Afterwords: The Sleep of Nonbeing

A Post-Sermon Reflection on the Second Sunday of Lent

This has been recorded for your convenience should you prefer to listen rather than read this reflection. The sermon, “Lent 2: Becoming Icons” is posted on the All Souls Knoxville Podcast which can be found wherever you listen or on Buzzsprout page.

There are times when I would like to stretch out on certain themes but may not do so in order to get to the heart of the matter in the homily. This space, however, gives me room to expand from time to time on some of the things that I didn’t prolong during the Sunday message. I call these after-words, words after the homily that are directly related to it.

This Sunday one of the through lines that I found fascinating was rooted in the sleep of Abram. I’m a big fan of Comment Magazine: Public Theology for the Common Good. It’s worth the price of subscription, in my view, if you’re looking for accessible spiritual writing dealing with relevant topics. In the Fall of 2023, one of the articles in the magazine was titled “Sex in the Cities: Sacrifice, Control, and Abundance in the Theatre of God’s Glory” by Doug Sikkema.¹ I touched on this briefly in the sermon, but Sikkema makes a fascinating move from the sleep of the first human (‘Adam), to the deep sleep of Abram, to the sleep of the disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane, to the Eucharist. I think his connection is compelling and beautiful so I thought I would use this space to bring a bit more attention to it.

THE SLEEP OF ‘ADAM

Before there was man and woman there was ‘Adam, Hebrew for human. We’re used to thinking of Adam as the male figure in the creation narratives, but ‘Adam simply means human. Gender doesn’t actually appear until the human is put into a deep sleep (tardemah), what Pope John Paul calls the “sleep of nonbeing.”² The language of ‘Adam is important because the human (‘adam) was taken from soil (‘adamah), and thus connected to the soil. While it is common to believe that the second human was taken from the rib of the first, I follow the translation tradition (which has been around since at least the late third or early fourth century) that the second human was taken from the side, not the rib, of the first human. It is at this point, by the way, that gender enters the scene. Now we have not the generic human (‘Adam) but Ish (woman) and Ishsha (man), and again, note the connection and all that it symbolizes. Biblical scholar John Walton, also contending for the translation of side over rib notes that the Hebrew word sela is used 40 times in scripture but only translated as rib in Genesis. He explains that typically the word is used to refer to the architectural structure “in the tabernacle/temple passages.” He says that “it can refer to planks or beams…but more often it refers to one side or the other, typically when there are two sides.”³

THE SLEEP OF ABRAM

Why do I feel it important to bring all of this up? I think it’s interesting to think of the human being halved, so to speak, in order to create two humans from the one while ‘Adam is in the deep sleep of tardemah, because when we consider our Genesis text this week we see Abram splitting the animals in two and then falling into tardemah. In Genesis 15 we read the following:

[God] took him [Abram] outside and said, “Look up at the heavens and count the stars—if indeed you can count them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring be.” Abram believed the LORD, and he credited it to him as righteousness. (Genesis 15:5-6)

As Daniel M. Debevoise asks,

“What does Abram believe? That he will have a child? That God can be trusted? That there are a lot of stars in the sky?”⁴

We don’t know, exactly. But he believed God and God would work with Abram regardless of the specifics of his belief because ultimately Abram believe the word of God, the word we live by instead of bread alone. God, Abram understood, is trustworthy. But also, faith is messy.

But Abram said, “Sovereign LORD, how can I know that I will gain possession of [the land]?” (v. 8)

Abram believes, but then asks the kind of question that causes Zechariah to go mute in Luke: but how can I know? Regardless, God tells Abram to bring “a heifer, a goat and a ram…along with a dove and a young pigeon” (v. 9). He does, splits them in half, and then, when evening came, “fell into a deep sleep, and a thick and dreadful darkness came over him” (12-13). The thick darkness came with a dark message about the future enslavement of his people, but also their future deliverance. During this sleep we read,

“a smoking firepot with a blazing torch appeared and passed between the pieces. On that day the LORD made a covenant with Abram.” (17-18)

The smoking firepot is God. God appears in many strange ways in scripture! But it’s important to note that

“When the time comes [for Abram] to walk through, God puts Abram in a deep sleep. God walks alone.”⁵

What’s important to see in both of these instances is first that God brings life out of division. One human from another; a covenant through the divided animals. In the creation narrative we see God creating through separating again and again. But even more importantly, we see that the work is all God’s. In both of these instances the human is asleep while God is doing God’s creative and covenant work. It is easy for us, especially during Lent, to really focus on the work as being primarily ours. The work is never primarily ours. We are invited into disciplines of prayer, fasting, and alms giving, but the work is God’s work and, let it be known, God works even when we cannot pray; cannot keep watch, and fail to give of what we have.

THE SLEEP OF THE DISCIPLES

During Lent we follow Jesus to the Garden of Gethsemane and, ultimately, to the cross. In Mark 14 we find Jesus “deeply distressed and troubled…overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death” (33-34). Jesus asks his disciples to watch and pray but they fall asleep not once, but twice. But it’s interesting to read these words with ‘Adam and Abram in mind. Sikkema does just that when he writes:

And where were the disciples, those bold advocates of power and domination, as Jesus struggled in the garden the night before his crucifixion? They were in a deep sleep, just like ‘adam and Abram. They were passive, able only to receive the gift they were about to be given. And [here]…it is the church as bride who will emerge from the side the second ‘adam, rent on the cross.⁶

These disciples, like all disciples, failed at their task. And yet God was at work while they slept. God is the actor in all of these stories bringing about what we could not and cannot. We mustn’t forget this.

THE SPLITTING OF THE BREAD

Each week during the Eucharist liturgy there is a silence before what is know as the fraction, that moment when the bread is split in two. What if during this silence we were to remember, amidst our failures, our inability to keep watch and pray the way that we should, that God continues to do what God does even while we fumble around the world half asleep to the reality of God? What if the breaking reminds us of the God who walks through the sacrifice alone, and walks to the cross alone, and creates covenant with us even while we sleep? What if we were to remember that saving the world is not up to us, we are merely invited to bear witness to the work that God has accomplished in Christ and to taste of that accomplishment week after week?

At the end of the sermon I quoted Sikkema and will quote him again here because his words bring together all that we have been talking about.

But I also wonder if any of them watching the Logos made flesh saw traces of their ancient origins, in which this their Creator, now with hands of flesh and in their presence, divided the bread into two just as he had, so long ago, divided the heavens from the earth, the sea from the dry land, the day from the night, and ‘adam from the ‘adamah—and in that division, miraculously, did not diminish creation but unleashed its ‘moreness.’⁷

Perhaps this Lent you have felt like you’ve really gotten off to a good start. Your devotion matters and will help you as you follow Christ. But then again, maybe you haven’t gotten off to a good start. Maybe the last thing you feel is “spiritual.“ Maybe you just feel tired and perhaps even angry. As the bread is broken each week, may you be reminded that God does God’s work even when we are deep in sleep physically or metaphorically. Our confidence is in God, not ourselves (thank God!). So let us do our best to keep watch, and pray, and give, and enter into this Lenten season with intention, but let us never forget that it is God who accomplishes what we need most, we are simply trying to align our hearts with God’s work. And as the bread is broken, let us remember that the God who walked alone through the sacrifice and alone to the cross still has his arm spread out to receive us all and welcome us into his saving work in the world.

1. Doug Sikkema, “Sex in the Cities: Sacrifice, Control, and Abundance in the Theatre of God’s Glory,” Comment: Public Theology for the Common Good, Gender, 41, no. 3 (Fall 2023): 8-20.

2. ibid., 17.

3. John H. Walton, The Lost World of Adam and Eve: Genesis 2–3 and the Human Origins Debate, (Inter Varsity Press 2015), 78.

4. Daniel M. Debevoise, Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary, Year C, Vol. 2, Lent Through Eastertide, ed. David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 136.

5. Sikkema, “Sex in the Cities,” 18.

6. ibid., 19.

7. ibid.