Pentecost 19 B: Communities of the Broken and Bles...

Dear Partner in Preaching, Let me suggest a totally different way to approach this text. I’ve written it on it from the perspective of how Mark’s “divorce text” relates to questions of marriage before, and there are certainly excellent commentaries available on this theme. But what strikes me this time around is that perhaps we don’t need to read this as addressed to individuals but rather as something descriptive of, and helpful to, a community. Bear with me a moment while I explain. When this passage is read at church, we tend to hear it in an intensely personal way. This is particularly true, of course, if you have gone through...