Sermon for Ordinary Time 3 – Genesis 2:4-25

Genesis 2:4-25

Sometimes the simplest questions result in the most complex, but important conversations and answers. There is of course the one that sitcoms tell us parents we should all rue, “the talk.” How are babies made etc. We avoided that completely by just answering the specific question one of our kids asked, when they asked, and over time they got the whole picture. Didn’t make it weird, didn’t make it awkward, but a whole complexity of knowledge was uncovered eventually by that simple question. Another happened when Monroe was 5 or 6. We put them to bed, and a few minutes later we heard her sobbing. We went in and asked what was going on, and she told us “I’m afraid of dying!” Oh no, I thought, did I leave Kierkegaard laying around? Where is my volume of Camus essays? But no, this came from another place. A few months prior, Holland had been studying cardiac failure and had explained it to Roe, and so for those three months she had been worrying about having a heart attack. The question that lay behind that was, of course, what about death? What does that mean? And opened the door to have conversations about the perfectly natural fear of death, but also the hope we have of resurrection. Simple questions, complex answers.

That has been what we are being faced with in these early chapters of Genesis. “What is the world and who made it?” resulted in the sophisticated, polemical theological poetry of the creation account of Gen. 1. “What is humanity?” we ask, and the answer at the end of Gen. 1 is “male and female, made in God’s image, called to steward the world he has given us.” But that seemingly simple question and answer would have follow-ups, asking for a further explanation of humanity’s nature and role.

Genesis 2 gives us an alternative account of creation, but the focus is quite different; it spends almost no time on the bulk of the cosmos, and devotes its space almost entirely to beautifully elaborating the nature of humanity. This text is rich with symbol and poesy, linguistic turns of phrase and implications, and teaches that humanity is a community of co-equal priest-kings called to worship God by bringing order to the world. (This is a reiteration of last week’s sermon, but with different emphases throughout).

After the creation, we are told that “the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.” “The LORD God,” the YHWH elohim, the first use of that covenant name of YHWH being used, pointing to a unique relationship with this creature. The “man” is the word adam, which is a generic word for humanity without a gendered connotation. It also shows us the, let us say “grounded” nature of humanity, as the word for ground is adama. Literally, the earthling created out of earth. We are bound to the earth, our cradle, our home, our grave. Yet, we also receive “the breath of life.” Humanity has a unique link to God, to the heavenly, and thus are the mediating beings on earth: earth and heaven, God and ground, breath and dust. This played out shows us why the incarnation is necessary, that in order to truly bridge the gap between God and man requires more than just the breath of life, it requires someone who is fully both to bring them together, to definitively unite heaven and earth, the second Adam in whom all of us are being made into new creations, a man brought from a woman.

Adam is given the garden to “till and keep,” to take the mass of chaotic nature and, in imitation of his creator and on his behalf, adam is to bring order to it. This too is the sense of the animals; naming them, in the ANE, represents putting them in their proper place, completing their creation as it were by bringing order to chaos. But it serves a second purpose, and that is to reveal that adam is alone, an object lesson as it were, God showing adam that there is no one to partner with. That is not good, adam being alone showing that humanity’s creation is incomplete. As Iain Provan puts it, “Human beings, Genesis tells us, are intrinsically both male and female–that is the communal reality that is “good.” Only in community can humanity fulfill the human vocation.”

We are made to be creatures-in-community. Isolation, while romantic in an epic book or movie, is profoundly tragic. Adam needs a helper, which does not mean inferior or subject, quite the opposite; I checked every reference of this word in the Old Testament, and out of 24, 20 speak of God as our helper. It is a word that means “one who gives aid,” without connotations of ranking. And so God puts adam under, and we get the somewhat poetic image of taking a rib to fashion a partner. When this is done, only then are they described in the language of different sexes, is and issa, man and woman. And we should not imply or detect here any difference in equality; the only difference articulated is that of biological sex, with its obvious differences in terms of the development of human life from there on. No, this passage sees them clearly as equal partners (hinted at by the choice of a rib), priest-monarchs together in a Garden that images the Temple, now a community, able to face the work of shaping creation together, brought into covenant as the first married couple in covenant with God to do the work he has given them to do. Adam is now complete, as “bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh,” they have in each other the perfect, appropriate counterpart.

This foundation of human community, goes from the base of male and female and biological reproduction, to become the new creation of John 20, that of the Church, given the Holy Spirit in imitation of the breath of life. This is the end goal of human community: a people all in community together, never alone but truly an ever-expanding family that is bound by the Spirit, brought into covenant with one another as those who receive the new covenant of Christ’s blood, and looking to him as the true Adam who leads us in doing what we have been called to do. As the human was divided and then brought back together as man and woman, Unity-in-Diversity, so we are united to Christ, bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. And in Him, we are all together, our great diversity brought back together in Unity, all equal, standing side by side, celebrating our gifts all given in the Spirit to the body. We expand not only through the procreation of early humanity, but also through the new birth of the Spirit, where we embrace as our family those who receive the life of God in Christ by faith, without distinction, embracing the gifts of all as gifts for the family, as we work together to till and keep what part of the world we can, which is simply to live in the Christ-like love which makes present now the new-creation life for which we wait. 

The Church often fails at this, just as people who are coupled often fail each other. We fail to be the new community, an expression of the New Creation that we’re designed to be. And the hurt we experience when this happens is real, as we continue to yearn for the perfection of our union to God, and as a result with one another. Our calling right now is to seek that willing unity that we are called to, recognizing and raising up the gifts of all, encouraging each other, forgiving each other, carrying each other’s burdens. A new creation Church in Christ recognizes that we are all stronger together when we treat each other with equal dignity and honor, seeing the blessing of difference, and the beautiful richness of a people who don’t disdain other’s gifts but receive them with joy.

Simple question: “what is humanity?” The answer will always be, to some degree, a mysterious one; but what we can say is that humanity is a community of co-equal priest-kings called to worship God by bringing order to the world. And as the Church, that command has not ceased, but taken new shape, as each of us regardless of race, sex, age, class, or relationship all contribute to our joint calling in Christ, to make present in our small way the new creation which brings us not just back, but to a better garden, an eternal paradise, where we shall see God truly face-to-face. Amen.