s important to grasp here on the front end, as we read the second of the two complete stories of creation we receive in Genesis. The first of the stories, the one with seven days, that one is a song sung in the temple by priests, explaining why creation is so awesome. “Everything is awesome,” sing the priests, sounding like they just got out of the Lego Movie. Good job, God!
This second story is older, grittier, the kind of tale told by the firesides of a wandering people when someone asks why everything isn’t quite so great. This story is filled with little grace note details, of a God who reaches into the dust of the earth with his hands, and breathes life into it. In this story, there’s a snake.
Over the millennia, we’ve conflated this creature with the idea of Satan, Lucifer, or the devil. The story, read in its plain intent, does not tell us that. There’s no reason to believe from within the narrative of Torah...or anywhere else in the Old Testament...that this is anything other than a snake. It was only in the intertestamental period...when the Hebrew people had been influenced by the dualistic religion of Babylon...that storytelling about Satan became woven up with this story of the snake.
It’s a strange sort of snake, to tell the truth of it. One, it talks. Your run of the mill garter snake isn’t the best conversationalist, although they’re great listeners.
Two, it’s crafty, the craftiest of the creatures, by which we can safely assume that we’re not talking about knitting or woodworking or macrame. It’s cunning, although it is worth noting that the same word used to describe it...arum, in the Hebrew... has no inherently negative connotation. It’s used in the book of Proverbs (12:23; 12:16; 13:16; 14:15; 22:3) repeatedly to mean wise and prudent.
Three, in Genesis chapter 3, we hear that the punishment meted out to the serpent for having managed to completely mess up humankind is that it has to get around by squiggling around on the ground on its belly. Which begs the question: what exactly was it doing before? Hopping around on its tail? Hovering? I always visualize it hovering, coiling through the air like living smoke.
Clearly, this is not a normal snake. But a snake nonetheless.
What we hear from this subtle talking hoversnake is that it is somehow in conversation with the woman...as yet nameless. She’s still just the isshah, the woman. They’re talking about food, which sort of figures, and the snake asks about what foods were not allowed.
She replies that they’re all pretty ok, except for the tree at the center of the garden. It’s the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and in it, or so they’d been told, was death.
The snake, being a smartypants...and if it could fly and talk, pants are always a possibility...replies by telling her what? It tells her two things. First, that if she eats she will not die. Second, if she eats, she will...like God...know good and evil, and thus be like God.
So she does, and things get messy. But what is striking about the words of the serpent is that they are not technically false. In fact, nothing the snake says is technically incorrect. She eats, and she does not immediately die. Not even that day. Second, she knows good and evil, just as the serpent affirms. Not lies. Not falsehoods. Truth.
It tells her the truth, a truth that then sets the stage for a different truth about human beings, their relationships with one another, and their relationship with God.
Is it the whole truth, one that includes the impacts of that action on the things that matter? No. Is it a truth that includes the future, and the realities that the choice will help write into being? No. Is it a truth that happens to mention that all that is being exchanged is a reality in which humankind only know the good for a reality in which we have the privilege of knowing shame and wrong and evil? That somehow does not get included.
So it is the truth, in that it is not wrong. But what is spoken does not set up a possibility for the deepening of the good. It is a truth that, when used to guide a life, bends it towards a less gracious end.
As we try to come to terms with the truths we know about our own existence, and the truths we know about our own selves, we need to be careful as we consider which ones we allow to shape the direction of our lives.
We need to be aware that what is real in our own lives, of the place that we actually inhabit, of the web and blend of relationships that are the stuff of our existence. We can tell ourselves truths about who we are that may well be true, but that leave out those elements of truth that we’d rather leave out. We close out our culpability for a failed venture, or a broken relationship, and choose instead to look at those truths that only serve our immediate angers and hungers and anxieties.
But more importantly, we need to be aware of what lies as the still-unrealized moment ahead of us. Of the paths before us, which one bears the marks of the feet of our Teacher? Which one is the most gracious, creating the greatest likelihood of the restoration and building up of the good?
Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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