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The Mother of All Living
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis May 14, 2006, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Genesis 2:18-3:7 II Timothy 1:1-7
“When I was a child in Sunday school,” writes novelist Dana Tierney, “I would ask searching questions like ‘Angels can fly up in heaven, but how do clouds hold up pianos?’ and get the same puzzling response about how that was not important; what was important was that Jesus died for our sins and if we accepted him as our savior, when we died we would go to heaven where we’d get everything we wanted. Some children in my class,” she continues, “wondered why anyone would hang on a cross with nails stuck through his hands to help anyone else; I wondered how Santa Claus knew what I wanted for Christmas, even though I never wrote him a letter. Maybe he had a tape recorder hidden in every chimney in the world. “This literal-mindedness has stuck with me,” Tierney confesses. “One result of it is that I am unable to believe in God.” Tierney goes on to report that most of her atheist friends are “proud of their unbelief, as though they’ve cleverly refused to be sold snake oil.” She is married to a man who counts himself in that number. On the other hand, even though Tierney longs to believe, as she puts it, she “doesn’t get the message.” Now I mention Tierney’s plight this morning because what worries her is not so much her struggle with faith personally; rather she worries about being a mother who has no faith of her own to pass along to her now four-year-old son Luke. I mention this, as well, at the end of what has turned out to be a little three week unintentional series on faith received and handed on, asking in the end: What if the faith handed on cannot be received--what if your literal mind cannot believe Jesus died for you and accept him as your savior so you can go to heaven and get everything you want--then what have you to hand on to your children? For some this is not a problem. For some faith in God appears to have been given naturally in the nurture of the near at hand…in a living, tangible relationship. If you trust that you are loved, held, upheld by another who can be trusted, then the leap is small to the belief that you also are upheld by the God who will not let you go. In this vein another novelist, John Carroll, recalls the hold of his mother years ago. “Part of what she held me with,” he writes, “was God. I have memories of rocking in the old chair against her breast…memories that taught me heaven….I learned faith in the cradle of her arms.” For others there abides a memory of growing up in a household rife with a sense of purpose, remember learning at an early age how obedience and responsibility--rather than a feeling or a personal relationship--are the way of faith in the world. For the most part, those of us raised in such a household either run the other way or become Presbyterians. So the Scottish theologian John Baillie wrote that his “earliest memories certainly contain the knowledge that [his parents] did but transmit and administer an authority of which they were not themselves the ultimate source.” The ultimate source was God. But so much has changed since John Baillie lived under an unquestionable parental authority which translated seamlessly into the will of an Almighty God. So much even has changed since John Carroll, cradled by his mother’s secure arms in the 1950’s, connected the constancy of her nurture to the unconscious trust of a small hand held steadfastly in a heavenly one. So many households, the truth be told, are headed by a parent who may long to hear God’s address but cannot seem to get the message, as Tierney put it. So on this Sunday apropos of nothing much in the church’s calendar, we would do well to reconsider the mother from whose will and womb our current crisis of faith surely descended. She is neither Mary the mother of God and vessel of all virtue, nor would she seem to be Eunice the mother or Lois the grandmother of our text. She is Eve, mother of all living as Adam named her…and we are the direct descendants of her theological speculation, of her radical curiosity, of her willful disobedience. In the first place and according to Walter Brueggemann, Eve appears as the mother of our questions concerning God’s intentions. Eve rather than Adam is the first theologian. In the beginning of the third chapter of Genesis, she engages in a kind of talk about God: a God in the third person who is not party to the conversation. At issue are the finer theological meanings of God’s word (Did God literally mean we would die?), a sort of second guessing of sacred speech. Sometimes faith appears to be a matter of getting things right in our head about the object we so blithely call God. Or sometimes we think being faithful means winning the argument about the meaning of a biblical passage. Hence the message we get is, at best, one of well-chosen words about God rather than the Word of God, which is to say the gift of a lively and palpable relationship with the God who comes to us in Jesus Christ which is faith. Instead our literal minds step back from the God who has breathed life into the dust that we are with more wariness than wonder. This is not original with us but is the sin with which all who are living began through Eve, the mother of our questions concerning God, the first theologian who stepped back critically to review the true meaning of God’s reported words in relation to the situation at hand before she took a bite! In the second place, Eve acts upon her theological analysis of the situation and so enters the world—our world—wherein God would seem simultaneously to be absent, a monster, and the maker of our sheerest delight. “When Eve bit into the apple,” writes Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, “she gave us the world as we know the world—beautiful, flawed, dangerous, full of being. She gave us smallpox and Somalia, polio vaccine and wheat and Windsor roses…She (not Mary) is the mother of my children, born in travail to a world of suffering their presence may refresh.” It is into this frail, fierce, fallen world we know best in the marrow of our vulnerable and broken lives that Eve bears us. A woman of the world, she responds to the situation in which she finds herself with radical curiosity. “When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes…” says the editor of the second creation story. Eve’s now educated instinct is to delight in the given world, to grab hold of every sight and sound and smell which comes her way. It is as though she were made to inhabit not the garden of our Fall but the first garden of which the Lord God said in the beginning of Genesis, “See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth;…you shall have them [all] for food…And it was so. [Period!] God saw everything that he had made…indeed…was very good.” That was that: a sixth day over, a seventh to rest. So goes the first story. I wonder this: if Eve had been written into the first story of creation, would there have been any more of the story to tell? The plot would never have thickened. The story of salvation never would have had to unfold. Faith would be the air we mindlessly breathe because God would be obvious, the world unconditionally good, all things permitted. But in the second story there is a catch mentioned, a caveat, a string attached, a freedom proffered. When Eve bit into the apple, she gave us the world as we know the world—knowing good and evil as we think we do: beautiful, flawed, dangerous, full of being. It is a world of real action and real consequences. It is a world in which the split second between delight and dread is all the time we normally have. One minute our salivary glands are working overtime and the next we are paralyzed by what we have, in fact, done. “We are demon yet angel, violence yet peace, fear yet love, lust yet chastity, blindness yet sight, blasphemy yet reverence. We despoil, deface, despise…we repair, renew, adore.” We are Eve’s offspring! Far from protecting us, the mother of all living thrusts us into the delicious earth with all of our senses intact. She dares the boundaries of propriety and invites us to explore what has been forbidden. In that split second before the dread inevitably sets in, she is the precursor of our gratitude, of our giddiness, of our glory in the garden wherein nothing, at first, is believed to be off-limits, where all things would seem to be available for our enjoyment, even God! As faith is delight and gratitude toward God’s good creation, Eve is the mother—for a moment—of that faith, of that radical curiosity, of that utter trust in the goodness of God’s world. But then, in the third place, she swallows and delight is turned to dread, theological speculation is transformed into thoroughgoing guilt: the story of our salvation is set in motion. Now the “alienation from God we feel as a direct consequence of her Fall,” writes Harrison, “makes us beholden to her: the intense desire for God never satisfied, arises from our separation from God.” Eve is finally the handmaid not of our speculative theological questions, but of our most anguished human cries in the dark for a hand greater than our own to hold. She is the handmaid of our doubts, of our longings, of our sighs too deep for words, of our alienation from the God who first gave us breath. She sets in us a restlessness until we rest in God alone; she sets in us a longing for One whose name we cannot, on our own, find out; she insinuates in us the distance absolutely necessary if we are to be children not of some mindless religious coercion but of the God is always the first to quit the distance we keep and come to us, come even to our children in spite of us, in Jesus Christ. I think the faith which lived first in our grandmothers and now in our mothers was a faith wrought by Eve’s fall from grace. I think they knew what it was in the dark to step back from the God of their fathers in quiet speculation. I think they knew the consequences in this world reserved for those with a radical curiosity, though we have heard little of their giddy gladness and mostly of their guilt. I think they knew the pain of longing for the God they could not call back to their side and the sorrow of knowing too much about the world’s meanness, knowing too much about a child’s sadness, knowing too much about their own fears. I think they dwelt in the distance between their real lives and the life for which they were made. I think by way of their cradling arms and stern commands they prayed for God’s nearness too in the face of Jesus Christ. “I assumed,” Tierney concludes, we “had stranded Luke in the same spiritually arid place we’d found ourselves in. When my husband went to Iraq for seven months, I thought Luke and I were in it together, a suddenly single mom and a nervous boy whose daddy was in a war zone…. “Then one night Luke and I were watching television and a story flashed on about a soldier on home leave….I tried to switch the channel, but Luke wanted to see….The soldier started talking about how afraid he was of going back, how dangerous it was in Iraq. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Luke steeple his fingers and bow his head for a split second. Surprised I said, ‘Sweetheart, what are you doing?’ He wouldn’t tell me, but a few minutes later he did it again. I said, ‘You don’t have to tell me, but if you want to, I’m listening.’ Finally he confessed, ‘I was saying a little prayer for Daddy…. “It was as if the mustard seed of faith [that had eluded me] had found its way into our son….I was envious of him. Luke’s prayers can stretch to infinity and beyond, but I am limited to one: Help thou mine unbelief.” Thanks be to God. |