Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost

(The preacher is indebeted for some ideas and/or inspiration from The Rev. James Liggett who preached a sermon from these texts in 2006.)

Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Gen 2: 18 - 24; Ps 8; Hebrews 1: 1 - 4, 2: 5 - 12; Mark 10: 2 - 16

St. Stephen's Episcopal Parish, Portland OR

October 4, 2009

Only Love Can Break Your Heart

Let us pray: Loving compassionate Jesus, we are gathered here this morning every one of us, because you have summoned us, sought us and bound us to yourself in love. We celebrate your encompassing and all embracing love. We give thanks that, even though we sometimes fall away from you, you never let us go. You continue to come for us, seek us and reach for us. Give us the grace to live our lives, to reach out to our sisters and brothers, that in some small way others might see some of your reaching, seeking and embracing love in us. Amen.

(SUNG) NO MAN IS AN ISLAND. NO MAN STANDS ALONE
EACH MAN'S JOY IS JOY TO ME, EACH MAN'S GRIEF MY OWN. WE NEED ONE ANOTHER, SO I WILL DEFEND, EACH MAN AS MY
BROTHER, EACH MAN AS MY FRIEND.

"If I speak with the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal...Love is patient; love is kind; love is not evious or boastful or arrogant or rude....Love never ends....And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love." 1st Corinthians 13: various verses. "But Ruth said, 'do not press me to leave you or to turn back from following you! Where you go I will go; where you lodge I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die - there will I be buried. May the Lord to thus and so to me, and more as well, if even death parts me from you." Ruth 1: 16 - 17. "As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love....I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete. This is my commandment, that you love one antoher as I have loved you." John15: various verses.

These are some of the passages and verses from our sacred scriptures that are often used at Weddings in our churches when we gather with the hope filled and happy couple that are looking to join their lives and love with the support and commitment of their Christian Community. You will notice that often the text from the author of Mark's telling of the Good News of God in Christ - the Tenth Chapter the sixth through the ninth verses will often be chosen by the happy couple "but from the beginning of creation, God made them male and female. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the tow shall become one flesh. So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate." I have yet to be asked by a couple planning their wedding or blessing ceremony to include the following verses from the Author of Mark's 10th Chapter that follow: "Then in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter. He said to them, 'whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery." I wonder why?

Today as we gather to hear God's word and celebrate the sacred mysteries of bread and wine become body and blood - we are challenged and probably wanting to completely avoid these words from the writers of the texts of Genesis and Mark. It would be far easier to ignore these challenges to our 21st Century sensibilities - when we hear the words which the Genesis author records and which Jesus repeats; they are harsh to our "enlightened" ears and we've moved beyond a Church that absolutely forbids divorced people from full participation in the life of the community. The wisest thing for the preacher to do, would be to focus instead on the life and actions of the monastic 10th Century young man from Assisi in whose honor our four legged friends have joined us today to receive blessing and attention. St. Francis and the prayers attributed to his ministry about peace and simplicity would preach much easier than Divorce which is painful and private. We do not like the judgmental words of Jesus that tells us anyone who divorces is guilty of adultery. Yet these words and scriptures are part of our canon and we dismiss them at our own peril if we are to understand the heart of the message in them texts which is, I believe about the sacredness of commitment in community.

The little piece from the second chapter of Genesis that we just heard, and that we just heard Jesus quote from, is like many other passages from the sacred scriptures, so familiar that we often don't even notice it. In it's familiarity it has become almost invisible. However, it is incredibly important and says some absolutely basic things about our vision of the world and of our humanity.

Do we remember the central pronouncement in the creation story? Throughout the previous chapter in the book of Genesis God has said one thing about the creation over and over again - "and God saw that it was good." But now God looks at all that has been made, everything, and says, “It is not good.”

It is not good that the man (and here “man” means, not a male person, but a human being) should be alone. Think about that. Listen to that. Everything else is good, but this isn’t. Notice also that Adam, the human being, was hardly alone in the garden. First of all, God was with Adam in the garden. That’s a lot all by itself. Then, when the animals were all done, all of nature, all of creation, was with Adam in the garden. The whole world was there. This man was not alone!

In fact, this sounds like the perfect situation for much of popular American religion -- one man alone, surrounded by nature, with God close at hand. How many times have we heard people say that this is really all the religion anyone needs: just me, God, and the great outdoors? This is the response that I almost always receive when someone finds out that I am a priest of the Church; "I find God in the mountains; all alone with the grandeur of creation that's my Church." Notice though when God saw it, when God saw one person, God, and the great outdoors, God didn’t say, “It doesn’t get any better than this.” Instead, God said, about this and only about this: “It is not good”.

(SUNG) NO MAN IS AN ISLAND, NO MAN STANDS ALONE.
EACH MAN'S JOY IS JOY TO ME, EACH MAN'S GRIEF MY OWN. WE NEED ONE ANOTHER, SO I WILL DEFEND EACH MAN AS MY BROTHER. EACH MAN AS MY FRIEND.

Creation wasn’t finished yet. As long as the man lived in isolation from other people, the creation of a good, a complete, human being, had not yet happened. It was in order to complete creation, to make a whole human being, that the other person, Eve, is created. There are a couple of things to notice here. First of all, this story is not as much about the roles of men and women as it is about what it means to be a human being. Also, it is not saying that everyone should be married or that only married people are whole people. That’s just not true. After all, Jesus, the perfect image of God, was single. But this is saying that we human beings can only grow into who we are created to be with and through the other -- through relationship and community. This growth happens in many ways, but it does not happen alone. If you ask an honest monk where his biggest and most important struggles come from, he’ll tell you “other monks.” We do not become whole or complete in isolation, but through community, through the “other.”

It is to this end that God has given us certain structures and situations in which we can, maybe, begin to discover what it means not to be alone, and where we can have our humanity drawn, and sometimes dragged, out of us. God has given us schools of love, places to grow. One of those places is certainly in committed relationship and family. These are some examples of schools of love. While not everyone is called to the vocation of marriage, for those of us who are, this business of helping one another grow into who we are created to be is one of the primary reasons God created the partnership of marriage. To be sure, there is more to it than this, but that is primary.

In much the same way, God has called us to be the Church, and called us into this church, because without something like this we simply cannot be very Christian, in spite of -- or more likely, because of -- both the difficulty and the joy other people bring. One of the central insights of Christianity is that being a part of a real, human, chunk of the body of Christ is essential to any serious Christian growth. Like covenanted relationships and families, parish life, church life, is not really about agreement, success, having our needs met, or personal "happiness". Instead it is a school of love. It is about growth into wholeness. That is why, in Church as in families, the real ties that bind are ties of love and circumstances, not of any other sort of genetics or homogeneity. This kind of growth is simply not possible without commitment to a lifetime of effort and intentionally seeking the grace and help of God. God’s intention that marriage be life-long is not an arbitrary and difficult rule God gives us to make our lives even more difficult. Instead, such intention is a gracious and necessary (if minimal) requirement if a real covenantal marriage relationship is even to be possible. In the same way, our Baptismal vows, which include a commitment to the life of the Christian community wherever we find ourselves, are also for the long haul; for better or worse. The same is true for life vows in monastic communities and the commitments involved in the other schools of love we are given. These vows are life-long in intention, because God knows we need at least that long to begin doing what we promise to do.

Obviously there are times in our lives when that does not happen. There are situations in which the reality of health and wholeness point to separation as the only option in which hope and healing can happen. Each of us has known that reality at some point in our lives and relationships. People leave churches and find new ones as most of us know from experience. In our own communion this reality has caused painful and costly fractures to the Body of Christ. Divorce, if not part of our personal experience, is a reality in our families and friendships and we have been deeply affected by it. These failures in our intention to live in life long relationship wound deeply and those wounds need our loving, caring and compassionate attention. In our vows, either baptismal, marital or spiritual we promise before God, and in community "to do all in our power to support these persons in their new lives" baptized members of the community, as newly formed partners in life; or as ordained ministers in service to the Church. None of us enters these vows lightly. Some of us, for reasons that often God alone understands are unable to fulfill them as intended - and in those situations God is at our call to lift us up in reconciliation and compassion. The function of community is to stand with each other in our successes and our failures - and share the love of God present among us in the Christ to aid in healing our deepest woundedness.

Our vows, in baptism, in covenanted marital relationship or in ordination are sacred mysteries, built into creation and into human nature. They are schools of love, gifts of a loving God. For it is not good to be alone; and the only way to goodness, to wholeness, is through commitment, relationship, community, and the grace of God.

Amen.