Thursday, February 13, 2025
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Naked
Humbly welcome the word that has been planted in you and is able to save your souls.
In the beginning God.
At times Genesis 1-3 uses the pronoun “we” in describing God; God was a community. Or a marriage. God was friends with God. God had conversations, discussions, within God. The bible says God is one, and the bible describes the Trinity, the relationship in the midst of God. The conversation, the community of God WAS God.
We say God is love, our word for “extending oneself to nurture one’s own or another’s spiritual growth, to desire ultimate good, theirs and ours.” Love noticed something missing in Adam’s own community with the animals. To this point Love’s creation was good, even very good. But man did not have a companion.
“It is not good for the man to be alone.
I will make a suitable partner for him.”
So the LORD God formed out of the ground
various wild animals and various birds of the air …
but none proved to be the suitable partner for the man.
Adam didn’t have much conversation with the animals. He named them, and then each went his own way. He was still alone. Hmmm. What to do?
The LORD God cast a deep sleep on the man,
and while he was asleep, he took out one of his ribs
and closed up its place with flesh.
The LORD God built up into a woman
the rib that he had taken from the man,
then he brought her to the man.
The man said:
“This one, at last, is bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called ‘woman’
for she was taken out of man.”
Like their Maker, the man was no longer alone. And neither was his companion alone. The two became one. We call this marriage, the first sacrament, the primordial sacrament in which we follow God’s sign of love for us with our sign of love for each other. And as well this was a revelation to his children of God’s relationship within: “God intended marriage to be a sign of God’s own inner life of love.”
Blessed are you who walk in his ways, for you shall eat the fruit of your handiwork, and blessed shall you be. This is why a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife, and the two of them become one flesh.
These are not just blood brothers or sisters wiping their pricked thumbs together, but one flesh. This most important relationship has a long history of success and failure, as Jesus pointed out. But more than any other, this marriage covenant resembles God.
The man and his wife were both naked, yet they felt no shame.
What shame? That comes soon enough, but not yet. And even now it can be defeated. Imagine that when you are born, a gold medal is hung around your neck. You win a First in being you. As you live your life the medal becomes tarnished and dented, and you no longer show it to anyone. You are ashamed.
Then if you are married, you will take off your clothes and be naked with each other. We will say, “Oh! You have a medal too!” And we will see how ugly the medals have become but … there we are.
What can we do then? We must say, “I love you. Do not be ashamed. Your medal marks you as the best at being you. I will never forsake you.”
For better or for worse, in sickness and in health, till death do us part.
(Genesis 2, Psalm 128, James 1, Mark 7)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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