Eat that Fruit
The First Sunday in Lent
March 13, 2011
Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7
Matthew 4:1-11
The Rev. Kara Wagner Sherer
My friend Heidi is teaching Sunday school at her church this year. They decided to read the earliest stories from the Hebrew Scriptures to the class of 7 -11 year-olds. It was Heidi’s turn to tell the story of Cain and Able. Do you remember the story? Cain and Able make sacrifices to God, God seems to prefer Able’s sacrifice and so Cain gets angry and jealous and kills Able. After telling the story one girl looked at Heidi and said, “Why didn’t they just talk about their feelings?”
What a good question! I might make the Bible a much shorter story but it is an excellent question, and I thought of it as I reflected on the story we heard today, the first story of conflict in the Bible, the story of Eve and Adam and God and the serpent. Why didn’t they just talk over their feelings, and misunderstandings? I imagine it would have gone something like this…
The serpent says to Eve, “You won’t die if you eat of the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden, you will be like God!”
Eve looks at the serpent with surprise, but rather than jumping to conclusions and making assumptions, she goes off to find God. (Remember in that story in Genesis God often walks with them in garden in the cool of the night.)
“God, the serpent says that if we eat the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden we won’t die. You lied to me?”
God sighs. “You won’t die immediately…I meant that your innocence will die.”
“Innocence?” asks Eve, “What do you mean?”
“See this apple, hanging on a tree?” asks God, “It is innocent. It grows, it gets red; you pick it and eat it. It feels no pain, no regret. You throw away the core and it grows into another apple tree. It is just life. If the apple loses its innocence it worries about when it will be eaten. It is angry with you for picking it. It feels pain. It has regrets and is disappointed. It knows the difference between being a good apple and a bad apple.”
“It knows the difference between good and evil?”
“Yes”, says God, “If you know the difference you will have to choose.”
“But God, you know the difference between good and evil. Don’t you always choose the good?”
God is silent. There is no answer.
Eve goes back to Adam. “So, it won’t kill us to eat the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden, but it will give us something called choice, and God doesn’t seem convinced that choice is a good thing to have. But it is clear to me that the fruit is good to eat, that is beautiful, and that it will make us wise. I think you should try it.”
“Ohh, no,” says Adam, “I’ve been around God a little longer than you have and I’m not so sure. One day I feel asleep and when I woke up there were two of us. I’m not the risk taker…you try it.”
O.k. so maybe if they had talked over their feelings the outcome wouldn’t have been any different. So Eve ate the fruit, and gave some to Adam and immediately they saw the differences between them, good and evil, black and white, right and wrong. And temptation was born.
Several thousands of years later Jesus is tempted. He is tempted because he is human, fully human. We can imagine what would have happened if he had talked over his feelings with the Tempter, because we know what temptation is.
The Tempter offers Jesus three job opportunities.
“Turn these stones into bread…become a magician?” says Jesus. “That would be a fun career. I could do that.” But fortunately Jesus’ parents had restricted his access to television and People magazine and he knew that fame could be fleeting. “That would be like being a pro-football player or a New York model. It wouldn’t last. No, I don’t want to be a magician.”
“Ahhh,” says the Tempter, “You want to be good. You want to be holy. If you throw yourself down from the top of the temple God will save you and everyone will believe in you. You will be a great rabbi, a mystic, a miracle worker.”
That was tempting for Jesus. His people were in terrible need of saving. But even as a teenager he had recognized that the religious authorities were keeping people in shame and guilt, and exploiting their spiritual needs to line their pockets. Joining the establishment wasn’t the way to save his people. “Tempting, but no,” he says to the Tempter.
“Ohhh,” says the Tempter, “You want great power, power that lasts a lifetime. Look! I can help you rise in the Roman ranks and rule all the cities you can see, and those beyond the horizon.”
The Tempter notices that Jesus is taken aback. “No, no, you want to be a Jewish hero! I will help you to throw off the Romans and lead your people to victory. You will save them. You will be the new King David!”
But Jesus wasn’t fooled. He’d been watching footage of Libya all week and the speeches of Colonel Kaddafi. He knew how a fool could wield power for forty years, only by terrible violence. “No,” says Jesus, “I won’t.”
And so Jesus proves that Eve was right to eat that fruit, that God didn’t need to fear giving humans choice. Jesus showed that humans can choose the good.
And Eve gave us a way to judge between good and evil.
Is this choice something that is good to eat, will it feed and nourish me? Is this choice, “a delight to the eyes?” Is it beautiful, enlightening my life and the lives of those around me? And is this choice one that will make me wise? If so, then we know it is good to eat that fruit.
Beauty and Pain
Christmas Eve
December 24, 2010
The Rev. Kara Wagner Sherer
I remember taking a bath as a little girl and feeling the water coming out of the tap, “It’s so hot it feels cold!” I exclaimed to my mother, who laughed at my strange idea. I guess the pain of the hot water felt the same as the numbness my fingers felt coming in after too long in the Minnesota cold. Have you ever felt something so hot it made you numb?
Tonight we celebrate Christmas, the feast of the incarnation. We celebrate that unique Christian claim that God became human, that in Christ God knows the depth and breadth of human experience. God knows hot and cold, suffering and joy, sorrow and sweetness.
As I meditated on the meaning of Christmas these last few weeks I kept coming back to this passage from Betty Smith’s novel, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
She wrote:
At midnight on the Eve of our dear Saviour’s birth, the kids gathered where there were unsold trees. The man threw each tree in turn, starting with the biggest. Kids volunteered to stand up against the throwing. If a boy didn’t fall down under the impact, the tree was his. If he fell, he forfeited his chance at winning a tree. Only the roughest boys and some of the young men elected to be hit by the big trees. The others waited shrewdly until a tree came up that they could stand against. The little kids waited for the tiny, foot-high trees and shrieked in delight when they won one.
On the Christmas Eve when Francie was ten and Neeley nine, mama consented to let them go down and have their first try for a tree. Francie had picked out her tree earlier in the day. She had stood near it all afternoon and evening praying that no one would buy it. To her joy, it was still there at midnight. It was the biggest tree in the neighborhood and its price was so high that no one could afford to buy it. It was ten feet high. Its branches were bound with new white rope and it came to a sure pure point at the top.
The man took this tree out first. Before Francie could speak up, a neighborhood bully, a boy of eighteen known as Punky Perkins, stepped forward and ordered the man to chuck the tree at him. The man hated the way Punky was so confident. He looked around and asked, “Anybody else wanna take a chance on it?”
Francie stepped forward. “Me, Mister.”
A spurt of derisive laughter came from the tree man. The kids snickered. A few adults who had gathered to watch the fun, guffawed.
“Aw g’wan. You’re too little,” the tree man objected.
“Me and my brother — we’re not too little together.”
She pulled Neeley forward. The man looked at them a thin girl of ten with starveling hollows in her cheeks but with the chin still baby-round. He looked at the little boy with his fair hair and round blue eyes — Neeley Nolan, all innocence and trust.
“Two ain’t fair,” yelped Punky.
“Shut your lousy trap,” advised the man who held all power in that hour. “These here kids is got nerve. Stand back, the rest of yous. These kids is goin’ to have a show at this tree.”
The others made a wavering lane. Francie and Neeley stood at one end of it and the big man with the big tree at the other. It was a human funnel with Francie and her brother making the small end of it. The man flexed his great arms to throw the great tree. He noticed how tiny the children looked at the end of the short lane. For the split part of a moment, the tree thrower went through a kind of Gethsemane.
“Oh, Jesus Christ,” his soul agonized, “why don’t I just give ’em the tree, say Merry Christmas and let ’em go? What’s the tree to me? I can’t sell it no more this year and it won’t keep till next year.” The kids watched him solemnly as he stood there in his moment of thought. “But then,” he rationalized, “if I did that, all the others would expect to get ’em handed to ’em. And next year nobody a-tall would buy a tree off of me. They’d all wait to get ’em handed to ’em on a silver plate. I ain’t a big enough man to give this tree away for nothin’. No, I ain’t big enough. I ain’t big enough to do a thing like that. I gotta think of myself and my own kids.” He finally came to his conclusion. “Oh, what the hell! Them two kids is gotta live in this world. They got to get used to it. They got to learn to give and to take punishment. And by Jesus, it ain’t give but take, take, take all the time in this God-damned world.” As he threw the tree with all his strength, his heart wailed out, “It’s a God-damned, rotten, lousy world!”
Francie saw the tree leave his hands. There was a split bit of being when time and space had no meaning. The whole world stood still as something dark and monstrous came through the air. The tree came towards her blotting out all memory of her ever having lived. There was nothing-nothing but pungent darkness and something that grew and grew as it rushed at her. She staggered as the tree hit them. Neeley went to his knees but she pulled him up fiercely before he could go down. There was a mighty swishing sound as the tree settled. Everything was dark, green and prickly. Then she felt a sharp pain at the side of her head where the trunk of the tree had hit her. She felt Neeley trembling.
When some of the older boys pulled the tree away, they found Francie and her brother standing upright, hand in hand. Blood was coming from scratches on Neeley’s face. He looked more like a baby than ever with his bewildered blue eyes and the fairness of his skin made more noticeable because of the clear red blood. But they were smiling. Had they not won the biggest tree in the neighborhood? Some of the boys hollered “Hooray!” A few adults clapped. The tree man eulogized them by screaming, “And now get the hell out of here with your tree, you lousy bastards.”[1]
The Incarnation – God in the Flesh – means God in a skinny, ten year old girl, shivering on a street corner in Brooklyn, waiting for a tree to fall on her.
God in the Flesh means God in a young man so wildly desperate to show the world that peace can be achieved without violence that he is nailed to a tree.
God in the flesh means God in a tiny baby, in a rough wooden manger used for feeding animals, surrounded by the smells of animal feces and the blood and sweat of a woman giving birth.
Sometimes the world is so beautiful, it is painful.
Sometimes the world is so painful, it is beautiful.
[1][1] As quoted in A Writer’s Almanac, December 15, 2010, http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2010/12/15
