“About THAT Woman”

a sermon by the Rev. Jay Ekman, Saratoga Springs, New York

based on Genesis 1 and 2

The ancients were not as primitive or as out of touch as we might like to think. Actually they were a pretty thoughtful people—in spite of having no microwaves! There are two different stories of creation in our Hebrew scriptures. [How much more proof do folks need that the Bible is not attempting a scientific treatise?]  The two Genesis stories capture the simple and the complex of created life.

In the first story, God’s presence and the creation of the universe are virtually simultaneous events. There is no speculation: “Where did God come from?” God is {just} there. God fashions a perfect harmony. “Behold it is good.”

Genesis Two is more colorful and complex…and messy! Genesis Two reeks of the stuff of living. Any harmony between the Creator and creation dissolves into the intrigue and disappointments of the Garden of Eden.  Human creatures are not as compliant and appreciative as THE Creative Force of the universe might like!

In Genesis Two, God almost comes off as not all-knowing, a bit surprised, and (even) taken aback by the work of his creation.  In His “all knowing” God apparently did not know that Adam would not find among the animals adequate companionship. When a rib is taken from Adam’s side to fashion Eve, the man exclaims, “At last….” which carries the connotation, “You—God—finally got it right.”

A central component of this story is the idea of “original sin.” Original sin is not a Jewish concept. It is distinctly Christian. Frankly it is a pretty pathetic doctrine that has been a part of the church for more than a thousand years. “Original Sin” would fit well on the Daley Show. God makes Adam and Eve in the divine image (Genesis 1). Then in a stroke of parental incomprehensibility  (Genesis 2) He seeks to deny to Adam and Eve the knowledge of good and evil—which is the very ability that makes them fully human, i.e. created in the Divine image. The problem starts, of course, with….THAT WOMAN!!

Jack Spong says that we men marry considerably above our station. If Adam had never lost that rib, we can speculate that he’d still be wandering around the garden patting the dogs, cats and frogs, listing “this way and that,” in a perpetual state of quiet desperation.

It is ONLY because of Eve that mankind achieves the glory and the bane of human existence.

Without Eve it looks like Adam would have been a dolt. It was Eve who had the moxie, the self-actualizing hupspa (Maslow would be proud) to break the unenforced Divine fetters…  “Admitting that the fruit looked good to the eyes and was good to eat.” SHE [THAT WOMAN!] took that first bite! Then she gave it to Adam [“Who was with her!”] and since then neither man nor God has rested!

Most ancient cultures seem fond of the idea that life and creation, in some primordial past, was better than it is in the present moment. Most civilizations seem to harbor the idea of a “Golden Age.” The Jews, looking back on the monarchy of King Dave speaking of the “Good Olde Days.” The folks who wrote Genesis fantasized a time when the cosmos was a harmonious good.

The logic runs that, “If there was a time in the past when things were peaceful and perfect….then it is possible to reclaim that unity (either) now or sometime in the future.” The Garden(s) of Eden, cultivated by ancient peoples, ever beckon the human spirit to a better time and place.

The truth is that there never was a Garden of Eden! There never was a time when humans and animals lived in perfect harmony. On the other hand, the knowledge of good and evil AND the propensity to do good and evil HAS {likely} been a part of the eternal human condition. It wasn’t Eve, nor was it the forbidden fruit that brought this glory and this calamity on the world scene. The knowledge of good and evil is a part of the Divine condition and that means that we, who are made in the image of God…also…know/do good and evil.

The images of the Garden of Eden, emphasizing our knowledge of evil and good, give us at least two ways to look at our created world. On the one hand we can embrace EVIL and assume that there is a scarcity of resources and a multiplicity of demand. Given this view, “To the strong go the spoils of war, greed, and avarice.” It’s Leona Helmsley {the NYC hotel magnate}, “Little people pay taxes.”

The political scene around the world is rich in this kind of evil. The fit survive. They take from the poor. They plunder the weak. This view spawns a politics of fear. The Barbarians are always at the gates wanting to tear from us that which we have accumulated.

A second view emphasizes the positive—the good of Divine knowledge. This view sees that there is a creation of abundance. The richness of the Garden of Eden is just a story; but it speaks to the reality of Earth’s resources.  There may not be enough resources to satisfy all of the world’s GREED; but there are enough resources to provide sufficiently for most human NEED.

The first view is the stuff of history books and modern news. Humans are able to do evil expeditiously. We only lurch toward the good now and then. The second view has never really been tried on a large scale. I suspect that it is utopian to think that we might end disease, premature and unnatural death, that all children’s tummies might be filled.  (YET) I believe we have a divine capacity to make a huge dent in the world’s misery. That can happen, if we apply ourselves to the best of Divine humanity within us and use our knowledge for good.

The ancients were not so primitive. They did have insight into the human condition. In our story this morning we owe to THAT WOMAN (Eve) the courage and the moxie to reach beyond the proclaimed boundaries. She opened our eyes to the wonderful mysteries and the enticing evils of created life. It was Eve (and Adam who was with her) who dared for better or for worse to touch and taste after the Divine image within us.

Our challenge is to use the full range of our knowledge to become more than the stunted and stifled “me orientated” creatures we so easily are. We can do it. And THAT WOMAN made it possible.    AMEN.

When the Truth Hits You Like an 18-Wheeler

a sermon by Eleanor Stanton, Sartatoga Springs, New York

based on Luke 13:10-17

Our perceptions shape our reality.  A day that starts out glorious, with the sun shining and all being right with the world can change in a heartbeat when we remember that today is our root canal.  Suddenly the world doesn't seem so warm and friendly anymore.  Thinking about the bent-over woman in the gospel of Luke, I wondered how her perception might shape her reality.  Luke says that she was crippled for 18 years: she was bent over and could not straighten up at all.  She was curved in on herself.  What she saw most of the time was her own crippled body.  What must it have been like for her to be stuck in looking down all day, every day?  To cook and clean her house from a bent-over position?  To shop for food from a bent-over position?  Can you imagine walking through Price Chopper, trying to buy groceries, but not being able to see what's on the shelves?  You'd be limited to choosing what was right in front of you.  And it went on for eighteen years.  At a time when most people didn't live past their 40th birthday, eighteen years is half a life… it's a long time to be stuck in one position. 

Something happened to me 14 years ago that changed my perception of God and shaped my reality for a long time.  My father died after eight weeks in the hospital.  Now, for seven of those weeks, I expected him to get better and come home.  He was only 73 and had always been a strong, robust man.  By rights, we should have had many more years together.  I prayed for him to get better.  I even prayed the rosary.  I hadn't been a practicing Catholic since my teens, but in my fear of losing him, I didn't want to overlook anything.  I prayed every day… but Dad died anyway. 

I was so angry.  I couldn't believe that God who was supposed to love me – who was supposed to know every hair on my head – didn't also know how much I loved my father.  And God wouldn't heal him.  It was an earthquake on the foundations of my faith.  I stopped speaking to God for a long time. 

Eventually though, after the grief lifted a bit, I began to feel again that God was there, had been there, suffering with me.  Where before I'd been angry that God wouldn't heal Dad, I then began to believe that God would have, but couldn't stop my father from dying.  I began to believe that God – the one who loves all of us – maybe wasn't in the business of rescuing individuals.  That belief hung around, unchallenged, for many long years.  I was pretty much stuck with that position.

Then, something happened in the summer of 2006 that challenged everything I thought I knew.  It was while I was a chaplain at Albany Medical Center.  Chaplaincy is an ordination requirement and I looked forward to it.  I thought I'd make a good one.  I'd certainly sat in a lot of hospital rooms since Dad's death and I'd learned not to ask too much of God.  The one thing I'm not very good at is sitting still, so I developed a way of sitting that reminded me to sit still.  I sat forward in the chair, placed my elbows on my legs and clasped my hands together.  The position bends me forward, so I don't leap to my feet too frequently.

But sitting still wasn't the only challenge of being a chaplain.  The work brought me face-to-face with tragedy and heartbreak on an almost daily basis.  These experiences only reinforced my perception that God couldn't keep people from dying… and perception shapes our reality.  After five weeks of that, the world didn't seem to be a very safe place at all.

That's what I was thinking – that God's world wasn't very safe for people – while I drove home up the Northway.  It was raining, raining heavily, and a gray mist rose up around all the cars as we drove along the wet road.  There was a car up ahead of me in the slow lane that was moving much slower than the flow of traffic.  I thought maybe I'd pass around it, but there was an 18-wheeler just behind me in the middle lane.  As the daughter of a truck driver, I don't dart out in front of big trucks.

Suddenly the front end of my car swished back and forth.  Then it spun sideways.  I was hydroplaning and nothing I did could stop it.  Within minutes, my car was spinning completely around.  Spinning right into the path of the 18-wheeler in the middle lane.  I had just enough time to think… this is bad… before BANG! the truck hit me. 

My car spun faster, harder, than before.  I clutched the steering wheel while the force of the spin stretched my head and neck out.  I was so afraid that another car would hit me while I was so vulnerable.  I'd prayed over accident victims.  I didn't want to be one, but it seemed inevitable.

The car spun one, two, THREE times and then… stopped.  I was on the shoulder of the road, facing forward, just as if I'd pulled over myself.  Somehow my car had spun back into the slow lane and then safely off the road.  There was a woman standing in the rain, talking on her cell phone, outside my passenger door.  She put me in her car, told me the troopers were coming, and asked me if I was okay.

It was a good question.  The passenger side of my car was mangled, the rear window completely gone.  It was totaled, but I… I was fine.  Not even a bruise from my seat belt. 

I felt… saved… rescued from certain harm… and I didn't know what to do with that information.  In a flash… or maybe in a BANG!… all that I knew about God and salvation disappeared.  I couldn't shake the feeling of being rescued, but I didn't believe God could do that… did I?  In this case, the reality of my safety was trying to change my perceptions about saving.  It was very confusing, so I kept it to myself for a long time.

Then, recently, I came across the Gospel story we heard this morning.  Boy, that bent-over woman just jumped out at me.  When I imagined how she looked, I saw the bent-over posture I'd used as a chaplain.  The more I thought about how she was stuck in one position, the more I saw how I'd been stuck too.  I'd been stuck with one way of seeing God, one way of understanding what God would or could do.  The words that Jesus spoke to her seemed aimed straight at me: "Woman, you have been set free from your infirmity."   The gift of the accident wasn't my physical safety; the real gift was in exploding my limited understanding of what was possible.  Like the bent-over woman, I, too, had been set free: free from a pessimistic knowing of what is possible, of what God can and can't do.

Funny thing, since I embraced the fact that I do not know everything that God is capable of, I've been more hopeful.  Not in a naïve way, where I think God might come riding in on a white charger and fix all of the world's problems, but hopeful that it's… possible… for us to reach real solutions to the real problems we face.  Also, since I've begun telling people about my car accident, I've heard amazing stories of people coming out of bad situations.  Judy Ekman told me that as a young child she was very sick with whooping cough.  At that time, children died of whooping cough, but she didn't.

Could I ask you to do something for me?  If you've ever been sick, as a child or an adult, with an illness or disease that could have killed you, but didn't, would you stand up or raise your hand?  If you've been hit by an 18-wheeler or been in a car accident that could have killed you, but didn't, would you stand up?  If your appendix has burst or you needed emergency surgery, would you stand up?  Have you been in a war zone or a dangerous situation where you might have died, but didn't?  Stand up. Have you nearly drowned?  Have you ever felt rescued out of bad situation?  If you have, stand up.

[Approximately 50 people stood up]

Look at you.  Look at all of you.  You just reinforce my perception that God has a preference, a prejudice, for life.  If God didn't have a prejudice for life, the hospitals wouldn't be big enough to hold all the people who've been close to death.  I have come, Jesus said, that you might have life and have it more abundantly.  This new perception is shaping my reality.  This hope that I've been feeling is working on me.  It's given me the courage to look at those places in my life that need help, healing, or transformation now that I know there is a higher power willing and able to help me.  Maybe, in this season of Lent, you'd like to join me in thinking about this question: where, in our lives, have we not even attempted healing, reconciliation, or transformation because we thought we had to do it all by ourselves?  What would it mean to honestly look at those places in our lives and believe that there is a power greater than ourselves that is willing and able to help us?  …What would it mean to be set free from knowing what is possible?