As I begin to write, I am on the Vermonter – an Amtrak train that is pulling out of 30th street station in Philadelphia.
As we leave the platform, with its brief burst of human activity, the Philadelphia skyline comes into view on the farside of the Schuylkill river. In the foreground, the trainyard is a landscape of gray gravel crisscrossed with tracks set within a world of parking lots and underpasses.
Electrical transfer boxes.
Long puddles edged with the taint of gasoline.
I enjoy traveling by train.
One of my favorite things to do is sit in the window of a train and look at the world moving by.
There is so much in the world to see.
Soon the train speeds up and it becomes more difficult to really see anything before it is lost.
The gathering speed makes me anxious. Not because of any fear for my safety, but because I must now contend with the fact that my memory will not be able to contain, and my words could never fully capture, the vast possibilities – the overwhelming human realities – that can be seen from the window of the train.
I feel an unaccountable responsibility to that humanity.
The writer in me has a hard time reconciling this reality – that no one person, no matter how skilled, could fully comprehend the lives behind each window… in each car heading down Route 76. Each life – how many millions contained within the sweep of this one vantage? – each human spirit, filled with hopes, fears, desperate desires…
I feel compelled by them all. But I can only gesture at them as I go by. The best I can hope for is to pluck a few fleeting details from this world…
The corrugated iron fence wearing the blush and the drift of old graffiti.
The shell of an old brick building, its empty windows blinded with buckling plywood.
A precariously thin looking pedestrian walkway arching over the tracks.
Trucks being unloaded.
Stacks of unused wooden pallets in the shadows of the loading docks.
Weeds tickling the bellies of abandoned cars.
Three story tenements following the shrug of a distant hill.
A stretch of dirty water that may have once been a canal, now skirting an auto body shop before disappearing among the summer trees.
A row of shipping containers, forgotten by the sea.
There is a kind of beauty here, but it is not here by intention – it is here as the inevitable result of neglect. Age and decay has worn away the edges of things. The wavering shadows of junk sumac softens ancient redbrick and rust. Old tires and sun bleached beer in cans in the gullies left behind after the earth moving machines are gone.
What would it be like to live in this neighborhood?
It hardly feels like a place for people to live – it seems to me to be a place that must exist so that stuff can be made, so that things can be loaded onto trucks and transported somewhere else. A place where cars can go to get a paint job… or just die.
And of course… there is a sinister logic to it all.
Rich people don’t want trains running through their backyards… so when you look out of a train window, you are looking out at poverty.
At dumpsters
Check cashing storefronts…
Liquor stores.
Auto body shops.
Storage units.
This place is designed for living, so much as for getting things done – all the grimey, oil stained things that need to get done so that our society can keep moving.
But, of course, there are people who live here – who look out of those tenement windows.
There are kids that run these trash ridden lots;
unemployed young men loitering on the corners, shooting up in the bathroom of the Gulf station.
Grandmothers in their kitchens, trying to keep track of their orphaned grandchildren.
Grandfathers with bloodshot eyes sitting on park benches nursing 40 ounce bottles of Olde English in crumpled brown paper bags.
These are the people who live “on the other side of the tracks.”
The folks we’d prefer not to think about.
The guy who gets a pack of pall malls and a six pack and watches the sun go down from the window of their studio apartment.
The single mom who sees her kids once a day because she has to go straight from her day job on the med-surg ward, to her night job cleaning offices.
These folks are mostly black, or hispanic. Many of them are immigrants. They are the underclass without whom our society would not function. We don’t have to think about them, because we hardly see them.
They’re not here.
They’re over there.
*
The passage that I read for you from the book of Genesis is a familiar one.
It’s familiar, but it’s not exactly one of our favorites, is it?
It’s awkward…
to say the least.
The story takes place shortly after the first couple – Adam and Eve – have made the fateful mistake.
Everything was going along swimmingly, as it were – the happy couple were enjoying their blissful ignorance in paradise, until… along came Mr. Snake…
Well… you know the story, don’t you? I don’t have to retell it for you.
With the help of the history’s first shyster – who knows a couple of suckers when he sees them – Adam and Eve do the one thing – the one thing – that God told them they couldn’t do – they take a bite out of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil. No sooner do they do this, then their eyes are opened and they realize that they are naked…
This realization – that they are naked – is the first result of having open eyes. To have open eyes is to be aware of vulnerability. To have open eyes, is to be acquainted with shame. And, interestingly, the only thing that Adam and Eve can think of to do in response to vulnerability and shame, is…
to hide.
God comes in the cool of the evening (I love that! – the cool of the evening) and, not finding Adam and Eve in there accustomed place, God calls out:
‘Where are you?’
This is when the awkward family system stuff starts happening. Adam admits that he ate of the fruit, but he does not take responsibility for the error. Instead he blames Eve. Hearing this, Eve, in her turn, blames the snake.
Part of “the knowledge of Good and Evil” – indeed the first demonstration of its influence on human interaction is this ugly passing of the buck.
And when the buck stops – when it becomes clear that Mr Snake was, indeed, the guilty party – God wastes no time handing out the punishments:
‘Because you have done this,
cursed are you among all animals
and among all wild creatures;
upon your belly you shall go,
and dust you shall eat
all the days of your life.
Cursed.
At this moment, a specific individual – the snake – is
cursed.
Note that the snake is not cursed by another snake. The snake is not hexed by a voodoo witch doctor. The snake is not judged by a judge, or a sentenced by a jury of his peers. The Queen Hearts does not say “Off with his head.”
If any of these unfortunate things had happened to the snake, he would have had some chance. In every case, when a mortal person renders judgment, there is at least the possibility that the decision could be reversed and the offender, in this case the snake, could be exonerated, and no longer be cursed.
But to be cursed by God!
To be cursed by the creator of the universe?
This, I imagine, is a different matter altogether.
I imagine that being cursed by God is not like any other curse. I imagine that being cursed by God alters the very nature of who you are. Your state of being is now at odds with the created order. You are set apart from all that is good in the universe.
What would that be like?
Would you ever know joy? Could you take a deep breath and know peace? Could you feel a gentle embrace? Enjoy beautiful music? Look up in wonder? Feel the presence of love?
I would not want to be cursed by God.
Would you?
As a minister, I have often found myself trying to comfort people who are in great pain.
On many occasions I have been asked a certain question. The question is:
Why is God doing this to me?
this question is often followed by another question.
What have I done?
Unlike most ministers, I do not go to the Bible to find truth.
The Bible is too full of things that I would call untrue – untrue to my sense of what is right in the world.
Does that sound blasphemous?
I don’t think it is. I am not saying that the Bible is any less important than any other preacher. It is important because it gives us the opportunity to think ethically about our lives. It jump starts our moral imagination. It can do this by telling us true stories, and it can do this by telling us stories that we must push back against.
This story is an example of a story that I push back against.
I don’t think that any individual should be given the idea that the maker of the universe is against them.
I don’t think we should accept the idea that a person, or a group of people, can be cursed by the maker of the universe.
If we allow this idea to function in our hearts, we can make the mistake – the awful mistake – of blaming ourselves when we suffer.
If you suffer, it is not because God has cursed you. It is could be because you are sick. Or it could be because human society has turned its back on you.
If we allow for this idea – God’s curse – to function in our society, we can make the awful mistake of thinking a whole category of people are separated from God’s love.
And this belief can systematically oppress people. Redline them into squalor.
Hide them.
I push back against this story.
I believe that when God curses someone in the Bible, it is not God cursing that person – but someone in power enlisting God for their own purposes.
God does not curse.
Love does not curse.
God loves.
Amen