“Dancing With the Snake”

A sermon based upon Genesis 3: 1-13

Dr. Charles J. Tomlin

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership

Disciple Series/ Sermon 3 of 14:  September 2, 2012.

Randal Berry is a Baptist and a herpetologist at the Little Rock Zoo.  He likes snakes and Baptists.  (I’m not sure which one scares me most). His pastor once asked Randal when he discovered snakes as his “divine” calling.  He said that when he was a boy, his dad would take him to the Golf Course.  His Dad would play golf and Randal, who never took up the game, would hunt for snakes. He would actually go looking for them.  Choosing snakes over golf?  Can you imagine that?  (From Randy Hyde,http://www.lectionary.org/Sermons/Hyde/OT/Num%2021.04-9,%20LeavingSnake.htm ). 

According to recent polls, 40% of people list snakes as their greatest fear.  Interestingly, at phobialist.com, the fear of snakes (herpetophobia) comes between the fear of deviating true teaching (heresyphobia) and the fear of the opposite sex (heterophobia).  All three of these come to play in this story.  But what comes most to play that snakes are dangerous, but they are not our greatest problem.   That same 40 percent who have a great  fear snakes probably don’t think a thing about getting behind the wheel of a car, speeding down the highway, with all kinds of other people speeding in the opposite direction, some of them even texting as they drive.  Now that something to fear!  Snakes are not that bad, unless you come up on one unexpectedly.

The other day there was a black snake on the wall near the door on the carport at my home.  Upon seeing the snake, I wanted to go get my dog and teach her how to take care of a snake, especially since she already had suffered a copperhead bite. So I fetched the dog to kill the snake.  I got the dog’s attention to see the snake still hanging on the wall.  Then I took a hoe and knocked the snake on the floor.  Sic’ em!.  My dog Zari did just what I said.  But what I didn’t expect was that when she grabbed the snake and shook him, he landed still intact and very angry right under my feet. By this time I had invented a new dance, but fortunately, the hoe stopped the music before anyone else saw me dancing with a snake.

Have you ever danced with a snake?   We all have our snake stories, don’t we?  How many of them are filled with sweetness and give us a warm, fuzzy feelings? That’s what I thought.  It’s impossible for a cold-blooded reptile to warm our hearts.

Today’s message involves humans “dancing with a snake”.  But it’s not just any snake, but it’s “the snake,” which the book of Revelation calls, “The old serpent himself…the devil, Satan…who deceives the whole world.” (12:9). But Genesis 3 begins with a very simple different kind of description of this snake as “the most intelligent of all the wild animals that the LORD God had made (Gen 3:1 CEB).  Why did God make a beautiful garden for humans, which included a very smart “snake”?  And why is the very first dialogical story (extended narrative) in the Bible also so very diabolical (a story about temptation, sin, and evil).  This does make you wonder, doesn’t it?  But we must keep in mind that this story is not about explaining snakes, nor about explaining the how things once were in the garden, but it’s about how things are now, and how sin and evil can get into any and all of us. 

What we need to understand first of all, is that this is no ordinary story and it is no ordinary snake.  This snake is not slithery, but he’s smart. He’s not scaly, but he’s good looking.  He can even ‘walk with you and talk with you’ in the garden and tell you “you are his” just like Jesus can. He’s not crawling around on his belly, nor climbing up the walls, but he’s wandering around looking for any Adam or Eve while all dressed up in a tie and a three-piece suit.  Wouldn’t you like to meet this kind of snake?  He’s very charming, you know.  Haven’t you’ve already met him?  Let me explain.

SIN AS HUMAN COMPLACENCY

This story is a story of human sin.  The Bible does not open with a definition of sin, but it brilliantly shows us.  It shows us what sin is and what sin does to humans and to God’s world.  But remember again, this is not simply a story about “original” sin which has happened, but it’s a story about “ongoing” sin, that is still happening every day in human life and the world.  

Someone once ask the late Carlyle Marney, where did Adam live, and where was the Garden of Eden.  Dr. Marney answered the question with his own address, 214 Elm Street, Knoxville, Tennessee. 

    “You’re lying,” the person responded.  “It’s supposed to be somewhere in Asia.”

    “Well, you couldn’t prove that by me.” Marney quipped.  “For there, on Elm Street, when I was but a boy, I stole a quarter out of my Mama’s purse and went down to the store and bought me some candy and I ate it and then I was so ashamed that I came back and hid in the closet.  It was there that my mama found me and asked, “Where are you?”  “Why are you hiding?  What have you done?”

What is sin?  Many would only define sin as doing something wrong, but the Bible would rather define it as falling to do something right.  Harvey Cox called it “leaving it to the snake”.  I’m calling it dancing with the snake.  Sin is much more than a transgression, a crime, or an intentional “crossing the line,” but it also “falling short of God’s glory” (Rom. 3.23).  Sin is “missing the mark.  Sin is not simply shaking your fist in God’s face (we don’t see Eve or Adam doing this at all), but at the very heart of this story and in the Bible’s whole story, the human person’s stubborn refusal to be less than we could or to fail to do what we know we should.   As it was in this ancient story, and still is today, sin is to leave the outcome for your life and the way things are to the snake, to your lower instincts, and to your unrestrained desires, instead of following the clear, higher, command of God.  It is to become God of your own life—without any regard for the true God.  To counter the late comedian, Flip Wilson, the devil doesn’t make you do it, but the devil is sure glad you did it.  When you come to realize what you have done, or perhaps more importantly, what you haven’t done, you will not be so glad.  You will wonder why things aren’t the way they should be.  Now, that’s sin.

Mistrust of the divine goodness.  There are, of course, many angles on formulating a biblical definition of sin, but in this original story (which is not so original), sin begins not with a deed, but with doubt and with mistrust.  The snake sneaks and slithers up to Eve, saying, “Did God really say you shouldn’t eat from any tree in the garden. (3.1, CEB).”  You can see what’s up the snake’s sleeve.   He wants to create a feeling of mistrust between Eve, Adam and the Lord God.  Here’s where all sin still begins.  It does not begin in simple wrong doing, but sin begins when people haven’t learned to trust, or can’t trust or don’t want to trust.  And the most important level of “trust” is learning to trust the greatness and goodness of God from childhood into adulthood.  “God is good, God is great….let us thank him for our food.”  This lack of trust which goes “against God” and “against the most basic trust” is the baseline where all transgression starts. This mistrust is more than a simple form doubt which wants to discover the truth, but it is the kind of doubt that will not settle for the truth that comes from loving and being loved by God.  Sin always begins as sin against God, but it doesn’t stop there.

Misuse of human freedom. The lack of trust in God’s relational truth leads humans to misuse their God-given and god-like freedom.  Genesis already told us that humans are created in the image of God, which means we are already god-like and have already been given the knowledge, skill, and command to care and to make good choices to do God’s will and work in the world.  But human sin comes into the picture when humans misuse that “freedom” and we demand more---to be “god” on our own terms.  This can be a misuse of freedom and power (to do wrong), but it can also be “no use of power” (failure to do anything).  When we leave our lives to the snake---our lowest instincts; when we only do on we want or wish in the moment, rather than make decisions based on what God commands and we follow only our desires, forgetting God’s dream for the world.  This is how we fall short of what we can be and what life could be.  We are free to “care”, but we are not free, “not to care”.  This is what Eve and Adam did.  They didn’t care what misusing their freedom would do.  This is the greatest misuse of human freedom, which has been and still is being inspired by the snake. When people don’t care, they are bitten.

     

Misdeed of deliberate disobedience   The third picture showing us what sin is, is the deed or act of sin itself.  The story says that “Eve ate, and then and gave to her husband, and he also ate.”  Both are responsible and both are participants in sin.  Eve listened to the snake, and Adam listened to Eve. Both of them gave into the snake.  Both of them choose to disobey God.  Adam will blame Eve, and Eve will blame the snake, but God holds them accountable for this misdeed which is nothing less than deliberate disobedience to God’s command.  They are without excuse, just as are.  In the matter of sin, we choose to become partners with the snake rather than partners with God.

 

SIN AS A HUMAN CONDITION

This new situation wreaks all kinds havoc in their relationship with God and with each other.  Years ago a popular song by Joe South, a song too religious and honest for today, named the human sin situation rather poetically, as “The Games People Play”.  It begins:

“Oh, the games people play, every night and every day now,

never saying what they mean now, and never meaning what they say. 

While they wile away the hours, in their ivory towers, ‘til they’re covered up with flowers,

in the back of a black limousine….”

What are these “games people play”, have played, and will continue to play, which go all the way back to Genesis Three and even before: they are the Shame game, the Hiding game, and the Blame game.  You or I could be “playing one of these games right now”? 

Adam and Eve played “the shame game”, for after they realize what they had done, they felt “naked”, exposed, and ashamed.  This is something they did not feel before.  We too discover feelings and emotions of “guilt” and “shame” when we sin.   This could be a safe guard built into the human soul to call us back to obedience, but too often people cover their shame, deny it, or try to get rid of it by covering it up, pretending that  it isn’t real, or God isn’t real, and saying to themselves that everything is quite alright, even when everyone else around them knows that it isn’t.  It’s like a person on drugs who is into major denial of what is really happening to them and in their relationships, having no regrets or shame, or admitting to such feelings, but everyone else clearly sees what going on.

In regard to “shame” and “nakedness”, I’m reminded how many Europeans deal with nudity and it’s a vivid and biblical illustration.  Before the fall into sin, humans were “naked, but not ashamed.”  After the fall, they are still naked, but now very ashamed.  I grew up in a culture that practiced modesty and realized the “shame” of nakedness, but when I went to Europe, I experience a culture that had much less shame.  I recall a debate in a German newspaper, between a East German and West German, right after reunification, with the “Ossie”, the East German complaining to the “wessie”, the West German, that the West German would only go topless swimming and the East German would go swimming completely nude.  “What are hiding, or covering up, the East German complained. Are you ashamed or hiding something?  Come on “take it all off”.  As I read that conversation, my only thought was have you Europeans no shame?  I could tell you some stranger stories, but what I’m illustrating is clear is that sin brings shame, whether we cover it up or not. 

Another “game” Adam and Eve played, which humans play in regard to sin is the “hiding game”.  You all know how that goes.  Instead of facing the truth of the matter, people like to hide, cover-up, deny, or refuse to face facts.  But when we “hit and run”, somebody always gets hurt.  Instead of taking the pain of self-knowledge onto ourselves, we pretend that truth can’t find or we won’t get hurt.  This is exactly what Adam and Eve were doing, hiding, or they thought they were hiding until they heard the voice saying, “Adam, Where are you?”   The voice can always find us, so why do we hide?  New Testament Scripture answers that question:  “ …people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God." (Joh 3:19-21 NRS) 

   

The final game Eden “saw play” was the “blame game”.   When God confronts Adam with his sin, Adam blames the woman, and the woman blames the snake.   No one accepts responsibility, but everybody else is to blame.  Blame gets them and us nowhere.   You know how the second verse of Joe South’s song goes: 

Oh we make one another cry, Break a heart then we say goodbye, Cross our hearts and we hope to die That  the other was to blame/ Neither one will give in So we gaze at our eight by ten

 Thinking 'bout the things that might have been It's a dirty rotten shame.”  

Joe South understands it perfectly. Only accepting responsibility will give humans the chance they need to work through their shame, their hiding and the blame game.

We all saw a good example of the blame game the other day, when an Oklahoma high school valedictorian said a four-letter word during her graduation speech.  The school principal blames her for speaking the inappropriate and ‘discouraging word’ and she blames the principal for not respecting her right to “free speech”.  What that young girl and her Father, who went on national TV to defend her words, don’t seem to realize is that free speech may be an American ideal, but it is not in any way an earthly reality.  When you speak to other you are in dialogue together with them, not just asserting yourself.   You both will carry what you say, together, forever.  Speech must be negotiated, just like life must be negotiated.  When we hurt and offend others, even if we have that right to say or do so, it’s always best to stop the “blame game” and say “I’m sorry.”  You don’t hear people doing that much lately.  Many would rather be content at playing the “shame” or the “blame game.”  That is what sin does to us, and if it continues---if we continue shaming, blaming, running and hiding, one must contemplate what it will mean for us all---what will our condition of life become.  Right now, the death toll is Syria and just one example of what could happen if the only game in town is “blame”.  There are some homes and churches around us, maybe even closer than we want to admit, that have become battlegrounds of blame and shame.  God forbid.

SIN BRINGS A CONSEQUENCE
For Adam and for us, there are consequences to our actions.  In the Genesis story, the world that was filled with so much blessing and good---becomes quickly contaminated with curses---the snake must crawl on his belly, the woman must struggle in childbirth and serve her husband; and the man must work with blood, sweat, and tears.  However you interpret this story, ancient people knew what we still need not forget: through human sin, the blessing of life quickly becomes the curse of life. 

In a new book on Sin, Professor Gary Anderson reminds us all that sin can have many consequences in our world and in our lives.  Like Lady McBeth, it can be a “stain” we can’t wash off.  Like in the early parts of the Hebrew Bible, sin can be understood as a “burden we bear” which lingers long after the deed and needs to be released and carried away from us.  This is how the “scapegoat” became one answer for Israel’s sin.  But the most dominate metaphor for sin in the Bible is sin as a “debt” that must be confronted, confessed and compensated.  We still use such language when we say that “Jesus died for (to pay for) our sins” or when we say simply, “somebody’s got to pay.” 

In the Genesis story, as in our story, the greatest consequence of sin is always the “costs” it brings to life and to living.  Adam not only had to pay for his sin with the loss of paradise, but the cost was also paid in the feelings of “contempt” or the situation of ‘alienation’ or ‘disconnect’ in human and divine relations.   Interestingly, when sin costs, not doesn’t just “cost” Adam, but we all somehow must pay the price.   Think about how the last few lines of Joe South’s song go.  They are still quite revealing then as now, for sinners in the church, as well as, outside: 

“People walking up to you, Singing glory hallelulia  And they're tryin to sock it to you, In the name of the Lord….”  Then his final verse is very pessimistic: “Look around tell me what you see,  What's happening to you and me, God grant me the serenity, To remember who I am. /  Cause you've given up your sanity, For your pride and your vanity  Turns you sad on humanity And you don't give a da da da da da….

Speaking of giving up sanity for “pride and vanity”, did you see the spot on last Monday’s Today show, where they interviewed a lady who was doing the opposite: She was giving up her vanity for the sake of her sanity.  Due to the pressures to become obsessed with their looks, this woman took action and she covered up her mirror.  She went on a “mirror diet” for a month.  Instead of looking at herself and trying to always look good on the outside, she took time to stop looking on the outside and start reflecting more about who she was on the inside.  I guess you could say she stopped her “vanity for the sake of her own humanity.”   She came to realize what it was costing her.  She was ready to do something drastic. (http://thelook.today.com/_news/2012/08/27/13461383-mirror-mirror-woman-reflects-on-month-of-not-looking-at-herself?lite).

We might wonder what Adam and Eve felt after the fact of their sin.  However, the writer of Genesis does not give us that insight.  The writer of Genesis moves quickly from what happen to Adam to show us what God did in immediate response to Adam’s sin.  God is the one who makes the move to “cover” their nakedness and to take radical steps to “guard” the tree life, which, as they text tells us, could not “take from the tree and live forever” (v 22).  What God does, and what the whole story of Genesis and the Bible is about, is how God interrupts and intervenes in the human situation to bring redemption, to offer grace, and to restore hope.   Beside the consequences of punishment which cost Adam paradise, God also offers grace.   God does not bring “instant” death to humans, but death is delayed, and life is not allowed to go on indefinitely, so that Adam lives forever in sin.  Amazingly, with God, if Adam will come to trust him again, even death is transformed into a work of grace.

We all know that sin has consequences.  But how much do we know about God’s work to pay and “cover” the cost of sin and to both redeem and renew our lives with hope?  I’d dare say we don’t know near enough and we need to know much, much more.  These days, humans know too much about how the world is: hate, division, competition, war and destructiveness---we know the bad news better than ever before.  But how much do we want to know about how our lives can be restored, can be redeemed and how our “debts” can be lifted, lightened, and even removed.   Who wants to know more about that?  One thing for sure, Adam didn’t protest when God “dressed” him in his ‘new’ clothes.  And who wouldn’t want to try grace on for size?  Amen.