Graduation Day 2025
Good morning, friends. Today we are celebrating our graduates and women, which presents me with an abundance of preaching possibilities. A few weeks ago, when I was thinking about this morning, I thought to myself, “If only there were a Bible story about graduation and women.” Then last Sunday, after meeting for worship, I had lunch with the Bassetts and the Gautiers, and Leslie Bassett and I began talking about Adam and Eve. Kind of makes you want to have lunch with me, just for the conversation alone, doesn’t it? I don’t remember why we got started talking about Adam and Eve, but driving home it occurred to me their story is both a story about graduation and about women.
I’m not going to read the story. It would take half my sermon time, but I suspect you remember the story. God created a garden for Adam and Eve to enjoy and gave them one rule—do not eat the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. That worked for a while, until Eve persuaded Adam to eat the forbidden fruit. How was that act interpreted? Women are temptresses who lead men into sin. This launched the well-known “blame the woman” school of theology. Humans are barred from paradise, kicked out of the garden, sentenced to drudgery and toil our entire lives, then we die, often in great discomfort. All because of a woman. This theology is still with us. A new Pope was selected this week to lead the world’s largest Christian denomination and not one woman had a say in the matter.
According to the story, because of Eve’s disobedience, men have authority over women. When children are born, it causes the woman pain, so she can remember her sin. But worse, the church told us when Adam and Eve disobeyed God, the penalty for their sin was charged to all humanity. Everyone paid. We are fallen, born in sin, powerless to do anything about it. God had to have his own son killed on our behalf, so his perfection and purity could pay the penalty we owed. But only if we acknowledged the perfection of Jesus and accepted his sacrifice. We’re all familiar with this theology. If we didn’t hear it in a sermon, we’ve read it on a pamphlet someone left behind in a bathroom.
We’ve also been taught if we didn’t share that message, God would be mad at us for not sharing this “good news” and we would be in trouble when we died. Jesus would look at us, and say, “Depart from me, I never knew you.” But it seems fitting on this day we celebrate both graduation and women, that there is another way to interpret the story. Not as a story of condemnation, judgement, and separation, but as a story of graduation.
Let’s think about that. Adam and Eve are in this lovely garden. It’s like Indiana in the springtime, the redbuds and dogwoods are in bloom, but they broke the one rule God gave them—they ate the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. What an odd rule that is. If you love someone and are committed to their growth, why wouldn’t you want them to be able to distinguish between good and evil? But strangely enough, God says, “Don’t go there. Don’t eat that fruit.”
Now I don’t know your experience with children, but I was a kid once, and I know there is one sure way to have a kid do something. You tell them not to. So God told Adam and Eve, “Don’t eat the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” And what do they do? They ate from it, and not just ate from it, they canned the fruit for the winter, and baked pies.
Secretly, this pleased God. God can’t come right out and act pleased, since God told them not to eat it, but inwardly, God is delighted, because it means Adam and Eve, in eating the fruit, are assuming the responsibility of distinguishing between good and evil. How much time have you spent trying to teach your children the difference between good and evil? That kind of knowledge is a good thing, right? Adam and Eve ate from that tree, and God thought to herself, “They’re ready to graduate. When they were young, I had to teach them the difference between good and evil, but now they are willing and able to discern that for themselves. Now they can leave home.”
God told Adam and Eve, “You’ve graduated. It’s time to go.”
But God is a loving parent, so the Bible says, “the Lord God made garments of skins for the man and woman and clothed them.”
How many of us were ever taught that part of the creation story? Not me. I had to find that one on my own.
My mom did the same thing for me. The night before I moved from home, she took me to Danner’s Five and Dime and bought me two pairs of blue jeans and three shirts. Same principle at work here. A loving parent never just casts their children out into the world when they graduate. They clothe them, they prepare them. But they also establish new boundaries, so God placed a flaming sword at the gate of the garden, along with an angelic being to serve as a guard, because wise parents are also reluctant to let their children move back home once they’ve graduated.
The story of Adam and Eve can be read at least two ways—as a story of condemnation, judgement, and separation or as a story of graduation. No one can compel us to interpret it either way. We are free human beings with the power to interpret these ancient stories however we wish. There is no authority anywhere who can tell us we are wrong or bad or misguided. We have the right, power, and duty to choose. We can believe God is a god of condemnation, judgement, and separation. A lot of people do. Or we can believe this is a story of graduation and emancipation. We can believe Eve isn’t a temptress, but a teacher, that she was God’s instrument for teaching a man that it was okay to think. We can believe God’s hope for us is to learn the difference between good and evil. We can believe God is pleased by our moral and intellectual evolution and our desire to learn. We can believe God is a god of graduation, a god encouraging our growth and evolution. We can dispense once and for all with the ignorant notion that women are the cause of our difficulties, and instead commend Eve for her determination to learn and grow.
Don’t ever let anyone tell you knowledge is a curse. Our country and culture are rife with those who fear knowledge, science, and truth. Let’s not join their ranks. Let’s you and I dine regularly and eagerly on the knowledge of good and evil, so that we can tell one from the other, and be filled.
Philip Gulley is the author of Unlearning God: How Unbelieving Helped Me Believe and the popular Harmony series.
Discover my books, stories, and more by visiting Books by Philip Gulley
Contact Philip directly at philiphgulley@gmail.com
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You hand us again the dignity God gave us in the first place. I lived in that prison for fifty years before I rebelled and ate the fruit for myself. Thank you for your wisdom.
What a great message. Thank you for giving a positive and uplifting interpretation to passages that have been used to degrade women and make all of us feel sinful. Please keep them coming, Phillip Gulley.