EIGHTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST – 08 OCTOBER 2006
ST PAUL LUTHERAN CHURCH, ABQ NM – THE REV. P. L. HOLMAN
GENESIS 2:18-24; HEBREWS 1:1-4, 2:5-12; Mark 10:2-16
“What is Good”
A great gift of the Lutheran church and its liturgical tradition is that we don’t self-select the lessons for each week. We follow a lectionary, a list of lessons from scripture assigned for each Sunday of the church year. While we don’t cover the entire Bible in three years, we come pretty close. We at least get challenged to hear what the lectionary – and the Holy Spirit – want us to hear instead of what the preacher or the council or some other leadership body decide we should hear. There have been many times in the past twenty years when I wish I’d scheduled a favorite hymn Sunday in place of trying to preach on the appointed lessons. This is one of those days. But it isn’t favorite hymn Sunday, so today we get to hear about marriage, and divorce. Yes, and so much more.
“It is not good that the man should be alone.” These words from the second of two creation stories in Genesis set the stage for the creation of woman, a partner for man. First, though, God offers a variety of birds and animals. Note that they are created not to be eaten (vegetarians, rejoice!) but to be partners for the man. God creates them, the man names them, and thereby he establishes a relationship with them. God creates humanity to live in partnership with creation. This is good. In these days of global warming and excessive consumption of natural resources we do well to remind the Creationists – to remember ourselves – that this too is part of the story.
But I digress. The animals are not, as it turns out, the fit partner that God had hoped for man. So from the side of the man – not the heel, mind you, but the side – God creates woman. A partner, a helper, not a subservient one (after all, God is known as one who helps), but one to share the journey. And God calls man to journey with woman, men and women to be partners together as life unfolds. This version of the creation story ends with verse 25: they were both naked and were not ashamed. I like to think of God closing this creation chapter as it began, hearing the narrator inform us that, indeed, God saw that it was good. God created men and women to live in partnership in community. This is good.
It is the final verses of this second creation story that Jesus quotes in response to the question about divorce. Historically the Jewish community took a rather negative view of divorce, and prescribed the death penalty for adultery. Judaism did recognize that under some circumstances a man and woman might not be able to learn to live together and so provided for the husband to be able to dissolve the marriage. By the time of this gospel of Mark, the death penalty was seldom invoked, and rabbis had ongoing debates about appropriate grounds for dissolution. Marriage, Jesus reminds his interrogators, is God’s intention for humanity – commitment, sealed by a covenant, faithfulness for the long haul. It is human hard-heartedness – the unwillingness or inability to learn to live together -- that created the need for a law governing divorce. But human need does not define God’s intent, Jesus said. God does. And God’s intent is for faithfulness, forgiveness, forever. Jesus knew. He spent his life trying to teach that to any who would listen – “I came not to abolish the Law of Moses, but to fulfill it; not to throw it out but to show through the law God’s still more excellent way.”
I cannot tell you how many times I have heard these words of Genesis and of Jesus used to judge someone – if you are divorced you are no longer worthy to receive communion. Or to control a relationship: if you become my wife, he told her, you must give up your friends and your past and become one flesh with me (true story – she has nothing left of her high school years as he made her burn it all). To condemn a person to a life of subservience in an abusive relationship: if your partner is beating you, you must pray to God to forgive you for being a spouse who deserves to be beaten (true story – they said “the Bible tells me so”). Or to condemn those God has created with the gift of homosexuality…
How often we as Christians, out of fear or anger or hatred, tend to place God’s law above God’s mercy and grace, as though somehow this Jesus we confess as Lord doesn’t really make a difference after all. Yet we have God’s word on this too: there is nothing we can do or have done that can ever separate us from God’s great love -- nothing. Jesus reminds us that God wants our lives to be fulfilling; God sees our relationships as husbands and wives, lovers and friends, companions on the journey as part of the plan God has for us to share in lives of holiness and joy, not judgment, and as part of God’s good creation. When we live together in that way, trusting and forgiving and focusing on the unifying joy of God’s desire, we are a glimpse of God’s intention from the beginning of time and thereby also a glimpse of the fulfillment of the Divine promise unfolding in the world even now through Jesus Christ. Now THAT is very good.
Oh yes, and one more thing. This glimpse of the divine realm, it can’t be ours unless we are willing to receive it as children. My own children are now grown and on their own. I am a grandparent in waiting, and so enjoy any opportunity I have to be around little ones. Yesterday I had two such opportunities – early in the morning watching little ones run and play as we adults watched the balloons ascend in the distance; and at the wedding celebration of two divorced adults blending their families and their extended families. How does a little child receive anything? Just watch a two year old shoving her way into the play circles of older youth, and being embraced by them with great laughter; just watch an eight year old struggle to be grown up when what he really wants to do is run and play with the younger kids – who cares if he’s in his “good clothes.” Unless you receive the promises of God – God’s intention for healthy relationships – with the enthusiasm of a child, you are missing out on life!
We don’t live with the same sense of “end-times” urgency that the writer of Mark embraced. Divorce is real, broken relationships at every level – personal, community, national, international – are fact of life for us. God’s first words to us today -- “It is not good…” speak volumes to all those situations. It is not good that we attempt to isolate ourselves from the impact our lifestyles have on the environment. It is not good that the first-strike defense policy we are pursuing in key areas around the globe is wreaking havoc with the goodwill we have long understood our nation to be about as global partners for justice and freedom. It is not good that our standard of living is creating gross inequities in the distribution of food, health care, and basic security not only globally but within our own country as well. It is not good that the premise of fear of others now so controls our lives that God’s promise of hope is overshadowed and even at times drowned out.
When the Church prays God to seal a covenant of commitment for life we ask the partners to promise faithfulness and forgiveness forever. When we wash little Ian Alexander in the waters of Baptism this morning we will claim that promise of God’s faithfulness and forgiveness forever for him, setting him forth on a life-long journey of living into that promise as he grows in faith and hope. As followers of Jesus we do well to remember, regardless or our marital status or age or occupation, that we are all on this journey together as one flesh with Jesus, the One who is always walking with us, and that each day we live is a day to use the gifts God has given us – of time and talents and treasures, of passion and compassion and hope – to be a glimpse of that hope for others, all of us, together. That is good.