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The Other Original Sin
A Sermon Given
by The Reverend Douglas Taylor
on June 8, 2003
at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
Bethesda, Maryland
Reading
Back-Scratcher by David Bumbaugh
The fall from grace, the great disruption of primordial order, the original
sin, had nothing to do with eating apples or talking with snakes. The
instrument of our fall was a wooden backscratcher, that piece of wood, bent at
the end so one can reach the unreachable spot – there, between the shoulder
blades, down just a little bit lower, now up a little bit, there where the
most persistent itch always takes up residence.
Before the backscratcher, before that simple, infernal device, we, like our
primate kin, depended on others to do for us what we could not do for
ourselves: "you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours." Before the
backscratcher, before that simple, infernal tool, we needed each other to
scratch the unreachable itch. The wooden backscratcher dissolved the bonds of
reciprocity, unloosed the ties of community, and tempted us to believe in our
own godlike self-sufficiency.
And God walked in the cool of the garden, and saw a primate standing alone.
"What have you done," God asked, "that you stand alone?"
"I have found a backscratcher," said the beast, "and now I need no one."
"Poor beast," said God, "now you must leave this garden: In Eden, no one
stands alone, each depends on the others."
And thus began our wandering, our pacing up and down the earth, scratching
our own itches, pretending self-sufficiency, trying to ignore the persistent
sense of loss, the vague yearning for the primordial order, a world where you
scratch my back and I scratch yours.
A wooden backscratcher is poor compensation for the gentle touch of a
living hand.
Sermon
Back during the beginning of my seminary career when I was at the Methodist
seminary, I took an ethics course called "Biblical Ethics in a Modern Global
Context." It was taught by a man named Star Bowen, who dressed like a cowboy
and worked as a missionary in Cuba. He was teaching a class on Biblical Ethics
in a little town in Ohio because he was taking a break from his missionary
work while things cooled off down in Cuba. Those of us in his class assumed
this meant he had gotten into trouble in Cuba. This theory was something Mr.
Bowen never officially confirmed or denied for us, so we just imagined him to
be the Indiana Jones of liberal Christian missionaries. He was quite a
character, and a rather good teacher, I might add. He had a very interesting
way of reading the Bible. I think it was because he looked at the world first
and then read the Bible, rather than the other way around. I remember
distinctly a rather subversive question he asked us one morning, the sort of
question that made me think that the hot water he got into down in Cuba was
not with the Cuban government but with the Christian hierarchy. He said to us,
"What if the Original Sin everyone talks about from the first story in the
Bible is not really a sin at all. Would that make the second story the story
of the real Original Sin?" Most of us just stared at him. A few of us were
right there with him.
Of course those of us in the room were all seminary students who had
recently taken classes, or were in the middle of other classes, dealing with
Biblical Study. I imagine most of you are not in seminary right now, or even
very recent graduates of our own fifth-grade Sunday school Bible curriculum,
so allow me to flesh this idea out, because it leads us down very interesting
paths with real life implications and applications!
Let me start with Original Sin. The text book answer to the questions "What
is Original Sin?" and "Where did the idea come from?" is as follows: Original
Sin is "the universal and hereditary sinfulness of man since the fall of
Adam." (Handbook of Theological Terms by Van Harvey, 1964) It
originated from the first story in the Bible which is about Adam and Eve who
ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil despite God telling
them to not do so. According to the story, God set man and woman up in the
Garden of Eden and had them tend to the various plants and animals therein,
but he specifically said to not eat from the tree in the middle of the garden.
But they ate from it anyway. And so God kicked them out of Eden. This is often
referred to as "the Fall." So some say Original Sin is our disobedience to
God, our own proud willful nature, inherited from our earliest ancestors. It
wasn’t a distinctly formed doctrine, however, until Augustine put it together
around 400 A.D. Specifically, Augustine said,
"... before the fall angels and men possessed the ability not to sin as
well as the ability to sin but that after the fall they possessed only the
latter. Adam’s sin, then, has corrupted the entire human race and it is a
mass sin and justly subject to damnation." By this Augustine means not only
that man inherits a tendency to sin, but that he also inherits guilt. (Handbook
of Theological Terms by Van Harvey, 1964)
So disobedience to God is the cause of Original Sin and the result is, at
least according to the traditional orthodox doctrine formulated by Augustine,
our inability to not sin. So, in effect, because the couple in that first
story were disobedient, God apparently solved that by making disobedience
compulsory. It’s this kind of stuff that gives God and religion a bad rap.
Jumping back for a moment, a quick reading will show that mandatory
disobedience is not in there at all.
In the story, God curses the snake who, as you may know, persuaded Eve to
eat the fruit. God curses the snake saying, "Upon your belly you shall go, and
dust you shall eat all the days of your life." (Gen 3:14) He also says
something about making snakes and women enemies from then on. When he turns to
the man and the woman, he says stuff to them, but never curses them. He curses
the snake, but he does not curse the people. The Woman is told she will have
to endure great pain during childbirth and that her "desire shall be for [her]
husband and he shall rule over [her]." And the man is told he must sweat and
toil to raise food from the ground. Never does God say, "cursed are you for
what you have done." Never does the story present God as saying, "Now I punish
you for your sin." And it certainly does not say anything about there needing
to be universal and hereditary sinfulness!
I read this and most other Biblical stories with the perspective that they
are myths. I see them as deeply meaningful and truthful stories, but not
historical or literally true. With that in mind, when I read this story, it is
quite easy for me to connect these consequences or "punishments" in the story
to some of the presumed early steps of physiological and societal development
among homo sapiens. The consequences Adam and Eve experience for eating the
fruit are the increase pain in childbirth, the ruling of woman by man, and the
sweat and toil of man to produce bread. As we moved from being transient
hunters and gathers to an agrarian society, we would have begun to notice how
hard it is to cultivate the earth to produce food. As we settled into
permanent villages and living clusters, cultural rules arose to manage the
relationships at the time. The consequences or "punishments" which Adam and
Eve experience in the Bible fit right in with some of these key evolutionary
steps in our development into civilized people.
And that bit about increased pain during childbearing, well, consider how
most other mammals emerge at birth and can walk within a few hours (and thus
flee from the immanent threat of predators). Many of us, I am guessing,
have seen the Wild Kingdom footage of the baby zebra emerging from its mother,
and then mere hours later attempting to rise up onto wobbly legs with marked
success. Humans take months before we can rise up on our wobbly legs and take
a few tentative steps! One theory says that humans come out of gestation
early. We emerge only half-finished because if we waited inside the womb, as
most other mammals do, until we were able to walk, our heads would be to big
to fit through the birth canal. The development of the frontal cortex, the
area of the brain I will add, which is associated with abstract thought and
moral reasoning (i.e., knowledge of good and evil), the development of the
frontal cortex made it necessary for nature to strike a timing balance between
the baby being ready enough to come out and yet small enough to fit through.
So, it could be said that the eating of the fruit from the tree of
knowledge of good and evil represents the important evolutionary leap from
common beast to the beginnings of civilized individuals. A leap, I might add,
which took a great many generations. This first story in the Bible is about
how we grew civilized.
But all that is one laymen’s theory, just some wandering, occasionally
connecting thoughts. Really, what I want to say is that the first story says
very little about the real problems we all face today. This first story does
not tell us what our biggest problem is. It does not contain a workable
statement of our human condition, thereby informing us of what we should be
fighting against. It just tells us that we are human; not beasts, not gods,
only humans. Which leads me back to the beginning of my sermon and that
professor who posed the question: "What if the Original Sin everyone talks
about from the first story in the Bible is not really a sin at all. Would that
make the second story the story of the real Original Sin?"
Let me remind you a little about the second story in the Bible: the story
of the first children of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel. "Abel was a keeper of
sheep, and Cain a tiller of the ground." (Gen 4:2) They both brought offerings
to God. God liked Abel’s offering and did not like Cain’s. Cain grew angry. He
rose up against his brother and slew him. Cain killed Abel. God says to Cain,
"Where is your brother Abel?" To which Cain replies, "I do not know; am I my
brother’s keeper?" God then curses Cain, curses him as he had cursed the snake
earlier. "And now you are cursed," he says. "...When you till the ground, it
will no longer yield to you its strength; you will be a fugitive and a
wanderer." The situation God described to Adam of needing to toil in the
ground, is revoked from Cain as a punishment, and it is acknowledged as a
curse upon him. And following my earlier thoughts about the evolutionary
development of society and David Bumbaugh’s meditation about the
backscratcher, the punishment of Cain comes as much to say, "If you can’t
behave right, then you can’t live in the society of men and women."
Now, again, it does not say anything in this second story about Cain’s sin
being universal for all of humanity. It does imply a certain amount of
heredity, but that does not seem to play out in any significant way throughout
the rest of the book. So, where do I get off suggesting this story of Cain and
Abel is about Original Sin if it lacks the same built-in supporting evidence
of the first story of Adam and Eve?
If we choose to read the Bible the way my teacher read the Bible, (my
teacher the Marxist cowboy Christian missionary who taught me to read the
Bible by looking at the world around me first, then reading these stories and
seeing what I might learn from them,) ... if we choose to read the Bible that
way, then we might see some worthwhile connections. If you think about the
troubling things going on in the world today and ask yourself, "What, if
anything, might be a universal problem we humans face from within ourselves
again and again?" What is our big problem? What, if anything, is the common
element humanity contributes time and again to what’s wrong in the world? It
seems to me to be our tendency whereby each person thinks only of him- or
herself. Self-centeredness believing in self-sufficiency. This plays out in
the extreme as violence in its diverse and plentiful variety. And that is what
the second story in the Bible is all about. Cain thought only of himself and
grew angry and ultimately violent because he did not understand the answer to
his own question! Yes, you are your brother’s keeper. "In Eden, no one stands
alone, each depends on the others." (Bumbaugh)
You know, that has got to be one of God’s biggest blunders. He missed a
great opportunity. Cain said "Am I my brother’s keeper?" And God skips over
the lecture and gets right to the punishment and cursing! What a missed
opportunity! God should have at least made the record clear, "Yes, Cain, Yes!
You are your brother’s keeper. You are here to help each other. You are here
to watch out for one another. I can’t be expected to do everything here, Cain.
Why do think you’re even here if not for some really important reason like
taking care of each other! Yes, Cain, you are your brother’s keeper." But none
of that made it into the book. Silence. God just brushes that question aside.
What a mistake!
You know, sometimes life gives us the short end of the stick. In the story,
when the two brothers took their offerings to God, that which Abel offered was
pleasing to God. Sometimes everything is going your way, things work out for
you, every now and then life and you are both flowing in the same direction!
Cain brought his offering and God was not pleased with it. Sometimes it feels
like you're swimming up stream against a strong current. Sometimes nothing
works out right, the timing is just always off, every now and then you hit a
tough patch and life just keeps throwing you hard and fast. And it almost
seems like it's human nature to get angry at life, or at God, or at whomever
you can find to blame. It almost seems universal.
If Original Sin is really all about our disobedience before God, then the
solution is for us to figure out the way in which God wants us to obey and do
it. This is not a simple solution to live out because there are easily fifty
different rule books about what God wants and many of them are contradictory.
If instead, we consider the possibility of the Other Original Sin which is
about the violence we do to one another, then the solution is to stop being so
violent to one another.
That’s a hard sell. People have been trying to convince the world to not be
so violent for what feels like forever. These people usually end up shot, or
crucified, or at best ridiculed and then ignored and forgotten. It is not easy
to speak out for non-violence.
Unfortunately I have not even told you the worst part, yet. The level of
violence has increased dramatically over just my lifetime. This is not simply
a case of exaggerating the days in which I live and a longing for some golden
era of peace. I have read history, I have listened to the stories of many
people, I understand the violence of previous generations enough to say with
conviction, things are getting worse. We have seen an increase in our tendency
to watch violence for entertainment, which is markedly different for using
violence for entertainment. We have a glut of personal firearms on our
streets, guns which simply were not available a generation ago. We have made
leaps and bounds in not only the technology of mass destruction, but also in
the speed with which that is now delivered. In the work-up to this most recent
war, we waited and negotiated with Turkey in hopes that we could use their
land to stage an attack upon the northern regions of Iraq. A few months ago,
we lacked the technology to reach a land locked nation with our ground troops
without the cooperation of neighboring countries. How long do you think it
will take us to rectify that situation for the next time?
In our story this morning, One man rose up and killed his brother. Today
thousands and thousands of our brothers and sisters rise up and kill our
brothers and sisters. What if the real Original Sin is not about disobedience
and guilt. What if the real Original Sin is the Other Original Sin:
Fratricide. Every major world religion preaches peace and love and
cooperation. As Bumbaugh said in meditation this morning, "In Eden, no one
stands alone, each depends on the others." Yet religion is too often one of
the major components leading us into war and violence. When will we learn?
When will we ever turn from this stain which seems to pervade every soul? When
will we be free from our warring madness? I don’t believe in Original Sin,
even as I have cast it this morning. I still believe that we all have an
inherit and basic goodness at our core. And as long as I see this basic
dignity and goodness in us I will continue to see hope for humanity. I will
continue to see hope that we can eventually quell this violent appetite within
us. I will continue to see hope as we here take what steps we can to deliver
our messages and examples of peace and love to our brothers and sisters near
and far. As we look at the world around us, and then read some of these old
stories and find there is truth herein, and hope for a better day.
In a world without end
may it be so.
Office@CedarLane.org
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