"Adam and Men"

Adam and Men
Genesis 2:18-25; 3:1-12


One little boy, when asked to tell about Father’s Day, said, “Well, it’s just like Mother’s Day, only you don’t have to spend as much on the present.”

Someone once defined fathers as the ones who give daughters away to other men who aren’t nearly good enough, so they can have grandchildren who are smarter than anyone’s.

Anthropologist Margaret Mead once said, “Fathers are a biological necessity, but a social accident.”  That seems to be the same sentiment of main stream media, through sitcoms and commercials on TV.  Men seem to be the last subculture in America whom it is permissible to bash, and no one reprimands you for being politically incorrect.  Men are depicted as stumbling, bumbling doofs, who don’t know how to wear the right clothes, can’t remember anniversaries, etc. etc.  Women never do anything wrong.  If they do, it’s usually the man in their life who screwed up.  Men are displayed constantly as dummies who are at the mercy of all knowing females, whose main job it seems to be keeping their men from being too much of an embarrassment.

I’m not sure how things got this way, in the media.  I think it’s sad, and I know I don’t like it.  And I don’t think it’s true, for the most part.

We men certainly have our challenges, though.  The whole women’s liberation movement has thrown us into an ongoing identity crisis of our own.  I don’t think we understand, anymore, what it means to be a man.  There’s a certain lack of clarity about what manhood, or manliness even means anymore.

So I want to talk about some of the challenges of being a man in our culture.  I want to bounce my ideas off of the story of the first man, Adam.  I want to identify three challenges we face as men, and get both men and women thinking about them together.

(Read Genesis 2:18-25)

I think the first challenge of men is dealing with our, apparent, inherent predisposition towards aloneness.  Notice God looks at the first man, and God doesn’t say, “It’s not good for man to be lonely.”  God says it’s not good that man is alone.  Being alone and being lonely are not the same thing.

Another important point to recognize in this story is that it is God who sees there’s a problem.  God identifies the problem, not Adam.  Adam doesn’t say, “Darn, I’m alone.”  And that might be the problem.  I’ve always leaned towards the interpretation that Adam was lonely.  But maybe the problem is that Adam is enjoying being alone too much.  Adam gets up each morning and says, “Alright!  Another day to myself.  I’m going to go do a little fishing.  Then try some hunting.  Then come home tonight and eat a whole pizza myself.  Then take charge of the remote control and watch all the shows I want to watch.  It’s going to be another great day, with no one else telling me what to do.”  And God saw a problem with that:  It’s not good for the man to be alone.

But that’s not all.  There is another whole level to this alone problem that God sees.  There’s a difference in how Bible translations deal with this statement of God.  Some have what I just said.  It’s not good to BE alone.  But the other translations have, “It’s not good for the man to LIVE alone.”  Is it live or be?  What’s the difference?  What’s the difference between LIVING or BEING?

Living, it seems to me, has to do with how you are.  Being has to do with who you are.  To be has to do with existing--your basic existence; who you are.  To have “being” is to have existence.  Therefore, when God spied on Adam, what God recognized was that it’s not good that the man’s being, his existence, should be defined as aloneness.

Indeed, if man is going to figure out his being, he may not be able to do that alone.  He needs another who also has being, to play his being off of in order to discover his true self.

Being has to do with your nature.  Living has to do with your nurture.  Some men, by nurture--not by nature--are who they are because of the kinds of families we grew up in, or by the kinds of experiences we’ve had in friendships, or by the kinds of relationships we’ve had with women.  All of that may have played a part in nurturing us to be alone, to feel alone, or to be loners.  Our nurturing, and if it was wounding nurturing, has caused men to feel alone.

BUT, that’s not our nature.  That isn’t how God wants us to BE.  That’s not who God created us to be, as men.  BEING has to do with how God made us--the basic ingredients around which God formed us.  One of the ways we were made to BE was evidently not to BE alone.  Our BEING, that is the discovering of all the basic ingredients God poured into us, making us, won’t be discerned or discovered alone.  We need another.  We need relationship to discover who to BE.

So, the first challenge to see in the Adam story for all men is the challenge of BEING.  The challenge of being alone, or being in relationship.  The challenge of thinking we can discover our being by ourselves, vs. discovering who we are in relationship with another.

(Read Genesis 3:1-6)

In this part of the story, it looks like there are only two characters:  the woman, Eve, and the serpent.  But we find out later in the story that isn’t exactly true.  There is another silent person there.

If you’re a questioning type of reader of this story, something may not seem right to you.  While the woman is sparring verbally with the serpent, where is the man? you might think to ask.  It’s not until Eve picks some of the forbidden fruit, we find out the man has been standing right there all along.  Adam has been doing nothing.  Saying nothing.  Why doesn’t Adam engage the serpent also, alongside Eve?  We aren’t given the answer to that question in the story.

There is the saying, “Two heads are better than one.”  So why didn’t Adam put his head in the conversational battle between Eve and the serpent?

Let’s go back to the first challenge I identified.  If Adam continues to struggle with the preference to be alone as a man, and yet may desire companionship, that doesn’t necessarily means he knows how to do that.  Certainly building a sense of intimacy and companionship with another, especially a woman, means creating a team.  That we are on the same team.  The man may need companionship in dealing with his aloneness--according to God--but it doesn’t mean Adam knows how to do that through team building.

So, the challenge I’m identifying here is building companionship through teamwork.  If how we as men come at life is more out of a rugged individuality, doing it ourselves, being our own boss, coming into our own, carrying our own weight, then the challenge will be to become a team with the woman whom God puts in the way of our desire to be alone.

In the book we used for Men’s Bible Study, Wild At Heart, one of the needs identified for we men is an adventure to live.  We men need a challenge, and to see if we have the right stuff to meet those challenges.  One of the internal questions we ask ourselves constantly is, “Do I have what it takes?”

But, because of this deficiency or difficulty of being unable to team up, we end up living the adventure, or taking on the challenge alone.  Which reinforces the tendency God doesn’t want--being alone.  The book also made the point that the women we love want an adventure as well.  A challenge to meet and overcome.  That they would give anything if we’d team up and take them along, make life and adventure an “us” thing, rather than a “me” thing.  The Eve’s in our lives don’t care that we want or need an adventure.  They just want to be on the same team.  The question then becomes, not:  “Do I have what it takes?” but, “Do WE have what it takes?”  In dealing with the serpents in the world, the challenge is, will we let woman take them on, on her own?  Or will we team up, and go after them together?

There’s another side of this part of the Adam story.  I would call it manning up vs. hanging back.  Again, in the book Wild at Heart, author John Eldredge says one of the biggest flaws we men might have is hesitating when we should act.  Adam hesitated, standing there at Eve’s side when she engaged the enemy.  It might have been one of the silent--yet loud-and-clear--ways, by his hesitation, of telling Eve, “We aren’t a team.”  He not only hesitates;  he hangs back.  Until it’s time to eat.

We’ve heard of the “mother bear” effect.  Of the woman, the mother, coming to the quick, unhesitating defense of those she loves, against an enemy.  Why haven’t we ever heard of the “father bear” effect?  Of men, launching themselves, unhesitatingly into the face of danger?  Alongside, as a team, with the mother bear?  At the point Eve needed a teammate against evil, Adam hesitated.  That hesitation cost both of them.

So the second challenge for men, that we learn from the Adam story, is the challenge of building companionship through creating a sense of team alongside those we love.  And not hesitating, especially when evil is knocking on the door.

(Read Genesis 3:7-12)

Adam has blown it.  Not just HOW he is, but WHO he is--his being--has been compromised.  Now what does he do?  How does he, how do we men, handle that?

Adam covers up.  He gets a fig leaf, maybe two, and covers up.  Adam is ashamed, so he covers his shame rather than courageously exposing it to God, to the world, to the truth.

Men, from that time on, are faced with the challenge of being a poser vs. being an exposer.  Instead of exposing ourselves to the truth, we pose behind a lame disguise.  A fig leaf, if you will.  We bluff our way through life.  Throwing ourselves into occupational fervor becomes a fig leaf.  Big car, big cigar--status symbols compensate for our failures.  Posing.  We’re faking it.  John Eldredge wrote that part of our posing involves the way “We pick the battles we’re sure to win, and only the adventures we’re sure we can handle.”

In a term I just recently heard, we put on our big boy underwear--our fig leaves--and then cower behind the bushes.  “I was afraid...” Adam says to God, “...so I hid.”  Posing is hiding behind something we think is going to shield us from exposing the full truth of our failures to the ones we love, and the rest of the world.

After we try posing and covering up, when we find out that isn’t going to work, we deny and blame.  It’s the woman’s fault, Adam tells God.  Refusing to take any responsibility for his failure at being a man, Adam blames the woman.  In a bank-shot sort of way, Adam blames God since God made the woman.  “...the woman you gave to me...” Adam whines.

Imagine how Eve hears that statement from her man.  What Eve is hearing is, “We’re not a team.  There’s no companionship between us.  I’m being thrown under the bus so he can be a poser.  The man just needs me as a foil for his failed manhood.”

That’s what being a poser is.  Covering up.  Denying and blaming.

I wonder how God would have handled the whole situation if Adam was an exposer rather than a poser.  What would have happened if the man went nakedly up to God, with Eve at his side, and said, “Look at us.  We messed up.  I failed Eve and you.  We got into this as a team, and we’ll face the consequences together.”

Expose yourself to the naked truth about your BEING before God.  Expose yourself to the truth of your BEING.  To expose yourself to who you are, not how you are.  If you, like Adam, think it’s a HOW problem, you will continue to fail.  That’s Representative Anthony Wiener’s problem.  He thinks he has a HOW problem as a man.  He thinks if he can change the HOW it will at the same time change the WHO.  That’s what he’s got; a WHO problem.  Same with Arnold Schwarzenegger; same with John Edwards.  And all men like them.

So the third challenge of being a man is the challenge of being an exposer vs. being a poser.  That the remedy for the messes we get ourselves into lies in fixing the who, not the how.  And that’s a God thing.  That’s a work that God does in us.

Some of you women who are listening in on this may be saying, “Yes!” thinking about your men.  But don’t let that stop you from thinking about your own aloneness, deficiencies in being able to create a team, hesitating, as well as posing, denying and blaming.

As I said earlier, this is not who God made us to be.  It’s time, isn’t it, to live in the power of God’s Spirit, to be the kinds of people God created us to be.  Not only HOW we are; but more importantly, WHO we are.