Lenten Meditation: The Fig Leaf
Scripture: Genesis 3:7
March 9, 2005 (Wednesday Evening)
For Lenten Taize Series
By Kendall Brown Kendall's Notebook Page 43
I am all excited, because tonight I am about to do something that I have never done before. Our creation theme provides opportunity to meditate this evening on Genesis 3:7. You all remember Genesis 3:7? It’s the verse about the fig leaf, and this is a first for me. I have never before preached sermon starting with this verse.
(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.”)
We could divide all time into two segments – BF and AF – before the fig leaf and after the fig leaf. Staying in step with our creation theme, we can think of BF as a time of oneness, unity and wholeness. There is that lovely expression in Verse 3:8 (God walked in the garden in the cool of the day.) – the evening – offering the poet’s picture of the BF oneness of creation, creator and creature in Eden. The Latin root for the word, “human,” speaks of that oneness each time we use the word. The root for human is “humus” which is Latin for earth.
Another word study, which I learned from John Sanford, a Jungian counselor and teacher, brings us into this oneness of Eden. The Greek root for the word therapy is therapuo. Sanford taught that that word had three meanings to the ancient Greeks. First, it meant to heal, as it does for us. Second, it could mean to be with god (oneness). Third, it meant to tend the garden. Healing, wholeness, oneness, and an image of garden - the creation, all wrapped up in one word.
The fig leaf symbolizes the brokenness of the original oneness of the creature, creator and creation. I am trying very hard tonight to use language that keeps the creation in the picture by using words like, oneness, harmony, healing, wholeness and brokenness. If you have heard a sermon before on the fig leaf, you probably heard the language of the fall and sin. But I think the creation story and all of its parts are bigger than that. The traditional language has a way of making the story all about humans and God; should the creation itself be included in the story, it is only there as a footnote, or is present merely as the stage for the real story, the story of Adam’s (humans’) fall. I want to keep the humus, the earth, the creation, in the picture tonight because we are a part of the creation and the creation is a part of us. Forgetting that oneness is adding more broken to our brokenness. Forgetting our oneness with the creation is what the fig leaf is all about.
Scientists and science call us to the essentialness of our creaturely oneness. I will speak of this call with a story. My college friend, Bruce, spent his senior year studying shrimp. Every Saturday, he would go down to the shore and pick up several buckets of shrimp from the local fishermen, bring them back to the biology lab, and then counted them while they died. We all thought this was just a wonderful way for Bruce to spend his senior year. We would remind Bruce of things like how good it was that he was already engaged to Chris before his senior year, because if the rest of us smelled as bad as he did, we didn’t stand a chance with any woman anywhere. But there was a little more to it than all that. These shrimp were special shrimp. They were being drawn from the waters off the discharge pipes from the cooling system of the Maine Yankee Atomic Power plant in Wiscasset. Other studies by other professors and students were showing that the ocean water was being warmed by the discharge water. All the studies together were showing how that warming was having an adverse affect on the life-cycles of local species of marine life.
The data gave hard evidence to what folk who live on the coast knew all along. In spite of the strength, majesty and power seen daily in the ocean’s swell and waves crashing against the shore, the inter-tidal and continental shelf biospheres contain a fragile, delicate intertwining of life in thousands of forms that can be disrupted, damaged and completely destroyed by as much as raising the water’s temperature one degree.
In a traditional Lenten series centered on creation, (and I try to be anything but traditional ), the fig leaf is all about Adam’s fall, his sin, and our forgiveness. For all too many Christians, the primary definition of Adam’s sin is in the language of sexual behavior and morality.
J.B.Philips, a conservative Biblical translator and writer, would say, “Your God is too small.” - with one different word, “Your sin is too small.” The essence of Eden, what was broken, what was lost, in that moment when the fig leaves were sewn together was not sexual purity. What was lost in the Fall was the oneness, the harmony, the unity of the Creator with the Creation and all the Creatures, including humans (humus – earth beings).
Scientist, like my dead scrimp counting friend, remind us of our own participation in the devilish work of destroying creation’s oneness. Most religions of the world strive in some way to find the wholeness, the oneness, we hope is there in the experience of the creation’s brokenness. In that spiritual longing for oneness, we are tempted to set up for ourselves and then worship false god’s of oneness. An example is when we worship at the altar of sameness. Eden’s unity and sameness are not equivalent. Yet we desire sameness. We want others around us to be just like us. We are uncomfortable around anyone who is different.
It is impossible for me to take a walk in the woods, take a stroll through a garden, or a mountain hike, or a barefoot splash in the surf and think that sameness has anything to do with the Creation or the Creator. Creation’s beauty is in its diversity. Jesus was well aware of this as he called as guests to his table all sorts of folk, most of whom the sameness people, and there are plenty of them, wouldn’t have anything to do with.
The fig leaf symbol has another dimension of meaning.
The fig leaf is all about hiding something, and in that hiding, denying even the existence of what is being hidden. Our pathetic denial of our human, creaturely sexuality is a subject for another whole Lenten series. But I have to at least mention it here. It is so obvious. But again, if we got stuck on the sexual angle, our sin is too small. Denial itself contributes to the destruction of creation’s oneness.
Ever since living in Evansville, I have had eye problems that I never had before. I awake almost every morning with sore, itchy, red, bloodshot, gunky eyes that have added to my daily routine an eye care ritual to get me through the day. On three occasions during the past year, I have been to the doctors with
eye infections that have required antibiotics. When I speak of these things, people say, “We are in one of the worst places on earth for allergies.” Allergies – my foot, or perhaps I should say, “My eyes!” People, I have got news for you. There are allergy-causing conditions in the rest of the world too. Even in the cold air of the coast, there are microbes in the mist of the morning fog that are troublesome to some people. I lived in St. Louis, which has basically the same river valley flora as you have here. My eyes were fine as they have been my entire pre-Evansville life.
It is not allergies we are talking about. It is pollution.
Pollution is man made and because it is man made it could be man unmade. Calling pollution ‘allergies’ has a little something to do with fig leaves.
I am certain there is a connection somewhere between my itching, flaking eyes and the high rate of cancer in this same place. God calls us to the wholeness of the creation and to forsake our sinful ways. BF, before the fig leaf, God was busy naming things and then made Adam, named him and gave him partnership in the naming business. Wearing fig leaves is to deny, to hide, to not name what is wrong and disturbing, even destroying the fragile interlacing of creation’s order. I am not proposing a political action. There are others who can do that much better than I. The theological issue, the sin is no action, not even to name the brokenness in which we participate and from which we suffer.
The movement in tonight’s worship and prayer is from brokenness to wholeness, from denial to taking responsibility, from spiritual infantilism to ethical maturity. Shalom. And may peace be with you. And may the creation’s brokenness and oneness be before you and move you to have no need to hide behind a fig leaf.