Genesis 2:4-7, 15-25

“And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.” Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and our Savior Jesus Christ, Amen. The text for our sermon this morning is the Old Testament lesson read a few moments ago from the second chapter of the book of Genesis. Dear friends in Christ, in his epic poem Paradise Lost, John Milton describes two acts of marital love between Adam and Eve. The first is just a night or two before the Fall, and Milton, in beautiful verse, praises what God has given as gift: “Hail, wedded love, mysterious law, true source of human offspring, sole propriety in Paradise of all things common else!” There, the marital union is as natural and good as breathing, a beautiful expression of love. But then, many chapters later, after they have fallen into sin, their first deed, after blaming each other, is to return to the marriage bed, however, in a much different way. Milton writes, “He on Eve began to cast lascivious eyes; she him as wantonly repaid; in lust they burn.” And they take each other, no longer in pure love, but in carnal lust, driven by passions now corrupted by sin. The message is clear: the Fall can be no better understood than in the perversion of man’s relationship with woman; even the lawful union of husband and wife is corrupted and poisoned, they are no longer naked and without shame, they are naked and filled with shame. Much has changed; indeed, everything has changed.

Woman was given to man as gift, indeed the highest gift of His creation, to be honored above all save the Creator Himself. “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh,” Adam cries, “She shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” She is man’s helper, to save him from his loneliness, to fulfill with him God’s command to be fruitful and multiply, to fill the earth and subdue it. He cannot be without her; humanity is incomplete without woman, “it is not good for the man to be alone.” She is the one corresponding to him, alike, yet unlike, they fit together in every way like a puzzle, completing one another, the two halves of humanity, the two eyes through which God’s greatest creation looks on the world. She is morally equal, an equal member of humanity, with equal worth before man, equal standing before God, yet she is placed in an order, with man as her head, her provider, her protector and she in submission, as receiver and bearer of life. As she was taken from man, so she will return to man, and the two will become one flesh again. She is his gift, and he receives her as gift in love.

But no longer. As Milton so dramatically illustrates, man now takes woman, and woman takes man, in lust, even within God-ordained marriage, man and woman are naked and should be ashamed. The trouble is, they are naked and so often feel no shame. And it is no surprise that if lust fills the marriage bed, that it would then spill out into other relations, that adultery and fornication would become common, that even greater perversions would result. The Fall ruins all. Woman is an equal member of humanity, but now she seizes on that equality to subvert God’s order. She seeks man’s headship in the home, in the Church, in society, and man either abdicates his role as head or uses it to tyrannize those whom God has given as gift. Man no longer receives woman as a helper, but as a slave or as a slavemaster, and woman no longer wants to help, but to be the head.

You can speak quite eloquently against cohabitation and fornication of all kinds, you can argue against the acceptance of homosexuality and the erasure of gender, but the root of all these corruptions is the same sin that fills you, that even perverts your marriage bed. You are no different in God’s eyes from those whom you condemn; your lust, whether it leads to action or not, is the root and source of all the corruptions that we rightly deplore. You can declare God’s order and argue against women’s ordination with the best of them, but you do so not out of a concern for God’s order, but from a desire for power, the same desire for power that has led women to seek the headship of men and men to treat women as sub-human. Women, you seek the authority God has given to men; repent! Men, you cover your desire for power with pious-sounding words; repent! You can puff out your chest and say, ‘The LCMS needs to repent!’ Certainly, our church body needs repentance, but so often we say this to avoid our own need to repent. Our time together this week is not an opportunity for self-righteousness, but for repentance, each one of us.

Repent and hear the Gospel. The Gospel is that woman is a gift, and not just a gift of creation. She is a gift through which God will bring forth salvation when man falls; from her womb will spring forth a line that will culminate in the One who will crush the serpent’s foul head. When God gave woman to man as his helper, little did Adam know that she was not just a savior from loneliness, but through her would come the Savior from sin. From generation to generation, every act of procreation in the promised line, as taineted as it may have been, was for the purpose of salvation, bringing humanity’s Savior ever closer. And when the time had fully come, man didn’t participate, but it was in the womb of a woman where God miraculously conceived the Messiah, God in the flesh, brought forth of woman alone. The second Eve, Mary, fulfilled woman’s task as helper, sent by God for this very purpose, to bring Jesus Christ, our Savior, into the world.

And this Jesus went forth and resisted every temptation, the temptation to lust, the temptation to tyrannize, the temptation to subvert God’s order. He honored and taught women, but He did not lust after them, He did not make them apostles. And as the women wept, He gave up His life into death for you, for me, for all. His death for your sins; He who didn’t lust after anyone, died for all your lust, He who never subverted God’s order, died for your desire for power. He died for your every sin, and when He rose again on the third day, it was the women who once again fulfilled their role as helper, not preaching, but taking the message of Christ’s victory to the apostles so they could take it into the world.

Through the apostles, the Bridegroom sought you out and made you His own, incorporating you into the salvation that He won. The Bridegroom sought out His bride, you, along with all of fallen humanity, and laid down His life for her. She had fallen into sinful adultery, idolatry that could only lead to death, she was destined to return to the dust. But Jesus laid Himself into the dust for His bride, He gave up the breath of life that was God’s first gift only to breathe again on the third day and rise up from the dust of death to make His people alive. He calls on all who are naked without shame to see their sin and repent, and He calls on all who are naked and ashamed to hear the Gospel. He sought you out in your sin, a walking corpse, destined to give up the breath of life and return to the dust, and He made you alive, giving you a new birth in water and the Word. You are His bride, and He the bridegroom, and the order of creation which we receive as Law is a picture of the Gospel: Christ the head of His redeemed, saved, purified body, the Church.

That’s why we fight to preserve the order of creation, within ourselves through daily repentance and in the world through our confession, because it gives us a picture of salvation, it points us and the entire world to the Gospel. Every perversion of the marital union, every attack on our creation as male and female, every perversion of God’s order, is not just a corruption of the Law, it is an attack on the Gospel. In response, the Church, who is the Bride, holds forth the beauty of marriage and the marital union, she declares woman as gift and highly exalts her in her role as helper and receiver in God’s good order, and she encourages men to take their place as provider and head. The Bride condemns perversions of God’s Word, and she also holds up the beauty of what God created and how He set all things in proper, wonderful order, all in service of the proclamation of the Gospel. For the Bridegroom has come for His bride, and He calls on all to take that honored place as His body, receiving protection and provision from He who is our head. He promises the removal of all shame, a restoration of the paradise we lost. There we will stand as Christ’s bride, living forever in these words: “And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.” In the Name of Jesus, our Bridegroom, Amen.