What was it about life in the Garden of Eden that made it a paradise for those who lived there? How was life in that ancient garden different from life as we know it today? It was, no doubt, a beautiful place in which to live with no slums, no ghettos, no abandoned buildings and no stretches of vacant lots littered with trash and debris. There was an abundance of things to eat so, unlike many places in our world today, no one had to be hungry. The idea of work had not yet been invented so people lived at leisure all the time. Nobody was getting up and getting ready to go off to a job and perhaps even more than one job just to make ends meet. That is not the way things were in paradise.

Advertisement

However, there was one more thing about life in the Garden of Eden that made it fundamentally different from life as we know it in our world today. There was Adam and there was Eve; there was one man for every woman. Nobody was left alone. Nobody experienced loneliness. God said “It is not good for man to be alone” (Genesis 2:18), so after God made the birds and the animals and the other living creatures, God made a woman to be the companion of man.

I want to suggest today that the perfect balance found in the Garden of Eden, which is one man for every woman may never have existed again, and it certainly does not exist today. As many women know all too well, there are far more women in this world looking for male companionship than there are men who are available to provide that companionship. There is not one man for every woman. In some American cities there are three women for every man. In some work and social settings there are no eligible, unmarried men at all.

Our society is one that is centered on the idea of people getting married and living happily ever after. There are some people for whom that reality has always been true. However, there are three unavoidable realities that must be acknowledged; the first is that 50% of those who do get married do not live happily ever after. They get divorced and have to fuss about how to divide the assets they accumulated when they were married. The second reality is that women tend to live longer than men, so no sooner has a man retired from working than he dies between the ages of 62-66, leaving his wife to live alone for the next 15-20 years. The third reality is that a good many people in our society, and especially as it involves women, will never get married at all. It is not that they don’t want to get married. It is not that they would not make wonderful wives. The hard fact is simply this; there are not enough men for every woman to have a husband.

That description of reality is as true right here in our church as it is anywhere else in the world. These four things define who we are as a congregation. Antioch is home to an incredible number of couples who have lived happily together for 30 or 40 or 50 years and more. We celebrate those couples almost every week in the church bulletin. At the same time we are home to a large number of divorced persons whose marriages perhaps should never have occurred, but at some point one or both persons decided to call it to an end. Divorce is as much a part of what defines our church as long-term couples.