Introduction
This is the sermon I preached at Holy Cross Lutheran Church, Beatrice, Neb., on Saturday and Sunday, Oct. 3-4, 2009, the weekend of the Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost.
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Readings
Genesis 2:18-24
Psalm 8
Hebrews 1:1-4, 2:5-12
Mark 10:2-16
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Prayer
Long ago, O God, you spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets. Now in these last days, make us listen as you speak to us by your Son. Amen. (based on Hebrews 1:1-2, NRSV)
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Message
Across and beyond the confines of the ELCA
in the weeks since the Churchwide Assembly met in Minneapolis,
people have raised their voices,
seeking understanding,
crying for help,
shouting for joy,
and praying for guidance and wisdom.
We now have an approved social statement,
“Human Sexuality: Gift and Trust.”
And our church has adopted implementing resolutions
that point to changes in ELCA practices
regarding the recognition of relationships
between people of the same gender
and the approval for public ministry
of people in those relationships.
So, while it might be tempting
to look at today’s readings from Genesis and Mark
and say, “Hmmm! Now that’s a coincidence,”
I believe instead that God has blessed us
with these readings—here and now—as a gift.
It’s like the opening lines
from a famous hymn by William Cowper,
“God moves in a mysterious way,
His wonders to perform….” (LBW 483).
Of course, in these last days,
God’s most mysterious way of all
is to speak—in our midst—
the Word made flesh in his Son Jesus Christ.
But even so, his timing
in bringing us with our questions
about how to follow Christ in faith
together with his Will revealed to us
by this inspired Word in Scripture
is an amazing, an awesome thing.
Our calling, then, is to hold God’s Word
before our faces like a mirror,
and to look at what he shows us
about ourselves and our lives,
both as individuals and as the ELCA.
And then we are called to follow his lead
along the path he points out to us to take.
When we look and listen to what’s going on,
it’s pretty clear that we and others
are giving the greatest attention
to the most novel, freshly minted thoughts
in the social statement and the related resolutions.
And so the debates about recognition and rostering
dominate the discussions in voice and print.
But, today’s texts of Scripture call us back,
they return us to the beginning,
to the roots, to the foundations.
We find both of these readings from Genesis and Mark
laying hidden, but breathing God’s Spirit
into an address we use at every marriage celebration.
This is what we say in our liturgy:
“The Lord God in his goodness created us male and female, and by the gift of marriage founded human community in a joy that begins now and is brought to perfection in the life to come.
Because of sin, our age-old rebellion, the gladness of marriage can be overcast and the gift of the family can become a burden.
But because God, who established marriage, continues still to bless it with his abundant and ever-present support, we can be sustained in our weariness and have our joy restored.” (LBW, p. 203)
So, whether we look at Genesis or at this liturgy,
we hear how God made us male and female.
Genesis also tells us that God made us in his image,
that he made us to live in conversation with him,
to speak with him as praying creatures.
And just as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
enjoy and celebrate a divine community,
we have been made and called
to live in a human community with one another,
a community we share with God himself in Jesus Christ.
Marriage is the foundation of our human community.
And to illustrate this,
the liturgy paints a subtle, yet wonderful picture.
Here and now, whether we are single or married,
we can know joy in our community,
a community based upon marriage.
But we live in hope that God will perfect our community
in the life to come, in heaven.
This is our liturgy’s allusion to the other text about marriage
that comes, like a second bookend, at the end of the Bible.
St. John writes in his Revelation,
“Let us rejoice and exult and give [God] the glory,
for the marriage of the Lamb has come,
and his bride has made herself ready….
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth;
for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away,
and the sea was no more.
And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem,
coming down out of heaven from God,
prepared as a bride for her husband.” (Revelation 19:7, 21:1-2, NRSV)
Together, Scripture and the tradition in our liturgy
tell us that marriage is God’s gift
making human community possible now,
but even more amazingly,
providing us and the world a hint,
a glimpse, a foretaste of the feast to come.
This means that God has made us male and female,
not simply so we can reproduce.
He makes us this way and invites, by his grace,
to become one flesh
in the community that grows between a husband and a wife.
The life of this union,
lived out in our community with one another,
is an act of proclamation of God’s Word,
a lifelong sermon on the joys that await God’s people
when he will join them together in heaven
to become the bride of Christ.
Sometimes the preaching of our marriages
gets distracted, goes off-topic,
and runs into the danger of getting drowned out
by the noise and the bedlam of daily life.
That’s what the liturgy means by saying:
“…the gladness of marriage can be overcast
and the gift of the family can become a burden.”
But just as God forgives us
when we come to him with penitence in our hearts,
he will refresh and reinvigorate
a marriage when the woman and the man
come together before God
in mutual recognition of their sin,
their age-old rebellion.
This renews the voice of the marriage,
and makes it once again a witness
to the promise of God to make all things new.
And so, in all things,
the ultimate purpose of marriage
is to prepare us,
by experience and by expression,
for the destiny that awaits us in heaven.
This helps to make clear
why God made men and women to be partners in marriage,
why he founds human community upon marriage,
and why our liturgy echoes what Jesus Christ proclaims,
“Therefore what God has joined together,
let no one separate.” (Mark 10:9, NRSV)
This joining empowers us to proclaim God’s Word,
while separating silences the proclamation.
The joining of a man and a woman
offers us a glimpse, a foretaste, of the joining of Christ and his bride.
That makes the separation of divorce
a veil that hides the new heaven from our eyes,
a noise that drowns out the music of the wedding feast.
And so, we are called, as a people,
to make the proclamation God intends.
But because of our nature,
we seem inevitably to be drawn
to ask questions like the ones on the lips of the Pharisees.
Is divorce lawful?
Or we could add the many questions raised by the social statement.
Can we set aside portions of the Scriptures
that make people feel excluded?
Can we devise a public recognition
of the relationships between people of the same gender?
Can people in such relationships
be admitted to the ranks of the clergy?
But no matter what questions we ask,
no matter what may puzzle or perplex us,
no matter what direction our culture might suggest we go,
we have been blessed with the Word in the Scriptures,
we have received the traditions of the Church,
we are called to make a witness of our faith
both through our speech and our action.
This witness, when it is faithful,
clearly proclaims God’s will and prepares us to await
the Bridegroom’s “coming in power
to share with us the great and promised feast.” Amen.