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. 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. 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.”
24 Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh. 25 And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed.

A big part of our human nature is the desire to belong, to fit in, to be a part of some group. We are social creatures. We are tribal. This is in our DNA. We like to form teams. We like to be on the winning team, but that’s not nearly as important as being on some team, and belonging somewhere.

One thing that helps a group feel close is to have a common enemy. That makes us depend on each other, and want to help each other, more. Enemies make us feel united, excited, and good about ourselves, even virtuous. This gives a new and different meaning to the phrase “loving our enemies.” Here it means loving to have an enemy. Loving to hate the enemy. This gets our emotional juices flowing, and it tells us who we are in a simplistic but powerful way. We’re against “them” - those other people, who are against us.

So we have the Red Sox versus the Yankees, liberals versus conservatives, labor versus management, and so on. On one of those political comedy shows on TV, they were making fun of politicians, and this was a skit on the last Presidential campaign. One of the candidates said, “Here in the audience is Mrs. Mary Trueblood. She’s a retired nurse and Sunday School teacher. She has diabetes, congestive heart failure, and cancer. Under my plan, all her medical costs would be covered and her volunteer work could continue. Under my opponent’s plan, her house would be burned to the ground.” And there was a similar satire of overblown political rhetoric coming from the other side.

The church has a lot of this in our own history. Four hundred years ago, the battle was between the Protestants and the Catholics. Then, on the Protestant side, the radical Protestants versus the magisterial Protestants. The evangelicals versus the intellectuals. The fundamentalists versus the religious humanists. Each side claims to have it right. The other side has it wrong. We’re obedient. They’re sinful. We follow the Bible; they follow their lust and greed. We’re intellectually honest and balanced. They’re ridiculous and fanatical.

For most of my lifetime, our nation’s favorite designated enemy was “the Russians.” How many times did we hear, growing up, “We can never trust the Russians. They’re godless communists.” So we needed 20,000 nuclear warheads to threaten them in return. A big part of our economy fed off that rivalry and suspicion.

What happened to all those dangerous people? Now, suddenly, Russians are our friends, our allies. It makes you wonder, Were they really so dangerous all along? To what extent was their “enemy status” a fiction that served another purpose?

Lately, we’ve had Osama bin Laden as our favorite enemy. Now that’s slipping off the front page, and we seem to be going back to Saddam Hussein, our previous favorite enemy. We do have some evidence that he’s not a nice guy. We, the United States, are certainly his favorite enemy; I’m sure he generates a lot of support for himself by demonizing us.

How dangerous is he, really? I don’t know how dangerous he is. I suspect that very few people, if any, really do know. Maybe he really is the menace he’s made out to be. Our enemies aren’t always imaginary. But this is the same man that the experts in Washington used to say was our friend. Fifteen years ago or so we were giving him military technology. Has he changed? Have we changed? Or have our interests changed?

How much of this has to do with oil? Remember how, at the end of the last gulf war, Iraq set its oil fields on fire? There’s talk now, in Washington, that after another war with Iraq we could - as a by-product of a war - end up controlling that oil. We could say it was to protect the environment. Wouldn’t that be convenient? Then we wouldn’t need as much oil from Saudi Arabia, where the terrorists really are coming from.

I’m very leery and suspicious about the talk of invading Iraq. A lot of innocent people have suffered and died in the last war, and through the ten years of economic sanctions. How much of it is based on real danger? How much of it is based on imaginary danger? How much do we really care about the Iraqi people? Why don’t we ever hear from them on CNN?

Christians, like everyone else, have done our share of demonizing an enemy. Christians have burned each other at the stake. But the worst in Christian history isn’t what we’re supposed to be about. Certainly a big part of what we’re supposed to be about is to resist the impulse to manufacture and demonize enemies so that we can feel good about ourselves, or have an excuse to do what we find convenient to do. Reality is always more complicated than that. History is more complicated than that. The enemy is always more complicated than that.

The main point I’m trying to make today is that the enemy, in opposing us, always has something to teach us. Not that the enemy is conscious of this role and performing it out of the goodness of their hearts.

Here we come back to Adam in the garden. God said, “It’s not right for the man to be alone. I’ll make him a helper as his partner, a helper to stand in front of him, a helper to oppose him, a helper who will sometimes feel like his enemy.”

Maybe we need an enemy - not to make us feel good about ourselves, but for the same reason that Adam needed a counterpart to oppose him. Maybe we need an enemy to help us be honest about our motives. Maybe God has a deeper, positive purpose in having created a world, in which some people, who happen to control a lot of oil, don’t like us. Maybe it’s part of God’s way to get us to evolve and learn to live together, and maybe to need less oil, to be a little more humble, and to become better participants and leaders in the world.