Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday October 3 – World Communion Sunday
Reading: Genesis 2:18-24
The bible story that we just heard – you may be most familiar with it as a wedding reading. And I’m not surprised by that. After all, the narrator of the book of Genesis has structured the story that way, telling us about how the original human was alone, so God created all of the other animals, but none of them was a suitable partner for the human, so eventually when the first human was sleeping, God divided the human in half and created partners. Then the narrator ends with, “And that is why a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.”
I can almost picture this story being told around a campfire, with a grandparent saying to their grandchildren, “Oh, so you want to know why people leave their homes when they get married. Let me tell you a story about the first human, and how God created an equal partner for them. Well, it happened like this. The Lord God said, ‘It is not good that the human should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.’”
Which might work very well in some partnerships, in some marriages, but it is less appropriate in others. We know today that not all marriages, not all life partnerships are between a man and a woman; and if this story is interpreted as saying that “the bible says that only a man and a woman are allowed to find their life partner in each other,” then we can cause great harm to a great many people.
Even our understanding of gender is different today than it was in the past – we know that “male” and “female” aren’t the only genders – we know that gender is a beautiful spectrum rather than only two options. If we interpret this story as teaching us that there are only two genders and they are perfect opposites of one another, or that only a cis-gender man and a cis-gender woman can complete each other, again, we can cause much harm to many people.
And a third challenge with interpreting this passage as a perfect description of marriage comes if you continue to read your way through the book of Genesis. Almost every family that you encounter in the book of Genesis involves polygamy. You don’t have one man and one woman completing each other – instead you have many people coming together to form a family unit. So the interpretation of this passage as a description of the only way to do marriage isn’t even consistent with the book that it’s found in.
So… what can we do with this story that we find in the bible? It is a troublesome story if we take it to mean the one and only way to describe marriage, and the thing that we all should aim for. So what can we do with this story instead?
I would suggest that we go back to the beginning. This is a story that begins with one human, and by the end of the story there are two humans. The human is no longer alone.
Most translations struggle to capture the nuances of the original Hebrew. The nouns naming these humans shift throughout the story. The original human is not a man, in terms of being a male human being. His name, adam, is related to adamah, the dust that he was created out of. Maybe instead of Adam, we might better name this human Dusty. My Old Testament professor at AST liked to name this human as the Earthling, a human created out of humus or earth. This was not a gendered being, but rather this first Earthling contained all genders.
It is only when the Earthling is divided in half that genders begin to appear, and the Hebrew names for them begin to change. The adam has become ish and ishshah. Two genders at first, but I can imagine other genders emerging in subsequent generations from this first human who contained all genders within themself.
And God said, “it is not good for the human to be alone.” We are created for community. We are created for one another. If we are hermits, we can’t flourish, we can’t fully be who God created us to be.
And whether we find our community in marriage or life partnership, whether we find our community in families of different sizes and structures, whether we find our community in a found or chosen family, whether we find our community in our church family, whether we find our community in community groups – when we find our people, when we are no longer alone, then we can be who God created us to be, and flourish with one another even as we support others in their flourishing.
One of the biggest challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic has been community. How can we be in community with one another when we can’t be in the same place as each other? We have had to find so many creative ways to build and strengthen community in the past year – and I do believe that creativity is one of the gifts that the Holy Spirit gives to us. We have been empowered to build community through outdoor gatherings, through virtual gatherings, through the comments section in Facebook live videos, through phone calls, through physically distanced gatherings and social bubbles.
Along with all of the outpouring of creativity though, the past year and a half has taught us, maybe more than we ever knew before, that we need community. We need each other.
And today, on World Communion Sunday, we have an opportunity to remember that our church community stretches far beyond the walls of this church, far beyond the borders of this community, far beyond the United Church of Canada, far beyond even the limits of our worship livestream. Today we remember that we are in community with followers of Jesus in every corner of the world. When we gather at the communion table today, we remember that the table stretches to every corner of the world. We remember that we are sharing the bread and the cup with people of every language and culture. We remember that God’s beloved community includes people of all times and all places. We remember that we are in community with, in communion with so many more people than we could ever meet in a lifetime.
It is not good for us to be alone, so God has given us the gift of community. And for that, let us thank God with our whole beings. Amen.
Adam and Eve in the Garden – Creation
Songea Cathedral, Tanzania
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