The Universe was Made for You: 3 October, 2021

Mark 10:2–16

While this was no doubt always a very “hard saying” in times past, today it has become unbearable. All I have to do is think of my married friends: which of these are still married to their original spouses? This is just as disturbingly relevant to my Christian friends as to any of my other friends. Nor do I begin to accept Jesus’ own belief that my friend A. is still really married to his first wife rather than to B., his wife of more than 30 years with whom he has raised three children. This devout Christian family has faced many difficult issues, but I do not believe either of them worried that they are not truly wed to each other, or that their marriage is somehow adulterous. Even the recent divorce of their son C. raised entirely different questions, having to do with his sexual orientation and a marriage commitment that probably should not have been made at all. So, is there any way to rethink what Jesus said about divorce? . . . .

It was always a hard saying, which the church very early on found impossible to rely on exclusively as a guide to pastoral situations. Perhaps it is like Jesus’ command to take no money on missionary journeys, or to travel only on foot: only the foolishly literalistic would be bound by these words now. And yet, divorce has been a problematic question, and Jesus’ words just made sure it never ceased to be one. –– Lucy Bregman

Hebrews 1:1–4; 2:5–12

Imagine no artificial light, but also a night sky uncompromised by countless factories and cars belching filth into the sky. Go back before electricity and smog. Picture a pristine night when the world was young.

Somewhere on the west bank of the Jordan, a poet-priest is standing under that starry sky. It is a clear night. Night as we have never known it. Night as God created it. Huge, bright, uncanny.

The poet-priest leans back and takes in the majesty of the heavens in all their vast, dazzling glory. . . .

We may wonder how the God who scattered a billion worlds around a billion-billion suns could care for one small figure. . . But here is the poet’s insight: all the night sky—the entire cosmic dance of gravity and light—was made for you. –– Lance Pape

Genesis 2:18-24

Hebrew scholar Robert Alter provides a more nuanced picture of the woman in Genesis 1 than is gleaned from a general reading. . . Alter observes (Gn 2:18): The Hebrew, ezer kenegdo (KJV “help meet”) is notoriously difficult to translate. The second term means “alongside him,” “opposite him,” “a counterpart to him.”

“Help” is too weak because it suggests a merely auxiliary function, whereas ‘ezer elsewhere connotes active intervention on behalf of someone, especially in military contexts, as often in Psalms.

Woman is sent to sustain man and actively intervene on his behalf. Eve stands alongside Adam as a full partner in a relational mutuality. Adam’s words go beyond acknowledging Eve as one like himself; she is a gift from the LORD in response to his need.

(The Five Books of Moses, Norton, 2004). –– Stacy Minger

Lance Pape, an ordained minister in the Disciples of Christ, is a professor homiletics at Brite Divinity School, Fort Worth, Texas.

Stacy Minger, an ordained elder in the United Methodist Church, is associate professor or preaching at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky.

Homily Service 42, no. 4 (2009): 47–58.