Our Scripture text today is a sandwich: two naked slices of bread surrounding some mystery meat.  The top slice is the verse preceding: And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed.  The bottom slice closes: Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.

How did we get from “naked and not ashamed” to “naked and ashamed” in just six verses?  What is the naked truth of our condition?

Do you have recurring dreams?  I’ll tell you mine—all of which involve nakedness.  Well, I’ll tell you some of them.  One is where I am running naked across campus in college, trying to find the classroom to take a final exam for a class I haven’t attended all semester.  Another is where I have been granted another year of eligibility, and I am to start at quarterback for the University of Miami again, but I am desperately wandering about in the locker room naked while the team is on the field waiting for me.  Things have changed so much in the years since I played there, I don’t know my way round.  Finally, I have been asked to preach at some big-shot gathering, and I am in the bathroom, unable to get myself dressed for action.  You can fill in the picture.  Or maybe not.

So there you have it: more than you wanted to know.  Any of you have dreams like those?  If you believe the noted psychiatrist Carl Jung, these are universal dreams, the details differing somewhat, but the essence is the same.  We process our anxiety in our sleep when our defenses are down and no one is listening, and even we can’t censor ourselves.

So what’s under the pillow of these dreams?  How do we account for this anxiety, this vulnerability, this feeling that we are lacking something essential at our very core?  Is it the result of sin?  Well, yes and no.  We should follow the story in Genesis carefully to see.

The story gets slimy when underfoot a talking serpent slithers up to the woman.  We don’t know why it should be a serpent.  There’s ancient mythology that links serpents to evil, but there’s no hint of that here, and no sign of the devil.  There are also ancient links to the serpent and sexuality, but there’s no hint of that here, and no sign of Britney Spears.    Maybe the serpent is chosen because of the natural fear humans have of them, which this story faintly explains.  Who knows?  The main thing is to see that we don’t see.  We want our eyes opened to see where evil comes from, but the story doesn’t give it to us.  It maddeningly just keeps an eye on us.

There’s a word play in the Hebrew, though, that links the character of the serpent and the feeling of vulnerability we feel.  The word for “more crafty” is harum, and the word for “naked” is harummim.  So the point seems to be that human beings are, by their very created nature, exposed to crafty elements in the world that could tempt us away from a life of simple trust in God.

Our essential nature—even in the Garden of Eden—involves a naked truth: like it or not, we are vulnerable, fragile, susceptible.  We come to feel the shame of it only after we sin.  But God has set us in an in-between position: we are not God, we are like God; we are not animals, we are like animals.  As long as we live within that tension—trusting God and caring for other creatures—we enjoy the life of the Garden.  As long as we are satisfied to receive life as a gift from God, we are happy.  But the tension is never resolved.

So listen to the serpentine conversation.  The snake: Did God say, “You shall not eat of any tree in the garden?”  See what he does?  Maybe he knows, maybe he doesn’t.  But he stretches the prohibition to cover the whole garden.  Blows things way out of proportion.  Makes the woman begin to think about the garden as a prison instead of a paradise.  He gets her to think of her life as one big denial, one major restriction, one grand forbidden zone.

And isn’t this the way it happens with us?  You get married and wake up one day thinking that every woman in the world is now off limits to you.  (Women never do this, of course, so I refer just to men.)  You figure God has designed marriage as a means of blanketing you in misery by denying you your natural desire for women.  Never mind that God has given you a woman, one just for you, one with whom you can feel bone of bone and flesh of flesh with.  All you start to think about is how deprived you are.  Poor thing.

Or you look at other girls in school and believe they are all smarter, sharper, and skinnier than you.  All of them.  You somehow got the leftovers at creation.  Something went wrong in the divine laboratory, and you came out accidentally, a mistake foisted upon the world, lacking all the assets of every other high school girl.  Never mind you are unique in all creation, a unicorn as yet unseen by human eyes, possessing secret qualities that God intends to use to bless the world with.  You feel shortchanged.  Poor thing.

The poor woman answers the serpent.  (And if you are wondering where the man is – no, he’s not off deer hunting that weekend; he’s right there beside her.  He’s just like most men in these situations; he likes to watch, quietly.)  Anyway, the woman answers, We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; but God said, “You shall not eat of the fruit of tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.” 

Now the woman gets it mostly right, though we should note the command was given to the man before she came on the scene, so she has probably gotten her information from him— which is probably part of the problem.  If I am any indication, men are lousy at giving messages, or at least getting the details straight.  See, she adds this little thing about not even being able to touch the fruit, which was not part of the original command.  So we wonder how it got in there. 

Maybe Adam had built a little fence around the tree before he had his little female surgery.  Maybe he was like the Pharisees that thought you ought to build a hedge around the law in order that you not even come close to breaking it.  Maybe he told her not to touch it lest she die the way my parents told me as a kid not to touch the porcelain lamp in the living room, lest I die.  Of course, it was my parents’ fault they gave me a rubber mallet for Christmas at age three.  I found out that porcelain can’t take a blow.  I found out that my backside can’t take a blow, don’t you know?!

On the other hand, maybe the woman was doing the same thing the serpent was doing, just more craftily still.  She was being faithful to God, but resenting it just enough to shade the truth.  We can’t even touch that fruit.  She nurtures in her mind a sense of injustice that God would so limit and deprive them of something.  Which opens her to the tempter’s comeback, just the way it does us.

You have a good job and work to do, but you really wish you could also do that one other thing that would surely make you really fulfilled as a human being.  If only you could be in charge of that project or lead that group or get control of … whatever.  Get it?  The envy is subtle but real.  You live with a sense of being thwarted.  You nurture a small if only and it grows into a great well, why not?

So the serpent moves in for the kill with his bad theology.  You’ve got to wonder why we humans are so inclined to listen to the wisdom of creatures who don’t know as much as we.  It’s like cheating off the paper of a D student, or asking a prisoner about honesty, or a prostitute about chastity, or the Taliban about how to treat women.  The serpent says, You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.

So it’s God’s fault.  God doesn’t want us to grow up, the same way kids think their parents don’t want them to grow up.  Parents know how much fun it is being adults, having all that freedom to do whatever you want whenever you want, with nobody to tell you no.  Parents don’t want to share that freedom, don’t want the kids to see it for themselves.  That’s what they think parents are thinking.  But it looks mighty different from up here, doesn’t it, parents?  Here’s the naked truth: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS AUTONOMY—living without boundaries, answering to no one, having complete freedom to do as you want.  And listen, some of you already think I am a liberal—well, listen to this and you’ll know you are right: even God doesn’t have that kind of freedom.  Even God cannot do everything.  God’s freedom is limited by God’s nature, which is love.  God will always and only act toward us in keeping with God’s determination to love us.

We, on the other hand, like the woman, start thinking that maybe we can’t trust God.  Maybe God is as insecure as we and doesn’t want to share.  Or, maybe God is daring us to become all we can be.  Maybe this is a test to see whether we’ve got it in us to be like God.  But here’s the odd thing: we are already created in the likeness of God.  God has seen to that.  What we really want is to replace God —to do without God, to live with our own resources and not to have to depend even on God.

So the woman starts looking at the fruit, and watch the progression.  [Pick up apple.]  Good for food—a practical purpose; nothing wrong with that.  Pleasing to the eye— aesthetically attractive; also good.  Desirable to make one wise—ah, there it is, the clincher.  She rationalizes that what is prohibited by God is actually good for you.  [Take a bite of apple.]  And don’t we all think we know better?

Somewhere in Afghanistan today there are probably special operations forces on the ground.  Rangers, Green Berets, Delta Force, SEALs.   Each team has a mission and some very definite rules of engagement.  These rules have been made by those in command who rely on higher intelligence that comes from agents on the ground and surveillance from the sky.  They have a bigger picture than those on the ground.  Each team member has a role to play.  But if one ground operative decides to go by his gut against his orders, to see things for himself, he breaks faith with his whole team and country, jeopardizing not just himself but everyone else.  Once he does, his eyes may be opened, but only so that he can see how blind he was.

The woman and the man eat of the fruit.  We eat of it, all of us.  And immediately we find our eyes wide … shut.  We spend the rest of our lives trying to cover up the nakedness we see behind our eyelids.  Will we ever learn just to trust and obey?