Have you ever had a summer vacation that was so good that before you leave to go home you say, “I want to go back there next summer?” That’s what we are doing. Before we finished the sermon series last summer, some of you said to me, “Let’s go back.” So, we’re back, a second sermon series titled Beach Reads.  Last summer we spent three weeks talking about Bible beach reads. Beach reads are those blockbuster novels that you read on vacation. Every year, there is a growing list of best books which you find online or in newspapers. Even my alumni magazine got into the craze of promoting summer reads for the beach.   Some publishers even hold books, releasing them at the beginning of summer, hoping to entice you into buying their sizzlers.

Last year’s Bible beach reads were actually on the beach, or as close as I could get to finding a story with water and sand in scripture. We read about Moses parting the Red Sea, Jesus walking on water and Paul’s shipwreck. Each of those stories had the important characteristics of a really good beach read. They are larger than life and require that you suspend reality. Things happen that just don’t ordinarily happen. But you are willing to allow them to happen because you want to discover the truth that is within the story.  You don’t get caught up in “How that happened?” 

In this year’s sermon series, we’ll look at four Bible beach reads and these stories require the same commitment to the read. You have to be willing to suspend your world view and just enjoy the story, letting the truth of it be revealed.  If you get caught up in how or where or when, you’ll miss the why.  I’ve selected four stories about sex, murder, wickedness and mayhem because I know that’s what many of you are reading. I’m stooping low to get your attention. When I announced the series, one of our elders went home and told his wife, “Randy’s starting a sermon series on sex, murder, wickedness and mayhem” and without a beat she said, “Wow, attendance must be really down.”

Whether I’m playing to the sensational or not, the stories selected come from the Bible’s prologue, the first 11 chapters of Genesis.  They are the foundational stories of the Bible and whether or not you grew up in a Christian home, you probably heard several of these stories as a child.  Hopefully we’ll discover some grown- up understanding of what those stories mean.  Today we are going to look at Adam and Eve. Next week’s story is Cain and Abel, followed by Noah and the Ark and finally the Tower of Babel. 

These stories are described as “pre-history” because they take place before the recorded history that we find in other sources.  Prehistory stories are archetypal stories, stories with a big truth about being human. We err when we think about these stories as biographical. If it was meant to be biographical, we’d have a lot more information. Adam and Eve lived for hundreds of years yet we only have one brief story. We have one story of Cain and Abel and only one story of Noah building the ark.  These stories are archetypal, presenting a pattern for being human that is familiar to everyone no matter whom you are or when you live.  Think of them as stories that answer some of the most basic questions that we ask as human beings.  It doesn’t matter if you were the first man or the first woman, or if you are a man or a woman living in Indianapolis in the 21st century, every human being asks “Who are we”, “why am I here” and “if there is a God, what is God like? Each of these four stories addresses these questions.

Today’s scintillating beach read about Adam and Eve is titled, “Sex in the Garden.”

Before we can get to the sex, we need to talk about the garden so that we have a common understanding because we all know that some people take these stories at face value. They approach them literally and then, they require that if you are going to be a Christian, you must take them literally as well.  Let me illustrate this with an experience I had a couple of years ago.

A family in our church invited some friends to worship and they were excited when they returned the next week. It was a middle aged couple starting a second marriage. The man in the relationship, for fun let’s call him Adam, had a very strong church background.  It was a second marriage so they were trying to find a church home as they started their life together.  He had a strong church background and was committed to a group of men who studied the scripture together, weekly.   The woman in the relationship, again for fun we’ll call her Eve, had been active in her youth and college. Then, she fell away and didn’t attend for most of her adult life. They worshipped with us for a couple of months and then made an appointment to visit with me about joining the church.

Before I could even begin the conversation, Eve said to me, “We have a problem with dinosaurs. I’m a scientist and believe that dinosaurs walked the face of the earth 200 million years ago and became extinct 65 million years ago, many millions of years before human beings.” Then Adam interrupted and said, “You’re wrong because the world is only 6,000 years old and Adam and Eve gave all the dinosaurs names.” At which point Eve interrupts her new husband and says, “You can’t possibly believe that” and husband said “And you can’t possibly believe in the Bible if you believe the world is that old.”  Then they looked at me like I could solve their problem. 

He was a literal creationist and believed that the story of creation and Adam and Eve is a literal story, that God created the heavens and earth in six 24-hour days like you and I are used to. Literal creationists add up the genealogy and come up with the idea that the world is 6,000 years old.  The logic goes this way.  The Bible is God’s book, God is the only eye-witness and that it couldn’t have happened any other way even if science today suggests a different sequence of events and length of time for creation to unfold.

In “Beach Reads 2”, I’m going to suggest to you that that is a misreading of the prologue of Genesis. The Creation account was not meant to teach us astronomy, biology, astrophysics or cosmology. As important as those fields are, that was not the purpose of these stories and it is not the purpose of the Bible. The Bible was written to teach us about God and to teach us something about ourselves. It’s theology and it answers the questions “Who are we”, “why am I here” and “if there is a God, what is God like? The Creation story is about truth, not about fact; it is about understanding who we are and who God is.  The Creation story tells us that behind every living thing is God and there is a purpose for everything under heaven. 

With that we can get to sex in the garden but in order for there to be sex, there has to be people. In the first chapter of Genesis, “God said, "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness… So God created humankind  in his image, in the image of God he created them;  male and female he created them”  (Genesis 1: 25a, 27). What’s with the “us”?  Much of the Old Testament is spent in trying to get human beings to move past polytheism, to understand that there is only one God. But here it says us. “Let us make humankind….” Some people think that God is talking to the heavenly host but as I said, these stories lay the foundation of all scripture and as Christians we know that the Godhead is three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. John begins his gospel making reference to this moment which God speaks to the collective us about creating you and me.  John says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). We are created in God’s image which gives us the capacity to reason, to think, to transcend ourselves and praise God.  But, most of all, created in God’s image means that we are created to be in relationship and have the ability to choose between good and evil. [1] This is what makes us like God.

 This idea to look like God is strengthened in second Genesis when God creates man and woman. I know, you are thinking, “you just told me that he created man and woman which God did in Genesis 1.  But there is a different version of creating man and woman in Genesis two. They don’t agree.” Genesis 2 has God create man, then all of the creatures, and then he decides upon a model upgrade and unlike the iPhone 4, when Adam sees the upgrade of man, there are no complaints. Adam wakes up from his sleep, sees Eve standing before him, he says, “Wow, you are something, ‘… bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; ….and they become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed’.” (Genesis 2: 25a, 26b-27).

They became one flesh…and there is the sex, right there in the garden, physical intimacy. God created us to be naked with a partner and not be ashamed. One of the first times I was embarrassed in ministry was when I was visiting one of my first mentors and his wife. Owen Kellison was a 98 year old retired minister and his wife Clara was 96.  She was wheel chair bound, tied in the chair so she wouldn’t fall, an advanced Alzheimer patient that smiled sweetly at you but didn’t speak, with a vacant look that made you wonder if she had any thoughts left at all. On the day of my embarrassment, Owen was holding her hand and talking about their love. He said, “We were fond of sex in the garden.”  For some reason, a 98 year old man talking about his sex life to a 23 year old seminary student was awkward.  I blushed, he saw it and said, “That’s what we called becoming one flesh in the morning. You know, Adam woke up, rubbed his eyes and spotted Eve and they become one flesh.” Then he added, “I’m glad God gave me Clara and gave us sex in the garden.”   It’s good theology. God gave us sex in the garden. Remember, archetypal stories tell us something about ourselves. God created us to have partners, to be in relationship and to become one flesh.

That’s the sex part. Now to the intrigue in our Bible beach read.  It starts out this way. “Now the serpent was craftier than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, "Did God say, "You shall not eat from any tree in the garden'?" (Genesis 1:1).

Of course God didn’t say that. He said there is only one tree you can’t eat, my tree; all the others are okay. But the devil has a way of twisting it around so that it doesn’t feel fair.  God is keeping something from you and that’s not fair. God created you, put you in this wonderful garden gave you everything but this one tree. And that’s not fair; God’s holding out on you.

Remember, this story was told in order to teach people about themselves. It was probably told to children around a campfire and you know how children are. Tell them they can’t have something and it becomes the very thing that they absolutely have to have.  God says to Adam and Eve, there is one thing that I don’t want you to do and it becomes the very thing they want to do. They could eat from any tree but they had to eat from this tree.  So the serpent whispers “Just touch it.  There’s no harm in that.  Smell it. That’s not really eating it. You were made for this. You deserve this.  Don’t hold back, life’s short. Take it…eat.

 It’s not about an apple; it’s about all the apples, the apples that tempt you, beckon to you, that you hear the deceiver whisper, “You need this.”  What’s the apple for you?  Another person? Anger and hate, resentment, bitterness?  Is it the constant desire for more?  A bigger house, a better car, a bigger big. What’s the whisper in your ear?  What’s so intriguing that you’ll listen to the whisper?             

Adam and Eve took what wasn’t supposed to be theirs.  They disobeyed God and we’ve repeated that story over and over again. What they didn’t find was what the devil promised. When they took the forbidden fruit, they didn’t find any satisfaction. Isn’t that the way it is when we choose poorly? They didn’t become like God; instead, they felt ashamed and they wanted to hide. God was walking in the Garden and “the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God.”  (Genesis 3: 8b)

When you choose badly, when you disobey God, you pull away from God.  You hide from the presence of the Lord God.  The result of choosing badly, of falling prey to temptation, of sinning is you don’t hang out with God any more, you move out of the garden. I can’t tell you the number of times that someone has said to me, “I don’t feel very close to God” and then, the truth comes out that they are choosing very badly.” I can’t tell you the number of people who have given in to temptation and find themselves wandering, outside of community, outside of any abiding relationship with God.  

Adam and Eve find themselves banished from the Garden but this big beach read doesn’t end that way.  There is an important footnote at the third chapter and it leads us into the fourth chapter. Even though the potential to live in paradise is lost, God is still in relationship with man and woman so, as they are leaving, God makes clothes for them.  “And the Lord God made garments of skins for the man and for his wife, and clothed them.” (Genesis 3: 21).  God knows that the new world that they are going to be living in is harsh and they need protection. So he gives them clothes and sends them off. Then he blesses them with two children and many years of life.  At the end of the story, God is filled with grace.

As I began this sermon, I said that the stories of Beach Reads 2 answer three questions.  Who are we”, “why am I here” and “if there is a God, what is God like? Do you have the answer? 

“Who are we?” We are God’s children, created in God’s image.     

“Why am I here?”  We are here to be in relationship, with God and each other, to have partners and to choose between good and evil. 

“What is God like?

God is a God of consequences and a God of grace. God expects His word to be followed but offers grace when we choose poorly.

It’s a great story, a story that speaks to the deepest truths about it and in the end, it comes down to two words. [2]

The serpent said, “Take, eat.” They do and paradise is lost.