Sermon on Mark 10:6-8, 19th Sunday after Pentecost 2021 (B), "Wonderfully Made: Male and Female"

 

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father, and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Amen. Today, our readings from Genesis 2 and Mark 10, tell us about God creating man and woman. God made us as creatures with a body. We are not like the angels, spiritual beings with no body. God made Adam and Eve in flesh and blood, with bones, muscle, organs, skin, fingers, and toes. Today I want to talk about the special blessing that God gave you a human body that is wonderfully made, male or female. The focus of our consideration is Mark 10:6-8, “But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh”.

We won’t focus primarily on marriage today, but rather the simpler fact that God blesses us with bodies as males and females. It’s too easy to take for granted. Like a fish taking the water for granted, or us taking the air we breathe for granted. Astronomers search high and low, but still can’t determine if there’s another planet in the universe that has air we can breathe. The air we breathe is no accident. This place is uniquely made for us and suited for us. We live in a “Goldilocks universe” and on a “Goldilocks planet” where the conditions are “just right” for us to live. And if we take the clean air we breathe for granted, so we also take our lungs and the body they supply for granted. Our lungs that breathe are no accident. They are uniquely made to breathe in the breath of life, perfectly suited for our bodies. God blessed us with bodies. Male and female bodies. Wonderfully made and uniquely beautiful in different ways. Bodies that require special care and a healthy and safe environment.

We entered this world in our bodies. That’s too obvious. But from our conception in our mother’s womb, we were given a body. A body is necessary to our existence. Our parents procreated. That is, they joined with God in bringing new life into the world. When we use the word procreation to describe the parent’s work in creating new life, we’re describing how the creating, self-giving love of God is shared and expressed through the human love of parents. Not, of course, that all lives were conceived under those circumstances, but that this is the fullness of meaning that God allows us to participate in. It’s not merely the mechanical reproduction like any other animal species, but family love is meant to image God’s love in flesh and blood reality. In human bodies, we may see echoes of God’s love, however imperfectly. Only His love conforms us to the true pattern and image of Christ Jesus. But even in the most broken examples of human love, God still grants the precious gift of life; a precious body.

These bodies, wonderfully created, are knit together in the secret, in the quiet place of our mother’s womb. The human body is a work of art, an engineering marvel. Dr. Werner Gitt, a Christian and an information scientist, describes the amount of information our brains process every single day. As a massively powerful supercomputer, our human brain processes a million times more information every day than the total sum of knowledge stored in all the world’s libraries. That includes all the information for the things you consciously think about and do, like listening to and understanding human language, walking and balancing, to the things that are subconscious, like your brain’s management of all your organs. And the human brain capacity exceeds 4 terabytes of information, sends electric signals at a speed of 170 mph through your body, and a single human brain produces more electrical signals in one day than all the cell phones in the world combined. What other manmade supercomputer can rewire itself?

What about the rest of our body? Our lungs alone have enough tiny blood vessels, that if laid end to end, they would measure 1,500 miles. The total length of blood vessels in our bodies is 62 thousand miles. Our bodies renew about 25 million cells every second. Our hearts pump 48 million gallons of blood in a lifetime. Our bodies have over 700 enzymes that work in them, and 4-year-old children ask on average 450 questions per day. There are 26 different medical specialties for doctors who treat all aspects of the human body. In whichever field they work, general medicine, endocrinology or dermatology or cardiology, they spend years of their life studying the biology of human life, and barely scratch the surface.

All this marvel, wrapped up in a body several feet tall and weighing a hundred or two pounds. In flesh and blood. In a body, male or female. And the only way any of us exist, any living human on the planet, is by the union of a sperm and an egg. A male and a female. No other combination can continue the existence of the human race. No team of genius engineers or surgeons or mad scientists could create your equal. God, by His creative power and genius and love, set this flesh and blood engineering marvel into motion, and despite our rebellion and fall into sin, He preserves our ability to procreate and continue the human species, making new lives made in His image. Deeply affected by the Fall, but still very much bearing the marks of our Creator and the beauty of His handiwork.

There is so much confusion in the world. Even Christians fall prey to the ideas that devalue the human body, or demean, degrade, or devalue one or the other of the sexes. I don’t need to describe the confusions for you, you know them. But whenever we are tempted to loathe or hate our bodies, for whatever reason, we are rejecting the goodness of God’s gift. This is difficult because in a world of sin, our bodies experience weakness, illness, aging, injury, and a host of other considerations, mentally, emotionally, and physically. But we should never despise our bodies, as some in the early centuries did. Right as Christianity was beginning to grow, some groups known as the “gnostics” thought the body was a prison, a detestable shell that we had a duty to escape from. They had no love for the body or the material world. Christians boldly responded by affirming the value and goodness of the body and the material world. It’s embedded in our Apostle’s Creed, when we confess that we believe in the resurrection of the body. We place our hope, not in staying young or staying beautiful or staying healthy forever—all that escapes our powers. Instead, we hope in the resurrection of the body and the future renewal of the body that we will have in Jesus Christ.

And other attacks on the body come from men and women who tear down what is to be masculine, and men and women who tear down what it means to be feminine. We rebel against the distinctness in which God made us. We battle each other for superiority and we both lose. God did not make us for this warfare! He made us to complement and complete each other! We have equal value in the sight of God. Equal value doesn’t mean sameness. It doesn’t mean that we are interchangeable and no different from each other. It means that our value is equally great with our uniqueness and differing gifts and qualities. Scripture says again and again that God shows no partiality or favoritism. Sink that in for a moment and consider how it relates to us as male and female. God doesn’t show favoritism among male or female. If He wanted us identical, He could have done that. But He didn’t! He made us different for a reason, with gifts and abilities that are not identical, but interlock and fit together physically, emotionally, and spiritual, so that “the two will become one flesh”.

Ultimately, any attack on a human body is an attack on the image of God. Disparaging words and devaluing the body, or also self-injury or harm to anyone’s body. We have a duty of care, not only to all human beings made in the image of God, but also of self-care. Our duty of care, and self-care, means that we are responsible for bodily wellbeing. Ourselves and others. If someone struggles with their body, we need to approach them in love, compassion, and in the affirmation of the goodness of God’s gift of your body. Our body is not an empty picture frame, or a blank outline or body shape; it’s not a whiteboard for us to erase and redraw as we like, but it is a good gift from God. Don’t let anyone flatten out, reduce, or distort our humanity into anything smaller or lesser than the whole picture of our humanity. Objectifying the body is another form of dehumanization.

Our bodies are wonderfully made, male and female. Your body matters to God, so much that He entered human life in a body of His own, when Jesus was born on earth. And your body matters so much to God that Jesus paid the price on the cross for all the sin and aching weakness and failure that afflicts our bodies and souls. But He redeemed our bodies, purchasing them back from the slavery of sin, and securing for us the resurrection of our bodies, to be glorified as His body is glorified. And in baptism He sanctifies us, washing us clean, so that we can use our bodies to honor Him in all we do. For all these reasons, we can have a wonderfully positive view of our bodies as good gifts from God. Wonderfully made, male and female. To God be the glory, in Jesus’ Name, Amen.