A sermon of hope on Genesis 2:4-25
This is a sermon preached at Evensong, Jesus College, Oxford, on the fourth Sunday of Epiphany 2021.
Whilst browsing Twitter the other day I came across the most amazing account profile bio. They described themselves succinctly like this: People loving Potter & Physicist. Artist. A&E Doctor. Gardener and Baker of bread. I paused for a moment just to admire how impressive this person’s skill-set was, and then I took at my own humble bio which describes me as The Church of England’s lay minister for snacks and dogs. Then I thought: If God had a Twitter account, God’s bio might be very similar to that highly skilled Twitter users: Loves people. Physicist. Potter. Artist. Gardener. Doctor. Baker. Then I started to think that maybe I’m not the only one telling porky pies in my Twitter bio.
Of course, the opening chapters of Genesis provide plenty of fuel for us to imagine God as most of these wonderfully creative things. God the physicist, who shapes the heavens themselves and brings forth light itself using a strange alchemy as unknown and unfathomable to me as anything that occurs in a physics lab. In chapter 2, our reading for today, God is a potter, using the dust or clay from the ground, and with that God forms and shapes an earthling, as brown as the earth from which it came. An Adam, which does not – cannot - live until God the Doctor literally breathes life into it. God is a gardener and so God makes things grow. God plants a garden with things pleasing to the eye and good to eat but because God is also an artist, this place to enjoy, this Eden, is also a place of indescribable beauty and wonder. God the potter makes more things from the dusty ground. God mixes the dust with water and with this pliable earth, God fashions animals and birds. And because God is a compassionate creator, God recognises that the earthling is lonely, so God the Doctor anaesthetises the earthling and performs surgery which according to rabbinic exegesis, splits it in two, and like cell mitosis there are now two: an Is and Issa, or a man and woman.
I think we can get bogged down in this passage by interpreting and reinterpreting what this story of creation tells us about people. What it tells us about human sexuality. What it tells us about hierarchy. What it tells us about gender roles and the importance of marriage. We can fall into the trap of using it as a convenient hook to hang our prejudices or theological biases on or worse, it can be used an exegetical stick to beat people with.
Now, I’m not fluent in any biblical languages. I can and obviously do make use of excellent biblical scholarship to translate the Hebrew and can discuss how certain words have been translated to render a particular meaning. For example, we could discuss how the word Adam means a human being and not necessarily a male human being, though Adam frequently gets translated into “man.” Or we could talk about how the Hebrew word usually translated into “rib” typically means “side” – the same word appears when the ark of the covenant is introduced and this word “Tsela” is used to describe the literal sides of the ark. We could go there, and get into the implications of this mistranslation for female subordination throughout the ages, but I’m reluctant to when so many learned scholars have already traversed that rocky hermeneutical ground before me.
I’m not a linguist but I am fluent in the language of hope. That’s what I find in scripture and that’s what I am called to share with you all today. I’ve had to really flex my muscles in this bleak season to wrestle hope from the pages of my Bible, because all seems hopeless at the moment. The days all merging into one seamless glob of despair, lethargy and frustration. It’s tempting to cry “I just want life to go back to how it was before.” Imperfect, flawed, but comfortingly familiar. Maybe this is an echo of an ancient yearning to return to the before-times, to an Eden that God intended to be ours.
In verse 18 God speaks and says, “it is not good for the Adam to be alone.” Anyone who has spent the best part of lockdown by themselves will feel the sting of that remark. Isolation and loneliness have been deeply painful realities of the past year and it is unrelenting. For true wholeness and human fulfilment, we need to be together, in communion and community with other people.
Maybe that’s where the hope is best expressed in this piece of scripture: God the Doctor diagnoses the problem – loneliness - and provides a remedy: Companionship. Friendship. Fellowship. Togetherness. Community. God gave us each other. We are God’s gift to one another. As the newly created man declares in wonder:
“This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.”
Phylis Trible describes the creation story in Genesis 2 as a love story gone awry. We know what happens next don’t we. The tree. The fruit. The serpent. The fracture between God and God’s people and distrust and brokenness creeping into relationships between people and other people. I am bone of your bone and you are flesh of my flesh, but somewhere along the line, we forgot how to relate to each other.
Our fractured disconnectedness is playing out horribly right now. The pandemic has revealed the extent of the disintegration. The rot that has set in. We regard other people as dangerous vectors of disease to be shrunk away from on our daily walks, or we tediously police one anothers behaviour with a relentless and unforgiving savagery that makes us exacting and petty. We can find ourselves digitally connected with hundreds of people but yet still feel profoundly, primordially lonely when the device gets puts down. We yearn for connection with others, even if we can’t always articulate what that means. Brené Brown calls this weird sensation “the lonely feeling.” You can experience it when you’re in a crowded room, or even inside a marriage, and of course, when you’re actually alone. It’s that feeling that says: This isn’t how it’s supposed to be.
We were made for companionship, it is literally how we were moulded. The memory of our interdependence to one another is pressed into our flesh, into our souls, the fingerprints of God indelibly marked upon our inner selves. We were never meant to do this on our own.
My hope for us all is that not one of us shall be alone. That when we’re no longer in the grip of this pandemic we should seek out and nurture relationships with others like we feel in our bones and flesh that they too are creatures of the earth. That we should be builders of community and if we can’t find a community to belong to, then we start one ourselves, from the ground up, just as God intended.
We need each other. We were quite literally, made for each other. If you feel the sting of loneliness and disconnectedness right now, then have hope that God diagnoses the problem and a remedy is coming. God the Doctor is still in the business of breathing life into dead things and then placing us where we are needed the most. Spring and new life is coming. The rivers will still flow. The trees will still bloom. The fruit will set and grow. The birds will make nests and they will sing and we will be able to enjoy it all. Have hope: This unnatural way of life isn’t forever. Have faith, for God is still planting a garden in this good but imperfect world. Have hope.
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