Brought Together

The texts for this sermon were Genesis 2:18-24, Mark 10:2-16, and Hebrews 1:1-4 and 2:5-12. They are not easy texts. For good and gracious contextualizing thoughts on the gospel, which talks about divorce, I would direct you to this reflection on the gospel text, which directed much of my thinking for this sermon. The sermon as preached was framed differently in the beginning, with an emphasis on communion, which comes back around at the end, but by and large, this is the sermon text. 

I want to tell the people that we were made with an unquenchable desire for something other than ourselves lodged deep down in our guts. I want to tell the people that the longing that they feel is real and powerful and motivating. I want to tell them that it is right, and a good and joyful thing always and everywhere to reach out to another. In times of sorrow and in times of celebration, in times of loneliness and in times of togetherness, in times of comfortable stasis and in times of life-altering fracture, we find our way to one another, and this is as it should be.

The ancient Israelites understood this truth and believed in it so much that they wrote it into their story of creation. The Lord God sees that it was not good for the first human to be alone, the scriptures tell us, and so God seek to create a companion, an aide, for the human. God creates and creates. God makes every living creature and the human names each (what a powerful thing, naming!) and still, at the end, no aide was found for the human.

And then,

After hiding the human in the depth of sleep,

The Lord God gently takes a piece of the human and shapes it into another.

The entirety of creation has passed by at this point. The sky, the seas, the ground, the depths of the earth, the stars, the plants, everything that lives on the earth or in the ocean or soars through the sky, all of the majesty and the marvel, and it is this other, this singular other and none other, that brings the human to song upon waking. This, finally, is the creation, the help, that meets the depth of the human’s longing. This is bone of bone and flesh of flesh. And the human names her Woman and names himself Man and knows that to this one he will cling.

Our lives bear out of the enduring truth of this story. We have all met others in our lives that we have clung to. Good friends. Good family members. Mentors. Partners. The expansiveness of the human’s hymn is so often forgotten. This, at last, is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. This, finally, God, finally, is one who feels so close to me that they must have a piece of me hidden inside of them, in their very being, deep down in their bones. My eyes can see the great goodness of Creation inside this one and it makes me sing. To this one I will hold. With this one I will stay.

We all long for these others in our lives, throughout our lives.

But.

We do not live in an idyllic garden, surrounded by every good thing to eat, at peace with each other and Creation around us. We live here. We live here, in this world, with people who will disappoint us and hurt us and leave us. We live in this world where it is so easy to miss the humanity of someone else, to, in our blindness, miss a piece of ourselves inside of another. We see glimmers of the good world we were made for, the good relationships we were shaped to hope for, but we are all the same surrounded by pain, and in our pain, we hurt others. We may not want to. We may not understand why or how we do it. But to be human in this world is to struggle with the pain given to us and the pain we give away.

Jesus understood this. Jesus, the Word Made Flesh who lived among us, the Word present at creation who knows us better than we know ourselves and loves us still, Jesus understood that humans struggle with pain. So when someone asked him, “Is it legal for a man to leave a woman destitute, without any way to live, shamed, ostracized, unable to find a home? Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?”, Jesus told them, “No.” Jesus said, “I understand how you have permitted yourselves to live, why you have given yourselves permission to cause lifelong pain to another, but you must understand: From the beginning, God called you to one another. God entrusted you to each other’s care. God joined you together, flesh of each other’s flesh and bone of each other’s bone, and you must not separate yourselves in this way. You must understand this. When you are joined, you have a burden of care for each other, and you must abide by this, and be worthy of it. To do otherwise is betrayal. To do otherwise is pain.” When I read this story from Mark, which contains such harsh words and such harsh teaching, I hear Jesus pleading with us, feeling our pain, understanding our desire for freedom from it, and begging us, “Be careful with one another. Care for one another. Please understand that you belong to one another.”

And as if he knew that we would miss this, that we would get distracted by all the complexity that marriage entails and misunderstand our burden of care for each other, the writer of Mark’s gospel tells us another story of togetherness. You see, people had been bringing little children to Jesus, but the disciples wanted to keep them away. They spoke sternly to them.

Jesus, upon seeing this, is indignant. Not only have they misunderstood that they must care for one another, but they have misunderstood again that there are some that we must extend particular care for. It was not only the women of this time who were vulnerable to this painful world, it was also the children. (And I think, in our heart of hearts, we understand that not much has changed in the millennia since Christ walked this Earth.) Jesus, heartbroken and full of love for these little ones who had come to see him and had been turned away, speaks to his disciples and he says, “Do not do this thing. Do not stop them. Let the little children come to me. Don’t you see? The World to Come, in all its goodness and togetherness, belongs to them. You have so much to learn from these ones, from their love and tenderness, their curiosity and their wonder.”

And Jesus lifts the children up in his arms, as he will lift up all of us in his outstretched arms on Golgotha, and Jesus blesses them. These ones who had been told that they had no place beside Jesus are the ones who are particularly blessed by him. When the God of the Universe came to this world in flesh and bone, he reached out to the ones who could give him nothing but love and answered their love with blessing. And even as he held them, he spoke to those who would have stood in the way of that blessing. “These belong to me, just as you belong to each other. Do not stop this.”

The writer of Hebrews gives us an argument for understanding Jesus’ actions here in the Gospel of Mark. In beautiful language, the writer reminds us that God has always been speaking to us, speaking to the ancestors in the past in many various ways, but that God has spoken anew in Jesus. God has spoken anew not by a prophet or by an angel, but by a Son, who is truly God as the Father and the Spirit are. He cares for us (and what are we that God cares for us, is mindful of us?), and he carries us along throughout our lives. Though he has returned to glory, for a while he lived here on this earth, moving through the world in flesh and bone just like us, and died, just as we will all die, and in this death brought us all to glory.

It is in the final verses of our reading from Hebrews that the author ties all of this together, our whole story from the man and the woman in the garden, to Jesus and the women and the children, to today. The author writes, “It was fitting that God, for whom and through whom all things exist, in bringing many children to glory, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through sufferings. For the one who sanctifies and those who are sanctified all have one Father. For this reason Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters, saying,

‘I will proclaim your name to my brothers and sisters,
in the midst of the congregation I will praise you.’”

Jesus has been here on this Earth. He knows our pain as deeply as we know it, and how we struggle with it, and how we suffer, because he suffered it too. And still, despite all that pain, God calls us God’s children, ones to be brought to glory. Despite everything, Jesus, who has brought us along with him, is not ashamed to call us his sisters and brothers. Before the world, he claims us as his.

And in calling us brothers and sisters, he gives us back to each other. He calls us again to care for each other.

For we are our brothers’ keepers. We are our sisters’ keepers. We are each others’ keepers. Flesh of flesh and bone of bone, we belong to each other and we are called to care for one another.

And so, we gather around this table for this meal, siblings together claimed by the Most High God, to remember what God in Christ has done for us. God has called us to each other from the very beginning, all humans everywhere together, and God has called us back to God, coming down from Majesty to suffer and die for us, that we might return back to majesty in love and thanksgiving. We gather this morning with Christians around the world, other daughters and sons of God, brothers and sisters together with Christ, to bring the pain that the world has given us and leave it on the cross, to be reconciled to each other, and to be given strength to care for each other as brothers and sisters ought. Best of all, God meets us here. Christ joins us when we share this meal that remembers him and in his presence we find love and joy, peace and comfort, strength for today and hope for tomorrow. In communion, Jesus gathers all of us once again up into his arms, blesses us, and gives us back to each other.

And what God has joined, let no one tear asunder.

Amen.