(Preached on Sunday, October 04, 2009)
God said, “It’s not good for the Man to be alone; I’ll make him a helper, a companion.” -Genesis 2:18
A nurse escorted a tired, anxious young man to the bedside of an elderly man. “Your son is here,” she whispered in the ear of the patient. She had to repeat the words several times before the patient’s eyes opened. He was heavily sedated because of the pain of his heart attack and he dimly saw the young man standing outside the oxygen tent. He reached out his hand and the young man tightly wrapped his fingers around it, squeezing a message of encouragement. The nurse brought a chair next to the bed for the young man to sit down. All through the night the young man sat holding the old man’s hand, and offering gentle words of hope. The dying man said nothing as he held on tightly. As dawn approached, the patient died. The young man gently released the lifeless hand and went to notify the nurse. “Who was that man?” he asked. The startled nurse replied, “I thought he was your father!” “No, he was not my father, I never saw him before.” “Then why didn’t you say something when I took you to him?” asked the nurse. “He needed his son. When I realized he was too sick to tell whether or not I was his son, I knew how much he needed me.”
Jean Vanier, founder of the l’Arche communities for mentally and emotionally challenged people, once observed, “There are times when together we discover that we make up a single body, that we belong to each other and that God has called us to be together as a source of life for each other.” This was the purpose of our creation. This is why Jesus called into being a community around himself and why the Holy Spirit brought into being the Church. But it is not just the purpose of the creation of Christian community, but the purpose of the creation of human beings themselves.
Stories are the ways ancient people explained things. The modern scientific approach to explaining something is to analyze it, break it down to its component parts, look for the lowest common denominator, and reduce it to its prime state. There is nothing wrong with that approach. In fact, we have made marvelous strides in understanding the universe around us through our scientific inquiry. But it is not the only way to understand the world and sometimes a story can go to the heart of the matter and touch us on deeper levels, truly illuminating without explaining all the details. Stories often communicate truth, which analysis overlooks or destroys in the process. (It is the difference between dissecting a frog and studying a living frog.)
The passage we read from Genesis 2 is such a story. One truth this story seeks to convey is that human beings were created for companionship. “It is not good for the Man to be alone; I’ll make him a helper, a companion,” said God. To be human is to be in relationship. It is to be with and for another. God recognizes that the human being needs a partner, a helper, a companion. To be fully human entails more than sovereignty over the animals or the instinctive ties of blood and family. It requires a relationship like no other, an intimate connection, not bound by biology or any other law. That connection makes the world meaningful and holy. It makes us human.
Originally God created us to be in companionship with God. The great African-American preacher, James Weldon Johnson, captured beautifully this desire by God in his sermon-poem “The Creation.” It begins:
“And God stepped out on space,
And he looked around and said:
I’m lonely –
I’ll make me a world.”
It goes on to describe God creating the sun, moon and stars, the earth, oceans, plants and animals. And it was all good, but God was lonely still. Finally, God decided to make a human being. Johnson describes that in these words:
“Up from the bed of the river
God scooped the clay;
And by the bank of the river
He kneeled him down;
And there the great God Almighty
Who lit the sun and fixed it in the sky,
Who flung the stars to the most far corner of the night,
Who rounded the earth in the middle of his hand;
This Great God,
Like a mammy bending over her baby,
Kneeled down in the dust
Toiling over a lump of clay
Till he shaped it in his own image;…”
What a picture, capturing God’s great desire for companionship. A desire so great God was willing to do the dirty work, getting down in the mud and dust of creation in order to fashion a companion for God’s self. That need for companionship is itself a divine attribute. Our need for companionship is part of our being created in the image of God.
But true companionship, true community, can only be formed between creatures of equality. The animals, as marvelous and loving as they are, cannot fully provide it, for they are not on the same level with us. And God cannot fully provide it, for God is not on the same level, either. We can be in relationship with our animal friends and with God, but we cannot be intimate, one-flesh, fully equal partners and companions.
The primary truth here is the intimacy, companionship, and community is in our very DNA. It is a core element of what it means to be human. It is also a core element of what it means to be Church.
One of the communities of relationship we most clearly understand is family. Here in America, our family lives present a strange paradox. We often wish that our families would function in an emotionally healthy way and look something like the family on the old Leave It to Beaver TV show. Yet it’s normal for a family to be dysfunctional and fractured and most of our families actually look more like the Simpsons. There’s our ideal of family, and then there’s the reality.
The same is true for our church family. We have an idea that we should always be united in Christ, always be singing “Bless Be the Tie That Binds,” but the truth is that we fight and are mean to one another. We exclude and do not always love with the love of Christ. Sometimes church life is more like an episode of the Jerry Spring Show than like an episode of Leave It to Beaver.
Even so, we are called by Jesus into community and we have just witnessed how we are created for community. It is important to remember that the Bible does not say that we are all friends in Christ. We choose our friends, but we cannot choose family. This means that when a member of our church gets on our nerves or votes against our proposal in the business meeting, we still love that person, just as we love a brother even though he steals our toys or a cousin even though she gets more attention. We still love them because they are family.
All churches are like families; they’re imperfect. There is no church where everyone agrees on the style of worship and the structure of power. There is no church where everyone agrees with the pastor 100 % of the time. Fortunately, the church was not made to be perfect; it was called to be a family. We bicker, we pout, we hurt – but on Sunday, we all gather around the Table to eat the common loaf of bread and drink from the common cup of the fruit of the vine. As we do we remember that Christ unites us. Even though we disagree, we sing, “The fellowship of kindred minds is like to that above.” We hold each other up while holding up Jesus as the example. We are created for companionship. None of us has to, or can, go it alone. We are in this together.