Sermon: “It’s Not Good to Be Alone”

Text: Genesis 2:18-24

27^th Sunday in Ordinary Time (B)

October 4, 2009

Scripture introduction.  Our second reading this morning is taken from the second chapter of Genesis, which tells the creation story from a different and more personal viewpoint than the lofty “In the beginning . . .” language used in the familiar verses of chapter one.  In chapter two we read how God formed a man—in Hebrew, adam—from the dust or mud of the earth—in Hebrew, adamah.  At this point in the story, the word adam appears to be descriptive, rather than a proper name.[1]  It’s unclear whether the word refers to a male human or simply to a “human being.”  Our text this morning begins after God has created the human being.  Up until this point in the story, God has seen that everything was good; but as our text begins, God notices that something is not good.[2] 

God said, “It is not good that the man [or the human being] should be alone.”  So God decided, in the words of the New Revised Standard Version, to “make him a helper as his partner.”  In Hebrew there is nothing subordinate implied by the word “helper,” which is used sometimes even to describe God.”[3]  The sense of the Hebrew version is that God wanted to create a helper that was fitting,[4] appropriate, corresponding—different, yet also the same.  So God formed out of the ground the animals and birds, which God brought to the human to be named.  But none of them was fitting. 

Realizing the problem, and the solution, God caused a deep sleep or trance to fall upon the human, and God took from the human a rib, which God made into a woman.  Again, no subordination is intended.[5]  Rather, as the only creature that did not come from the ground, the woman’s close affinity and kinship with her partner is affirmed.  Now, for the first time in Genesis,[6] the human is called a “man”—in Hebrew, ish.  English and  Hebrew both emphasize the relationship between man and woman: man, ish; woman, ishsha.[7]  And now the man is happy:  “Finally, bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.”

Sermon.  One of my favorite blues recording artists, Kevin Moore, sings a song called “Loola Loo”: 

I’m lookin’ out my window Feelin’ kinda blue I ain’t heard from my baby Did she find somebody new So I called up her number And her number had changed So I climbed up to the mountain And I screamed out her name I said Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey My, My Loola Loo

I can’t give up on Loola I’ve gotta take a stand So I wrote this little letter And I gave it to the Postman It said Baby please call me Please drop me a line Come on and throw an old dog a bone I need to know if you’re still mine Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey My, My, Loola Loo[8]

It seems like at least half of the popular songs, whether they are blues or bop, rap or rock, tell the story of lost love.  Probably more than half of the jokes that stand-up comedians tell depend for their humor upon assumptions about the problems of relationships between men and women.  We even have a name for it: the “Battle of the Sexes.”  So on this World Communion Sunday, a day when we receive the Presbyterian Peacemaking offering, two days after the birthday of Mahatma Ghandi, you might question my judgment in reaching outside the lectionary to preach on this text from Genesis about the creation of man and woman.  Why go this direction?

Well, for one thing, when we look around our particular part of the world for the most common examples of lack of peace and peacemaking, it is often within the home.  The statistics are numbing—just to see how many families are characterized by verbal abuse and violence between husband and wife and between parents and children.  Yes, we have violent crime.  Yes, our country is involved in war; and some of the sons and daughters of this church currently are involved in those wars; and we pray for peace for them and for the world.  But if we had to say where our most common violence would be, it would be within the family.  It’s a violence that rarely is discussed among Presbyterians.  It’s not supposed to happen in our churches.  But I can assure you that it does.  So there’s something very appropriate about choosing a text about family relationships on a day when we think about peacemaking.

This was probably coincidental, but the lectionary gospel passage today also dealt with marriage relationships—one of the passages where Jesus was asked about divorce.  That just seemed too bleak for me—watching Jesus, who knew God’s will for peaceful and harmonious relationships, struggling with the reality of disharmony and divorce.  I don’t know: it just didn’t seem to be a very good peacemaking passage.  For me, it was much more hopeful to read, “Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.”  In the beginning, that’s how God intended it to work.  And when we are at the top of our games, that’s how it really works for us. 

The first chapters of Genesis consist of stories telling deep truths about who we are as humans and who we are in relationship to God.  Our text for today teaches that we  were made for each other.  One is not superior to the other; we are different, but we are complimentary.  So many of the problems in family relationships arise out of one person’s attempts to use power over other family members.  It can be physical power.  It can be economic power.  It can be the power to articulate and argue.  It can be power over the children or other products of the relationship.  But when we forget that we are, as the New Revised Standard Version translates it, “partners” and a “helpers,” problems in the relationship begin.  We are not then living according to God’s intentions for us or for our relationship.

There are lessons in this text, as well, for those of us who are not married.  Even God, it seems, needed to learn the lesson that the human is meant to live in community.  Maybe some of us have had the thought that if we could just get away from all the other people in the world and live by ourselves, devoting ourselves to a life of prayer and contemplation, to fellowship with God, we would be happy.  In effect, that’s what the first human had in the Garden of Eden—an idyllic life and sweet communion with God.  But the human was not happy!  And God recognized the problem:  “It is not good that the human should be alone.”  All humans—male and female, married and not married, old and young, introverts and extroverts—need the companionship and friendship of other humans.  And like the relationship between husband and wife, these other relationships should be characterized by mutuality and partnership, with neither person seeking to use power over the other person.  Power is a fact of life on this fallen earth.  When we find that we have power, it is our responsibility to use it for the good and against the wrong.  But in relationships power is not to be used by one person over against the other.

When we come to the Table of Christ, we come as equals, as “helpers” and “partners” of one another in the ministry to which Jesus has called us.  Jesus once told his disciples, “I no longer call you servants; now I call you friends.”  In taking this turn, Jesus was showing the way for all of us to satisfying relationships of mutuality.  Jesus was pointing the way to peace in the world.  As we gather around this Table of World Communion, we are shoulder to shoulder with Christians of other races, of different cultures, of different economic conditions.  We stand next to Christians in Turkey and Palestine and Iraq and Iran and Pakistan.  They are our equals, and we are to love them.

I’ll close with this question.  Could it be that God, too, desires a relationship of mutuality and friendship and love with us?  Maybe God recognized Adam’s problem so quickly because God, too, yearns for the kind of love and relationship that Adam was missing.  Perhaps that is why God chose to take human form and to come to us in the person of Jesus, to teach us by example and not merely by words, to love us, and finally, to die for us, as the highest expression of God’s love for each one of us.  God looks for us and sometimes we are not there.  God calls up our number, and sometimes we do not answer.  So God climbs to the mountain and screams out our name, “Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey, My, My Loola Loo.”  How will we answer God?  How will we answer each other?