Old Testament Reading: Genesis 2:18-24
For Sunday, Oct. 7, 2012—Ordinary 27
People feel very passionate about marriage. Not their own marriage, of course, other people’s marriages. I think most people probably felt passionate about their own marriages, you know, at some point.
Most people I know seem to prefer their marriage, to, say, not being married to their spouse. They are generally happy, grateful, somewhat content, really-super-one-hundred-percent think it’s worth sticking out—but passionate? Well, occasionally for sure.
Real Passion?
In Minnesota where I live and blog, there is an amendment to the state constitution on the November ballot that would define marriage as being between one man and one woman. Same sex marriage is already illegal in Minnesota and will remain so no matter the outcome of the vote.
People are very passionate about this issue. I have to say that I am of the “love your neighbor, but stay out of their business,” school, so I really have a hard time with people talking about the need to defend traditional marriage by requiring the government to infringing on the rights of other people. People at one point were just as passionate about divorce.
Textual Politics?
I bring this up, because it came up in the text, not because I have decided to use the Scripture and this nascent blog to support and proclaim my own political viewpoint. I don’t make direct correlations between particular Scripture passages and current political issues when I preach either—although I think it would not take long to figure out that I am left-of-Jon-Stewart liberal.
Never-the-less, I have the humility to believe other people could read the same Bible as me and come to different and equally credible political conclusions. Or be equally disappointed and confused.
Gospel Truth?
In the Gospel text for this week, Jesus quotes this Genesis and adds, therefore, what ever God has joined together, let no one separate, a ringing endorsement of lifelong marriage. But I am confused. God did not join man and women together—God ripped them apart.
God, tried to provide a suitable companion for Adam, making every kind of animal, bird, fish, monkey—I guess God comes close with the dog—but none of them do the trick. Adam names them and then plays with them for a while, but it is never a love connection. So God knocks Adam out and tears part of his insides out and forms another being. God separates woman from man, God tears them asunder. When Adam wakes up and sees her, he sees himself, saying, this at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh, and he likes what he sees.
The Hardest Question
After that it is man than that leaves his mother and father and clings to his wife and then they become one flesh. God doesn’t join them together—God pulled them apart and they come back together on their own.
If God separated Eve from Adam once couldn’t it be possible that God would want to separate a man and a women again?
Russell Rathbun is a preacher at House of Mercy in St. Paul, Minnesota, the author of Midrash on the Juanitos (Cathedral Hill Press, 2010) and the curator of The Hardest Question.
