Mars and Venus in Eden and Beyond

Genesis 1:26-27 (NRSV), 2:18-25
Then God said, "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth." So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them…
Yahweh Elohim formed from the earth every living creature of the field and every flying creature of the air and brought them to the earth creature to see what it called them and what the earth creature named the living creature, that’s what its name was. So the earth creature gave names to all the beasts and birds of the air and to all the living things of the field, but for the earth creature an equal and adequate helper was not found. So Yahweh Elohim caused a great sleep to fall on the earth creature and it slept and God took one of its ribs and flesh closed in to fill the gap. Yahweh Elohim built a woman with the rib God took from the earth creature and brought her to the earth creature.
The earth creature said,
“This now is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh;
So this will be called woman for from man she was taken.”
So it is that a man leaves his father and his mother and will cling to his wife and they become one flesh. And the two were naked, the earth creature and his wife, and they were not ashamed.

I don’t think that the main point I want to make today in this sermon is going to be very controversial. The thing I want to say is this: Men and women are different. There I’ve said it. Men and women are different. Now we’re not all that different. The folks who mapped the human genome code say that there are only 78 genes separating us. But those 78 genes can be pretty significant.

For instance, from my experience it seems that there women have a gene that men don’t have that allows them to tell what clothes look good together. For me brown’s a good color and grey’s a good color, too. Why can’t you wear them together? But a woman’s going to look at that outfit a little differently and that’s why, when I’m in doubt, I run things by Suzanne or Rachel. No amount of HGTV is going to help me do that well.

Men, on the other hand, have a gene that allows us to store a vast amount of information about things we are very interested in. Like the batting averages of minor league baseball players, the specs on boat engines, and the top speed of high performance cars we will never even own. That’s a gene to be proud of!

Men have a gene that makes us blissfully unaware of impending emotional outbursts. We may be very proud of this but I don’t think we can count it as a particular strength. We also have a gene that allows us to take on any project, including driving across the country, without the need for directions. Biblical scholars now think that this may be the reason that Moses and the people of Israel spent 40 years in the wilderness.

Women have a gene that allows them to do more than one thing at the same time, like talk to you about parent-teacher conferences and at the same time doing a detailed analysis of your emotional state. Men have a difficult time watching a TV ad for Tylenol they’ve seen thirty times and paying attention to anything else being said in the room.

But I’m just being funny now (or not!). There’s a lot of research, though, that shows that men and women are really different. A recent book about this that became rather famous was by John Gray called Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. Gray argued that we have problems in our relationships because we forget that we’re supposed to be different. He starts the book by imagining that that the citizens of Mars (men) look through a telescope at the citizens of Venus, who are women. They fall in love with them, build a space ship and travel to Venus where they find that they have a wonderful relationship with the Venutians because they are different. But when they go to live on earth they develop a kind of amnesia. They forget that their differences are good and they start to believe that the other sex ought to react to things the way they do and to feel about things the same way, too.

Gray lifted up some observations that many people resonated with. In communications he said conflicts usually arose because men would go into conversations looking for a problem to be solved while women would go in needing to be heard. Men assume that they are being helpful in offering solutions while women interpret this as invalidating their feelings. On the other hand when women offer advice that men are not seeking, men often interpret this is a sign that women don’t trust them to be competent at what they are doing and they react defensively. There is some truth here. There’s also some truth to Gray’s observation that men, in general, cope with stress by going off into a cave to sort things out on their own while women “go to the well” to seek out others for emotional support.

More recently a researcher named Louanne Brizendine has written a book called The Female Brain that talks about the neurological differences in male and female brains and how that affects our growth and development. Among the things she found were that women have a great capacity for processing emotional information and interpreting the emotional responses of others. As she puts it, “Women excel at knowing what people are feeling; men have difficulty spotting an emotion unless someone cries or threatens bodily harm.” On the other hand, women also remember fights that men insist never happened. Women, she found use 20,000 words every day; men, on average, use about 7,000.[i]

Now you can make a determination from your own experience about how accurate these observations are. They are generalizations and most of us exist on a continuum between stereotyped male and female characteristics, but we are more and more able to pinpoint things that are unique about the genders. Ignoring the differences would be tragic. Cherishing them might be a blessing.

But what does the Bible say? Well, it seems that the differences between men and women were so important to the compilers of the Bible that they couldn’t put the subject off to later in the book. It’s right there in the very beginning. You can’t go two pages into the book of Genesis without running smack into this basic question.

Those ancient stories at the beginning of the Bible were put there to answer the questions that all of us have about fundamental questions. Why are we here? Why did God make the universe in this way? What is the role of human beings within the creation? How did the snake end up with no legs? Why are women so different? Or, to put it the other way round, why are men like they are? These were questions that could not wait and so they are addressed right up front.

The first chapter of Genesis tells one version of the creation story and it is very efficient. God says, “Let there be light,” and, boom!, there is light. God says, “Let there be dry land,” and, boom!, there’s earth and sea. God says, “Let us make human beings in our image,” and, boom!, there’s a man and a woman. God says, “It is very good,” and takes a day off. There’s a little more to it than that. There’s day and night and creepy crawlies and birds and other things but it’s very efficient. And it leaves a few questions. For instance the whole business about God wanting to make a creature in God’s image and there being two – male and female. Suddenly it seems like there’s diversity within the unity.

So the second creation story that begins in chapter two of Genesis goes into a little more detail. In the first chapter we see everything happening as a result of God’s voice: God says this and it happens. God says, “This is good.” In the second story we see how intimately God gets involved with this new creation. God doesn’t use words but hands. Like a potter fashioning clay, God gets right up to the elbows in the dirt of the earth that is being moistened by streams rising up from below. And God makes an Adam.

Now here’s a funny thing about this word, Adam: We hear this and we immediately think that this is the man and this is the name that is eventually given to the man. But at this point in the story it’s a little unclear. The creature is called Adam because it’s made from the earth, the adamah in Hebrew. So you could just say that what God creates is an earth creature. The word for a male person, ish, isn’t used until after the woman is created, which led some of the old Jewish scholars to say that the original creature was neither male nor female. They don’t become what they are unless the other one exists. A man without a woman makes no sense in the way God goes about creation.

So God makes this Adam and places the human in a garden. It’s a wonderful garden. It has trees and fruits and a river. And the Adam has a purpose in this place. The human is supposed to till the ground and to protect it. To enjoy the garden and to eat of all the trees that are there, except the one tree which is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. That one is separated out and it will be the cause of some drama in the next chapter.

But there is a problem from the very beginning. Everything up to this point has been good. Very good even. God has said so. But now God says that there is something that is not good. “It is not good,” God says, “that this human should be alone.” God is all about relationships. God is all about creating communities. God, as we know from our image of the Trinity, contains diversity even within the heart of God. If human beings were created in the image of God then they must have relationship, too.

So God brings all the creatures of the earth before Adam to see if they will be a suitable partner and to see what the human would name them. It must have been quite an audition. “I’m going to name that one a koala, God. It’s cute, but lifelong companion? I’m thinking not. That one? I’ll call that a cat, but it looks like it doesn’t need me. Don’t think that’s going to work. That’s a hippopotamus and it’s definitely out. And what were you thinking when you made that one? Let’s call that a giraffe.” But at the end of the day there was nothing else like the human being. Nothing in whom Adam could see a likeness or a partner.

So God decided to do some radical surgery. If something was to be made of the same kind as the human it should also come from the human. So the potter became a builder and the material the builder used was a rib, taken from the side of the sleeping human Adam. It’s no accident that it happened while Adam was asleep. We’ve been dreaming about this moment of diversity ever since. Our dreams are filled with visions of men and women and the relationships between them and it is because our ancestor was sleeping when the one became two and we have been wrestling with the change ever since.

But what happened was miraculous. When Adam saw what God had wrought while he slept, he sighed a huge and relieved sigh. Finally, at this moment, he attained the image of God because he was able to say, “This is good. This is very good.” Just the same thing that God had said over creation in the first place. Because now what the man beheld was a woman. He didn’t know what it meant to be a man until he saw the woman, but immediately it was clear to him that his existence would never be the same. He recognized that she was different from him. Wonderfully, confoundingly different. And yet, so incredibly close to him that he could say, “This, at last!, is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh! I can name this one. This is woman, made from the same stuff as man.” And just as in English, in Hebrew the two words are very similar. Woman is ishah, and man is ish. So very close. And the intention God had for the two is clear. The man and the woman are meant for each other. When they come together in marriage, the two become one flesh, in their bodies re-membering the original unity they once had.

Now what does this story tell us? Well, the first thing it tells us is that God does not want us to be alone. We are meant to be in relationship with each other. And marriage between men and women is a relationship rooted in God’s original intention for creation. It was, to use Adam Hamilton’s phrase, “God’s big idea.” Not that everyone is going to be married. It’s clear from the Bible and from church history that the people of God have lived full, complete, and faithful lives as single people as well as married people. But there is something unique in marriage, something God arranges and intends to happen. And I don’t think constitutional amendments are going to help us determine what it is. The Bible has things to tell us about what our relationships and marriages ought to be about.

I think the other thing we can say about this story at the beginning of the Bible is that it tells us that sex and sexuality are not things that the Bible tells us to repress. These powerful parts of our lives are blessed when they find their expression in relationships that mirror God’s will for men and women. In marriage there is a place for their full expression and that’s the context in which God blesses the sexual relationship. That’s not to say that sexual behavior within marriage can’t be abused. You know that it can be. But outside of marriage, it is always haunted. What does sex mean apart from marriage? There are a thousand different agendas for it and a thousand different ways that people can be hurt. You only have to look at the television or the internet or literature from any age to know that’s true. That’s why the church has always talked about sex within the married relationship where it is clearly affirmed.

So men and women are different. That’s the first thing to be said. It’s one of the first things the Bible says. But there’s so much more to be said. Men and women are different, yes, and that’s a good thing. God intends for us to be in relationship with each other, even if it’s not a married relationship, we need each other’s differences and we need to learn from each other. And the union of men and women in marriage is a relationship that God has an intense interest in and a special blessing for. We’ll talk about that more next week.

Last week I said that we are a mystery to each other at times. We men and women sometimes look at each other and wonder how in the world the other sex manages to operate as they do. But there is something powerful to be learned from each other and a journey that we are on together. It’s a journey that has something to do with the God who created us and brings us together in love. Thanks be to God.

[i] Joe Garofoli, “Femme Mentale”, San Francisco Chronicle, 8/6/06