Defanging the Serpent: Returning to Original Harmony
A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Second Sunday After Pentecost by Holly Huff, Postulant for Holy Orders.
In the beginning, we read, humankind walked together with God in the garden. Genesis gives a theological account of how the world was called into being by the divine voice, each creature created by love for love; every tree and mountain and fish and bird and person set by God in a grand original harmony. It was very good. And Adam and Eve, who are images of each of us, walked with God in the cool of the evening. In the garden, God was not far away or abstracted, not some object of perfection out there or up there, to be attained, grasped after, strained for and never reached. No, in the beginning, we were made for unity, and God was close at hand.
Yet we live most of our lives far from that garden paradise. Reinhold Neibuhr once called original sin “the only empirically verifiable truth of Christian faith.” Look around, read the news from this past year, or any year, walk our streets, or just try to be kind to someone you love very much for more than five minutes, and it’s easy to see that we live a divided life, at a distance, from God and each other and the earth. Genesis gives us an account of how this division came to be, starting with the story of a snake. (And this story is true, by the way, true in the way that matters, because it shows us something about who we are and who God is.)
There once was a snake in the grass, and it was very smooth. It slithered unseen through the tall, tall grass and made hardly no noise, and when it spoke its voice was smooth, too, and very convincing. It sounded a bit like your voice, actually, very knowledgeable, and it claimed to know the truth about you. You are so weak, said the snake. You are naked before this world. Who will protect you?, the snake asked. Aren’t you afraid? You should be afraid, walking through the world like this, so exposed and dependent, so vulnerable. Hide!, said the snake, slithering off. But everywhere you went the snake went, too, plotting and planning and fuming, and as you walked through the garden it kept up a steady stream of commentary: reacting to each creature, each person, each fork in the path, spinning a smooth story of self-conscious fear and grasping ambition that was so convincing it became more real than the scents and sounds of the garden in the evening. Caught up in the dream, believing the snake, who seemed bigger now, you kept walking through the evening, but you didn’t see it or hear it anymore, you didn’t feel the breeze on your skin, and your absent mind and tightly protected heart split apart from your body and hid themselves, cast out of paradise to wander, divided. And, all the while, matching you stride for empty stride, God asks, “Where are you?”
The snake, the small, fragmented self, sees equality with God as something to be grasped, as a means to security. Seen through fearful eyes, God becomes an object, separate and outside, and we are lacking, insufficient, locked in enmity and never-ending drama, despising and disowning our weakness and dependence. We wish to be self-created, and so much of our capitalist society feeds and encourages this idolatry of the self, never mind who we have to subjugate in our pursuit of consuming happiness.
Yet at your depths you are still in the garden. You are a creature, yes, dependent, weak, and exposed before the world. The snake wasn’t wrong about that bit. And yet you can still give yourself to this world and find your life, united always to the Source of life. Adam & Eve try to hide from God, but there is no hiding from God. And that’s not a cause for fear: God is not watching the heavenly security cameras from above, waiting to drag us in for wrongdoing. No, there is no hiding from God because at the deepest reality we are not separate from God. The depth of our own being opens onto the vastness of God’s being, and so the kingdom of God has come near. God is always walking with us, calling us gently back to ourselves. Even when we hide ourselves away, when we wander distracted or get caught up in our smooth stories, playing hooky from our own lives, God, “to whom all hearts are open and from whom no secrets are hid,” knows us intimately and will not, cannot leave us.
Before we go looking for God, God is here already, present to us and within us, even before we’re aware of it. There is a place within the self that is whole and undivided, that has never been separate from God. “Out of the deep have I called to you, O Lord; Lord, hear my voice.” Below conscious thought, the depth of our being is continually calling out to God, because it is a piece of God, Christ within us, a ray of God’s own light, reflecting that goodness and already at union with it. “My soul waits for the Lord, more than watchmen for the morning, more than watchmen for the morning.” Laying down the serpentine stories and taking up our life with God is not some great and heroic task—human effort is generally the snake’s thing—but a release and a return to what is already most real. God is already with us, asking “Where did you go?” We only need come back to this moment.
So return to yourself and find your life. Release the running commentary you think of as your life, let that smooth story spun from silk fall through your hands and come back to the world. It is rough and it is real, and God is here. Come back to your body, to this room, its shadows and echoes. Feel your breath lifting your sternum, feel your feet in your shoes and your back against the pew. Perhaps through your mask you can smell the scent of this old building, dust and summer and something faintly lemon. God is here. God can be met in this moment, and God can be met everywhere, at any moment, as long as you are there, too!
Returning to our body in the present makes possible a new relation to the grasping voice of the serpent, driven as it is by the fearful desire to be separate and independent, powerful and right. We can notice the snake speaking as it does and simply hold that voice in loving awareness, without engaging the content of the drama it serves up.
It's not that we cast out or destroy that voice. The snake in Genesis, after all, is presumably among the creeping things God created and called Good. One of God’s creatures, made for the sport of it and fed by God’s hand. We don’t silence or shove away the running commentary of thoughts and feelings that arise in us every day like weather patterns. Repression won’t free us from a divided life! But our relation to these thoughts and feelings changes and we are no longer so run by them, driven, distracted, acting out of fear or trauma, now inflicted on others. Understanding that we are not that voice, already united with God, we return to the reality of walking through the garden. “Where are you?” we hear, and we come back to this place, in this time. Keeping watch over our thoughts as a witness defangs the serpent. The voice of the snake shifts from a feared enemy or desperate lieutenant to merely a rustle in the grass, one sound among the others at the time of the evening breeze.
Jesus came preaching the nearness of the kingdom of God. “The kingdom of God is within you.” God is close to you, closer than your own heart, and Jesus wants to make us whole, is making us whole. Paul says our inner nature, that place where we are joined with Christ, is being renewed day by day, as grace extends its reach, restoring us to the harmony meant for all creation. Day by day, dwelling with God in the ease of a summer evening, we become more at one, less divided against ourselves, and against each other. Remember, the first thing Adam and Eve do after listening to the snake is turn on each other. And so the kingdom of the heart that was under siege is set free, freed to love God and each other and the earth, truly seeing and being with and responding to each as they are, rather than fearfully reacting to our silky-smooth ideas about them. There is no need to hide. Jesus looks at those who sit around him and says, “Here are my brother and sister and mother!”—You are my family! He delights in us and draws us to himself, and grace extends further and further until we too are a place of extravagant, undefended welcome, meeting every person as our brother and sister and mother, beloved in the family of God that extends across all creation. And we find ourselves, walking in the garden once again, where we’ve always been.
In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.