The peculiar thing about our times is that while we seem to be so free and easy, so relaxed about what used to be thought of as intimate, yet at the same time we are hung up, truly hung up, about intimacy.
I say the strange thing about us in this last half of the 20th century is that on the one side we are so completely, utterly relaxed about our bodies, about our sexuality, about all the things that used to be spoken of, if at all, in whispers. We go to movies where the most private of relationships are portrayed and where the most Anglo-Saxon of language is used. We read books and magazines and make millions of dollars for their purveyors, in which there is all sorts of provocative material, and seem not to be much taken aback by it all. We get very relaxed indeed about things which used to be thought of as intimate.
But at the same time we are as a people scared of intimacy. What lam I talking about? What do I mean? Well, I mean that we find it difficult to share with one other the deeper things of the heart. We find it painful to live in the same household with wives or husbands or children or parents and see them as our soul's mates, as our partners, as our confidantes. We will pay a psychiatrist outlandish fees to listen to us unburden ourselves, and that may be all right. Yes, I know there are many times when that's appropriate. But I am finding more and more that the finest human resource we have – and that is, one another – we do not know how to use, we do not like intimacy.
In a little French film I saw a number of years ago, there is an elderly lady who daily makes her way out of her murky apartment into the bright sunshine of the Parisian gardens nearby. Every day her routine is the same: she puts on the same dark. old-style clothes, she gathers her shopping bags around her, and off she marches to the gardens, where she spends her day feeding the birds. The birds are her very life, you see, and she has no human contact, none at all. In fact as she makes her way among the pigeons and the doves it almost seems as though there are no other human beings in the world. She speaks to no one, she nods at no one, she acknowledges no one.
And then one day something new appears in the gardens: there is a sign, planted there by the authorities, and its command is clear and terse: Do not feed the birds. Do not feed the birds; this new factor in her life she discovers, she reads it quickly, does a double take, reads it again, and then, shaking her head, she goes on about her usual round of feeding the hundreds of birds which flock around her, as though the official order meant nothing to her. And nothing seems to happen – no one interrupts her, no officer confronts her, all seems well. But the film proceeds to a close with a haunting view of her little room, just off the Parisian gardens, and as the camera seems to float through the room, you see first a group of photographs: a smiling young woman on the arm of a handsome young man; a woman, not quite so young, cradling an infant add clasping the hand of another child; photographs of relationships, pictures of intimacies, somehow now evidently long gone. We are not told how or why, but relationships, intimacies now broken, and then the camera takes us to a chair in the corner of the room, a chair in which there sits, slumped over, the body of the old woman. Her last intimacy taken from her, she is gone; her friendship with at least some living thing to be denied her, then life itself has to go.
Intimacy: we need it but we don't seem to know how to find it. Closeness, friendship, the companionship of the heart. Sometimes we can do no better than scatter crumbs to the birds and pretend that we are not lonely; but the truth is that we may well be lonely. We may well be afraid of intimacy. We may well be unable to complete the kind of closeness that our humanity demands.
I say again, the peculiar thing about our times is that we appear to be so utterly free and easy, to the point of sheer vulgarity, about sexuality and the kinds of relationship that bear the marks of intimacy; but the truth is that in a hundred different ways we find it hard to be intimate, close in a deep spiritual way.
Now the Book of Genesis, the profound insight in the heart of all humanity, offers us another possibility. The writer of Genesis, seeing deeply into the intention of God for his creation, understands that God has made us relational, God has made us with the need and the desire to connect with one another. He puts it in beautifully simple language, but don't let its simplicity throw you. Behind the simple words there are truths and realities that must not be missed, must not be taken lightly. Hear this ancient interpreter of the ways of God with humanity; and as you listen, notice the way in which our God, our creator, gradually moves us toward the depths of intimacy. Watch how the Spirit of the living God progresses us toward spiritual intimacy:
"The Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being." That’s step one, that’s the first rung on the ladder. God made us not just material, not just flesh and bone, but God made us souls, God gave us spirit, His own spirit. The Spirit of God is blown into our nostrils, he says, and we became alive, we became someone able to feel and know and think and care. We became a living being.
And then step two, the second stage: "Then the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him." We need somebody else, that's what this is saying. We can't exist alone, we cannot pretend to independence. By the way, when I read this text originally, you may have noticed the references to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. You may have noticed that something about the origin of sin was in the text. I suspect it is not an accident that Genesis lays this business about the meaning of sin alongside the other material about the need to be interdependent, the need not to be alone. Because, you see, when you read into Genesis 3 and the whole passage about temptation, you discover that the heart of our sin is that we want to be independent, we want to be as gods, we want to go it on our own. That's what sin is, going it on your own and acting as if you needed no one, nothing, not even God.
But that's another sermon. Right now, look at what the Spirit of God does with the man. You need a helper fit for you, you need closeness, you must have a degree of relationship, of intimacy; and then God spreads all nature out before the man. Birds and beasts, fish and fowl: name then, man. Tell them all your are their master. Have dominion. Take change of the world, mister.
But – but – not even that is enough. That's not sufficient. That's not intimacy either. The scripture says, "The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for man there was not found a helper fit for him." It just wasn't enough. It just didn't fulfill that spiritual longing that lies within every one of us.
You know there ought to be a message there for every one of us who thinks he can find salvation and vitality working twelve and fourteen hours a day behind the desk. There ought to be a message there for every macho man who believes that if he just brings home the paycheck and provides for his family’s physical needs, he’s done all he needs to do. There ought to be a message there for every woman whose obsession with neatness and style and propriety and status saps her energy and keeps her from investing herself in her children. God brings us to the place where we name every beast, where we spend all day long asserting ourselves, working hard at doing what we’re good at doing, but when the day is over, listen: "For the man there was not found a helper fit for him." Wow! Isn’t that the story of many of our lives? Again, we are backing off of intimacy, we are so everlastingly busy about things, good things, but we have not yet arrived at caring for one another and finding satisfaction in one another. No helper fit for him, not yet.
I think of the pastor I know who was so everlastingly busy doing things, good things, around his church. He boasted, in fact, that he had practically never taken a day off, that it had been several years since he had even observed a holiday. Work, work, work; name those animals, names those beasts! Then one day in the midst of all those good things and all those appointments with people who needed his help, it was time for the next counselee to be ushered in. One more person to see, one more needy soul to save. He busied himself with the accumulated papers on his desk, impatiently stacking and restacking them, at least looking busy and efficient. And when he looked up to see who the next counselee was, imagine his surprise when he saw sitting in front of him, his own wife. She had made an appointment through his secretary just so she could have some uncluttered time with him.
We are afraid of intimacy, and yet we need it. And we get so caught up in doing and going and looking masterful and seeming to be efficient that no helper is found fit for us.
But now I want you to come with me to stage three. I want you to see how the grace of God is at work, how the spirit of God breathes into our humanity something fresh. Watch what God does for this our humanity, having made us alive and able to feel, first of all; having made us able to control our world, and to create and to do and to achieve, and yet, that's not quite it.
"The Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh; and the rib which the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, 'This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.'" One commentator says that you could translate the man's comment more like, "This at last is more like it." "That’s what I had in mind!"
And in beautifully simple language, in one of the finest and fullest phrases of Scripture, "For this a man leaves father and mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh."
One flesh: the One spirit breathes on us and we become one flesh. We become able to seek and to savor the intimacy, the closeness, the sharing, that is made possible only by the breath of God, the miracle of God's intervention.
I well recognize that this passage of scripture has to do largely with the foundation of the institution of marriage. I also recognize that a significant proportion of this congregation is not married. And to you I would say, read it again. Read what is at the heart of this scripture; it is telling every one of us that spirit-created relationships can be ours. I believe it is telling us that we ought not to pull back into isolation, but that we ought to open ourselves up to others, to care for others, to allow others to care for us, that God expects and wants us to have openness for one another, that it's possible, even without the physical and sexual intimacy that belongs only to marriage, that we find our fullest humanity only in relationship, heart-to-heart relationship.
I wonder this morning what the one spirit would breathe into your connections with other human beings. I wonder whether you felt the spirit of God breathing on you and asking you to invite that lonely neighbor who never seems to go anywhere to come to your home for a lunch or just a conversation. I wonder whether you can sense the spirit of God blowing into your heart so that you could make room in it for that child who seems to be neglected by her parents, and maybe, just maybe, you could become a kind of substitute grandparent. I wonder this morning whether the one spirit is breathing on you in any way to help you achieve one flesh intimacy, spiritual intimacy, with anyone else.
I wonder whether the spirit might be breathing on someone to get out of the trap of saying to yourself, Oh, my mother, my father, they know how I feel about them, I don't really have to say it. Is the spirit of God blowing at you and moving you over to where you could acknowledge with open gratitude that you are one flesh? Is the spirit of God blowing and breathing on some parent here who has been thinking, Oh these kids; nobody can talk to them, nobody can get through to them. But is it just possible that you've been so busy naming the beasts all day long you haven't taken the time or made the effort to know, really know your own family?
And church folks, is the spirit of God so breathing and blowing among you that you might find right here, next to you on the pew, a person, a real live, breathing person, whom God is calling you to love and to care for, because this is your brother, your sister, in Christ?
One spirit, the spirit of God, creator of all humanity; one breath, the breath of life, given in love; and thus one flesh, the possibility of closeness and care, companionship and comfort, for every one of God's children.
