Two weeks left and I'm preaching on forbidden fruit. Great.

Genesis 2:4-0, 15-17, 3:1-8

The Narrative Lectionary and I are going to be having words after this. Two weeks left to preach and you give me the stupid snake in the Garden of Eden? Great.

            So, I guess we’re going to talk about sin?!

            The ol’ forbidden fruit. I suppose it’s worth thinking about what that fruit is. The phrase “forbidden fruit” is typically used to mean a particular kind of temptation—a different kind than what we see in the Garden. Today, we might call the temptation to commit adultery “forbidden fruit,” or the temptation to steal “forbidden fruit,” or the temptation to cheat, whether on a test or a diet. The temptations we tend to label as “forbidden fruit” are issues of control that we can avoid. The forbidden fruit that the snake promotes, on the other hand, is a matter of idolatry.

            The snake tells Eve that the fruit from the tree of the middle of the garden will give her the knowledge of good and evil. The problem isn’t the fruit—it’s the desire to be god. This is where nuance is challenging, because knowledge is not in itself a bad thing. The problem is the endgame of knowledge. We think it will be really good if we figure everything out, and we’re right about that up to a point. Human ingenuity has led us to down a pathway of many incredible inventions and innovations that make our lives more pleasant and longer. But at the same time, we are terrible at rationing our use of power. I think of that great quote from Ian Malcolm in the original Jurassic Park movie where he says, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” That quote echoed again in my mind a few weeks back when Elon Musk made public that he had implanted a computer chip in a sheep’s brain.

            You see, the knowledge of good and evil is not as black-and-white as we suppose, and it’s very easy to see ourselves as the “lawful good” saviors of the world even when the things we are creating are doing irreparable harm. The knowledge of good and evil inevitably leads to seeing ourselves as righteous, and, therefore, we place ourselves in front of Christ. This kind of knowledge leads only to idolatry.

           If you see yourself as morally upright in a dark and sinful world, then you have placed yourself in front of Christ. Of course, your view of yourself may be partially true; it may even be mostly true, but you are neither as good (nor the world so comparatively bad) as you imagine. We are saints and sinners, and the world is filled with 7.5 billion people who are both saints and sinners. You are special—you are a child of God—but you are still one of 7.5 billion sinner-saints.

            Of course, there is evil in the world, but we imagine that it is something apart from us much too easily. As Queen Gertrude says in Hamlet, “The lady does protest too much, methinks,” which is to say that we are the guilty ones and our protests to the contrary are evidence of how deeply the fruit has taken hold. We create artificial distance between ourselves and evil, protesting that we are, in fact, the righteous remnant. This allows us to watch the news and shake our heads at all those unenlightened people—the people rioting, the people killing, the people doing things that surely, I would never do! And there’s an ounce of truth in that comparison, but also a whopper of a lie.

            If you want to judge other people, they will always come up lacking. Some more than others certainly, but all will fall short of your standards—let alone God’s standards. The knowledge of good and evil that feels at first like it will be useful for telling the good apples from the bad ones inevitably leads to us placing people on a ladder system where we are always on the right rung. Rating other people is the surest sign that you have put yourself in the place of God.

            OK, so here I have spent nearly a thousand words on sin—just the way I want you to remember me! As usual, there is an upside to this mess of the tree of knowledge, and it is this: You don’t have to play the game. You don’t have to parse who is in and who is out, what is up and what is down, who is left and who is right—who is pro-life and who is pro-death—because you know the secret? We are all both. Right and wrong, pro-life and death, sinners and saints. Fully, totally, both. And if your first instinct is to say, “Yeah, but…” well, that’s why we should have left the stinking fruit on the tree, but they didn’t and we don’t do it either. We keep eating from the tree. Every single day.

            Meanwhile, we have a God who we know in Jesus Christ, who takes us as we are, who doesn’t require us to stand beside our peers and choose between us like heaven is a big schoolyard pick. God doesn’t play our stupid games. Instead, God chooses us warts and all. It’s up to us if we want to live like this is true.

            So, how then should we live? Well, God gives us those ten commandments, and one of them deals indirectly with this question of good and evil. The 8^th commandment says that we shall not bear false witness against our neighbor. At its simplest, this is a command not to lie, but, like most things in scripture, there’s a whole lot more depth to it than that. To bear false witness is also to label a person as something other than what they are. To call somebody rotten without also acknowledging they are a child of God made in God’s image—to tell somebody they are beyond redemption when God proclaims that nothing is so broken it cannot be made whole—to tell somebody that they are a moron without acknowledging that every one of us fails to understand the proper distinction between good and evil—all of this is violating the 8^th commandment.

            The story of the tree of knowledge challenges us to live as if people are actually beautiful, to see one another through God’s eyes, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. The first thing to go when we declare what is good and what is evil is love. Actual love—not the religiosity that proclaims it loves everything without a hint of self-sacrifice. Love requires that we stop eating the dang fruit and that we acknowledge that God is God and we are not.

            So, today’s scripture tells us something about ourselves that is true and ugly. God also tells us that something that is true and beautiful—that we are not defined by others’ judgments of us. We are enough through God who created us and redeems us. We are beautiful.

            May you put aside that fruit that compels you to believe otherwise.