SPEAKER_00: Grace and peace to you in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Happy June.
SPEAKER_00: Happy summer to you.
SPEAKER_00: It got very hot.
SPEAKER_00: I'm not wearing the robe.
SPEAKER_00: I hope that's okay.
SPEAKER_00: But I I hope we can find ways to enjoy our summer together as a congregation.
SPEAKER_00: This summer we're going to be visiting a set of characters from Scripture together and hopefully getting to know them better, reintroducing ourselves if we if we've heard of them before.
SPEAKER_00: The Bible is full of heroes, most of them deeply flawed.
SPEAKER_00: But aside from the big names, the Bible is also full of lots of ordinary people: shepherds and midwives, grieving mothers, curious bystanders, disciples who showed up quietly and did what was theirs to do.
SPEAKER_00: And so this summer we're going to slow down, and each week we're going to meet a few of them.
SPEAKER_00: One or two or three.
SPEAKER_00: We're going to meet some of them.
SPEAKER_00: Faces of our faith.
SPEAKER_00: That's what this series is.
SPEAKER_00: It's from a sanctified art.
SPEAKER_00: And it's an invitation for us to dig into 16 often overlooked stories from Scripture.
SPEAKER_00: From the earliest pages of Genesis all the way through the early church and acts, through visual art, reflection, and worship together, we will enter these characters' worlds with fresh eyes and asking what they might have to teach us about faithfulness and courage and grace.
SPEAKER_00: But before we do that today, with our story from Genesis 2, let's pray and ask God to bless our time in the scriptures.
SPEAKER_00: Will you pray with me?
SPEAKER_00: God, you are the source of all light, and by your word you give light to the soul.
SPEAKER_00: Pour out on us the spirit of wisdom and understanding, so that our hearts and minds might be opened to see your truth and your way.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: Scripture reading for today is from Genesis chapter 2.
SPEAKER_00: I'm going to read from verse 4b all the way to 7, and then from 15 to 20.
SPEAKER_00: And as you'll notice, I'm going to be referencing really two whole chapters here, chapters two and three of Genesis, but we'll read those verses this morning.
SPEAKER_00: Let's listen for God's word to us today.
SPEAKER_00: On the day the Lord God made earth and sky, before any wild plants appeared on the earth, and before any field crops grew, because the Lord hadn't yet sent rain on earth, and there was still no human to farm the fertile land.
SPEAKER_00: Though a stream rose from the earth and watered all of the fertile land, God formed the human, the Adam, from the topsoil of the fertile land, the Adama, and blew life's breath into his nostrils, and the human came to life.
SPEAKER_00: The Lord God took the human and settled him in the garden of Eden to farm it and take care of it.
SPEAKER_00: The Lord God commanded the human, Eat your fill from all of the garden's trees, but don't eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, because on the day that you eat from it you will die.
SPEAKER_00: Then the Lord God said, It is not good that the human is alone.
SPEAKER_00: I will make for him a helper that is perfect for him.
SPEAKER_00: So the Lord God formed from the fertile land all the wild animals and the birds of the sky and brought them to the human to see what he would name them.
SPEAKER_00: And the human gave each being its name, named all the livestock, the birds in the sky, and all the wild animals.
SPEAKER_00: But a helper perfect for him was nowhere to be found.
SPEAKER_00: So the Lord God put the human into a deep and heavy sleep, and took from his side, and then closed the flesh over it.
SPEAKER_00: And with the side taken from the human, the Lord God fashioned Esha, a woman, and brought her to him.
SPEAKER_00: And the human said, This one is finally bone from my bone, flesh from my flesh.
SPEAKER_00: She will be called Esha because from Esh she was taken.
SPEAKER_00: This is God's word for God's people.
SPEAKER_00: Thanks be to God.
SPEAKER_00: There's a whole sub-genre of social media video that really starts to hit when you're in your 30s.
SPEAKER_00: So, youngsters, you have this to look forward to.
SPEAKER_00: What happens is it's usually just a close-up of someone's face, and there's music playing with subtitles going to the music.
SPEAKER_00: And the heading is something like this When I actually paid attention to the lyrics for the first time, and the person is usually shocked.
SPEAKER_00: Have you seen anything like this?
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
SPEAKER_00: All right.
SPEAKER_00: I know I did.
SPEAKER_00: When I was a 90s kid, I was absolutely convinced that I was connecting to the lyrics of Third Eye Blind.
SPEAKER_00: And then a handful of years ago, one of those videos popped up and I was shaken to my core.
SPEAKER_00: There's this idea out there that I think we all understand intuitively, that when we hear stories or music as children and they become very familiar to us, we actually don't really understand them as deeply as we would if we were hearing them for the first time as adults.
SPEAKER_00: We take whatever our first impressions of the story were, and they become sort of unshakable for us.
SPEAKER_00: So we take our maybe watered down, maybe age-appropriate, sing-song-y, upbeat, catchy version that we knew as a kid, and it quickly becomes the only version.
SPEAKER_00: And honestly, I get it.
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes I wish I didn't know what a semi-charmed kind of life was.
SPEAKER_00: But if I were a real fan of Third Eye Blind, then I would want to know the real lyrics and the stories behind the songs and the band's intentions.
SPEAKER_00: Does that make sense?
SPEAKER_00: These would all be really important to me.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I don't know a real Beatles fan who wasn't absolutely fascinated by the eight-hour-long get back documentary.
SPEAKER_00: You know what I mean?
SPEAKER_00: Rabbi David Foreman calls it the lullaby effect.
SPEAKER_00: The way a story we've heard a hundred times can quietly put us to sleep.
SPEAKER_00: We think we know it, but scripture is stranger and richer than our earliest interpretations of it.
SPEAKER_00: If we want to be real fans of the Bible, we have to move beyond our first readings and our original understandings of things to dig in a little deeper.
SPEAKER_00: Find the bee cuts, you know.
SPEAKER_00: Are we willing to be surprised again?
SPEAKER_00: Firstly, I would bet everyone in here knows this story as the story of Adam and Eve.
SPEAKER_00: Raise your hand.
SPEAKER_00: Is this the story of Adam and Eve?
SPEAKER_00: My NIV Bible growing up actually had that as a heading.
SPEAKER_00: Before you got to verse 4, it said Adam and Eve.
SPEAKER_00: Well, I was surprised as I started studying this story that grammatically speaking, the man does not receive a name in this story at all.
SPEAKER_00: Adam is simply the Hebrew word for person.
SPEAKER_00: And it is a rhyming word in Hebrew with the word for dirt.
SPEAKER_00: Adam is dirt, man.
SPEAKER_00: And Adama is fertile soil, earth.
SPEAKER_00: And so the author of Genesis doesn't begin using Adam as a proper noun for him until chapter 4, verse 25.
SPEAKER_00: But we approach the text knowing the end of the story, and then we go back and we just go, well, this is Adam and this is Eve, right?
SPEAKER_00: Eve doesn't get her name until the 20th verse of chapter 3.
SPEAKER_00: She's Esha.
SPEAKER_00: So we bring these assumptions to this text, and we know this story is Adam and Eve instead of the story of the human who was split into Esh and Isha.
SPEAKER_00: So let's try.
SPEAKER_00: Let's try today to hear the story afresh.
SPEAKER_00: In the beginning of this story, not Genesis 1 with its majestic sweep and its cosmic architecture and its poetic day structure, day one, day two.
SPEAKER_00: This story, this earthier one, God is not hovering over the deep.
SPEAKER_00: God is on God's knees in the dirt.
SPEAKER_00: And the Hebrew is unforgettable.
SPEAKER_00: Ha-adam is born from Ha-Adama, the human from the humus, the earthling from the earth.
SPEAKER_00: My professor Bill Brown called him the groundling, the image of God striding across creation, not to take dominion, but to make a creature of the soil, a being whose very name is a pun on the ground he walks.
SPEAKER_00: And the God of this story is not the God who speaks galaxies into existence from a safe cosmic distance, but one who has us close enough to breathe.
SPEAKER_00: God is a potter.
SPEAKER_00: God's hands and knees get dirty.
SPEAKER_00: This God bends down and lifts handfuls of topsoil and breathes.
SPEAKER_00: There's something almost tender and risky about it.
SPEAKER_00: And then God plants a garden and puts a groundling in it.
SPEAKER_00: To farm it, the text says, and to tend it, to care for it.
SPEAKER_00: And from the very beginning, the human is not the owner of the earth.
SPEAKER_00: The human is the caretaker, its keeper, made from it and responsible to it.
SPEAKER_00: But then something unexpected happens.
SPEAKER_00: God looks at this creature, this beloved, breathing, dirt-borne thing, and says, It is not good that the human should be alone.
SPEAKER_00: Not good.
SPEAKER_00: Those are strong words from the mouth of the God who has been calling everything good and good and very good thus far.
SPEAKER_00: There is something incomplete here, something that doesn't sit right.
SPEAKER_00: And so God, remember the improviser, guess who God is in this story, a God who tries things and experiments.
SPEAKER_00: God brings the animals to the human one by one.
SPEAKER_00: And you picture it, the groundling sitting there in the garden, and here comes a goat, and here comes a sparrow, and here comes something that might be called an armadillo.
SPEAKER_00: And the human names them all, which is its own kind of intimacy.
SPEAKER_00: You can't name something without really looking at it.
SPEAKER_00: But when the last animal has wandered off into the garden, the text delivers its quiet verdict.
SPEAKER_00: A helper perfect for the human was nowhere to be found, still alone.
SPEAKER_00: So God tries something else entirely.
SPEAKER_00: God takes one side of the human, the word is tsela.
SPEAKER_00: It's got that ts on the front.
SPEAKER_00: It's been translated rib for some very interesting and historical reasons, including Latin, that I will not get into.
SPEAKER_00: But suffice it to say, it is actually more accurately translated side.
SPEAKER_00: It just means side.
SPEAKER_00: A whole flank, a whole dimension of a person.
SPEAKER_00: And from that side, uh God fashions someone new.
SPEAKER_00: From the same stuff as humanity, but now a unique part of that dirt person.
SPEAKER_00: And when the human wakes up and sees this new person standing there, the words that come out are a poem.
SPEAKER_00: This one, finally.
SPEAKER_00: Bone from my bones, flesh from my flesh, finally.
SPEAKER_00: There's only some there's almost something funny about the word.
SPEAKER_00: After all the animals, after all the naming, after walking in the garden with God, God's self, finally, someone who is made of the same stuff.
SPEAKER_00: But here's what I want you to notice Esh, man, and Isha, woman, are not the same.
SPEAKER_00: And that and uh doesn't have to be read as entirely separate.
SPEAKER_00: They're made from the same stuff.
SPEAKER_00: There's a use of the word and that I think gets lost in English as well.
SPEAKER_00: It's called a marism.
SPEAKER_00: And that's when something means everything in between it.
SPEAKER_00: When God says I am the Alpha and the Omega, God doesn't mean I am not beta and theta and eta, right?
SPEAKER_00: It's all of it.
SPEAKER_00: All people, all of humanity here are represented by these two people.
SPEAKER_00: The story is not a story about uh, it's not a morality tale about disobedience.
SPEAKER_00: It's not a story about romance, it's a story about what humanity actually is: a community, a unity made up of different people.
SPEAKER_00: We are not meant to be self-sufficient.
SPEAKER_00: We are not meant to be identical.
SPEAKER_00: We are made from the same ground and animated by the same breath, but we are wonderfully, necessarily not the same.
SPEAKER_00: And so when we get to chapter three and the consequences roll in hard labor, thorns and thistles, the pain, my professor Bill Brown is careful to say these are not punishments handed down by an angry god.
SPEAKER_00: These are descriptions, etiologies, scholars call them, stories that explain why the world is the way it is.
SPEAKER_00: Why is why farming is so hard, why we work so hard in the land while childbirth is so painful, why snakes slither on their bellies.
SPEAKER_00: These are the same.
SPEAKER_00: These are the things that the story is trying to explain to us.
SPEAKER_00: It's not God slamming a door, it's a story trying to make sense of a complicated world.
SPEAKER_00: God made us and called us very good, and also made us individuals with our own wills, these endlessly uh curious, uncontrollable dust people who, in their questioning and their craftiness and their boundary pushing, undoubtedly experience pain and toil and heartbreak and suffering, and ultimately death.
SPEAKER_00: And that's not a death sentence.
SPEAKER_00: It's just an accurate description of the human experience.
SPEAKER_00: And the garden doesn't end in shame and exile as the final world, the final word.
SPEAKER_00: It ends with humans out in the world, different from each other, carrying the image of God and their particularity, and needing each other precisely because none of us has the whole anymore.
SPEAKER_00: None of us has all of it, right?
SPEAKER_00: And so this same author, just a few chapters later, tells another story where the cure isn't sameness, the cure is each other.
SPEAKER_00: That's the diagnosis at the heart of these stories.
SPEAKER_00: A few chapters later, now after we've learned in Genesis that we are all our siblings' keeper, and after God hung the bow in the sky, never to seek correction through violence again.
SPEAKER_00: The author tells a city full of people that had begun again to force conformity.
SPEAKER_00: If you'll remember, there was only one language, and everyone was making bricks, and they all had one task, and the task was to build a tower with its top in the heavens.
SPEAKER_00: Do you remember this story?
SPEAKER_00: Tower of Babel.
SPEAKER_00: And once again God took the monolithic, the singular, the unicultural people, and scattered them across the whole earth, giving them different languages.
SPEAKER_00: Not just out of the little garden, but now just across the whole world.
SPEAKER_00: Different songs, different tasks, different names for things.
SPEAKER_00: Because the cure isn't sameness.
SPEAKER_00: The cure is each other.
SPEAKER_00: So this week you will meet people who are not like you.
SPEAKER_00: They'll carry different values, they'll speak different languages, they'll have different signs in their yards, different flags on their porches, different music coming out of their car windows.
SPEAKER_00: They may even ask you to call them different names.
SPEAKER_00: And they'll move through the world differently than you do.
SPEAKER_00: And we have ways we can respond to the difference we see in others.
SPEAKER_00: Some of those differences will feel small, and some of them will feel enormous and insurmountable.
SPEAKER_00: And is it even worth it?
SPEAKER_00: But if we write anyone off, before loneliness hardens into suspicion, before suspicion hardens into contempt, remember where you both came from.
SPEAKER_00: The same dirt, the same breath of life, the same God on both knees in the garden, hands full of earth, unwilling to make just one kind of person.
SPEAKER_00: This one finally.
SPEAKER_00: Bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh.
SPEAKER_00: These aren't just Adam's words, they're yours and mine.
SPEAKER_00: So go today and build something, but maybe not something like a skyscraper, maybe something more like a community garden.
SPEAKER_00: Invite someone to your table who doesn't look like you or think like you.
SPEAKER_00: Show up for someone whose life is entirely different than yours.
SPEAKER_00: Let your differences be the beginning of a conversation and not the end of it.
SPEAKER_00: Because that's what we are made for, not to be a lonely monolith who has everything the same and everything in common, but to be a family.
SPEAKER_00: Messy, particular, and irreducibly different from one another, yet bound together by the same breath of God.
SPEAKER_00: May it be so.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.