Genesis 2:18-23

Sermon from February 5, 2026

The Rev. Megan Collins

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Birthdays when I was young were so exciting. 

It was partly because there was cake. Mmmmm, cake. 

But it was mostly because they often came with wonderful new privileges.

At 12 I could go to the mall by myself. 

At 16 I could drive a car. 

At 18 I could vote.

Every birthday was a new upgrade. 

But then I got older, and the privileges now feel a little less glamorous. 

There is one specific privilege that they used to make you wait until you were 50 to get, but then, they lowered it.  Now starting at 45 you too can get . . . a colonoscopy. Dave and I put it off for over a year, but finally had ours this month (and it was not a big deal. In fact, if you’re due, go get one. It’s so important and not as bad as everyone makes it sound). But if I’m honest, it did ruin one thing for me. Pumpkin pice candles. I had this lovely little candle. Warm. Cozy. Smelled like fall in New England. So I put it in the bathroom to make things cozier during “the prep.” Now it is forever connected. That scent is no longer “autumn harvest.” To me it is forever now “autumn  . . .  colonoscopy prep.”  I tried lighting the candle again a few days later. Absolutely not. It’s ruined. So I threw it away.

Maybe you have had an experience like that, when something that was once good and lovely now carries an association you can’t shake, and it’s ruined? Maybe it’s a song. Maybe it’s a place.Maybe it’s a restaurant you can’t go to anymore. Whether it was the pizza or not, something made you violently sick and now you cannot eat Hungry Howie’s ever again.  

Or maybe that something with a bad association is related to God. 

It’s a church building, or a worship song or hymn, and certainly, for some, the Bible itself.

I think that’s what has happened for a lot of people with the Bible. 

Maybe it happened to you. You loved it once, or at least felt neutral about it. Some of you even memorized Bible verses, or sang Sunday School songs about it.But now, if you’re honest, it can make you cringe, not necessarily because of what it says, but because of what it has been used to say.It was something beautiful. But now it’s contaminated. There’s this bad association, and it’s hard to untangle. It feels easier to just throw the whole thing out. 

We’re not just wrestling with the text, we’re wrestling with the reputation it carries. Maybe you’re embarrassed to tell people you read the Bible because you don’t want them to assume you support everything they’ve seen done in its name. Dave and I struggle with this too. Christianity has a bad rap, and it’s a well earned one. It’s hard to tell people we’re pastors, because they can easily assume we believe things we don’t. Our kids told us when they were in high school, people would ask what their parents did for a living, and when they said “they’re both pastors” the response was almost always “are you guys okay?”

For some of you, the association with Scripture isn’t just uncomfortable, it’s deeply personal. It left a wound. Maybe Scripture was used to silence you, or tell you you aren’t somehow fully in the image of God.  Maybe someone said, “The Bible says…” and what followed wasn’t love at all. If that has happened to you, I am deeply sorry. I want to thank you for being here, and trusting us with your story.

I know by now there are also some of you thinking, “I’ve never struggled with any of this. I love the Bible. I’m proud of it.”That’s wonderful for you. But even if you haven’t struggled with any of this, someone you love has. At some point, you may find yourself in a conversation where it comes up, and iin that moment, you won’t be able to just ignore it. 

So what do we do? 

Well, let’s start with one thing we can do here, together. We began a project in January, where we are slowly working our way through the whole Bible. Here we are in mid-February, all the way in chapter 2 of Genesis. In today’s reading we’ll look at this beautiful passage in the early creation, showing God’s first encounters with us, with humanity. It’s a lovely passage. But it’s also one of those stories that has been contaminated by association. 

This is the first time we’ll deal with a verse like this in the project, but it certainly won’t be the last.  As we move through Scripture together, we’re going to encounter other passages that have been misused, mis-taught, and even weaponized. Each time, we’ll feel that temptation to skip over it. But we can’t do that. 

Because this is our story.

These are our sacred texts. They don’t belong to the loudest voices who have misused them. They belong to the people of God. They belong to us. We can’t let those who misuse Scripture have the final word. The Bible tells one long, sweeping story of God’s love for humanity. We cannot lose our hold on that story just because some people have mishandled the text. 

So we relcaim it. We dig in. We wrestle. We read it carefully. We refuse lazy interpretations. We learn to say, “That’s not what this means.” We defend it, because this is our story too. 

Let’s look at Genesis 2. Overall Genesis 2 is a poetic picture of God forming humanity from dust, breathing life, planting a garden, rivers flowing outward into the world. It’s intimate, and it’s sacred. But it’s also one of those passages that tempts us to toss out the Bible, or at least tear out this page, not because of what it says, but because of what has been done with it. Let’s dive right in with one of the key problems in verse 18: 

18 Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.” 

After calling everything else good, God says something is not good. It is not good for the human to be alone. That’s the first problem in the Bible. The first problem is not sin, which we’ll get to in chapter 3. The first problem is loneliness. Isolation. And then God says, “I will make him a helper as his partner.”

This is where the mishandling begins. Entire systems were built by breezing over the word partner and latching on to the idea that helper meant that women were designed to be beneath men. Helper was interpreted to mean that patriarchy was the divine design, that hierarchy was embedded into creation itself.

I know that because I believed it once too. 

I didn’t grow up in the church. But when I began to explore faith as a teenager, I went to a church that taught that this, that women weren’t equal to men, based on the Bible, on passages including this one, and others that we’ll address as we get to them. I’m embarrassed to admit this,  for a while, I believed them. I didn’t know enough to question it.Eventually I came to see that wasn’t true. But even then, I didn’t challenge it.

I just left.

I found other kinds of churches where women were treated equally. I figured it was a live and let live situation, one of those differences in Biblical interpretation that doesn’t matter much outside of the church. So why argue? 

After 20 years in ministry, I know now I was very wrong. We don’t get to just retreat to our safe corners in the church where we read the Bible the same way. I heard from women in abusive relationships who the church told to submit. I talked to women who were told to be silent, to women who were told they didn’t have a calling, they were called only to help. We don’t have to look far outside of the church to see the damage of  these kinds of teachings. We can see what happens when powerful men operate inside systems that protect them, when women’s voices are minimized, and when power shields exploitation. 

That is what patriarchy does. When women are treated as less than, less credible, less authoritative, less worthy. This is not just a theological debate. We don’t get to stay quiet when Scripture is misused. We have a responsibility to speak up, to teach it carefully, and to refuse interpretations that harm. The witness of scripture from Genesis to Revelation is the full equality of women. (I know some are wondering about some other passages, like Paul’s letters, and how they relate to this. We’ll get there). 

But what does Genesis 2 really teach? Let’s look. 

18 Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.” 19 So out of the ground the Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air and brought them to the man to see what he would call them, and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. 20 The man gave names to all cattle and to the birds of the air and to every animal of the field, but for the man there was not found a helper as his partner. 

Then God created the woman. The word that has caused so much trouble in this section is that word helper. But the Hebrew word that is translated into English as “helper” doesn’t mean what our English word does. In Hebrew, ezer refers to one who rescues. An ezer is one who comes to the aid of someone who cannot do it alone. In case there is still some confusion, we can look at how it is used in the rest of the Bible. Most often in Scripture, ezer isn’t used to refer to women at all. It’s used to refer to God. 

21 So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. 

The text makes a point of telling us that Adam was asleep. That detail isn’t accidental. The man did not create the woman, God did. This was not male superiority at work. God is working. The man is asleep. 

Some also argue that the creation order here establishes authority, that because the man was created first, he must hold some greater status. If whoever got there first established the hierarchy, then humanity would be subordinate to everything created before it: earth, water, sky, and animals. Instead, the movement of the creation narrative seems to progress from less complex to more complex. Incidentally, the woman is created last. 

22 And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. 

23 Then the man said,

“This at last is bone of my bones    and flesh of my flesh;this one shall be called Woman,    for out of Man this one was taken.”

The man says “this one shall be called woman” but naming isn’t about power. In Genesis 16, just a few chapters later, Hagar names God, and God clearly has more power than Hagar. So what is happening then? Naming here isn’t about authority; it’s discerning the relationship. Adam sees a partner. The problem God named, aloneness, is finally addressed.

When we reclaim this story, when we let the text speak for itself, we see something entirely different than what I was taught the first time I heard this passage.

The crisis in the garden wasn’t authority. It wasn’t a concern for who was really in charge. If that were the case, Genesis would have addressed it directly. The big problem in the garden was isolation. It is not good that the human should be alone. That’s the tension God moves to resolve.Before sin ever enters the picture, God identifies isolation as the thing that is not good. We learn in Genesis 2 that we were created for a connection, with God, and with one another. The design was not patriarchy. God’s design was partnership.

People who misuse the Bible often warn us that we can’t let the culture shape how we read it.

They’re right. So let’s not let the culture shape how we read it.

The culture we live in is still deeply held by patriarchy and hierarchy. Power still tilts toward men. Systems still privilege certain voices over others. So to say that all people are made in the image of God, equally bearing God’s likeness and dignity, is not giving in to the culture. It’s challenging it. And in a culture that also celebrates radical independence and absolute self-sufficiency, where strength means needing no one and success means standing alone, the most countercultural thing we could say is that you are not self-sufficient. You were never meant to be. You need God, and you need other people.

There is a lot in the Bible that has been contaminated by association. I know it can feel embarrassing at best, and at worst, deeply painful. It can make us want to distance ourselves from it.

But some things are too beautiful to throw away. The story of the Bible is one of them. 

It is a story that says you are made in the image of God.That all people are made in the image of God.And that from the very beginning, it was not good for humanity to be alone.

I think that’s a story worth fighting for.