Garden Party (Genesis 2:4b-25; Pentecost 16; September 13, 2015)

Garden Party

Genesis 2:4b-25
Pentecost 16
September 13, 2015

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

A myth, I have said, is a story we tell ourselves to explain ourselves to ourselves. Myths are stories, but they don’t have to be complicated. As long as they have a beginning, a middle and an end, they are long enough. One of our most popular myths is a very short story. It is known as the Myth of Redemptive Violence. It goes like this: A bad person did something bad to good people. A good person attacked and killed the bad person. Everything was good again. The end.

Some myths are more or less true. Others, like this one, are dangerously untrue. When a nation, say, uses this myth as the foundation of its foreign policy, the violence and the suffering never end. 

But what makes a story a myth is not whether it is true or not What makes a story—true or not—a myth is that a groups tells the story to itself to explain itself to itself. We use the Myth of Redemptive Violence, for example, to explain to ourselves why we have gone to war. Without the myth to explain this, most wars would just look like a stupid and shameful waste of life and wealth. With the myth to explain it, war is a holy duty that makes sacred both the effort and the lives lost. Without the myth, war becomes blasphemy against the Creator.

Of course the Garden of Eden story is not a variation on the Myth of Redemptive Violence. It is another and very powerful kind of myth: it is a creation myth. It’s not the only one in the Bible. In fact there’s another just before this one, in Genesis One. Another biblical example of a creation myth can be found in John 1. “In the beginning,” it begins, always a pretty good sign of a creation myth. Another can be found in Proverbs 8 when the figure Wisdom sings, “The Lord created me at the beginning of his work...”.[1]

We shouldn’t look to creation myths for scientific accuracy. Scientific myths like the Big Bang or Evolution care about scientific accuracy; biblical myths like the Garden of Eden story do not. Fundamentalists commit a category error when they take the Garden of Eden story as scientifically accurate.

You can travel to Petersburg, Kentucky, and for $29.95 plus tax you can visit the Creation Museum. Once inside you will see a state of the art museum dedicated to demonstrating that the Bible is free from error. Its accounts of the creation of the universe are taken as scientifically true. You can, for example, see exhibits in which humans interact with dinosaurs. The Big Bang and evolution and climate change are all the modern fantasies of godless scientists who refuse to accept God’s Word as true. The Creation Museum wants to persuade its visitors that the Bible is true and anything that disagrees with the Bible is false.

But the Bible itself cares so little about accurate description of events that it has included two creation myths, one after the other in Genesis, that contradict each other in ways that cannot be explained away. This is why the Creation Museum is such a waste of money and devotion. 

The ancient Hebrews did not tell these stories to accurately detail the events. They told these stories to explain to themselves why things were the way they were by telling themselves a story about how things came to be.

So why have I spent all this time on what are, really, introductory matters? Well, because this is a creation myth, there are people who want to use it to press an agenda and back themselves up with the authority of the Bible. Of course I have an agenda, too. We all do. No one comes to the Bible innocent, without hopes or questions or pre-conceived ideas. And, of course we want to make as a persuasive case as I can.

But to use a myth without myth-understanding is to risk misunderstanding. Myths are designed to make the present seem inevitable and necessary, to make it seem natural, to make it seem to be the will of God. Myths are designed to cut off debate, to end the conversation, to win the argument by sleight of hand.

When I was in seminary, long ago during the last century, we were deep in a debate about the place of women in the life and ministry of the church. Traditional notions were being challenged by second-wave feminists. Our seminary had a few of them, including, eventually, me. They brought questions not only about the authority of women in the church but also about the use of gendered language, not only to describe people, but even to describe God. The traditionalists used this story to defend their position. God had clearly placed men in authority over women. Look at Genesis Two. God created the man, placed him in the Garden, and gave him the job of naming all the animals. God gave him the one rule, that is, that he could eat any fruit except the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Then God made the woman. Adam was responsible for telling her the rule. Adam was clearly in charge and, when he let Eve lead in the next chapter, things went badly wrong. This is how stories get myth-used. 

Feminism in theology brought new insights in biblical studies. This story was certainly on their radar. They noted the rather odd description of Eve’s creation: she comes from Adam’s body. In fact, the story plays on the Hebrew words for man and woman. Man is ish and woman is ishah. Ishah is really just ish with the feminine ending on it, but the teller of this story says instead that ishah is ish with the directional suffix ah, so that ishah rather than just being the feminine form of ish, now means “from the man.” Nice trick.

Of course, one of the things that the Garden of Eden story undertook to explain was why it was that men were in charge. The story could simply have said that men were stronger than women (quite often true) and were quite able to force them into obedience. This was probably pretty close to the historically accurate fact. But that wouldn’t have been enough. A myth wants to show that the present is what is supposed to be, not just how it turned out. Especially in view of the fact that women have one power that men do not and cannot have: women give birth. Without that power, the human enterprise goes nowhere. 

So just saying that men are in charge because they forced the women to obey them seems a rather thin reason. So the story does what myths do: it myth-represents reality; it turns reality upside down to present how things are as if they were completely natural. In this case, we have men claiming priority because Adam gave birth to Eve, when we all know very well that men do not give birth to women; women give birth to men. The story is making a deliberate myth-take. And that’s how it works.

These days the story of Adam and Eve has been trotted out to defend a particular notion of marriage. The argument is framed in this way: It’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. The biblical view of marriage, the argument says, is marriage between one man and one woman. This is another myth-take: there is no one biblical model of marriage. In some cases, a marriage of one man and two or more women was not only tolerated but commanded by God. At very least we would have to say that, if the biblical notion of marriage is one man and one woman, neither the Hebrews nor God took that biblical notion very seriously.  The Hebrews told the story of Adam and Eve well aware that there were models of marriage that they themselves participated in. But they told the story the way it is because the story is concerned with beginnings. In the story the whole world is virtually empty and is conceived as a home for people. Naturally its concern is with reproduction, with being fruitful and multiplying, so there is a man and a woman and they stand for all men and all women in whatever marital configurations they might be found. Men and women are to make sure that the world is populated. There are 7,300,000,000 of us now.[2] I’d say, mission accomplished and then some.

The trouble with invoking this story as a myth, or maybe I should say, myth-using it, is that this is designed not to further a conversation, but to end it. We have so much work to do to continue to reinvent marriage, not just because marriage in our country now legally includes one man and another man, one woman and another woman, as well as one man and one woman, but because the challenges are greater than ever. 

At various times in history marriage has been primarily political, primarily economic, or some combination. Marriage has mostly been patriarchal. In the midst of all that some men and women managed to love each other. It’s a miracle, really. For us, now, marriage has become about love. That isn’t really very traditional, but it’s what we do. With reproduction and inheritance demoted as motives and reasons for marriage, there really is nothing to prevent these very untraditional combinations. When it comes to love, straight couples have no particular advantage over gay or lesbian couples. Myth-using Genesis won’t change that.

My recommendation is that we not try. In the meantime we have marriage in three basic configurations. Those of us who have decided to live in marriage have plenty of work to do. The good news is that we will increasingly have two new groups of married folks to consult about what is working and what isn’t. While we’re doing that, my hope is that our denomination will eventually catch up with us.

For now I’ve come to the end of this story of stories about beginnings. The story of Adam and Eve must be tired, from all the work that it has had to do. It’s time to give it a rest. 

[1] Proverbs 8:22a.

[2] "World Population Clock."

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