First Mennonite Church
Annie Lengacher Browning
August 29, 2010

Genesis 3, NRSV
Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, ‘Did God say, “You shall not eat from any tree in the garden”?’ 2The woman said to the serpent, ‘We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; 3but God said, “You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.” ’ 4But the serpent said to the woman, ‘You will not die; 5for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God,* knowing good and evil.’ 6So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. 7Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.
8 They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. 9But the Lord God called to the man, and said to him, ‘Where are you?’ 10He said, ‘I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.’ 11He said, ‘Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?’ 12The man said, ‘The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate.’ 13Then the Lord God said to the woman, ‘What is this that you have done?’ The woman said, ‘The serpent tricked me, and I ate.’ 14The Lord God said to the serpent,
‘Because you have done this,
   cursed are you among all animals
   and among all wild creatures;
upon your belly you shall go,
   and dust you shall eat
   all the days of your life.
15 I will put enmity between you and the woman,
   and between your offspring and hers;
he will strike your head,
   and you will strike his heel.’
16To the woman he said,
‘I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing;
   in pain you shall bring forth children,
yet your desire shall be for your husband,
   and he shall rule over you.’
17And to the man* he said,
‘Because you have listened to the voice of your wife,
   and have eaten of the tree
about which I commanded you,
   “You shall not eat of it”,
cursed is the ground because of you;
   in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life;
18 thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you;
   and you shall eat the plants of the field.
19 By the sweat of your face
   you shall eat bread
until you return to the ground,
   for out of it you were taken;
you are dust,
   and to dust you shall return.’
20 The man named his wife Eve,* because she was the mother of all who live. 21And the Lord God made garments of skins for the man* and for his wife, and clothed them.
22 Then the Lord God said, ‘See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever’— 23therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken. 24He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life.
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In Genesis 3, it is easy to reduce the experience of Eve as a woman acting brashly on her own out of her own personal motivations. Or to reduce the serpent as villain and temptress. Or Adam as innocent bystander.

Instead, the conversation between the serpent and Eve is one of truth-telling and seeking clarity. The serpent questions Adam and Eve about what God has told them about the forbidden tree. The woman responds, expressing that she does not want to touch the tree for fear of death. The serpent clarifies that this is false information. They will not die, per say, rather they will become like God instead.

The “wrongdoing” in the text is often stated as Eve wanting to be like God, knowing good and evil, which seems to be a rather harmless and good-natured sort of desire. Almost a compliment to the divine.

The serpent poses the idea that God is holding something back, some truth, from them. That God is self-serving, wanting to keep humans from becoming like God. And so the serpent presents a variety of options to Eve about what is the truth in this situation.

Will she die if she eats from the tree? Will she live? Will she have superior knowledge? Are there other unknown benefits if she touches the tree?

The serpent asks for clarity God’s words and asks about truth.

She hears this question, surveys her options and she chooses to act. She eats from the tree. She desires immediate wisdom, knowing good and evil. Immediate gratification.

And so her wrongdoing, perhaps, is not so much wanting to be like God, but rather how she goes about gaining wisdom. She uses personal freedom and agency to break away from the covenantal bond she has with God to make her own decision. A decision based upon a series of questions and wonderings from a serpent.

Much of this creation account is reduced, then, to a question of wisdom, discernment, and understanding personal choice as part of the larger whole. It is also a story of humility and yieldedness, of understanding that the view from within the garden looking at one tree is far different from understanding the forest.

It is bringing together local and global, personal and communal, individual and corporate identities.

It is a question of my choice becoming part of the choice.

Just as Eve was presented with multiple options of where to place her trust, this is the “original sin” that we still encounter. The multiplicity of options for allegiance pulls us everyday. We are constantly barraged with where to locate our time, resources, energies, priorities, loyalties... our decision about what is truth and what we believe.

It is the “original sin” question posed in today as there are honest serpents all around us simply presenting us with multiple options of truth-telling.

A recent article in the New York Times, “Too Many Choices: A Problem That Can Paralyze”, writes that, “although it has long been the common wisdom in our country that there is no such thing as too many choices, as psychologists and economists study the issue, they are concluding that an overload of options may actually paralyze people or push them into decisions that are against their own best interest. “

A famous jam study was conducted in a California gourmet market when a group of researchers set up a booth of samples of jams. Every few hours, they switched from offering a selection of 24 jams to a group of six jams. On average, customers tasted two jams, regardless of the size of the assortment, and each one received a coupon good for a $1 jam purchase.

Sixty percent of customers were drawn to the large assortment, while only 40 percent stopped by the small one. But 30 percent of the people who had sampled from the small assortment decided to buy jam, while only 3 percent of those confronted with the two dozen jams purchased a jar.

The study “raised the hypothesis that the presence of choice might be appealing as a theory,” the Columbia University research concluded, “but in reality, people might find more and more choice to actually be debilitating.”
In many ways, in Genesis, Eve was given multiple options based on multiple sources, and her decision boiled down to where she located her trust. This is how she made her choice.

The article continues to point out that navigating choices, from which of the 50 cereals we will choose, to what college to attend, to what we do on Sunday to which cable package to go with can paralyze us without a conscious decision about what information we subscribe to, the type of expertise we listen to, and how much importance and priority we give to our choices.
In this postmodern world of globalization and a plethora of choices, there is the question of “Can you have too many choices?” An article in the New Yorker with this title concludes that we lose sight of our own human resilience when we make big choices. We often discover, as the article points out, that we are consistently puzzled that “so many things they we dread—from getting fired to being left by a spouse—“turned out for the best.”

We tend to overestimate the joy that we’ll get from buying widgets, winning prizes…even the elusive desire to be like God. “Can you have too many choices?” states that “this is only half of our complex disposition. The other half is our enormous capacity for happiness, even in the absence of such things. The surprise isn’t how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.”

A case in point is my haircut on Friday. I purely go to my stylist because he makes decisions about my hair, and I do not want to make decisions about my hair. I sat down in the chair, and this was our conversation verbatim:
Him: “You have a lot of hair.”
Me: “I know. That’s why I am here.”
Him: “Let’s cut it off.”
Me: “Okay.”
Him: “Should we do layers or one length?”  (slight pause) “I’m going to do layers.”
This choice for me was simply to go between being an informed chooser or an informed nonchooser.  For me, it was freedom of will to be informed and say, “I trust you. Carry on. Cut away.”

If I am honest, though, there was a moment of doubt, though. There was no discussion of how short he was going to cut it, what the layers were going to look like, whether or not he was going to cut bangs or a mohawk or a mullet.

And what allowed me to sit in the chair and have him lob off 5 inches was a resilience that said, “I am okay with this decision. Hair grows back. My decision is enough.”

I trusted the information he provided me, his expertise as a hairdresser and my own level of priority over how my hair looked at the end.

It was an informed decision, even though I said little in our interchange.

And so what does it mean to be informed choosers or even informed nonchoosers in our postmodern world, the garden of Eden, First Mennonite Church, our families, relationships, even within ourselves?

How are we deciding? Who do we hold as trusted informants? Where do we find expertise? What is important and of priority?
This is the question of free will, original sin, the truth telling of a serpent, the bite of an apple, the toil and pain of humanity, and the questions posed in Genesis 3 are the same questions of information, expertise and importance that we ask today.

On Friday night, we heard Madeline Albright and Condelezza Rice speak at DU’s Korbel School of International Studies’s fundraiser, and Condelezza stated that we harvest good results from the decisions made before us, some good, some bad, and that many of these decisions at the time must have a spirit of unfailing optimism in order to see their potential progress.
It means making decisions with the wisdom to know that this decision may work or even be “good enough” for this time and place while it point us in a direction of what we hope for, dream of and expect to come to fruition.

I’m not sure that Eve’s decision can be reduced to a “bad decision”. She chose based on the information presented to her from a so called expert who claimed to “know” God and a priority for her to “be like God”. It could be just as easily called a “wise decision”.

What is clear, however, is her waffling nature of trust in the Genesis narrative. And this is the waffling nature of trust that we wrestle with as a condition of humanity. Waffling or displaced locations of trust are perhaps what can really influence us the most in making poor decisions.

What is clear is our location of trust in God’s goodness for us, God’s deep desire for our wellness and wholeness, God’s interest in our benefit, God’s infinite love and grace, God’s expansiveness is our guide. Our guide in information, expertise and importance.
This is the source of wisdom, discernment and careful choice.

It is God’s nature that is the harvester of our good, bad and in between decisions. Even our nondecisions.
As I think ahead to this coming year at FMC, I am aware of all the decisions that await us. We are discerning our worship service, our budget, our building, and on and on. It is a challenge of balancing information, expertise and importance among us as we venture into new decisions.

While I do not know what will decide (and even what we will decide not to decide about), I am confident of the nature of God that is among us challenging us to be wise, thoughtful and discerning stewards.

Harlan Unrau is composing a history of First Mennonite Church for the Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online , and as I read over our history I see many, many decisions we have made. For this is not the first time in our history that we have asked questions of multiple worship services or master plans for the building or budget requests.

Some decisions we may say were good, bad or in between, but I do see a community that consistently asked the question: “What is God’s movement among us and how do we enter into this movement?”

We are harvesting today the results of decisions that were made in our past, and our challenge is to know how to follow God’s movement into new decisions that break ground and plant seeds for the future harvest of FMC.

This requires love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, happiness, gentleness and self-control to be our guides. The nature of God among us. That movement of God which we trust in one another and in ourselves.

And this is what informs us, is our expertise and is most important.

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