Sermon prepared for
by
Gregory S. Kaurin, pastor
traditional services,
Texts: Genesis 2:16-24,
Psalms 8, Hebrews 1:1-4, 2:5-12, Mark 10:2-16
Sermon:
Ish
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The
past couple of weeks we’ve been talking about these lessons and today’s message
in my pastors’ text study. As we went
back and forth with these lessons on marriage, divorce, men, and women, one of
my pastor friends said, “This is a tough message; it gets messy.” It’s true, but that’s not why I used this
sermon title of I-S-H, Ish. I’ll get to that in a couple minutes.
First,
let me give you the key verse for this sermon.
It’s from the first lesson: “The Lord God said, ‘It is not good that the
man should be alone.’” I want that verse
in the back of your mind for the rest of this message and service. Say it together: “The Lord God said, ‘It is
not good that the man should be alone.’”
God
never meant us, any of us, to feel alone, abandoned or orphaned. God meant us, from the beginning of creation,
to be in a loving relationship with him, and all the people and creation he
loves. God said, “It is not good that
the man should be alone.”
Notice
it is God who recognizes this need in the man, a need for companionship. God sees it, and he is not green with
jealousy; he doesn’t shake the man and say, “Love me and only me.”
Instead,
God is already and always compassionate.
He sees the need for his man to have a relationship on an equal level of
sharing and comparing. God takes the
initiative, God creates the one and the other, and he gives them to each
other. There is no greater love than the
love of a God who can share, and can feel compassionate love through our love
for each other.
I
want to teach you three Hebrew words from this lesson. I’ve done this for quite a few wedding
services, so this isn’t going to be new for all of you, but I never miss my
chance to teach these three words from Genesis.
The
first two Hebrew words that I’ll teach you are both translated into English as
“man.” Most of you already know the first one, because eventually it becomes
the man’s own name, “adam.” Everyone say, “adam.”
Women,
you should like this: “adam” literally meant… “dirt,” or “soil.” It
makes sense, though. That is of what the
Bible said he was made. Actually, it’s
just like our English word “human.”
“Human” is directly related to the word “humus,” which describes a rich
dark soil. So, in both
the English and Hebrew, to be human means to be made up from the soil, dirt.
And
adam was a word that could
be used for any person, male or female.
It really was just like our word human, a person. Alone, that’s all he was: just a nameless
person, without someone similar enough with whom to relate, and no one
different enough from whom to compare. He
was a wonderful creation, but unfinished, because he was alone. And God knew it. God saw it.
And God felt it.
He
was alone until God introduced him to… (you can hear
the drumroll, the curtain lifts, and, after all the
rough drafts and failed attempts, there she is, unveiled in all her beauty at
last) …the woman. At that moment
everything changed. Even the Hebrew word
changed. Suddenly, a word that
specifically meant man, or male, was used for the first time. Women, you really ought to love this. We started out as adam, dirt, but now the Hebrew word that specifically
meant man, or male, was this: “Ish.” All the women in the congregation,
look at or think of the favorite man in your life and say that once to him, “Ish.”
At
the same time that he was “ish,” she needed her own
word that meant woman, or female. It was
this: “Ish-shah.”
All the men in the congregation, look at or
think of your favorite woman and say that once to her, “Ish-shah.” We have a little revenge; it means, “made of ish.”
The
point of this story and these three words, go beyond marriage, beyond maleness
and femaleness. In that moment, the
second greatest commandment took shape for the first time. The human met the other and, from that time
on, God has commanded us to, “Love your neighbor,” including your nearest
neighbors, spouses, brothers and sisters, parents and children, as yourself.
Just
like the adam, we are called
out of ourselves, our own selfish little worlds. God gives us to each other, and we are called
to do something about it, to let it change our perspective from just “me” to “us.”
The
man calls her woman because she was made out of man, but before we men do any
kind of dance of dominance, that passage is immediately followed by the one
that Jesus repeats, “That is why,” he said, “a man leaves his father and
mother, and clings to his wife.” That is
the relationship, the mutuality, that God intended
from the beginning for all people, not one over the other, not dominance. Companions, partners. She came from him, but he leaves his parents in
order to cling to her. Male and female,
but both are created in God’s image.
Martin
Luther once wrote to an older colleague, a monk, who was trying to decide
whether or not to get married. In his
letter, Luther reflected on God’s words that it is not good for the man to be
alone, and then he wrote these words to Wolfgang Reissenbusch. He said,
We do well when we sing of holy virgins in such a way
as to indicate that they lived lives that were more angelic than human… Our bodies are in great part the flesh of
women, for by them we were conceived, developed, borne, suckled, and nourished… So, Whoever will
live alone undertakes an impossible task and takes it upon himself to run
counter to God’s Word.
One
month after getting this letter, Wolfgang got married. Two months after that, Luther himself got married
the ex-nun, Katarina von Bora,
Katy Luther.
It
is not good for the adam,
the human, to be alone. I will make a
helper, a partner. Cling to her, she to you. Love God, and Love your neighbor as
yourself. The one who would be great
must be servant of all.
We
are created for mutual relationships. But
selfish desires and selfish worries keep ruining it for us. We keep trying to figure out how to use the
laws and rules to get more, to be more, to exclude others, to put them down, or
to use them to fulfill our own desires or ambitions. Even those people who are supposed to be our
nearest neighbors, brothers, sisters, husbands and wives, children and parents,
we sometimes treat our nearest neighbors with less dignity and respect than
others.
If
I ever use, even God’s law, in order to subjugate, to put down, or to boss
someone else around for my own pleasure, or to take out my own anger or
insecurities, I have disobeyed the deepest levels of God’s law. In marriage, if I ever raise my hand against
my wife, or otherwise purposefully threaten Pauline’s health or dignity with my
actions or words, in that moment I have broken most of God’s greatest laws, and
I shatter all the vows I made as a husband and as a Christian. I promised to protect her life, her health and
her name. Marriage is sacred, and that
is why certain behaviors and abuses cannot be tolerated within it.
These
vows are not excluded to marriage and family.
Child abuse, pornography, adultery and infidelity, promiscuity, using
sex or people and so called friends just for status or conquest,
these are the greatest sins, the sins of hard hearts.
When
Jesus turned their question about divorce back on the Pharisees, they quoted the
book of Deuteronomy 24:1-4 which give rules that men could use (or, really, to
misuse) in order to get out of unsatisfying or barren marriages. “It’s because of your hardness of heart and
selfishness,” Jesus said, “that you use those rules as an excuse.”
I
hope you realize that what Jesus was saying also works in reverse. You cannot use the laws of marriage or
parentage in order to trap people into abusive or dangerous situations. An abusive husband or parent does not get to
say, “You just have to take this, because God says so.”
That’s
what makes this such a hard and messy message.
You can’t use the allowances of divorce to get out of an inconvenient
marriage. You can’t use the sacredness of
marriage to enforce an unloving hurtful relationship. And yet so simple when you cut to the middle
to realize that Jesus was saying that the rule is love, and loving actions.
And
today’s message is not just about marriage.
It is about all relationships. Marriage
is a sacred promise, but that does not automatically lift us married folk to a
holier state than being single. Remember
that Jesus, most holy of all, lived and died as a single man. And being single is not more holy than being
married.
The
rules that apply within marriage, apply with all our relationships. We are meant for each other. We are called to love each other as our
selves. By the Ten Commandments we are
called to protect each other’s health, property, families, and lives, each
other’s dignity, and names. Yet, because
of our hard hearts and our fears of not being special enough before God or
others, we try to use our religion, or even our Bible, to figure out all the
exceptions to the rules, or the people we don’t really have to embrace, or
which people God must love less than us.
Who
will save us from our hard hearts? Whether
we are single, divorced, married, child, adult we are all meant to reflect
God’s image and glory, and we know that we all fall far short. So, who will save us from our hard hearts?
Jesus
Christ. As our lesson from Hebrews said,
Jesus is the reflection of God’s glory and the imprint of his very being. He is what we were meant to be. And he gives it to back to us…here, and from
the cross, when he looked at you and me, and said, “Father, forgive them. They do not know what they are doing.”
In
the new Luther movie that’s showing here in a few theaters around the country,
there is a scene where Luther is preaching one of his greatest sermons. It’s the heart of the Lutheran message that
you need to hear again and again.
He
tells the people to recognize that it is the desire of the devil to undercut
and destroy the gospel message of God’s love and forgiveness. So, just when the devil is telling you that
you aren’t good enough, not deserving enough, and not pure enough, Martin
Luther says, “Tell the Devil this. Tell
him that you’ll grant that you are sinful and deserving of hell and death, but that
you know of one who willingly suffered and died in your place to show you the love
of God. And wherever Christ is now, that
is where you shall be.”
Your
relationship with God is restored by Christ.
You do not need to work your way to the top, whether by force or
purity. When you look at the cross, and
see Jesus, your God dying for you, and then giving you his eternal life, that
has got to soften your heart.
Let
that restore your relationship with God and all your other relationships. We are restored by one Word: forgiveness …in
the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.
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