One Flesh

Scriptures: The Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 27), A.D. 2015 B

Sermon:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

A myth is a story that makes sense of our world. It teaches us why things are the way they are.

Calling something a myth doesn’t mean that it isn’t true or that it didn’t happen. The Big Bang, Natural Selection, American Exceptionalism, Manifest Destiny, the March of Progress—these are all myths. They tell us who we are and how we got here. They turn human experience into narrative stories, stories that then can guide us through everyday life. Myths help the world make sense. And when they can’t do that any longer, we turn to other explanations, other stories, other myths.

This is important for understanding the book of Genesis. The early chapters of the first book of the Bible are myths. Again, that doesn’t mean that these stories aren’t true, or that they didn’t happen. It means that the stories are told in such a way as to explain grand truths about God, about humanity, and about our world. And what myth could be more important, more true, than that of Adam and Eve?

The pagan myths of the ancient Near East were varied, but they all taught roughly the same three lessons: the gods were born of nature, the universe is cruel and indifferent, and human beings are not terribly important in the grand scheme of things. These myths made sense in a violent and frightening world. The myths of Genesis, however, teach us precisely the opposite. In Genesis, nature is born of one eternal God. The world as God made it is not hostile but good, full of truth and beauty. And human beings, far from being an afterthought, have a key role in upholding and caring for God’s good Creation.

You remember Genesis 1 from Sunday School. God makes the world good. He makes light and separates it from darkness. He forms the waters above and the waters below. He causes the seas to uncover the dry land, and the dry land to bring forth vegetation. Vegetation clears the skies to reveal the heavenly bodies; the seas produce life; and finally come the great beasts of the land. And God looks at all that He has made, and sees that it is good.

Now, in Genesis 2, God does something new. He builds a bridge between the physical and spiritual worlds. He does so by taking a creature formed from earth, and breathing into it God’s own Spirit of life. This hybrid being, half material and half ethereal, God calls A’dam, which means simply, “the earth-critter.” And God tasks this earth-critter with caring for all the wonders that God has made, tending His beautiful Garden of Eden. Adam is God’s steward and sub-creator. He is unique, not because he is the highest or wisest or fairest of all creatures, but because he is the lynchpin that ties together the higher with the lower. Halfway between angel and ape, the earth-critter is the keystone, the hinge, the crown of Creation.

Already this myth has taught us much to make sense of our world. We see how we are beloved of God, how we are to steward and care for all that God has made, and how we are uniquely suspended at the intersection of matter and spirit. We are neither bodies with souls nor souls wearing bodies, but instead a psychosomatic union, a blending of the two. Yet for the first time in Genesis, God now looks at something He has made and declares that it’s not good: “It is not good that the earth-critter should be alone.”

So far everything has been created in harmonious relationship: light and dark, sea and sky, earth and plants, sun and moon, male and female. Yet the earth-critter is alone. Adam has God and the Garden and the beasts of the field, but there is no other creature quite like him. He is unique amongst Creation. Animals can bring him companionship, but they cannot be his helpmates. He needs someone like unto himself yet separate from him, not a copy but a complement.

So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then He took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man He made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one shall be called woman, for out of man she was taken.” Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.

There’s a lot to unpack here. We all know this story, but I fear we do not often hear it the way that it was intended to be heard. Take, for example, that word “helper” or “helpmate.” This seems to imply that woman was made to serve man, to be subordinate to him, but such is not the case. In fact, the word “helpmate” in the Bible most often refers to God. Woman and man are to help one another, to love one another, in the same way that God loves them. The notion that a woman must obey a man comes later, and is clearly referred to as a consequence of sin, of broken relationship—hardly an ideal to emulate.

Then there’s the fact that woman came from man’s rib. Keep in mind that “rib” can mean “side,” and that while I’ve been calling Adam a man, in fact the earth-critter has no gender back when there’s only one of us. For indeed, how can there be male without female? Certain superfluous parts would need to be explained. Only after God removes one side of the earth-critter—only after God, in essence, splits the first human being in half—only then is there gender, is there male and female. The first human being has been pulled apart into two sides, two halves, and so husband and wife are only whole when they again cling together as one flesh.

This is the basis for the Christian understanding of complementarity: the idea that man and woman are different, but not in an inherently hierarchical way. Each side, each gender, complements the other, helps the other, cleaving together as one human flesh. Now there is relationship, reciprocity, mutual dependency. Now there’s sex, and the proliferation of human life. Now, God says, it is good.

How does this help us make sense of relationships today? In loving relationship, in the context of the family, we cannot view one another as anything less than our own flesh and bone. What that means is that we must accept one another for who they really are, not for who we might want them to be. It means treating our partners with equal dignity, as true persons, rather than as objects to be manipulated or used. It means striving to be a helpmate, to give of oneself, rather than focusing only on what we can extract from or get out of one another. It means seeing another person’s flaws honestly and loving them anyway, realizing that we have more than enough flaws of our own.

Men and women drive each other crazy all the time. We always have. And that’s because each of us is at heart precisely what the other is lacking—two sides of the same coin. Only together is humanity whole. Only together do we have a future.

Does that mean that every person has to get married in order to be happy, to lead fulfilling and wholesome lives? Of course not. Jesus never got married. And there are many marriages that clearly should not have occurred in the first place. We live in a broken world and our relationships share in that brokenness. Anyone who’s ever been married knows that marriage is no fairytale. And anyone who’s ever suffered divorce knows just how deeply our relationships can wound us.

Yet it is not good for the man to be alone. Today humanity has not been divided between two people but between seven billion. Everywhere we look, we are surrounded by those who are flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone. Once we were one. Now we are many. And we will never quite be whole until we recognize that what we lack we shall find in others, and what they lack they may well find in us. We must love one another, for we are each one another’s missing pieces, born from each other’s sides. When we give of ourselves, when we recognize our own incompleteness in our neighbor’s incompleteness, when we accept innate human differences without diminishing innate human dignity, when we seek our own good by seeking good for another—then we are made whole. Then we are one flesh. Then we see, as God sees, that all He has made is good.

Remember that we are only whole when we are one. Only as one will we walk again in harmony with God and His Creation. This is what Jesus has come to do, that we may all be one, born again from His wounded side as we all were born from Adam’s. Only as one in Christ will the world make sense again.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.