On Genesis 2:18-24, Mark 10:2-16. At Trinity Lutheran Church, Coopersburg, PA.

“It is not good that the man should be alone,” God said.

Many people mistakenly read this text as saying that we should all be in a romantic relationship, preferably in the bonds of holy matrimony, certified and legalized by a license from the state, creating the basic family unit on which our society is founded. While I have no doubt that Genesis 2 did serve as a way of explaining why we do this crazy little thing called love, the Bible’s true purpose isn’t to tell us how the world works. It’s always to tell us about our relationship with the God who made us and loves us. This story tells us something about who God made us to be: We are not meant to be alone. We are meant to be in relationship with the world around us.

Some verses earlier, this story of Creation begins with a great, deserted wasteland. Not even rain graces the world with its life-giving power. So God decides, for reasons that are not explicitly revealed, to plant a garden, in a place called Eden, in the East. The garden needs a gardener, so God creates a human being. That is the purpose of humankind: To be caretakers for Creation. God forms the human from the dust of the earth, so our relationship with the earth is fundamental to who we are—not a surprising thing for a creation story for ancient Hebrew farmers. Then God breathes into the human and it lives. Our very being is also connected to God.

Then God decides to make a companion for the human being. All animal life is created for the sole purpose of relationship with the human, but none of them quite work out. So God makes another human out of the very same flesh and bone as the first. They are created from each other. They have a relationship that cannot be broken. But of course, with the tree of good and evil, they do break these relationships, and all Creation begins to unravel.

We live in a society that has forgotten this. Relationships between nations are falling apart at a time when we need each other’s strength. Our own political system has lost its mind. Did you watch the Supreme Court hearings? I won’t comment on the results here, but it’s very telling that everyone in the room appeared to have their own agenda. The Republicans wanted to push this through before the primaries and the Democrats wanted to delay until after the primaries and absolutely no one wanted to make sure we had the best judge possible. When did we stop caring about the relationships held within the common good? Of course our world is beginning to unravel.

The same happens closer to home. God has inspired our scientific community to develop technologies that can help us communicate and maintain our relationships better than ever before. And we fail to use them well. I remember a time in my life when our next-door neighbor would come over to borrow a cup of sugar or a few eggs, and an hour later she’d still be sitting at our kitchen table, chatting. Sometimes I think she just wanted an excuse to visit. When I was a pastor up north for seven years, I lived in a safe, little suburban community where people would go out in the morning to walk their dogs or get a little exercise. In that whole time, I never met a single one of my neighbors. What kind of community is that? Of course our lives feel like they’re beginning to unravel.

This, I think, is what Jesus is talking about in today’s Gospel reading. The Pharisees, our favorite bad guys, come to trick Jesus. “Tell us what you think about divorce,” And Jesus explains that while the Law allows for divorce, it’s only because of human hardness of heart. In reality, divorce is wrong.

Now, the Church has used this to condemn divorced people, but that isn’t what Jesus is talking about. The give away for that is in the way the story continues. “What God has joined together, let no one separate,” Jesus says. And then suddenly, Jesus is surrounded by little children. His disciples are sending them away, but Jesus insists that they belong with him. The Kingdom of God belongs to children. And to show that God has joined them together, he takes them up in his arms. Let no one separate them.

“Children are made for love,” Jesus is saying. “And you rip them away from love. Children understand love better than adults ever can. They don’t always, of course, but they can dwell in love in a way that you forgot long ago. And so they already are living in the Kingdom of Heaven.” And Jesus’ teaching on marriage is the same. “You rip your relationships apart,” he says. “You have forgotten the Kingdom of Heaven you once saw, when you were first in love. That is a terrible thing to forget.” It isn’t so much that divorce is a sin. It’s that divorce reflects a sin we cannot help but make. Divorce is a response, sometimes a very necessary one, to the brokenness of human relationships.

When you divorce, you commit adultery, an unfaithful relationship. When you speak rudely to your parents, you commit that same infidelity. When you lose your temper with your children, it is infidelity. When you don’t speak to your brother for years because of that thing he once said, it is infidelity. When you fail to pray, you are unfaithful to God. When you fail to love people who are different from you, when you live in a place for seven years and never knock on your neighbor’s door, when you exploit and pollute the resources of the earth, when you hold fast to your time and talents and treasure and do not share them to build up your community of faith, when you do not take your part in your community’s civic life, all these things are relationship infidelity. This is what the idea of Christian stewardship really means. It’s not about giving money. It’s not about stuff. We act like it is, but it’s not. It’s about being faithful to the relationships you have with other people, with all creation, with your Church, with yourself, and with God.

And when you tend to relationships, let me tell you, the most wonderful things can happen. I’m an introvert, challenged in the making-new-friends area. A year ago, I began a Master’s degree in New Jersey. I remember the first day I walked into the school cafeteria—all these people I didn’t know. My gut instinct was to find a table off in the corner by myself, and hide there. Instead, I forced myself to sit at a new table at every meal. Meet as many people as possible, and hope someone “clicked.”

One evening, I spotted an odd group of people off to the side. Faces of every color and shape, accents that showed English maybe wasn’t anyone’s first language. So I invited myself to join them. They turned out to be the international Master’s students, people from India and Myanmar and Nigeria and Switzerland. They were interesting, and I kept coming back.

Then, in April, I was at breakfast and my friend Melissa joined me. I’d applied to six Ph.D. programs that year, and had just gotten my sixth rejection letter. She asked why I wanted a doctorate, and when I began talking about my love of teaching, my face lit up. As we talked, as we lived faithfully into our relationship with one another, my career goals became clear and I found a way forward, one that will bring me on a truly exciting adventure. Her faithfulness reveals God’s faithfulness in a way I could never imagine.

God decided, for reasons that are not explicitly revealed, to plant a garden, in a place called Eden, in the East. Not explicitly revealed, perhaps, but I do think they are clear. “It is not good for God to be alone,” God says. For if God is love, God must have something TO love, or God is not truly being God. So God creates humankind out of the dust of the earth, and breathes his own Spirit into us. And when we refuse to be faithful to our relationship with him, God should give up on us and start new. But instead, God does everything he can to fix it. And when nothing works, and all Creation continues to unravel, he finally sends us Jesus to repair every broken relationship and mend things back together.

And we refuse. We categorically refuse this gift. We take Jesus and murder him in the most brutal way we can imagine. What greater infidelity could we commit in our relationship with God?

And then God proclaims clearly that not even death can separate us from him. God is still faithful to his relationship with us. God will not let us destroy the love in which he made us to dwell. In the waters of Baptism, God takes us up in his arms, and we belong to him. What God has joined together, no one can separate.

If God is not truly being God unless he loves, than neither are we truly being God’s people unless we love. As a community, we are entering into a time of thinking about stewardship this month, and I want to invite you to think about it in a bigger way. It is about giving to your church, yes, but not because we need to pay the bills. We do this instead to be faithful to the relationships we have with other people in this place and with the God we encounter here. We are called to be good stewards not just of these, but of all our relationships. We are called to give away the greatest treasure we have: The love of God in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit, by proclaiming to the world that it, too, is caught up in an unbreakable love. This is true stewardship, not giving, but loving, and sharing with others the news that they are loved.

Unbreakable Love Worksheet

Relationship with God

  • Find 15–20 minutes to just “sit” with God. Set a timer. Choose a comfortable chair in a quiet place, where nobody will bother you. Perhaps you can light a candle or play soft, instrumental music. Quiet your mind. Pay attention to your breathing. Allow yourself to focus on the idea that God loves you. Let the awareness of that wash over you in the quiet.

Relationship with People

  • Choose a person you have not talked to for a while: An old friend, a relative with a busy life, a past mentor. Pray for them—their well-being, their loved ones, their hopes and dreams. Then call them, write a letter or email, visit—find some way to reconnect, just for the joy of it.

Relationship with Your Church

  • Choose a ministry in the congregation that you are not involved in, but that you think matters. If you can, find out who is part of it, and pray for them by name, thanking God for the Spirit given to them for that work. Pray also for the church staff and council. Then thank God for your part in Trinity, and the way being part of this community connects you with all these ministries.

Relationship with the World

  • Consider what worldly need it is that you care deeply about. Is it the environment? Disability? Poverty? Racism? What makes you excited? What makes you angry? Look for an organization that works on that issue. Write them a thank-you note, expressing why you think what they do matters, and tucking in a small monetary donation.

Relationship with Yourself

  • You, too, are created in God’s image, and worthy of your loving energy. Set aside some time this week to do something for your own well-being. A little exercise in a scenic place. A chapter in a favorite old book. A trip to the ice cream parlor. Any loving act toward yourself that will remind you that you matter, and you are loved.