THE FAINT RECOLLECTION OF EDEN

September 7, 1986, 11:00 a.m. Worship Service
John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

"So God created man in his own image...male and female...’
--Genesis 1:27 (RSV)

Scripture
Genesis 1:24-31

There is an old New Yorker cartoon which shows Adam and Eve being
driven out of the Garden of Eden by an angel with a flaming sword. Adam is
say to Eve: "My dear, we live in an age of transition." [See The Essential
Reinhold Niebuhr, Ed. by Robert McAfee Brown, p. xix.]

Who you are can be defined, at least in part, in terms of where you
are from. To know yourself is to know and to affirm your roots. Alex
Haley taught us that.

Last Saturday a wonderful event happend, to illustrate that point
again, at Somerset Place, a large plantation in North Carolina. Dorathy
Redford, Portsmouth, Virginia, spent a decade of painstaking research to
discover the identities of all the original slaves at somerset Place. She
contacted the more than 2,000 descendants of those slaves and last Saturday

there was a family reunion at the place, the plantation. "They are," Mrs.
Reford said, “people who have never been home before." Time magazine
editoralized: "The day's highlights can only be the discoveries,
surprises, delights, touchings and twinges that are bound to occur among
people newly aware that they spring from a common past..." When the Time
reporter asked Mrs. Redford how she felt when she discovered the 1796 bill
of sale that actually verified the whole thing she responded: “With the

past opening up, you feel more complete, you feel whole...homecoming (is) a
healing." [Time, 9/1/86, p. 21]

Who you are is defined at least in part by where your home is.

Who you are as a human being is an important question. People who
think about us and study us are saying that there is no more important
question than the human one: that as we move into the brave and dangerous
new world of high technology and all that implies, our survival depends on
having some sense of who we are as human beings.

Who are you? The question can be answered scientifically in terms of
your component elements, your bodily parts and your genetic structure. It
can be answered politically, economically and artistically, sexually. How
you define yourself is, in fact, revealed by the way you relate to other
people, how you dress, how you make your ethical decisions.

The Judeo-Christian answer to the question "Who are you," begins with

where you are from, where your home is. You are first and foremost and
essentially a child of God. You belong to God. Your truest home is that
place the primal story calls Eden.

That is the point of one of the most remarkable passages of
scripture, largely mininterpreted and misunderstood, the opening section of
Genesis. The misguided but zealous attempt to make Genesis into a history
book, or worse yet, a science book, ends up missing its meaning and most of
its power.

The historians tell us that the story of creation was written down
during the Exile, when Israel was being held captive in Babylon. It was a
time when people were inclined to doubt that God even existed. The future
looked grim; the people of Israel in exile seemed like an insignificant
speck of dust in the wide desert of Babylonian and Assyrian and Feyptian
power politics. Genesis 1 is a bold proclamation to those people in
captivity about who they are and to whom they belong — where their home
really is - even while they are in Exile.

What Genesis said to them and to us is: You are a child of God,
created by God.

-you are being created for a purpose;
-you are the crowning achievement of creation.

~you are created in God's image; not in the way you appear, your
shortness or tallness, not your race or your gender, but the freedom
and responsibility that are yours alone in creation: in your
capacity for love and beauty and ecstacy you are a reflection of
God.

The story continues to define us in terms of our consistently missing
the mark. We do not live up to the image which is in us and are not free
and responsible. We do not live in our home, but East of Eden. And
finally - Genesis - anticipates the Gospel, in fact, begins to tell the
Good News with he wonderful assertion that the memory of Eden is always
with us: that our departure from the Garden is mixed with tenderness and
grace. For even as the man and the woman leave the Garden, the creator is
weaving clothes for them, seeing to their care, tenderly loving them. They
cannot live in the Garden, but the love of the creator, the continuing
relationship and the memory of Eden will always bless them.

It was a revolutionary word to people in captivity. It was radically
good news and it still is. Dr. Fred Craddock in a new book for preachers
urges us, eloquently, to ponder the people who listen to sermons:

“When God looked upon sky, sea and hills, Gad said, 'It is good.'
When God looked upon man and woman, God said, ‘This is like looking in a
mirror; these are my image...'"

Some of us have forgotten that about ourselves. Some of us never
knew it. But in all of us "there remains the faint recollection of Eden."

{Preaching, p. 88]

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That is what St. Augustine meant with those wonderful words: "Thou
hast made us restless until we find our rest in you." It's what Jesus
pointed to with description of God as Good Shepherd, woman looking for lost
coin, father running down road to meet child returning.

Our capacity for beauty, the gift for making beauty which some of us
have so magnificently, the capacity for nobility and unselfishness and
great love, come from that blessed memory of Eden within us. And yet we
live in transition, East of Eden. In the remarkable motion picture Stand
By Me, four 12 year old boys, at the end of the summer before their entry
to Junior High School, go on a wonderful two day adventure. Each lives
with ambiguity and unhappiness at home. One is abused, one lives with an
alcoholic father, one is demeaned by parents, one is ignored. The real
world is very real for them. But on their two day sojourn in an Eden-like
wilderness, they confront life and death, their own frailities and their
own wonderful capacity for learning and love and compassion. The story
which was written by popular novelist Stephen King, is a confessional
statement which speaks for all of us. We live in this world with a sense
that there is another, better, world always tantalizingly close by. We
live here and now but with a memory of something more, with a faint
recollection of the fact that human life is capable of great beauty and joy
and meaning.

We live on Michigan Avenue but with the memory of Eden in the back of
our minds. As a race we can come up with an Albert Schweitzer and an Adoif
Hitier in the same generation. We can build cathedrals and guided missels.
We spend our treasure testing nerve gas and artificial hearts. The recent
news replay of the downing of a Korean 747 by Russian fighter planes
paraded a technology so precise we can sit in our homes and listen to the
Russian pilot closing in at 35,000 feet, firing the missle, destroying the
target, agonizing, aware of the limitations of humanity, not knowing the
words to say or shout that will make him stop.

Who are we? Is the paradise of Eden a real memory or simply wishful
thinking? There are two positions essentially...the high view and the low
view. On the side of the high view - put the liberal vision of a humanity
becoming more civilized, more human, with each generation, growing to new
heights of compassion, justice, liberty and goodness. The high view has
inspired us to work for the improvement of the human condition, to build
houses and feed people and cure diseases. The high view is us at our best,
the Renaissance view, Michelangelo's David, Shakespeare's Adulation...

"What a piece of work is man.”

And the weakness of this view, inspiring as it is, is its myopia.
The same humanity expressed in Albert Schweitzer and Mother Theresa is
expressed far more modestly in most of us, and on occasion with great and
real evil. Something about humanity is also expressed with each incident
of ghastly terrorism.

Thus, the low view. Sigmund Freud said we are a product of deep,

subconscious, mostly unmentionable impulses, and although we learn to
behave appropriately most of the time, it is essentially a charade, a cover

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for who we really are. Karl Marx suggested that we are driven by an
economic determinism. Meanwhile the new biology is suggesting that we are
the product of a genetic code hidden in our DNA and B. F. Skinner up at
Harvard keeps insisting that freedom and will have nothing to do with it,
and of course, from the distance of 2,000 years St. Paul keeps clamoring to
be heard on the subject of sin and the war raging in his own members.

The Biblical view is that...we live in an age of transition. We
remember the Garden of Eden. We cannot seem to forget whose we are and
where home is. In terms of the ongoing debate between the high and the low
view of humanity, the Bible holds both views simultaneously. The Bible
holds out for the whole picture which includes the glory and the grime, the
sublimity and the folly, the holiness and beauty and the sin and ugliness.

The late Reinhold Niebuhr helped several generations of Christians to
understand the human condition in terms of a dialectic, a tension between
the high and the low view of humanity. He taught a generation of post
World War I idealists who thought that everything was going to get better
and better in every way, that bad things begin to happen when people feel
so good about themselves they cannot allow for evil. At the same time he
warned against the cynicism which results when people feel so negatively
about themselves that they do not aspire to anything higher than the lowest
behavioral common denominator.

Who are we? The Marxist answer is that we are cogs in a larger gear,
and that our purpose is to lose our identity for the sake of the state.
The Fascist answer is that we are part of the folk, the race which exists
to obey the leader. The culture in which we live abhores both of those
answers but sometimes seems to suggest that we are essentially consumers, a
market, with needs created by one segment of the system called advertising,
to be met by another segment called manufacturing.

The Christian word is that we are more than that. We are creatures
of God. We are, our oldest and wisest literature suggests, God's
masterpieces.

To be human, in the idiom of the Bible, is to know about our
significance and our insignificance. [It is to find a place on a warm and
clear summer night to lie down on the ground and look up into the sky,
which is what I have always imagined the Psalmist doing, 3,500 years ago,
when he wrote “O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is thy name...when I look at
the work of thy hand - the moon and stars." I imagine him with his back on
the ground, reminded of his humanity, his frailty by the pressure of his
weight pressing into the dirt and the annoyance of the arthritis that makes
lying like that on the hard ground not altogether comfortable, yet gazing
into the incredible blackness and starry extravagance and almost in spite
of himself asking in total wonder "who am I? In this incomprehensible
vastness, how is it that I am who [I am?"

Christianity wants us to know our humanity - and, at the same time,
to expect much of humanity - including our own. Christian religion invites
us to affirm the limitations; to know that we live outside Eden, that we
are going to stumble and fall and fail sometimes, and also to affirm the
potential, the possibility for greatness, the hope that is in us because of

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the image of God in us, the memory of Eden within us.

Nowhere is that word about us clearer than in the one we know as the
Word of God, Jesus the Christ.

Jesus told stories of a God who seeks people out precisely to remind
them of who they are...a God like a Gook Shepherd.

Jesus, we believe, is the promise that God does not write us-off when
we fail to measure up...the same promise, the same bold assertion in that
ancient account of the genesis of it all. Adam and Eve — all men and all
women live with the memory of Eden. The deepest truth of all is that in
Jesus Christ, God knows human sinfulness. God shows that human sinfulness,
human failure, is covered, forgiven, recreated by the love and power that
is at the heart of the whole creation. That is very good news if you are
in exile and it is very good news for us.

It is good news if you feel lost, lonely, exiled in a foreign land -
to know that you are not forgotten.

It is good news if you feel unimportant, insignificant - to know you
are a child of God - his crowning achievement.

It is good news if you feel guilty, cut off, alienated, to know that
your creator still loves and wants you to know where your true home is.

Who are we? We are part of God's creation: we are saints who fall,
sinners who are forgiven: men and women who live in the here and now but
who can't shake the memory of whose we are ~ the faint recollection of
Eden.

No wonder the Psalmist ended, as he began:
"O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is thy name in all the earth.'
Thanks be to God. Amen.

Lord God, we praise you for your creation: for the beauty and power
and resilience of all you have made. We know our. limitation. We know our
sin. We know your forgiveness. We praise you for the promise and
potential you have created in us: for your image which we bear secretly in
our hearts every day of our lives. Lord God, we would be faithful to that
image. Give us courage and strength and hope to exercise the dominion you
have given us, the responsibility which is ours, in lives that are pleasing
to you. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

ul

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