Sermon – Genesis 2 – September 2, 2019

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Today we begin another year of working through the whole story of the Bible. Starting today in Genesis, we move chronologically through the Old Testament until December 15th. We do take some pretty huge narrative leaps in order to cover the entire Old Testament in 14 Sundays, but we should get a sense of the narrative arc of the Old Testament in that time. Then from January until Easter, we will be reading the Gospel of Mark. From Easter to the end of May we get some passages from Acts and 1 Corinthians. This schedule is called the Narrative Lectionary and it has a four year cycle with a different gospel featured each year. And our children and family Sunday School class will follow the same schedule.

I like using the Narrative Lectionary because as Presbyterians we claim as inspiration the whole story of the Bible. Yes we prioritize Jesus as a unique revelation and inspiration, but we believe his life, teachings, death, and resurrection are consistent with the testimony of the Hebrew Scriptures or Old Testament. Another way of saying it is that we read the whole Bible, but we do read through the lens of Christ. 

Today we begin with a very particular portion of the creation story.

We skip Genesis chapter 1 this year. Genesis 1 is the seven days of creation: on the first day God did this and said it was good. On the second day God did this and said it was good. We skip all that. We also don’t get the whole bit about the serpent and the eating of the forbidden fruit. That comes in chapter 3.

Instead, we get a story that focuses primarily on the creation of the plants, the humans, and the other animals.

This story has been used, wrongly, to justify heterosexual marriage as the only legitimate form of marriage. I’ll say more about that, but first, here is the core message for this morning. This text tells us who we are as human beings and who we are called to be. Specifically, we as human beings are called to care for the earth and care for each other. That is our dual purpose.

Let’s start in verses 4-7. Reading from the NRSV translation “In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no one to till the ground. but a stream would rise from the earth, and water the whole face of the ground— then 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. And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed. ”  

So the initial problem was that there was no one to till the ground. My friend Dr. Bobby Williamson, says that what God really wanted was a garden, but in order to have a garden, God needed someone to take care of it, so God created a human for that specific purpose. In other words, the earth is not here for us. We are here for the earth. God created us to care for the earth. 

Now let’s look at this person God created. The translation misses a lot here. The Hebrew word that is translated “man” is “adam” and adam really means human. We are all adam. We are all human. It does not mean a gendered male. We will get the word for a gendered male later in the story. When God creates adam, God creates a human without specifying gender. 

The Hebrew word “dust of the ground” is adamah. Or earth. So the text really says God formed a human without specific gender or adam from adamah, the earth. Another translation that preserves the Hebrew wordplay and removes the gender is “from the earth God formed an earthling”. 

Now there is a lot of stuff I’m going to skip over here for the sake of time. 

In verse 18 we have God saying for the first time in the Bible that something is not good. In chapter 1 everything God made was declared good. In verses 18 of chapter 2, the first thing that God declares as not good is that the human is alone. 

God decides to solve that problem by creating a “helper as a partner”. And that is fine translations, except when we read that today we might tend to diminish the role of helper in a way that was not intended. Because this has been read through a patriarchal, hetero-normative lens for so long, we might already be setting up an unequal heterosexual relationship in our minds, but remember in the text, the earthling does not yet have gender and the Hebrew word for helper is not hierarchical. The word “ezer” and it can mean many different kinds of helper, including the kind of help God provides to humans. In other places in the Bible God is referred to as an ezer or helper. “God, be my helper, be my ezer.” So when God is our helper, is God subservient? No. What about when we are very sick and a medical team helps to make us well, are they subservient? No. So helper is not a subservient word. “Ezer” is also the word from which Ezra is derived which is a man’s name in the Bible. What God is looking for is a mutually helpful partnership. Not just two people being together, but two people helping each other.

After God determines to create a partner, God creates all the animals. God wants to create a partner as a helper and so creates each animal as an attempt to fill that need. The trial and error method of creation here is really fascinating by the way. What does that say about God, but let’s not dwell on that today. 

Eventually, after about 8 million tries which is about the number of species there are on the earth, God has another idea.  In verse 21 we get what has been interpreted as a surgical removal of a rib to create a woman, but even here there is another way to read the text. Rib can also be translated as “side.” God took one side of the human and created a woman. Or God split the non gendered human in half and created gendered women and men, the first time the text gives clear indication that there are now two genders. In verse 23 it says, “Then the human (adam) said, “This at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh, this one shall be called Woman (or Ishah which is the first clearly gendered term for a human) for out of Man (here the word is not adam but ish) this one was taken.” Now we could say “Ahah! Out of man she was taken, so the first person was a man” but at the same time the text goes to a lot of trouble to save the gendered language for this moment as we should pay attention to that. 

The last verse is one of those texts that people like to use as some kind of proof that all couples should be heterosexual. It does not have to be read that way. Verse 24 “Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.” What matters here is how we read this text. I believe the way we should read it is descriptively. This is describing the reality that there are women and men most people are one of those two genders and that pair bonds are usually women and men. That is descriptive of the way things are. We should read this story as describing a common feature of the world which is heterosexual pair bonds. It would be nice if we also had an origin story for same gender pair bonds, but we just don’t get origin stories for everything that exists. 

We should not read this text prescriptively. We should not read this text as saying all pairs bonds must be or should be heteosexual. The text never says that, does it? It never says, Therefore a man must leave his father and mother and marry a woman. It says, this is the way things are for most people and here is a little story about why it usually happens that way. It is descriptive not prescriptive. 

So who are we and who are we called to be, based on this story? What does it mean to be human? First, it means we are called to care for the earth. We were created to be gardeners.  God wanted a garden, so God created humans for the specific purpose of tending the garden. If we read that in the context of our current ecological crisis, we see that the way we are currently destroying the earth is fundamentally against our character or purpose in being created. Or a positive way to say that is that if we want to be who God created us to be, we have to get connected to the earth and we have to prioritize advocacy for the earth. We were created to be environmentalists.

And second, we were created to help each other. That doesn’t mean we have to get married to anyone in particular or get married at all, but it does mean that helping other humans is our fundamental purpose. We were created as ezers or helpers. 

Yesterday at our Session retreat we drafted a new purpose statement for our church. The statement is “Govans Presbyterian is a progressive faith community empowering people to make the world better.” I’ll let Karen tell you more about that in ChurchWorks, but what we can say from this ancient creation story is that we can all make the world better by caring for the earth and caring for each other. We may each answer that calling in different specific ways, but everyone is called. Care for the earth. Care for each other. How will you answer that call? How will live out that common purpose? How will you be who God created you to be.