March 1, 2015, Second Sunday in Lent (Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16; Mark 8:31-38)
We are still learning what it means to be human, even as we learn who God truly is.
Why do people get married? In our culture, the most common response to this question is, “For love!” In other times and places, it’s had more to do with the socioeconomic relations between two families. A Christian answer might go something like this: we belong to a covenant God who calls us to live in covenant with each other, covenants such as marriage.
When you live in faithful relationship with someone for years that stretch into decades, you share just about everything. In a marriage founded on trust and love, this can range from the most ordinary activities down to your innermost thoughts and feelings. In getting to know my life partner, I learn both about myself and about what it means to be human. This is a never-ending process filled with trial and error. You know how it goes: just when you think you have a loved one figured out, the loved one surprises you again. So you can’t proceed in this journey without love and forgiveness.
That’s why God is a covenant God: to undergird all our human covenants with the love and forgiveness we need. From the beginning, God offered human beings a covenant life as a foundation for our living together in peace. But from the beginning we blew it. We thought we could know these things on our own. The serpent said we could know good and evil if we ate the fruit of the forbidden tree. Paradise was lost.
