We know now what life is not supposed to be like – the smell of fear, a dark cloud of foreboding.  Terror lurks round every bend in the road, or waits to be wakened in the mind of a “sleeper” who seems like a friendly neighbor, or hides in the suitcase of the woman sitting next to you in seat 16B.  This is not the way things are meant to be.  And we will fight these agents of terror wherever in the world they hide.  Thank you, President Bush.

But as we do, we must keep in focus what we are fighting for as well as what we are fighting against.  In his poem “The Wild Geese,” Wendell Berry says he prays not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart and in eye clear.  What we need is to hear with our hearts beyond the noisy foreground to the gentle hum of the peaceable kingdom God created the world to be.  We need an eye clear to see through the smoke to the simmering love of God that burns yet warm under every nation.  We sigh for Eden and a vision not just of what is not good but of what is good.

And that is just what we get here in Genesis, chapter 2, in week three of the series What’s the Story?  We get a peak at the way things are supposed to be, the rules of engagement set up at creation, the ecology of power.  This piece of the story introduces all the players at creation that have breath to act—God, animals, humans.  There is a balance of power established by God, a dance of responsibility in which we all have something to do, but not everything.

We begin—as always, it seems— with God.  Until now God is the principal player, the lead actor in the drama.    Now God steps back in a way that is hugely gracious and enormously frightful.  God slips off stage, behind the cameras, and begins directing.  Until now God has had all the power.  Now God delegates power to the creatures God has made.

It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.  Here is the first time the words not good are spoken by God.  They don’t mean not good in the sense of evil, they mean not YET good.  God wills for the creature God made to be truly like God—a related being.  Human beings are not made to go it alone, needing no one or no thing to exercise their power.  To be like God is to act always and only in relationship to others.

There’s a hint of the Trinity here— God’s own life is a life of relatedness.  Jesus never used his power for himself: he acted only in concert with the will of his Father, the love of the Holy Spirit, and for the well-being of the world.  God wants the same of us.  It begins with God stepping back to make room for us to be powerful, too.

This past week we have heard the question phrased in different ways: How could God do this?  Why would God allow this terrorist attack that killed so many innocents?  Where was the Almighty God?  One says (though now he has recanted) it happened because America has turned its back on God’s laws and allowed immorality to run amok.  Thus God lifted the divine veil of protection for our nation.  Others have said— especially in Arab lands—we got God’s brand of justice for the injustice we have done to Allah’s people.  Both of these views think of God holding all the power and only distributing enough of it to those who will do what God wants in fulfilling God’s plan.  After all, God is in control, right?  Anyone heard that this week?  Whatever happens happens because somehow God is behind it.

Well, God may be directing events, but the kind of director God is is not like a marionette, a puppeteer that pulls strings to make people do good or evil.  God steps back in order to make room for us the way parents step back to let their children step up.  It’s a power-sharing move, and most times we like it.  Times like these we would rather have God controlling things than allowing us this terrible freedom.  We can’t have it both ways.  You can’t demand free will to drink yourself drunk and drive a car without interference from God, and wonder why God let you drive off a bridge.

God gives us the power to act freely, but we use it like God only when we use in partnership with others, never alone.  Alone is not good.  With a helper, with a partner for the common good, is good.

So God creates characters for us to be partners with.  Animals first.  God goes back to the same dust of the ground the man came from and shapes all these other creatures, bringing them to the man in a kind of animal parade.  Cattle, birds, every kind of creature. 

Here we see a new movement in the way God will work.  God creates possibilities off stage and presents them to us to see what we will say and do with them.  This is the way God normally helps us with divine power.  God will not do it all for us; God will create ways for us to exercise power with others that will give us a taste of God-likeness.  God helps by doing less than we often want, but God is always doing more than we know.  The Rolling Stones may have got it right: You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you need.

So God brings the animals to the man for naming.  We’ve got a kind of Dr. Doolittle thing going on here.  Talk to the animals.  Naming is a kind of power.  To name something is to know it in a way that you can discern what it is and have some control over it.  That’s why pious Jews even today do not pronounce the name for God or even spell it out.  They do not presume that kind of control over God.  Well, the man listens to the sounds around him and forms the name for each thing.  From then on, that thing is what he calls it.

Reminds me of the way grandmothers do with grandkids.  Before the kid is born, she decides what she wants to be called—Granny, Grandma, Grammy, whatever.  Then the child is presented to her, and what comes out the mouth of the babe is Ghi Ghi or GeeGee or MawMaw.  That’s the end of it.  From then on, when the grandchild calls her name, Ghi Ghi will come running with single-minded, open-armed love. 

The man has this power over the animals.  They will serve humans and humans will care for them, but they are not suitable partners.  Thank God.  Figure God would have known that from the start.  But that’s also the way we learn, isn’t it?  We date all these people who are not good until we meet the one that is good, and we know the chosen one as much by old bad chemistry as new good chemistry.

So God causes Adam to fall into a deep sleep.  And again we see that God’s power is unobservable.  All miracles are hidden from our eyes; we  get to see them only after the fact.  God is working to bring us new possibilities for help.  God takes a rib from the man and with it creates his partner. 

It is not the main theme of the text, but we should note that woman was taken from the side of man.  Preachers wax eloquent on this one at weddings.  The woman was taken not from the head of the man that she should rule over him, nor from his foot that he should trample over her, but from his side that they should be equal partners walking alongside one another in mutual love.  Nice.  So we note without debate that the original and persistent will of God is for every human being to have equal dignity next to every other.  Men have no claim of superiority over women, let alone husbands over wives.  The submission of women is a result of sin, not God’s intention for the world at the beginning and not God’s intention for the world to come.  And that applies as much to Baptists Christians as to Taliban Muslims.

Nevertheless, she is taken from him.  Something of each of us is always sacrificed when we give life to others.  We should not expect it to be otherwise.  We are part of each other.  Our lives are caught up with every other.  John Donne captured this well when he said, No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.  Therefore, he says, every man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.  We have been so deeply affected by the deaths of fellow countrymen because we sense that we are involved with them.  We get a sense of being one flesh with them.

What we don’t get is our one-fleshness with those who murdered our people.  We do not see how we could have come from the same stock as they.  And this presents us with a challenge.  When we cannot find the sympathy of common humanity with those we hate, the next step is to dehumanize them in our minds, to separate them from humanity altogether.  We not only call what they did beastly; we call them beasts.  We say they are animals, which probably isn’t fair to most animals!  We objectify them so that we can defend our own sense of goodness over against their pure badness.  We use our power to separate ourselves from each other instead of join us to each other.  But isn’t that exactly what they have done to us?  When Osama bin Laden and the Taliban objectify us as pure evil, they justify jihad and all kind of hatred and terror.  We must be careful not to do the same, or even our glorious ambition of infinite justice is dubious.

One budding child-theologian in our church asked his parents: If those men who flew the planes into the buildings all thought they were trying to please God by doing it, will they get to go to heaven?  And parents, feel free to answer that question without the help of your pastor, who prefers to play God only with the easy ones, don’t you know?!  What we have here is a young person trying to reach inside himself to examine his heart and motivation while looking at theirs.

When God parades the woman before the man for the first time, he looks at her—oh, wouldn’t you have wanted to see his face?—and it’s love at first sight.  He lets out the word, At last!  God Almighty, you’ve finally done it. Bellissimo!  This is what I’m talking about.  Bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.  She’s like me in all the right ways.  She’s unlike me in all the right ways!

What the man sees in her is himself, and at the same time someone else.  He cannot even give her a name that objectifies her.  He looks at her and says, Whoa, man!  He calls her woman, for out of man she was taken.  In the Hebrew she is ishah from ish.  She’s the womb-man, the man with the womb.  Whereas the man listened to the sounds of the world in order to name the animals, he listened to his own heart to know the woman.

And this is what we must do not only with women or men we are married to, but with every human being.  This story is not about male-female relations so much as human relatedness.  We are in this together, all of us.  And when we act, when we use what frightful power God has given us to use, we must account for one another when we do, because whatever we do to others affects us, too.

We are a long way from the Garden when the man and woman were naked in each other’s presence and not ashamed.  It’s not the way we look that makes us ashamed; it’s the shame that makes us care.  A shame that comes from using our power for ourselves and not for each other.

Emily Woodall is 10 years old.  She ended her prayer at the Arkansas Capitol Building this past week with these words that bring echoes of Eden: Help us to know you are there and care for us. Let us also remember that while there are people in the world who do bad things, you have asked us to do the right thing. Let us show your love to others who are different from us, because they may be scared, too. Thank you for loving and caring for us. We need your love more now than ever.  And all God’s people said  Amen.