I preached this sermon at St. Lydia's on Sunday, September 5, 2010. The text is Genesis 2:18-25; read it here.
Late last winter I met a good friend in the West Village and we would through the crooked streets and the icy weather and found a tiny little restaurant and ordered a bottle of wine. Both of us are church leaders, and both of us are single women, me dating men and her dating women, and I asked her that night how her dating life was treating her. Her eyes suddenly filled with tears and she looked right at me and said, “I’m so tired. I’m so tired of false starts and disappointments. I’m just ready to be with someone.”
It was in the midst of a particularly trying time in my own dating life, and so we talked a long time, and both got a little teary, and laughed a lot about our mutual state of affairs.
The two of us were both looking for a partner, a helper, and we had held a ton of auditions, and none of them, so far, had gone all that well.
The ‘adam in this creation story holds his own version of auditions for a partner, the rough equivalent of online dating in Ancient Isralite folklore. God says, You know Adam, it’s awfully lonely down there. Let’s get you set up with a partner, huh? And Adam’s like, Sure, God, that sounds like a good plan.
So God gets a little bit of dirt and pats it and molds it, and breathes into it, and puts it in front of Adam and says, How’s this? And Adam’s like, No, no, God...that’s a giraffe! That’s not my partner!
And then it’s a game. God tries everything, and in the process makes hippos and penguins and caterpillars and wildebeests, and with every new animal God presents to the ‘adam, the ‘adam says, No, no! That’s not right. That’s not my partner.
Last winter in our little restaurant in the West Village, my friend’s and my experience wasn’t too far from this story. We’d both been dating online, doing our best to meet people, had been presented with every possible mate, every variety of partner, and to each had said with shock and surprise, “No, no, God, that’s not my partner…that’s a giraffe! That’s not what I’m looking for at all.”
This creation story is wonderful because of its humor. The whole world, it seems, becomes populated by animals through God’s experiments searching for a partner for the ‘adam. Through trail and error, through saying, Is this what you’re looking for? No? Well how about this? an incredible diversity of creatures is created by God. It’s playful and unguarded. Each mistake is named by the ‘adam and added to this crazy pile of animals, until God suddenly decides to try another track.
A few months after my friend cried her eyes out in the West Village, she went out for brunch with a woman some friends set up her up with, and to my delight, promptly fell head over heels in love. In June we met up for brunch, this time in the East Village, and I asked her how it was all going. “It’s amazing,” she said. “She sees me, and she doesn’t get scared, and she doesn’t leave. I’m so scared that she’s going to see who I really am and run away. But she sees me. And she stays.”
My friend has found something different from the trial and error experiments that characterized the winter. She’s found bone of her bones and flesh of her flesh, and whether that relationship lasts for days or months or a lifetime, she’s engaged right now, in this moment, in something that is utterly and completely good and right: the act of seeing someone and being seen.
She’s found a partner, a companion.
Someone who she can reveal herself to.
Someone with whom she can be naked, but not ashamed.
Being in relationship with someone else, whoever it is, or whatever type of relationship it is, a friend or a family member of a partner, takes a tremendous amount of risk. It takes risk to say,
I trust you enough to let you see parts of me I don’t show to anyone else.
I trust you enough to be completely vulnerable.
I trust you enough to show you what’s underneath all of this,
to show you the pieces of myself that I don’t even like to acknowledge exist,
much less look at.
In means allowing someone else to see you as God made you, naked, alone, unafraid, unashamed, vulnerable and astonishingly open. In means, in a sense, returning to the garden, a place before fear and a place without pain, to find a piece of ourselves we thought we had lost long ago.
God looks at the ‘adam and says, It is not good that he should be alone. We need companions, family, friends, lovers in our lives, people who can teach us to be naked and unashamed. Getting there sometimes means sustaining some bumps and some bruises. Some trial and error, a lot of risk, a lot of fear. But in time, we find people who know us so intimately that we could swear they were made from the same raw material we were. We find them and say to ourselves, At last. This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.
We share the sermon at St. Lydia’s, and so I invite you to share a story from your experience that was brought up by the text or my words.
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