The joy of being human? (Proper 22)

 Reading: Mark 10:2-16

Jesus placed a child in the middle of them and said “unless you become like a child you will not enter the kingdom of Heaven”.

 

What is it that a child has which makes them more able to accept and understand the love of God?

 

There could be lots of things, I’m sure – but at least one thing a child has that we should all try to find for ourselves is a capacity for joy – and especially joy in the telling of a story.

 

Those who were at Kate’s ordination here a couple of weeks ago might have heard that as I started to tell the story of creation from the first chapter of Genesis, and held up a card showing the light that God creates on the first day, one young lad in the congregation just said ‘Wow’.

 

I think Jesus is reminding his disciples that when they stop to think about what God has done and is doing in the world it should make them go ‘wow!’.

 

Can we bring that sense of wow with us when we listen to our next reading. It’s the second story of creation – the one that comes in chapter 2 of Genesis.

God has made a human person out of the dust of the ground…

 

Reading: Genesis 2:18-24

 

Reflection

 

It is interesting that we hear the seven- day story of creation – the one in chapter 1 of Genesis  - far more often than we hear the story of creation in chapter 2.

Both are wonderful stories in their own right – but they are clearly different versions of the story of creation, meant to make us go ‘wow’ in different ways.

 

In today’s story, God is much more involved: thinking about how the creature he has created feels – what will be good for the human – and creating more beings out of the earth. This is quite a different God from the one who ‘speaks and it is so’. God wants life to be good for the human and experiments with what will work so that the human is not lonely.

 

We might think we know the story and what it means: God creates man and then creates woman from the man’s rib. This is open to all sorts of misinterpretation. Men are more important, because they were created first…women are inferior because they were formed from just a spare scrap of the man. There was even the magazine called “Spare Rib” published from 1972 to 1993, which encouraged women to reject the idea that women are subservient to men – based on the idea that a woman is just the ‘spare rib’ from a man.

 

But if we look carefully we see that this story doesn’t talk about women being made from men.  The ancient Hebrew story describes God making one human creature (ha-adam) from the earth (ha-adamah). Then this one being is separated to form 2 separate creatures – man (ish) and woman (ishshah).

 

If we had to use a modern word to describe what God does in the story to create two human beings, it would be ‘cloning’ – one being which is divided to make 2 beings. These are male and female – but that’s not the most important thing in the story. It is more important that the human beings are each created by the same, one God – and that they are more than just animals, although, like the animals they are created from the same stuff of the earth.

 

This story was handed down through being told by many generations – told to children who went ‘wow’ – told to adults who wondered what it meant. By the time the story came to be written down, it was a story which helped the people of God understand how their concept of God was different from those around them.

 

Other creation myths had men and women being created by separate gods – possibly form a spark of the god itself. Those stories stressed how different men and women were from one another, and how different all people were from the animals, too. Men, women animals, plants and mountains all had their own, separate, competing gods.

 

But the God of Israel was a God who created everything – the same one God, with the same love for all creation. People and animals were made from the dust of the earth; and then men and women were separated out from the one human being – the original ‘earthling’.

 

The story tells us that we are much more alike as different genders, or races, or even species, than we might at first think we are.

 

Modern science has taught us that this is not just a story, or wishful thinking – it is so.

Even very different humans share 99.9% of their DNA in common.

Humans share 98.8% of their DNA with chimpanzees.

Humans even share 80% of their DNA with cows.

 

And the purpose of this amazing story of the God of Israel was to help people understand how to live. Because what we think about how we are made affects what we feel about how to live and how to treat other living beings.

 

When we reflect on our similarities and our common origins – from the Genesis story or from modern genetics – we might feel differently about our responsibility towards the rest of creation.

God has made us so that we don’t need to be alone.

Other people are much more like us than they are different from us.

So why are there wars and hatred?

 

We are related, as creatures made by God, to all living things.

So why do we abuse and disrespect the other forms of life around us?

 

We are made to react with joy to the life around us.

So why do we mistreat others?

 

How can this story help us to be better at loving others and caring for the world?

Looking back at the story for a moment.

When the human being has been separated into man and woman (ish & ishshah) there is a lovely little piece of poetry – the first human poetry in our Bibles.

 

“At last! This is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh”.

My Old Testament tutor at college taught me that that cry ‘at last’ could be translated ‘yippee!’.

Here is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. Yippee!

 

Perhaps that sounds like another echo of the child-like-ness that Jesus encourages. An innocent delight and joy in the other person. What a lovely way to describe falling in love – of finding delight in companionship and partnership. Someone like me to love – yippee!

 

Faced with a world where peace seems far off for many people and nations are locked in hatred and combat; where there are arguments about human gender identity; where the climate is suffering as people continue to release too much Carbon dioxide into the atmosphere; we might wonder where to start to try to put things right.

I pray we can start with joy. As we read this story of creation, can we delight in what it tells us about 

God’s care for all creation. 

Of God’s particular love for human beings.

Of our need for companionship with one another. 

Then, as God’s beloved children, we can delight in all that God has made – in one another and in creation – held in the love of Jesus Christ. 

 

So that in that delight in others, we can pray with real feeling – knowing we are praying for people like us, creatures like us, other parts of God’s beloved creation.

And may the god who made us hear our prayers and answer them. In the name of Jesus.

Amen.