“Be Careful What You Eat”
Text:
Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7
© February 10, 2008 by C. Edward Bowen at Crafton
United Presbyterian Church.
On
a number of occasions I’m sure that we’ve all heard it said that you are what
you eat. Well, a few years ago a
professor of nutrition at the
And
after interviewing quite a number of waitresses at local diners and talking
with more than 1,000 random people, that professor came up with these
conclusions – see if you agree with him or not.
He said that according to his study, people who eat a lot of chicken
noodle soup tend to be people who watch a lot of TV, care about their families,
and have a good sense of humor. In
contrast, he said, people who eat a lot of tomato soup tend to be stay-at-home
people, who love their pets and like to read.
Those who prefer to eat vegetable soup or minestrone soup fell into the
same category: they all tended to be
outdoorsy, church-going people who like to try new things. People who eat chili, on the other hand, tend
to be party animals, who are athletic and competitive. And finally, according to that professor’s
study, people who eat a lot of New England clam chowder tend to be realistic,
sarcastic, and not so athletic. Is that
professor’s research on target? Is it
true that we are what we eat?
This
week, as I was re-reading this story that we just listened to from the book of
Genesis, it struck me that the very first commandment that God ever gave to
human beings was basically: be careful
what you eat. God’s first command wasn’t
to not steal or to not swear or to not lie.
No, according to this story in the Bible, the very first commandment –
and at that time the only commandment – that God had given to Adam and Eve was
this: “You may freely eat of every tree
of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not
eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.” But out of all the possible commandments that
God could have chosen to give to Adam and Eve, why did God pick that
commandment? Why did God think it was so
very important to tell Adam and Eve to be careful what they ate?
One
evening an old Cherokee Indian sat down and told his grandson about the battle
that goes on inside people. The old man
said, “There is a battle between two ‘wolves’ inside all of us. One of the wolves is Evil. It is a wolf of anger, jealousy, greed, and
lies. The other wolf is Good. It is a wolf of love, hope, kindness, and
faith.” After thinking for a minute
about what his grandfather had said, the boy looked at his grandfather and
asked, “Which wolf wins?” The
grandfather answered, “The one that you feed.”[1]
Which
wolf inside us are we feeding? Since
ancient times the Jewish people have held a very similar view. They contend that inside each person is both
an inclination to do good – what they call the yezer ha-tov – and an inclination to do evil –
what they call the yezer ha-ra. Since ancient times the Jewish people have
recognized – that whether we want to admit it or not – within all of us are
both of those urges.
For
example, one of the masterminds of the Nazi Holocaust, that resulted in the
deaths of more than six million Jewish people, was a man by the name of Adolf Eichmann. But when
One
reporter that went to cover that trial was a woman by the name of Hannah Arendt. And based on
what she knew that Eichmann had done, based on what
she knew about his role in the brutal slaughter of so many innocent men, women,
and children, she went to Israel expecting to see a madman, a monster, some
tormented devilish fiend. But when Eichmann was brought into the courtroom and placed inside a
bullet-proof glass box, Hannah Arendt was stunned at
what she saw.
She
was stunned because what she saw was simply an ordinary common person, a person
no different at all from the people that you see on the street every day. And when she saw that Adolf Eichmann was virtually no different in appearance from
people she knew, it sent a chill down her spine, because at that moment it
struck her that evil isn’t just something that demon-possessed “sinners” engage
in. No, at that moment it struck her
that inside every single one of us is the possibility that we could end up
engaging in the same kinds of evil that Eichmann and
the other Nazis took part in.
In
that same vein, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who for many
years was imprisoned in the Russian gulags but finally was released and went on
to win a Nobel Prize, made this observation.
Solzhenitsyn said that the line that separates good and evil is not a
line that can be drawn between countries.
In other words, it’s not possible to draw a line and declare certain
countries to be completely pure and good while at the same time declaring other
countries to be utterly bad and evil.
And
he said that the line that separates good and evil is not a line that can be
drawn between different classes of people – such as between the rich and the
poor, to say that one group is good and the other one evil. And he said that the line that separates good
from evil is not a line that can be drawn between different political parties –
like the Democrats and the Republicans, to identify one party as entirely good
and the other one as entirely evil. No,
Solzhenitsyn said, the line that separates good from evil is a line that runs
through every human being. As he put it,
it’s not possible to expel evil entirely from the world, but it is possible to
hold it in check within each person.
At
its heart, that’s what I believe this story in the book of Genesis is saying to
us. It’s not a story that is meant to cause
us to shake our heads and say, “Boy, how could Adam and Eve have done
that? I can’t believe it! How could Adam and Eve intentionally gone
against God and sinned like that?” No, I
believe this is a story that is meant to cause us to say, “I can understand
what Adam and Eve did, because if I had been in their place I would have
probably done the same thing!” This is a
story that forces us to recognize that that urge to sin isn’t just an urge that
“sinners” have. Instead, whether we want
to admit it or not, that urge to sin is an urge that exists inside all of us.
But
alongside that urge to sin is also the urge that we have to do what’s right,
the urge that we have to live the kind of life that God wants us to live. But as those two urges struggle inside us,
which side is going to win? Basically
the side that is going to win is the side that we choose to feed.
When
you think about it, it’s rather remarkable that when Jesus chose to give his
people a sacrament, something to do to remember Jesus and what he stands for,
he gave his people the sacrament of communion, a sacrament of eating. When you think about it, Jesus could have
given his people a certain song to sing to remember him, or a certain dance. But no, Jesus gave his people a meal to eat.
And
I believe that one of the reasons that Jesus did that is to cause us to
consider on a regular basis what it is that we’re feeding ourselves. Are we feeding ourselves with the ways of God
and nurturing the good that exists inside of us? Or are we filling ourselves with other
things, things like greed, anger, and revenge, and in essence feeding that
sinful tendency that’s there inside of us?
Be
careful what you eat. That was
essentially the first commandment that God ever gave. And it’s a commandment that we still need to
take seriously even today. And so especially
as we share in communion here this morning, as you take the bread and the cup, pause
and consider what you’re feeding your spirit.
Are you allowing God to come into your life on a regular basis and fill
you? Or is there an emptiness, a hunger
inside of you? If so, the good news is
that Jesus has set before us a table, and he says to us, “You never have to be
hungry again.”
[1]
Jim Wallis, The Great Awakening: Reviving
Faith & Politics in a Post-Religious Right