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I can't
recall an occasion in my ministry when I stood up to preach
after reading but one verse of scripture. Nobody would teach
such a method. And I never learned such a method. Which means
I am violating all the rules. I know it. And have announced
it. Which puts the ball squarely in your court. You can either
stay and listen or head for the parking lot. I'll understand
the latter, while hoping for the former.
Actually,
I stopped reading after one verse because, had I read any
further, I would have to talk about a murder. And while it
is a fascinating murder, it is not where my head is tonight.
Instead, my head is in verse one of chapter four: "Now
Adam knew Eve, his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain,
saying: `I have gotten a man with the help of the Lord.'"
As an
aside, I should have talked to the band and encouraged them
to play their version of the old spiritual, "Do Lord."
For when I was spending my summers in church camp, I held
the world's record for knowing more verses to "Do Lord"
than anybody else. Among the verses was one that went like
this:
Adam
and Eve got married and started raising Cain,
Adam
and Eve got married and started raising Cain,
Adam
and Eve got married and started raising Cain,
Look
away beyond the blue.
All of
which goes to show that junior high imagination quickly outstrips
junior high innocence, even in church camp.
All of
this business about Adam, Eve and Cain is nearly 2000 years
old in the writing and (given what we know about the oral
tradition) even older in the telling. As I am constantly reminding
Bible study groups, don't ruin these lovely, ancient stories
by requiring that everything in them make perfect sense. It
never will. Instead, look for the meaning. A kid once read
this story and said: "If Eve was Adam's wife, who married
them?" Which is the kind of question you can't get hung
up on. Nowhere does it say that anybody married them. And
unless God performed the ceremony, the chances of figuring
it out are pretty slim.
Actually,
I think Carl Price married them. But I can't prove it. And
Carl isn't here to set the record straight. Even if the marriage
question were answerable, we would still be left with subsequent
issues like: "How did Cain find a wife, assuming that
Adam and Eve had nothing but sons?" Who knows? Maybe
Cain married Carl Price's daughter. Except that Carl has three
sons.
But all
such speculation aside, we still have this text to contend
with. "Now Adam knew Eve, his wife, and she conceived
and bore Cain, saying: `I have gotten a man with the help
of the Lord.'"
What is
all this business about "getting a man with the help
of the Lord?" There was a day when I thought that the
man God helped Eve "get" was Adam. What's more,
I am willing to bet that most of you read it that way, too.
Logic would suggest Adam. Eve needed a man. God helped her
land one. Never mind that this assumption is more than a little
sexist. For it implies that, where men are concerned, Eve
needed one ... as in the sense of being "incomplete"
without one. And it also implies that Eve needed help ...
as in the sense of being unable to corral a man for herself.
After all, how hard can it have been? We are not talking "multiple
choices" here. Which reminds me of the day Eve turned
to Adam and said: "For all the attention you pay me,
I might just as well be a stick of furniture. Every night
you come home, eat dinner, watch television and fall asleep
on the couch. No zest. No fire. No `sweet nothings' in my
ear. How do I know it is me you still love?" In response
to which Adam rolled his eyes, looked up ever so briefly from
his paper, and said: "Get serious, Eve. Who else?"
No, when
Eve exclaims that she has "gotten a man with the help
of the Lord," she is not referring to her husband, but
to her child ... not Adam, but Cain. The more understandable
translation now reads: "I have produced a man with the
help of the Lord." Which is interesting. For it means
that God was seen, early on, to be totally invested in the
birth process.
Strangely
enough, I am hearing increasing numbers of people talking
about childbirth as a God-infused miracle. People go through
the birth experience today ... even men ... and talk in glowingly
spiritual terms about what has happened. But why? Why should
the birth process suddenly strike people as being "spiritual"?
The birth process, itself, has undergone considerable modernization.
Today, both husband and wife take childbirth classes and end
up learning everything there is to know about how babies are
born. Then, they see it through from start to finish. The
father is present and participating. The mother is present
and awake. No longer is she "zonked" into an anesthetized
never-never land. No longer is her husband shipped off to
some smoky cubicle to pace the floor and read five year old
magazines. It's different now. It's "natural" now.
Oddly
enough, we always assumed that the more "natural"
something became, the less "supernatural" it would
seem ... until we would know so much about our part, that
there would be no room to consider "God's part."
But just the opposite has occurred. Knowing how it happens
makes us appreciate how miraculous it is that it happens at
all. It is not uncommon for today's Adams and Eves (who know
everything about birthing from focal points to timed contractions)
to say: "We have gotten a child with the help of the
Lord." It is just one more example of my contention that
the deeper we look into the "natural," the closer
we come to "God."
Now, with
that little matter tucked neatly behind us, we can get on
with the real issue in verse one of chapter four, namely the
issue raised by the verb in the opening phrase: "Now
Adam knew Eve."
I'll never
forget when the force of that verb first struck me. We were
sitting in Sunday School class, reading that line, when Tommy
Teeter leaned over and whispered in my ear: "You know
what that means, Ritter? That means they did it." Which
I wouldn't have understood if, several months earlier, Tommy
Teeter hadn't explained to me what it meant to "do it."
We were on a Scout campout at the time. Tommy knew about such
things because he had a pair of older brothers, John and Bob.
Having no older brothers, I had to get my information secondhand.
I didn't believe it at first. But Tommy was most convincing.
Which was why I also believed him that morning in Sunday School
when he said that Adam's "knowing" Eve was the same
as "doing it."
He was
right, of course ... which made him my very first Old Testament
professor. To "know" someone (in the biblical sense)
is to become intimate with that person to the point of sexual
union. My biblical concordance reveals several scriptural
references to "knowing," with the most famous being
the one that reverses the concept in Matthew 1:25, where we
are told that a man named Joseph became engaged to a woman
named Mary and "knew her not."
For four
consecutive summers (spanning my late college and early seminary
years), I worked as a tour guide for the Ford Motor Company.
My job was to lead visitors through the Rouge Plant. It was
a wonderful opportunity, offered annually to about 20 young
men, most of whom were the sons of Ford executives. I was
the only Protestant pre-ministerial student in the group ...
although they later hired a couple of candidates for the priesthood.
To my knowledge, I was also the only person hired who had
no Ford exec in the family.
The job
was not all that hard. Each of us took out a couple tours
a day. It was difficult while we were doing it, but it left
us a lot of "down time" for reading, conversing
and getting bored. One August day (when boredom was running
high), somebody suggested that we make a list of every known
verb for "making love." The list got longer by the
hour ... and by the day. Every time a new face entered the
guides' room, a new batch of verbs was added to the list.
To this day, I don't know any other human activity for which
so many verbs have been coined to describe it. But no one,
including the priests or myself, mentioned the verb "to
know." We should have. It would have elevated the discussion.
For "to
know" someone (Hebrew word, "yada") implies
the kind of intimacy that can never be captured by the phrase
"doing it." To "know" someone implies
both a physical sharing and an intellectual awareness. But
it also implies a total experiencing of the other in the fullest
sense. In fact, E. A. Speiser's Anchor Bible translation (which
is the best scholarly work done to date on the book of Genesis)
reads: "The man had experience of his wife, and she conceived
and bore Cain." Still another commentator, W. Cuthbert
Simpson writes: "To know another, in the biblically-sexual
sense, appears to involve a surrender of the self."
Now that's
a powerful word ... "surrender." It means that I
give up something ... that I yield something of myself ...
as part and parcel of "knowing." I hand whole big
chunks of my life over to you, trusting that you will treat
them kindly. Which is why I don't "surrender" very
much of myself to just anybody. And I certainly don't do much
"surrendering" early in a relationship. Instead,
I give little bits and pieces of myself early on. Then I wait
to see what will happen. How will you treat what I have given?
How will you treat me? Can I trust you with more?
Don't
you see what I am driving at? The kind of "knowing"
that the Bible describes is something that happens deep in
a relationship. It is also something that only happens with
people who are deeply committed. One doesn't "know"
someone sexually until one "knows" that person in
every other way imaginable. All other sex is mere "coupling."
But it
doesn't take a genius to know that there is a lot of "coupling"
going on. Let's be frank here. Most of us are big boys and
girls. We are well past the snickering stage. We are talking
about sexual intercourse ("doing it"). And it is
time to acknowledge the degree to which "doing it"
is permeating our culture. It is a recurring theme of filmmakers,
script writers, musicians and daytime talk show hosts, who
have discovered it is a marvelous way to increase ratings.
But don't lay it off on the media alone. They are talking
about something real. Most every study suggests that the age
of the first sexual encounter is going down, while the overall
number of partners-per-person is going up.
All of
this is interesting. But it is beyond the scope of any comments
I can make this evening. What is within the scope of tonight's
sermon is the discernable shift toward "coupling"
earlier and earlier in a relationship ... to the degree that
people are "knowing" each other sexually long before
they can possibly know each other in any other way. Which
means that sex is becoming, for many, just one more way of
getting better acquainted.
Let me
tell you something that I think will surprise you. Did you
know that, last year, over 98 percent of the intimate acts
either depicted or implied on television, were between unmarried
persons ... meaning that less than two percent of the intimate
acts (either depicted or implied) were between married persons.
Television doesn't believe that married people make love.
But television believes that virtually everyone else does.
Is that some kind of backwards, or what?
One of
the magazines I used to scan is entitled Seventeen.
I once read it, not because it spoke to me, but because I
found it on the coffee table in my family room. I learned
a lot by reading it. One of the things I learned is that sex
is an unspoken, but assumed, expectation of the senior prom.
The author of the article, remembering her own internal debate
of a couple years previous, wrote:
Far
from being my serious boyfriend, my date for the prom was
just someone I kind of liked but had never gone out with
before. So why did I even consider sex as a possibility
that night? On any other evening, I wouldn't have even kissed
him. I think it was because there is a kind of silent seduction
on prom night ... something you begin feeling in the pit
of your stomach, hours before he even shows up. You can't
help but feel the pressure and expectation of this thing
that technically doesn't even exist. But let me be the first
to tell you, it does exist. Sometimes it's more about what
you feel you need to do than what you want to do. My friend,
Sophia, who is headed in the fall to Wesleyan University,
said: "If I didn't do it at the prom, I would be the
only virgin in college. No, cancel that. I would be the
only virgin in the state of Connecticut. So we did it at
the prom."
Now do
you see what I mean about the danger of separating "coupling"
from "knowing"? I've got to believe that her encounter
was hardly blissful. Instead, I suspect it produced feelings
of incredible loneliness. When sex is "mere coupling,"
you may get up feeling satisfied ... but go home feeling cheated.
Even the young lady in Seventeen acknowledged as much
when she concluded: "Having sex anytime with anybody
you don't know very well ... and aren't very comfortable with
... is not likely to be a great experience."
My title
this evening is borrowed from a song recorded by The Doors:
"Hello, you know I love you, won't you tell me your name?"
But without knowing someone's name, there can't be love. And
without knowing a great deal more than a name, there shouldn't
be any consideration given to the making of love. To "know"
someone is certainly to experience the deepest parts of their
body. But it is also to experience ... and take responsibility
for ... the deepest parts of their soul. And apart from a
relationship of singularity and fidelity, I doubt that such
knowledge is possible. Which is my way of saying that the
person you "go all the way with" had better be the
person you are willing to go all the way with (I'm talking
"better/worse, richer/poorer" here).
Quaker
theologian Tom Mullen of Earlham College said something interesting
in an essay entitled "The Joys of Sex, Fifteen Years
Later." He wrote: "There have continued to be many
memorable nights ... the kind that the movies record with
stereophonic music and waves crashing upon the beach. But
there has also been the quiet discovery that, in going to
bed together, the real joy of sex has less to do with the
word `bed' than with the word `together.'"
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