Genesis 3:8-15

The story of getting kicked out of the garden has many interpretations. It is an ancient story with unknown origins. I have read interpretations of it being some sort of pre-agricultural vision, or something about crop farming versus the nomadic herders. There is even the idea that the tree of knowledge is a symbol of the use of mind altering plants that pagan cultures would have used. As for the doctrine of original sin, that did not begin to form until sometime in the 2nd century AD. It was first mentioned by Irenaeus. We know it mostly from the formulations of Saint Augustine of Hippo.

To describe my own understanding of the symbolism, I'll tell a story.

There is a picture of me on file with the Minneapolis Star Tribune. I'm standing in the background with a rake in a community garden that was having its first spring planting. The person managing that community project is being interviewed. The question was asked, "how did you get this project started?" That wasn't as simple of a question as you might think. She said something about having meetings. No single person started it, really.

I had done some of the initial groundwork and recruiting of volunteers but I didn't really start it. We had a paid neighborhood volunteer organizer who started it. He proposed it to me one day, and handed me phone numbers and information. And he didn't really start it, he had a job, paid for by city tax dollars, someone told him to start projects like that. And the people that created that job were elected by everyone else and were told to come up with ways to get the drug houses out of that neighborhood. And we did. Together we made that neighborhood better than it had been. And of course it hadn't always been bad. Someone had built those homes long ago and turned that grassland into a city.

This isn't a story of building a utopia. Any attempt to organize people involves some arguing. It was volunteer work, but it was still work. Not everyone wanted a garden where we decided to put that one, but compromises were made and we created something that was a step in building community.

If you try to trace anything humans have done back to the beginning, the answer to "how did this get started" is, we evolved as social beings. Even before we were monkeys in trees we cooperated to protect our young and grow our furry little animal societies. We made our way up the food chain in some part of the savannah in Africa and somewhere in there came down from those trees and did something other animals don't do on the scale that we have, spread around the world adapting to almost every eco-system.

We had to compete with others to do that, with larger animals, with other homo-sapien species, with nature itself. Although cooperation has been a key to our success, there has also been competition. Not everyone agrees with the value of a place in the neighborhood where food is grown and elders met with children and show them how you nurture life, how you take a seed and make it a banquet. The garden is a symbol of that type of peaceful and bountiful meeting place.

Music: Woodstock by Joni Mitchell

1 Samuel 8:4-11, (12-15), 16-20, (11:14-15)

Samuel is already an old man at this point. He has been a judge and aided his people against the Philistines. Now, the people want a king, which means they are throwing off God's direct authority. He gives in, but he and God have some warnings for the people. These warnings come in the form of laying down some laws. Some of them sound oddly familiar to things God has done. But since they want a king and not a god, they might not be able to call on god if things don't work out. This doesn't seem to phase them. They want to be like other nations.

2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1

Paul puts quite the fine point on the idea of life being about the unseen, about what we are preparing for, not this "slight momentary affliction" of being alive. Having a body and experiencing suffering is not something anyone needs a prophet or preacher to explain. The reason Paul gets us thinking about it is that he really wants you to think about how great it's going to be when we go to the God building for eternity. That's going to be awesome.

Mark 3:20-35

At this early point in Mark's gospel, people are having trouble understanding who this Jesus is. Don't feel bad if you can't make sense of these verses, it seems to be the point of them, because the people in the story are having just as much trouble. There's something here about being in the group or not. Depending on who preaches this, it's either a statement about including anyone who wants to join in, or excluding those who don't do the will of the Father.