Saturday, February 15, 2025
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Who told you?
God is looking for his people, children he created from dust not so long ago. He does not see them in their usual place. He calls out,
Where are you?
Adam answered, I heard you in the garden, but I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid.”
Adam spoke up, rather than  being silent as well as hiding. He knows what he did was against God’s rule, he knows his excuses are flimsy, he knows … that God will punish him? He has never been punished, never been held back from what he wanted to do. Never having experienced its opposite, Adam knows only his Father’s unconditional love.
But that love is neither simple nor silent. God cares more about his children than about their comfort. I imagine his next words loud and harsh.
Who told you that you were naked?
And then he spoke the words Adam could not speak.
You have eaten from the tree of which I had forbidden you to eat!
And rather than answer God’s question about nakedness, he answered something he did not ask. Who told you to eat that fruit?
Forty years ago in Waynesville, Illinois we heard Gilbert Hall preach an unforgettable sermon. A big black man staring down at us from the stage, he left the pulpit and stretched out his hands toward us and shouted, “Who told you?” Turning away from accusation, though, Gilbert looked at those who spoke lies to us as reprehensible, thoughtless killers. We are NOT ashamed, he said. We are NOT incompetent. We are NOT afraid, or failures, or worthless, or ugly, or lost. WHO TOLD YOU?!? You are NOT!
But God has something else in mind at the dawn of time. Neither Eve nor Adam had anyone (besides the serpent) challenge their confidence that God was their Father, their Maker, always on their side, that God could do nothing to shake the confidence they had in him. In spite of that Adam blamed Eve and Eve blamed the serpent. Passing the buck began that day in earnest. And it has never ended.
What would God do now? He spoke directly to all three involved in this betrayal, to the serpent, then the woman, and finally the man. BECAUSE YOU HAVE DONE THIS …
On your belly shall you crawl,
and dirt shall you eat
all the days of your life.
I will put enmity between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and hers.
Woman,
I will intensify the pangs of your childbearing;
in pain shall you bring forth children.
Yet your urge shall be for your husband,
and he shall be your master.
And then God pointed out that Adam had listened to Eve and forgotten or ignored what his Father had said.
Cursed be the ground because of you!
through painful toil you will eat food from it
   all the days of your life.
It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
   and you will eat the plants of the field.
By the sweat of your brow
You will eat your food
Until you return to the ground from which you were taken;
For you are dust, and to dust you will return.
And then after making clothing for them better than they could make for themselves to cover their nakedness, the Lord cast them out of the garden he had made for them, and they wept, shadows of what they had been. How the beautiful have fallen.
The man has now become one of us, knowing good and evil.
He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and also eat from the tree of life, and live forever.
Adam and Eve are our first, most ancient, primordial relatives, our father and our mother on this earth. They lived both before the Fall and after the Fall. I can imagine them thinking these thoughts, writing these lines, copied (so to speak) by Wendell Berry:
It is hard to have hope. It is harder as you grow old,
for hope must not depend on feeling good
and there is the dream of loneliness at absolute midnight.
You also have withdrawn belief in the present reality
of the future, which surely will surprise us,
and hope is harder when it cannot come by prediction
any more than by wishing. But stop dithering.
The young ask the old to hope. What will you tell them?
Tell them at least what you say to yourself. – A Poem on Hope
On a website called puritanboard.com, I found the following comment:
If they would have eaten from the tree of eternal life afterwards, they would have been eternally separated from God and lived in a physical eternal body. God, in his grace, prevented that and as we know, gave a promise, oddly enough, in the form of a Seed from Eve.
I think I should not be in a hurry to claim eternal life. This will be God’s gift to me, and to all of us, in the Kairos moment of our time. Just right. Not from my point of view, but from God’s. What else could I ask for? Mr. Berry continues …
Found your hope, then, on the ground under your feet.
Your hope of Heaven, let it rest on the ground
underfoot. Be it lighted by the light that falls
freely upon it after the darkness of the nights
and the darkness of our ignorance and madness.
Let it be lighted also by the light that is within you,
which is the light of imagination. By it you see
the likeness of people in other places to yourself
in your place. It lights invariably the need for care
toward other people, other creatures, in other places
as you would ask them for care toward your place and you.
Jesus told us clearly …
One does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes forth from the mouth of God.
(Genesis 3, Psalm 90, Matthew 4, Mark 8)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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