20th Sunday after Pentecost

 

Genesis 2:4b-9, 18-24

Season of Women

Alright everybody, buckle up because today in our season of women we are going to go all the way back to the beginning.  To the very first woman.  To Eve and to the story of the beginning of humanity that we see in Genesis.  And I am going to invite you to go ahead and get out your bulletins and flip them over to the 1^st Lesson and follow along if you want because we are going to look really closely at this text today.  And I am willing to be bet that you are going to discover a bunch of things that you have never seen before.  But first before we begin, I need to give a big shout out to the Rev Dr Wil Gafney, the incomparable black female scholar, who did a lot of the Hebrew work I am going to share with you today because my Hebrew was never all that great but she has shown me so many amazing things about the Old Testament.  So here we go.

Now I bet unlike some other stuff we have read in this series this text for today was actually pretty familiar, right? We know the creation story.  We know all about Adam and Eve, right?  But actually, we might not know as much as we think we do, because of all the things in the Old testament, this passage is probably one of the most poorly translated into modern English.  And then we have piled centuries of religious, social and political baggage on top of what was already a mistranslated text and now what we think it says and means probably bears little resemblance to what was actually there in ancient Hebrew.

So let’s begin and the beginning, what we see is that the earth is nothing but this sort of barren wasteland and then God creates man.  Except the Hebrew is much cooler than that.  In Hebrew, God takes adamah – earth, dirt, ready to plant soil and forms it into ha-Adam the human, the earth creature and breaths life into it.  So the human comes from the earth, from the soil, which also makes an important point.  I’m a gardener, soil that is this color won’t grow a thing, the Adam, the human is made from the soil of the garden of Eden, rich, dark, healthy soil, which is black, brown or dark red.  In the biblical imagination, the body of this first and perfect human is black not white.

And so, God brings this earth creature to life and plants a garden around it and surrounds it with every good thing.  And then our English bible says “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.”  And from this we have carried this down this idea of women as helpers to men, as secondary, as assistants or even servants to a self-sufficient man.  But the word here for helper is Ezer which really means defensive warrior, it is the person who comes in and saves you from danger or the hand of your enemies.  The vast majority of other when times it’s used in the Old Testament God is this mighty helper.  And everywhere the Ezer is always the stronger party. 

So then God makes all these animals but none of them are suitable. None of them are the ezer. And so we think the bible says that God takes a rib out of a man and makes a woman.  But it doesn’t.  The word here tsela does not mean rib, it’s a Latin mistranslation, it means side, like one side or the other of a house, hill or room.  So basically, what actually happens here is God takes the Adam, our beautiful brown earth creature and cuts it in half and makes two sides and fills in the middle. 

And the Adam sees it’s other half and exclaims ‘This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one shall be called Woman (ishah),  for out of Man (ish) this one was taken.’  The creature that has up until now always been ha-adam the human is now suddenly ish & ishah man and woman, two gendered halves of the same whole.  And then the bible says and “Therefore a man (ish) leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife (ishah), and they become one flesh.” It signifies sort of return to that first united earth creature, that we are literally made to be together.

One more thing to note because over and over we hear this story touted as the biblical model for marriage one and man and one woman together forever, right?  Except these two people aren’t married.  There is no separate word for wife in Hebrew, all women who aren’t children are ishah whether they are married or not and there is no specific word for husband either.  Words commonly associated with marriage don’t appear in the Bible until generations later and usually refer to polygamous or ownership-based unions which clearly don’t follow this or our modern marriage model. 

So that was a lot.  So now what are we supposed to do with all this?  What are we supposed to take away here?  Perhaps the biggest thing we can learn from this first story of Adam and Eve is that we humans, all humans are created to be in relationship.  We are fundamentally incomplete when we are not in relationship with other humans.  And I don’t just mean romantic marriages.  God says “It is not good for this one to be alone.”  Which is not surprising really, because right before this we are told that we in made in the image of God.  God who is a Trinity, who is 3 parts Father, Spirit, Son in one indivisible God.  A God who exists in relationship.

So God sets out to create a creature in his own image.  And God creates a human out of earth and breaths her holy breath into it and brings it to life.  And stands it up in the garden and lets it run around a bit and then says nope this creature doesn’t look like me.  And so God puts it to sleep and cuts it in half ish and ishah mirror images so that humanity can be in relationship.  What it is to be human is to be in search of relationship.  God is a trinity and humanity is a community. We are incomplete without others.

And, those relationships never cease to be hard.  Because we also can’t forget that it takes exactly 12 verses, little more than half a page for this perfectly created couple to turn on each other.  The woman eats the fruit, she gives the fruit to the man, God gets angry with the man and the man turns on her and starts blaming her.  And suddenly, so suddenly, there is sin in the world.  And these perfectly created partners have learned how to hurt each other and they never stop.

And this is where we live, always in this tension, because we are human beings born to love each other, born to desire one another, to care for one another, to fall in love, to need each other, to live in community.  And also capable of the most horrific sin against each other, so terribly prone to violence and blame, betrayal and mistrust and astonishing cruelty. 

And so maybe that is the thing that we can really learn from Eve today.  That we are all in this together.  That it not really about men and women and marriages and power and who serves who, and what roles are right.  But that we are created to be in relationship and there is no getting away from that.  No matter what shape these relationships take, romantic, familial, social, religious, we need to be in mutual relationship.

And that maybe the only way to really do this is to get some help.  God is a Trinity and maybe fundamentally we are meant to be too.  You, me and God.  Knowing our penchant for sin and betrayal, maybe inviting God into our relationships is the only way to make it work.  Our gospel text today made it really clear that we aren’t likely to hold this together on our own, but maybe that’s what Jesus is for, to enter into our relationships with healing mercy and love.  And to remember that we are all made of the same stuff, the same rich brown earth and holy breath.  And no matter how far apart we are, no matter how deeply we are divided, we were literally created to fit back together again.  Amen.