Imagine

This is the sermon preached by Rev. Don Van Antwerpen on Sunday, October 6, 2024, for the monthly worship service of Unfinished Community, drawing from Genesis 2:18-24 and Mark 10:2-16.

There are some weeks when you can just feel the collective tension of every single pastor, worldwide. ‘Round about Monday morning, when the majority of us turned our attention to the Revised Common Lectionary to see what the recommended passages were going to be for the week, I’ll bet there was and actual stutter in the Earth’s orbit as every pastor in the world simultaneously dropped their heads into their hands in desperation and resignation.

Because…let’s be honest, if you’re looking for scripture passages that charge up a congregation with a fire for justice, or which leave folks feeling inspired and uplifted by God’s love, or which give us point-for-point refutations of one of the many, many, great heresies of our time… the combination of “God creates woman” and “Jesus talks about divorce” would probably be the last two passages in the world you’d want to pull out, right?

As pastors, we like to avoid these verses for kinda the same reasons a lot of us don’t like to hear them; they seem like they’re just meant to be hurtful. How many times, for example, have we heard that beautiful story of God carefully and lovingly crafting Eve out of the bones of primordial Adam, only for some dude to tell us that it means women are always going to be second-best? How many times have we heard “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” and been told that this is an expression of possession and dominion, rather than an expression of awe at the one and only time in history that a man has been considered good enough, privileged, honored by God enough to actually deliver life into the world; something women around the world do every single day?

How many of us have heard this story as an example of women being made subservient, rather than one of men being perfected?

Because I have to tell you, one of those readings is far more in keeping with the God we know, and it’s probably not the one you’ve been taught to expect!

Consider the story of Genesis 2 for a moment, and think about what actually happens here. After making about half of everything, God decided to make a creature in the Divine image; a genderless being, neither male nor female, who was to be given stewardship over all the things that God was just about to create.

And then….God created.

God created literally everything on Earth - every animal, every bird, everything - and brought them before Primordial Adam to see if any of these creatures, which the CREATOR OF THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE HAD MADE was good enough for him.

And Primordial Adam wasn’t having any of them.

Just to give you a good idea by the way, the scientific community currently estimates that there is somewhere in the neighborhood of between 8.7 and 9 million distinct species, of which we have currently catalogued maybe 1 or 2 million, and we’re at an all-time low for planetary biodiversity. So that means that if we take the story entirely literally, Primordial Adam sat there rejecting millions of God designed custom-made helpers.

Can you imagine that? You have the literal creator of the universe trying their absolute best to custom-design a creature to be your friend and helper, and you just sit there shooting down absolutely everything that they suggest? Can you imagine how arrogant and full of yourself you’d have to be to reject that many custom-made gifts from anybody, let alone from literal GOD?

Is it any wonder that God’s very next move is to turn the whole person completely off, just knock Adam right out, and start trying to figure out if maybe, just maybe, God might’ve built this weirdly arrogant monkey-thing a little bit backwards in the first place?

And God then does something unique and wonderful, something that the Creator almost never does; God takes the thing that they had made and called good back into the Divine hands, and starts over. God re-opens the file on humankind, and finishes the job God started way back in the beginning, all those few days ago.

God reshapes. God corrects. God creates again.

God improves.

And from there, we have woman. And you’ll notice that the first line of demanding subservience, the whole “this one shall be called Woman for out of Man this one was taken;” that line isn’t God, by the way.

It’s Adam.

Talk about epic foreshadowing!

But in all of that, other than Adam getting vaguely patriarchal from the beginning…did you ever hear anyone, let alone God, in any way refer to the woman as being lesser than, weaker than, or subservient to?

Because when you look at the Bible, it kinda feels like a bit of a stretch, doesn't it? Like a really desperate interpretation crafted by a bunch of arrogant, first-draft monkeys who wished they had gotten the upgrade instead of Eve?

But that interpretation…that “women are the lesser creation” take, that incredibly bad-faith read of a Biblical text that says absolutely no such thing…it’s not new. It’s been around for a while, in fact. So long that we honestly don’t even question it. So long that we just look at the text, and we read it off the page as if all that mysoginy were actually there…

…but it’s not. It never was.

Can you imagine what our world might look like if we just…didn’t do that? If we didn’t allow ourselves to be led astray by people who told us that we are supposed to be subservient, that we are supposed to be secondary, less important, less worthy, cupbearers to the kings of this world? What might our world look like if we heard the gospel of a Christ who wanted that all should prosper, that none should perish, and that everyone could join with him in paradise?

Flash forward through the millennia, and we find ourselves seated at the feet of Jesus Christ himself, and if we’re still carrying with us the weight of that interpretive scaffolding hoisted onto us by people who want to corral the wild and unrestrained grace, mercy, and love of the Creator like a horse that they want to keep forever in their own backyard, well…then Christ’s teachings take on a decidedly menacing tone, don’t they?

Consider this moment here, when Jesus starts preaching about divorce.

If you take this passage here, where Jesus seemingly says that no divorce is ever possible ever, and take it with the one that follows it where Jesus highlights how very important children are to the kingdom of God, well it sounds like Jesus has gone full quiverfull, doesn’t it? And even if you don’t know what that is - and if you don’t know, I am incredibly jealous because….yeah, you don’t want to know what that is! - this moment in the Gospel where Jesus seems to say both “no divorce ever” and “children are the #1 best thing to God” is the part where nearly every woman ever has wanted to run out of the church as fast as possible.

And I can’t say I would blame any of them for that, because that is how this text has been presented, hasn’t it? I mean for centuries, this has been given to us as a watershed moment in which Jesus tells every single woman ever that she must, in no circumstances, be permitted to leave her marriage. No matter how dire the situation, no matter how violent or abusive the husband, no matter what; absolutely no divorce, because the vows matter more than your own personal stability, security, health, or safety.

But…if we actually look at the text, we start to see the holes in that interpretation, holes in that power-mad patriarchal power structure through which the merciful, loving, and compassionate Christ is peeking through, just waiting to be seen.

The first little hole in this “no divorce ever” interpretation comes right away at the beginning, where Jesus handles the question about divorce by directing the ones asking him that question to the original law of Moses. Of course, as a Rabbi (let alone the incarnation of the person who gave those laws to Moses in the first place), Jesus already knows what Moses said. Which is why it comes a such a surprise that, despite the fact that in every other interaction in the Gospels Jesus takes some conservative piece of legalism and uses love to pry it open and give us a much more progressive take on something that was otherwise restrictive and a little bit weird, in this case Jesus basically says;

“Oh, you thought Moses was strict? Well buckle up friendos, ‘cause I’m about to give you a teaching that’ll make even the most legalistic of legalists blush with pride!”

Yeah…that does seem more than a little out of character, doesn’t it?

Of course, once you see that, once you realize that there’s something here that doesn’t add up then, if you’re anything like me, you start asking yourself…why? Why would Jesus, whose whole thing was breaking the harsh legalism by which the religious leaders dominated and oppressed people, why would he suddenly take such a hard right turn, and here of all places?

Well the answer, as many of you have probably guessed, lies in context.

In Jesus’ time, neither marriage nor divorce were the same things that they are today. Today, marriages are a commitment of equals, where two people come together to share their lives, and commit to each other for mutual support and affection under God. But in the time of Jesus, marriage wasn’t anything like that. Marriage was a social contract, wherein a man would effectively purchase a woman from her family to be used as a specialized house slave and a vessel for propagating his lineage.

Yeah…that’s not really the same thing, is it?

What’s more, women in that time and place didn’t actually have rights or a means of supporting themselves outside of the family, which meant that a woman’s only hope of survival in the long term was in being married off. Men had no such limitations of course; they would leave their homes when they came of age, and have the full right of participation in society. They could make money, build and hold wealth, and support themselves and whatever size household they could support on the wages they were able to earn.

And once they had enough, they could buy a wife. Of course, the days of Abrahamic polygamy were long past at this point, and no father out there would ever let his daughter alone in a room with a man before getting married off because…well…his daughter’s only value was in her virginity, and if she lost that he wasn’t getting paid. So what was the discerning player to do if what he really wanted was to collect women like they were Pokemon?

The answer is divorce, of course!

This had become the established norm for a great many men, particularly wealthy men who could afford to just keep buying up women from poor families, use them up until he got sick of them, and then just cast them out like so much garbage. And because women’s only social asset was in their marriageability, divorce was basically a death sentence. Divorced women were cast out into the streets to face poverty, suffering, and even death, all because of a single man who chose to see them not as equals deserving respect, or even as fellow humans deserving basic dignity, but as objects to be used and discarded at a whim.

Flash forward two thousand years now, and marriage isn’t the same thing it used to be. It isn’t an economic contract for the purchase of slave labor, it’s a recognition of mutual love and equality between two fully realized people in the eyes of God and the world. Of course, that’s not to say modern marriages are perfect; the rise of modern marriage structures didn’t make promiscuous and deceitful men disappear after all, nor did it suddenly make everyone open, honest, true, or even good communicators in relationships. Like it or don’t, marriages do sometimes still go very, very wrong.

But when marriages do go wrong, when cruel men - and yes, I do know that women can be abusive too, but statistically it is almost always men - when cruel men decide to weaponize one of the few social systems blessed by God against a woman they’ve come to see as an object for their amusement and not a partner to be cherished, it’s not divorce that they use to deliver the death stroke;

It’s marriage.

Abusers these days don’t use the law to cast people out from safety into suffering, they use the words of Christ Jesus to bind people into toxic and unsafe marriages, and prevent them from escaping into safety and independence.

That, you may notice, is the exact opposite of what Jesus was getting at here.

At the time, the commandments of Moses were being interpreted so as to allow one group of people to exercise a great and terrible power over the humanity of others, to do irreparable harm to some for their own personal gratification by treating other human beings, bearers of the divine image of God, as disposable objects rather than the beloved companions God made them to be.

In condemning divorce at the time, Jesus wasn’t teaching us that the institution was more important than the people, he was speaking to a crowd of people who were terribly and powerfully experienced with using the institution as an instrument of abuse, and telling them that they had lost the thread entirely, that the purpose of the system wasn’t to grant some of us power over others, but to bind us all together in equality, mutuality, and love.

One of the darkest, most brutal truths of the human experience is that all too often, when have the option to understand something in a way that gives us power, even at the cost of another…we’ll usually take it. We’ll twist our scriptures, bend our Bibles, squint really hard at our laws, and build the most convoluted arguments and justifications we can to seize that power because the alternative - surrendering our chance at dominion in order to raise another to the equality and respect that everyone deserves at a child of God - is just to scary for us.

So we build these institutions, these interpretations, these systems that preach to us and our posterity the gospel of power and privilege, that some are made to rule, and some are made to serve, and we look at texts like today through that lens and tell ourselves that Jesus has our backs in that.

But Jesus, the real Jesus, is absolutely the sort of person who stands up to longstanding and entrenched systems of abusive power, and declares boldly to everyone present that these all of these systems are completely and utterly irrelevant before Almighty God. Your interpretation of the scripture doesn’t matter, what you think a marriage ought to be doesn’t matter, who you think deserves a marriage doesn’t matter, the systems that enforce your own power, privilege, and wealth don’t matter.

PEOPLE matter.

God began by creating a perfect, genderless, creature; a reflection of the divine self in miniature.

And, after a time…he realized it kinda sucked. It needed something.

And this realization came not because God saw it had the wrong number of limbs, or because it was the wrong color, or something petty like that.

But because it was lonely. It, as do we all, needed relationship. Primordial Adam had everything a person could want, except for someone to stand as their equal. Their supporter. Their helper.

All of paradise before them, but none of it mattered.

PEOPLE mattered.

So God fashioned a way for this being to reflect God's self better; a God who is perpetually in relationship within the divine self. God divided that first human, changing them both so that they - and all those who came after - would be focused on that one thing that was more important to God than all the rest of creation.

Relationships. LOVE.

Of course, we screwed that up. We built all these institutions, rules, and restrictions about who can love who and how, put up boundaries between each other so we can never quite reach each other, created systems that allowed us to abuse each other, enslave each other, take advantage of each other, to treat each other as disposable tools for our own gratification rather than that which we were always meant to be:

Partners in divinity.

Imagine a world in which we looked at each and every other human being as a different facet of that divinity, a world in which we could see that each one of us, in all our infinite diversity in infinite combinations, was one sparkle of God's infinite, loving prism.

Jesus spoke against divorce here because that institution, in that time and place, was a wet blanket thrown over that prism, a tool that allowed some people to skip the hard work of existing in relationship in favor of the quick-fix of gratification borne on the backs of disposable people.

And then, Jesus turned to the children. The kids. The ones who hadn't yet been grafted into the social and political systems WE have built, that WE have bought into, that WE have designed for ourselves rather than others. Jesus turned to them, looked into their eyes which knew nothing but love, peace, and the pressing desire to live in relationship with others….and he said that if we can't receive the Kingdom of Heaven in this way, we'll never see it.

So let us imagine. Let us love. Let us seek for relationship, foster relationships, tear down any barriers that might stand between us and that divine sense of connection that God has literally built us for, and let us build a world greater even than the one we can imagine.

For that, my friends, is the kingdom of God.