“The Knowledge of Good and Evil”
a sermon by Carol Howard Merritt
Pastor, Western Presbyterian Church
Washington, D.C.
October 25, 2008

Text: Genesis 2:4-17

When I was a teenager, an interesting thing happened. All of a sudden, my father found out that he had a brother. A half-brother, to be more specific. My grandmother, was married to a man, gave birth to my father, and when her husband went off to fight in World War II, she fell in love with another man.

Today, this would be a heart-breaking story; back then, it was utterly scandalous. So, I suppose they did what a lot of families did in peculiar situations. They hid all of the facts, crammed all the secrets into some closet. My father changed his last name and was forced to cut off all contact with his biological father. In order to keep up with appearances, they never spoke about my biological grandfather. I heard about one war story and was told how he died, but that was it.

Until the day when my dad was in his fifties, when a complete stranger contacted my dad and told him that they were brothers. After my grandmother died, someone hired a detective to try to sort out our mysterious family history. With the detective’s report, I found out that my grandfather had died in a completely different manner that I had been told, and it happened much later than I was led to believe.

That bit of knowledge rearranged our family history quite a bit. My father accepted the news with some bitterness. He had never gotten along with his mother well, and the fact that she hid his brother did not help matters.

I began to question so many things after that. Suddenly, to me, my grandmother was no longer just a woman who moved slowly with her walker from her kitchen to the Lazy Boy in order to watch Lawrence Welk. There was more to her than I had imagined.

She kept photos of herself on her dresser, she kept constant reminders of her smooth skin and her eyes that sparkled as much as her earrings. She looked so glamorous and beautiful. Now, when I think about those photos, I realize how much she was hiding. The level of betrayal and dishonesty seemed to match her shame—it all shook me, changed me.

It’s interesting to note that nothing in our family history had actually altered, but suddenly, I had a new knowledge, and a whole new set of questions. Overnight, I no longer trusted my own family history, and I felt more responsibility to question things.

Knowledge does that. Francis Bacon tells us that knowledge is power, and we certainly know how true that is. That realization is what leads people to learn a trade or go to college. But, I think that knowledge can bring even more than that. It seems that with a depth of knowledge in almost any subject, we get a sense of good and evil. Whether we are talking about something as small as our own family histories, or something as large as the global economy, when we gain an in-depth knowledge of something, we realize the good things about it, as well as the immoral aspects of it. 

Like many of you, I suppose, I have been spending the last few weeks, reading about the global economy, trying to figure out why our markets are in such bad shape, and how on earth we have gotten into such massive debt as a society. We look at one piece of the crisis, such as mortgages, and we realize that people who were never allowed to have capital, were suddenly able to borrow. There is a certain expansion of freedom that comes when credit can suddenly flow into underserved areas of our population.

The bad thing was, we victimized certain people as well. We lent money to people who could never pay it back, and we did it at extreme rates. Financial institutions told people that they could afford mortgages that they could not. For people like me, people who were not aware of all the complexities of these issues, we are gaining knowledge now, and we see that issues are not so black and white, we are tasting the knowledge of good and evil. 

One of our first stories in the Scriptures captures this. Most of us probably know this story, even if we did not grow up in Sunday school. Adam and Eve were placed in a magnificent garden, and they were told that they could eat from any fruit of the garden, but one. There was just one tree that was off limits.

Well, of course, you know what they did. They did the same thing that I would do. They ate from the tree. I don’t blame them. I would have eaten it, after all, it was called, “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” Who could resist that?

In this myth, this very important story that has all sorts of implications for our lives, we learn what happens. Adam and Eve were pure and innocent, and suddenly with the taste of that fruit, they began to understand the difference between good and evil.

This is the story of original sin. And since this is Reformation Sunday, I need to point out that John Calvin developed the notion of original sin into the doctrine of total depravity—the idea that every part of our lives has a degree of sinfulness in it.

We point to this story when we describe human nature, especially when we are trying to explain that strange tendency that we have to push the one button we are told not to push, or eat the one food item we are not supposed to eat, or drink the drink that we know is bad for us. We look to this tree when we want to describe why a spouse is unfaithful, even when everything about a marriage might rival paradise.

We all do things that we know we shouldn’t, even when we realize that they will destroy our lives and our relationships. My grandmother was not the only one. It’s been happening since the beginning of time. This piece of tempting fruit symbolizes our human curiosity and how we got our first taste of evil, and it tells us about human nature.

But I think it also tells us a bit about the nature of knowledge as well, because one of the first things that Eve and Adam did, was they looked down, and realized that they were not wearing clothes. The knowledge that the fruit gave to them, enlightened them about the good and about the bad. The fact that they were naked had never occurred to them before, so they immediately tried to figure out a way to cover them selves.

Knowledge often leads us to realizing the evil. I read an article in Friday about “Doomecrats and Republigrins.” The newspaper revealed that according to research, Republicans are happier than Democrats, and they were trying to figure out why that was. So they pointed to a couple of things, Republicans are more likely to go to church, and being a part of any community makes people happier. Republicans are more likely to make more money, and enjoy to their wealth.

One of the Democrats who was interviewed said that the reason why Republicans were so much more happy was because they just didn’t care.

Now, I know that all of these stereotypes are not very helpful. I’m sure that we could pretty easily point out a few Democrats who go to church, and there are plenty of Republicans who care.

So, I don’t want to stand here this morning and talk about whether Democrats go to church, or Republicans care, but I do want to talk about this response. This idea that when people care, when they care enough to gain knowledge, it adds to their burdens, because we have tasted of the fruit of good and evil.

I was leading a seminar recently. I often lead these workshops on how churches can attract adults under the age of forty. Western is a pretty special place in that way. We are one of the rare churches in our country that is growing, and filling up with younger members. It’s because of you--older members who have been willing to share leadership, and younger members who are willing to take it up.

Churches are having a difficult time with being vital and relevant in a new generation, so in the last couple of years, I’ve traveled all over the country, talking to all different denominations about how we do it, how we have created intergenerational religious communities.

One of the things that I try to point out is that we have been formed and shaped in different generations. Most of our mainline congregations were built in the 1950s, and we speak the language of the 50s, and we have had a difficult time transitioning into our current culture. I try to help people build that bridge.

It’s really fascinating work. I typically begin by asking what events shaped their generation. And people talk about the small world in which they grew up. Older men and women tell us about a time when they worked on the farm, and their family and close friends made up their whole world. They did not have television, or even telephones. And as the histories move on, we hear about how the wars suddenly made them aware that there was more out there.

And then the stories turn to little children, hiding under their desks, imagining what they could do to shield themselves from an attack.  The knowledge of the bomb settled within a generation of people, its massive destructive power, they began to realize that with that knowledge, they had responsibility. 

And there is a shift that I can always hear within those gatherings. It goes from a time of “We never questioned our parents. We never questioned our government.” To, “All of a sudden, during the Vietnam war, after all of the assassinations, after Watergate, it felt like we distrusted everything.” And it was almost as if our knowledge exploded and people began to understand that they needed to take some responsibility.

And then, we I talk to people in their twenties, I hear them say, “I have more information at my fingertips than any other generation has had, but I have no idea what to do with it all. It’s overwhelming. It’s scary.”

It’s true. We have tremendous information right at our fingertips, and it is difficult to process it. Knowledge is good, and yet, when we suddenly know about evil, we have to act. We know what’s happening in Afghanistan and Iraq. We know what is happening in Sudan. We know what is happening with our environment. We know about the global economy, and we shudder to think what might happen, not only in our country, but in countries all over the world. And we do not have to go across the world, because right here in our own city, we know how AIDS affects men and women. Our knowledge extends beyond our families and our close friends. We know about the issues that plague this world.

In this time and place when we have so much knowledge, we feel a great deal of responsibility. And it washes over us, and at times it can just feel scary. We know things, we have eaten of the fruit, we have tasted the bitterness of evil.

Yet, one of the reasons why we gather here is because we have also tasted the bursting, empowering sweet taste of goodness. We are part of a tradition of hope and mercy. And so we gather here, to imagine how we can use our hunger for knowledge. How we can continue to use science, technology, the arts, for justice, to uplift the powerless, to feed the hungry, to shelter the needy.

We gather, because this is the place that we are fed, by the grace and glory of

God, our Creator,

God, our Liberator,

And God our Sustainer. Amen.