Have you eaten the apple yet?
Sermon at Holy Trinity Church, Llandudno & St Tudno’s Church, Great Orme; 22 September 2019
The churches of the Ministry Area of Llandudno are spending a year following the lectionary and themes of Brian McLaren’s We Make the Road by Walking. This sermon is the fourth of the first season, “Alive in the Story of Creation”.
Genesis 3:1–13; Psalm 32; Philippians 2:3–11; St John 13:1–11
+ In nomine
Have you eaten the apple yet?
I will be 40 next year, so I’ve already begun to prepare myself, mentally, for reaching this basecamp of middle age.
Some of the side-effects are already with me — I mean, the hair went a while ago — but I’ve begun to put on weight more easily, my eyebrows need trimming all of a sudden, I’m feeling I should be beginning to take things more slowly, drink less, go to bed a bit earlier.
To help me persuade myself that it’s not, to mix my metaphors, downhill from here, I read an article the other day about the ages at which we’re best at various things, the ages at which we’re at our peak. [I’m grateful to the Dean of Grace Cathedral for the reference.]
It turns out that it’s at age of 7 that we’re at our best for learning new languages. It’s at the age of 18 that our brains process information the best. At the age of 23 we are at our best for remembering new names. At the age of 25 we are at peak muscle strength, which I must say rather passed me by. Most Nobel Prizewinning discoveries happen to people when they are 38 or 39 — which leaves me with eight months left to discover how to turn water into wine. And all of that isn’t very comforting; but the list goes on. Most people’s salaries peak at the age of 48. We’re best at understanding other people’s emotions at the age of 51. It’s at the age 71 that most people have their best vocabulary, when they possess their richest language. And, apparently, it’s at the age 82 that we’re most likely to say that we’re happiest and most content.
Have you eaten the apple yet?
I suppose that one thing to take from that list is that life is never a single journey to a peak, and then a downhill trek — we’ll be comfortable with, we’ll be good at, different things at different times along the way.
But stay for a moment with that first statistic at the beginning of the list — it’s at age of 7 that we’re at our best for learning new languages. Instinctively, the reasons are obvious: at that age, if blessed with a happy home and the assurity of love, children are so open to the world and new experiences, so attentive and ready to mimic, able to absorb so much, happy to play with sounds, unafraid of making mistakes, so undefended, wanting communication and relationship. Hence, of course, Jesus’s saying that “the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.”
And then they grow up; and so quickly the boundaries harden; and, like you and me, the teenager is aware of themselves, and other people, and the world. That growing self-awareness, that growing self-consciousness, takes away that open-ness that makes it so easy for a 7-year old to learn a language; but that growing self-awareness, that growing self-consciousness is also a necessary, a natural, a healthy part of growing up and of understanding one’s place in the world. Emotionally healthy adults need a healthy understanding of themselves, and other people, and the world all around, and all the boundaries and bonds in between.
Have you eaten the apple yet?
This is the fourth week of our readings about being alive in the story of creation.
Our tremendous reading this morning from Genesis tells one of the most famous stories in the Bible. Traditionally we call it the ‘Fall’ — where, tempted by the serpent, Adam and Eve eat the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (– usually that forbidden fruit has been depicted as an apple, but the type of fruit isn’t mentioned in the text) — they eat the apple, against God’s command, and they’re literally exposed for their disobedience, and go on to be banished from the perfection of the Garden of Eden to a hard life of toil in the lands to the east, beyond the Garden’s walls.
Traditionally, we understand it to be a story about disobedience and its consequences. Yet, try as I might, I find it hard to read it as a story of sin and punishment. I find it much easier to hear it as a story about coming to terms with that growing self-awareness, that growing self-consciousness, that’s a part of growing up.
Before the serpent slithered along, all was good. There was no place in Eden for anxiety and doubt about the meaning of things, for Adam and Eve and God dwelt together, the sounds of God’s footsteps walking in the garden at the eve of the day so familiar to them, the assurance of his presence so profound and all-encompassing. There was no place for conflict and guilt in Eden, such was the one-ness of Adam and Eve with one another and with the whole of Creation. There was no place for fear of pain and death in Eden, for here was paradise and perfection.
Yet, you and I know what the authors of the book of Genesis knew — that our lives as children of God are not free from anxiety and doubt, and conflict and guilt, and pain and death. And while the heart of God is that paradise and perfection that the Garden represents, the stage that Genesis sets east of Eden, outside paradise and perfection, is the stage that belongs to us. Here, east of Eden, as the poet Edwin Muir wrote, the flowers are those of “grief and charity”; here, unlike Eden, where they weren’t necessary, we have need of “hope and faith and pity and love.”
We do not enjoy the easy company of a God whose footsteps we hear in the garden at the eve of the day; but we do exalt the God who stayed not in Eden, but came here to wash feet as a sign that “hope and faith and pity and love” are what we need, and are what ultimately triumph.
Have you eaten the apple yet?
It’s easy to want our faith to stay in Eden — to want, to expect God to take us back there — to remove our anxiety and doubt, to eliminate the world’s conflict and guilt, to wipe away pain and death. With Adam and Eve, we must eat the apple, and meet, east of Eden, the Christ who lives, and loves, and suffers as he saves.
