Women of the Bible, Part 1: Eve
Service of Worship
Eastern Parkway United Methodist
Church
June 6, 2021
Rev. Natalie Bowerman, Pastor
Let us
pray:
Creator God,
you call us like a good parent to you to guide and protect us, to nourish and
lead us.
Jesus our
Savior, you call us like a caring elder brother to serve us and help us, to
cheer us and invite us.
Healing
Spirit, you call us and move us ever closer into fellowship with you and each
other.
Yet like
unruly children we strain at your guidance, we try to break away and do it
ourselves. As we mature and grow up we desire knowledge, but then don’t know
what to do with it; we want independence but then fatigue at the weight of the
responsibility that brings; we desire the knowledge of good and evil, but then need
to make very hard choices. Before we know it we are in the grip of other
powers, leading us away from your loving ways into the grip of selfish greed,
adoring idols of materialism and power.
Lord,
forgive us and free us. Open our eyes to how your wisdom knows true leadership
to be service. Open our hearts that we may learn that neither race or tribe,
culture or religion are barriers to separate us but that we are all one family
in your love.
So open our
hearts and minds to learn again to live your love as we celebrate and worship
you here together. Amen.
Our Mother,
Father, Creator God, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy Kingdom come,
thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily
bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who have trespassed
against us. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is
the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory forever. Amen.
Genesis
3: 8-24
8 And they heard the sound of
the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool[a] of the day, and the man and his wife hid
themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the
garden. 9 But the Lord God called to the
man and said to him, “Where are you?”[b] 10 And he said, “I heard
the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and
I hid myself.” 11 He said, “Who told you that you
were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to
eat?” 12 The man said, “The woman whom you
gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.” 13 Then
the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this that you have done?”
The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”
14 The Lord God said to the
serpent,
“Because you
have done this,
cursed are you above all livestock
and above all beasts of the field;
on 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[c] and her offspring;
he shall bruise your head,
and you shall bruise his heel.”
16 To the woman he said,
“I will
surely multiply your pain in childbearing;
in pain you shall bring forth children.
Your desire shall be contrary to[d] your husband,
but he shall rule over you.”
17 And to Adam he said,
“Because you
have listened to the voice of your wife
and have eaten of the tree
of which I commanded you,
‘You shall not eat of it,’
cursed is the ground because of you;
in pain 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,
till you return to the ground,
for out of it you were taken;
for you are dust,
and to dust you shall return.”
20 The man called his wife's name Eve,
because she was the mother of all living.[e] 21 And
the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins and
clothed them.
22 Then the Lord God
said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil.
Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat,
and live forever—” 23 therefore
the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the
ground from which he was taken. 24 He drove out the
man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a
flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.
A Message
“Women of
the Bible, Part 1: Eve”
Friends,
today we are starting a sermon series that brings me great joy to share with
all of you: Stump the Preacher 2021. From now to the end of October I’m
preaching on sermon topics that you all asked for. Get excited, y’all, these
topics are going to be awesome. The first three sermons in this series were the
request of our dear friend Trish, who wanted to hear about strong women from
the Bible.
Now, you
need to understand that in your pastor’s head every question comes with
follow-up questions. How do you define a “strong” woman from the Bible? Are we
looking at strength of character, strength of body, strength of mind, strength
of spirit? Maybe all of the above? Any woman in the Bible, just by virtue of
surviving in the world the biblical authors describe, is a strong woman. Still,
there’s women in the Bible that are easier to preach about, and women that I
myself have preached about many times before: Ruth, Hannah, Jesus’ mother, Mary
Magdalene. For this sermon series I decided to challenge myself and all of you
by lifting up women who have relatively small roles in the Bible, and are
rarely extolled to the same level as someone like Mary the Mother of Jesus. I
figured we should just start from the very beginning, so today we’re talking
about the very first woman on earth: Eve.
The authors
of the book of Genesis—scholars believe there were at least four—seemingly agreed
to disagree about how God created the earth, and demonstrated little conflict
about this by putting two different creation stories right next to each other.
This gives us two different stories about how God created people. In the first,
God put a single soul on the earth and divided it in half, giving one half
traits of the Divine Masculine, and the other half traits of the Divine
Feminine. In that story two life partners were created at the same time, and are
literally two halves of the same whole; neither is complete without the other. Isn’t
that romantic?
The second
creation story features God pointing out the first “not good” thing in an
otherwise good world: Adam’s loneliness. In this account God created Adam from
the dust of the earth, breathed life into him, and had him go live in paradise.
But when God realized that Adam didn’t have anyone just like him to keep him
company, God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a
helper suitable for him.”[1]
In this creation story man comes before woman, and God makes the first woman
out of Adam’s rib.
The two
stories converge in chapter three, when the very first two humans break the
only rule in the world and get in trouble for it. God puts Adam and Eve in the Garden
of Eden and tells them to go do whatever they want, whenever they want with
only one stipulation—you see that one tree in the middle with the apples? No
apples for you. K, have fun kids.
Then the
woman is hanging out minding her own business when a snake starts chatting to
her about that one tree. And rather than wondering why snakes can suddenly talk
the woman engages him. He tells her he knows God better than she does; she
thinks if she eats the forbidden fruit she’ll die, but he tells her that she’ll
become like God. She falls for it, she eats, Adam eats, everyone has a great
big apple party, and with a tummy full of apples they look at each other with a
whole new feeling they never experienced before: shame. Interestingly, it wasn’t
until after this moment that Eve gets her name, which means “life”. It’s
prophetic—you don’t really know the meaning of life until after you’ve felt
shame.
Most of us
are at least familiar with the classic take on this story, and some of us grew
up in churches that taught nothing at all but this take on the story: that woman
was a great big ol’ TEMPTRESS. That’s going to mean something about either her
intelligence or her sexuality, and more often than not, both. She let the snake
talk her into doing the bad thing, and then she schmoozed her hubby into a life
of apple-related crimes. Now, because of a woman, all of humanity is eternally
doomed. We lost paradise because of a woman, we disobeyed God because of a
woman, man was tempted by woman, and clearly this proves that only men can be
trusted anywhere but especially in the Church, and women will be better off
staying barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen where men can control their
actions and keep them out of trouble.
Here’s the
thing, and I hope y’all aren’t hearing this for the first time: that’s far from
the only way to read this story. That interpretation, in fact, doesn’t come
from the text itself. We have the power structure of the emerging Church to
thank for that; we have men with a whole lotta personal issues who couldn’t
take responsibility for their own actions and instead wanted to blame women to
thank for that.
Prominent
among such men is one named Augustine, a theologian, philosopher, and bishop
who lived in the last 4th and early 5th Centuries CE. Augustine
was a brilliant mind and soul, and we owe a huge debt of gratitude to him for
the theology that he gifted a Church struggling to discover its identity. But
he wasn’t perfect by any means, and he injected a ton of his personal feelings
and life experiences into that theology, and those things stuck. He was a
bright student, a dedicated minister, a voracious reader, and an excellent
leader. He was also the kind of guy that Britney Spears would call a “womanizer”.
In addition to that, he was a guy with a lot of internalized shame and
self-doubt, and he had a terrible time facing himself in the mirror so he
projected his feelings onto others. He struggled with his sexuality throughout
his life, from crushes in his younger years that made him wonder if he was
committing the sin of lust to a number of illicit affairs when he was older, a
child born out of wedlock, a woman he loved who didn’t love him back, and a
mountain of Mommy Issues to boot. The more he struggled with the man in the
mirror the worst he felt, and the more he decided women, sex, and the human
body must be sources of grief not just for him but for the whole world. In
reference to his own mother, Augustine wrote in his book Confessions “The
torments that she suffered were proof that she inherited the legacy of Eve,
seeking in sorrow what with sorrow she had brought into the world.”[2]
The author of
the first letter to Timothy, also writing during the emerging Church, was
sympatico, and wrote in 1 Timothy 2: 11-15: “11A woman should learn
in quietness and full submission. 12I do not permit a woman to
teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet. 13For
Adam was formed first, then Eve. 14And Adam was not the one
deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. 15But
women will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith, love
and holiness with propriety.”
I, for one,
am pretty sick of this interpretation. And the ball is in our court, guys. We’re
the Church. We’re really big on tradition but we don’t need to keep things that
aren’t helping us grow. Allow me to offer you a different way to think about our
friend Eve.
A theory
about Adam and Eve’s Fall and Exile from Eden that I have held dear to me is
one that I learned from my old testament professor in seminary, Mark Brummitt. He
suggested that maybe Adam and Eve weren’t perfect or sinless before they ate
the forbidden fruit, but that they were like babies. Think about it. Who walks
around naked and doesn’t care? Who talks to animals and comes up with their own
names for everything? Who doesn’t work, eats for they didn’t make and sleeps
whenever they feel like it? Babies. But that can’t last forever. When Eve ate
the apple and handed it to Adam, they learned about good and evil. They didn’t
know about good and evil before. Their innocence was forever lost. They grew
up. They had to work. They had to wear clothes. They had to grow their own
food. And they had to raise kids of their own. And that’s ok! It’s what God
knew they’d do sooner or later. After all, any of you who have cared for a
child know that if you want to make something irresistible to them, tell them
they can’t touch it. It’ll be in their sticky little fingers within seconds.
Then I came
upon another theory about Eve, this one from a contemporary Lutheran pastor and
author by the name of Nadia Bolz-Weber. She’s one of my very favorite authors.
She also swears a lot. Those two statements are not unrelated. Since she’s got
a bit of a mouth on her I have to be careful about quoting her from the pulpit,
but her words about Eve, found in her book Shameless, are amazingly
on-point. Nadia shares with us that Eve felt curious, which is natural. And Eve
succumbed to the voice of a predator, someone who preyed upon her naivete and tried
to block God’s voice out of her head in favor of his. He swindled Eve out of an
uncomplicated life, one in which she sat in God’s presence unafraid,
unrestrained, and unashamed, just to prove he could. Eve wondered if there was
something more out there, and this other being, this snake, tried to tell her
that God was wrong about the tree, that he had the real truth, and that she
should follow him. Meanwhile her dopey husband just passively ate the apple
without a moment’s hesitation.
Eve should
have listened to her gut instinct, and to God. Adam should have turned off the
game, put his beer down, and actively helped his wife. And the snake had no
right to speak for God. Eve witnessed for the first time, but by no means the
last time, that bad beings will pretend to know God better than God does, and
will fill our heads with all kinds of horrible messages. And the very worst one
of those messages is shame.
Nadia puts it
like this:
Before the
weight of good and evil and the legalistic [nonsense] that has forever plagued
religion entered into the minds and hearts of human beings, there was no shame.—no
shame about our bodies, or what those bodies desired, or how those bodies
looked. There was absolutely no reason to hide from God…
Shame has an
origin, and it is not God. God said, “Where are you?” and they said “We were
naked and tried to hide from you because we were afraid.” God then said to them
“Wait. Who told you you were naked?”
Who told them
they were naked? My money is on the snake. For some reason God allows us to
live in a world where alternatives to God’s voice exist, and those alternatives
are where shame originates.
Maybe you,
too, are hiding, having listened to a voice other than God’s. But can you hear
God saying “Wait. Who told you you were naked? Who told you that you have to
lie to be accepted? Who told you [you’re] not beautiful and worthy to be loved?...My
money is on the snake. And he’s a liar.[3]
I think it’s
well past time for us to exonerate Eve. She is not a temptress, nor is she the
root of evil, not is she somehow proof that no woman is worthy of trust as a
leader. Quite the opposite. Eve is life. She is mother of us all. And, as a
leader, she shows us that you can be led astray, you can make mistakes, you can
endure the abuse of someone feeding lies and insecurities into your ear while
claiming they’re smarter than God. You can go through that all, you can lose
your innocence and the happy life you knew before it, and then you can keep
going. Eve teaches us resilience, perseverance, hard work, and, maybe more than
anything, the importance of shutting down those who would shame you. Because
you know who they are, and they do not speak for God. God loves you for who you
are, always will, and will keep loving you long past the Garden of Eden and out
into the real world.
Amen.
I invite
you to receive the benediction:
Family of
Christ, go into all the world!
Go forth with forgiveness and grace.
Go forth with compassion and love.
We go as Christ’s family
for all the world to see.
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