Texts: Gen 2:18-24 and Mark 10:2-9

Ever wonder how preachers decide what they are going to preach about? Here’s my story about this week’s sermon.

Last Monday night I sat down at the table in my living room and read today’s texts: the one from the Creation story in Genesis, and the one about the Pharisees’ confrontation with Jesus in Mark’s gospel. “Hmmm,” I said to myself. “What will it be: the creation of Eve out of Adam’s rib, or Jesus’ words about divorce? Tough topics; tough choice.”

Whereupon something prompted me to look down at the floor where, moving along the carpet right beside me, was a snake!

So I concluded that I should talk about Adam and Eve.

To say that the Creation story is all about the snake is typical of the way we often react to stories that are very familiar to us. “Oh, I know all about the Creation story!” we say. “It’s about the snake and sin! And people have been blaming it on Eve ever since!”

Well, the Creation story is not all about the snake any more than today’s gospel reading is all about divorce.

I want to talk about what God said to Adam in the Garden, and what that says about how we are to live with one another. In the verse just before today’s reading from Genesis, God tells Adam that if he eats of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil he will die. In other words, God says, you are not God!

And then God says, “It is not good that the man should be alone.”

You are not God, and you are not to be alone.

The Creation story in Genesis is what anthropologists call a “charter myth,” a story that locates us in the world and give us a compass on how to live in it. To call it a “myth” is not to say that it isn’t “true.” Unless you’re a fundamentalist, your “take” on the story in Genesis is that it doesn’t tell us the facts about Creation. But it does tell us the deepest truth about how we are meant to live in relation to God and one another.

To say that we are not God is to say that we live under the sovereignty of God. Putting anything above God is idolatry.

To say that we are not to be alone is to say that we were created to be in relationship with one another through God our Creator.

Living in relationship is at the core of what it means to be human in God’s economy. Indeed, God’s own essence—the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—is one of interrelationship. To be out of relationship with God, or to be out of relationship with our neighbor, is to be broken.

When the Pharisees asked Jesus whether it was “lawful for a man to divorce his wife” they were trying to trap him into an argument about the Law. But Jesus grounded his response to the Pharisees not in the Law of Moses but in the state of Creation, in the way that God intended us all to be: in wholesome and life-giving relationships with one another, whether in marriage, friendship, or Christian community.

The Marriage liturgy of the Episcopal Church draws an analogy between the manner of life in marriage and “the mystery of the union between Christ and his Church.” Just as the lives of married persons are sanctified by the presence of God within the covenant of marriage, our lives together in Christ’s Church are sanctified by the presence of God among us as we live out our Baptismal Covenant.

God is the head of marriage, just as Christ is the head of the Church. Whether we are at home or in the Church, when our lives are not centered on God, our relationships suffer.

The Pharisees constantly tried to trap Jesus into arguments about the particularities of the Law. But Jesus placed before them a vision of salvation—of healing and wholeness--in which Creation would be restored and renewed.

We have all heard it said that some people “bring out the best” in us. That’s the vision that is set before us in the Creation story. When God said, “man is not to be alone,” God was saying that there is a part of us that is only developed in relationship with another person--a synergy that grows out of our common life. We need each other to become who we were intended to be as whole persons before God. This is to say that my salvation is not just about me; rather, our salvation is about all of us.

It is obvious that our relationships are broken. In denomination after denomination the Church of Christ is in conflict, if not in schism. The divorce rate in America is around 50%. The nations and peoples of this world are at war. Violence is endemic in our streets and in our schools. We are broken people living in broken relationships.

Jesus came among us and lives among us to restore the created order of a peaceable kingdom in which the lion lies down the lamb, and human beings live in wholesome, life-giving relationships centered in the divine life of our Creator. This week the Amish community in Pennsylvania modeled for us, in an extraordinary way, how a people whose lives and relationships are centered on God can respond to unimaginable violence with forgiveness and compassion.

When the Pharisees confronted Jesus about divorce, the vision that Jesus put before them was one of hope, not of condemnation. God’s transforming grace works always and everywhere to encourage us to heal what is broken in ourselves and in our relationships, so that we may be made whole, as God created us to be.