Scripture Genesis 3:1-7
Now the serpent had more naked intelligence than any other animal of the field that the SOVEREIGN God had made. And it said to the woman, “Indeed, did God say, ‘You two shall not eat from any tree in the garden’?” The woman said to the serpent, “From the fruit of any tree in the garden we may eat, though of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden God said, ‘You two shall not eat and shall not touch it lest you two die.’ ” Then the serpent said to the woman, “You two will certainly not die, for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you two will be like God, knowing good and evil.” So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her man, who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.
Response Holy Wisdom, Holy Word.
Thanks be to God.
Sermon “In the Garden”
Our church has a strong affinity for gardens. In fact, we love them. Every summer, approximately once each week, we have a tour of our members’ gardens. Everyone is welcome, both to offer their garden for viewing, and to go and visit the gardens of others.
No two gardens are alike. Climate, soil, space, time, and imagination all contribute to the countless different kinds of beauty that exist in our members’ gardens, and in any garden. This week I opened an envelope to find tiny golden cornflower seeds, and my heart leapt a bit. This morning, we can gaze for a bit at an image of Monet’s garden in Giverny. Monet made more than 250 paintings of his garden in the last thirty years of his life, and no two of his paintings are alike. Monet’s design plan was simple: No bare earth; no dark-colored flowers; no single blossoms, only plants that produced double blossoms at least; and he adored blue flowers above all. His garden famously contained both irises and water lilies, as well as fragrant, pale pink peonies.
Today, we tell a story that takes place in a garden—scripture tells us, the first garden, created by the first artist. We don’t know what it looked like, but we’ve seen the work of this Artist in sunsets and nature in general, so we know it must have been breathtaking. We know it included fruit trees and all kinds of edible plants, as it was created for the humans. Undoubtedly there were flowers even more beautiful than Monet’s, if such a thing is possible. The of Eden has awakened in the imagination an idea of paradise on earth for as long as this story has been told. In the beginning, God placed humanity in paradise, asked them to care for it, and gave them one boundary—one rule, never to be broken.
A bit about the creation of the man and the woman. God creates the human from the dirt of the ground, humus, the richest soil, and breathes life into it. Notice, I’m not calling the human either he or she, because, despite the usual translation, the human isn’t yet differentiated into two sexes.
God gives the human instructions about the garden. The human is to till it and tend it but is forbidden to eat from the tree in the middle of the garden: the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. God does not forbid eating from the Tree of Life, which we learn later, will make God’s creations immortal.
Then, God causes a deep sleep to fall upon the human. Since the human is about to be divided in half, something like anesthesia seems like a good idea. Our translation tells us, God takes one side of the human and then closes the opening that is left. We are used to the noun “rib” being used here, but the Hebrew word is “side.” Elsewhere it’s used to refer to everything from the sides of the ark and the tabernacle in Exodus, to the sides of the Temple in 1 Kings and Ezekiel, and hillsides in 2 Samuel. Woman was not made from the rib of a man named Adam. Instead, the first human (in Hebrew the word for human is “adam”), who must have contained both female and male, was taken apart and differentiated into two humans, a man and a woman.
Now, for the unfortunate incident. There is a serpent, wily and shrewd. The serpent approaches the woman, not the man, and asks her a loaded question. “Indeed, did God say, ‘You two shall not eat from any tree in the garden’?” We can already see that the serpent is up to no good. Why? Because he’s asking a question that is meant to suggest that God’s boundary for the man and the woman is unreasonable. Why fill a garden with fruit trees if no one is allowed to eat them? The woman, for her part, responds with a more extreme version of the boundary than God’s actual statement. She reports, “of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden God said, ‘You two shall not eat and shall not touch it lest you two die.’” God said nothing about touching the tree, but the woman has responded to the serpent in kind. He exaggerates, and she exaggerates back.
Then the serpent replies that the couple will NOT die, but instead, will be godlike in their wisdom and knowledge of good and evil. I think we can assume a naivete on the part of the couple. I think they are much like children whose parents have protected them from the bad things in the news. They don’t know what they don’t know. But in scripture we find that wisdom is personified as a woman—a woman who, indeed, has all the characteristics of God. The serpent reaching out to the woman makes sense, and we know that because the reasoning of the serpent gets through to her:
So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her man, who was with her, and he ate.
~Gen. 3:6
Parents create boundaries, and children push back at those boundaries. Professor of Hebrew literature Valerie Bridgeman included the following story in her commentary on this passage:
Humans are prone to push boundaries. It starts early. When my younger son was two, I put the cookie jar up on the refrigerator, out of his reach, and explained to him that he could have a cookie after dinner. When I left the room to vacuum, he dragged a dining room chair to the counter, climbed up on the counter, and pulled the cookie jar between his chubby legs. I came back into the kitchen just as he was reaching into the jar for the cookie that I had delayed but not forbidden. I promised I would pop his hand if he got a cookie. He looked me in my eyes and never left my gaze as he got a cookie and ate it. He had determined in his two-year-old mind that the cookie was worth a pop on the hand. [1]
The first man and first woman decided that beautiful and delicious wisdom was worth a pop on the hand. Or, perhaps, even, death. But they did not die on that day, as God had threatened. God told them that life would be hard, now that they knew what was what. That work would be exhausting, that childbirth would be painful, and that the serpent would be hated.
All our lives we have all been taught that this is the story of the fall of humanity from God’s grace. From the time of Saint Paul, this story has been depicted as the first sin that was spiritually deadly to all of humanity who came after. But neither that word nor that concept is found anywhere in the story. Our Jewish and Islamic friends do not see this story as depicting a fall. Rather, they see it as the first sin, and a kind of coming-of-age story, in which the participants emerge wiser and smarter, though there is a great cost to them.
Another reason to question the idea of this as a “fall” is that we now have an idea of when and why this story was written. Most scholars believe it was written sometime in the tenth century B.C.E., during the reign of Solomon. At that time there was a troubling trend of God’s people worshiping the Canaanite gods and goddesses instead of the God of Israel. The goddess Asherah was depicted holding serpents; this story was a critique of the Canaanite fertility cult and its rituals.[2] It was designed to remind people of the goodness of their Creator, and the questionable practices of those symbolized by the serpent.
The story ends, not with God smiting the woman and the man, but rather, the end of life as we have all come to expect it:
“By the sweat of your brow
you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
and to dust you will return.”
~ Genesis 3:19
God makes clothing for Adam and Eve—by now we know their names—and dresses them, and sends them away, placing a guard of cherubim and a flaming sword outside the garden, to keep any of God’s creatures from finding their way to the Tree of Life.
What is the central treasure in this story? What is the treasure you will take with you? Is it the beautiful creation of the garden itself? Is it the life of innocence, which is lost by the woman and the man, after they disobey and defy the boundary set by God? Perhaps each character in the story has a different treasure. For the man, it may be the garden itself. For the serpent, it seems to be sowing chaos in the relationship between God and God’s creatures. For the woman, the treasure may be wisdom—something for which she was willing to face the consequences. For God? I can’t help feeling that the treasure was these two humans, who lived innocently and peaceably in the garden for some short period of time, and whom God dressed like a parent sending their child to preschool for the first time—with a strange mixture of sorrow and joy, and love.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
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[1] Valerie Bridgeman, First Sunday in Lent: Boundary Crossing, Genesis 2:15-27, 3:1-7, Working Preacher, February 22, 2026, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/first-sunday-in-lent/commentary-on-genesis-215-17-31-7-7.
[2] Alberto Soggin, “Old Testament and Oriental Studies,” in Biblica et Orientialia 29, (Rome, Biblical Institute, 1975), as found in “Human Fall,” The New World Encyclopedia. https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Human_Fall.