All jokes aside, this part of Genesis has been used for centuries to relegate women to a second class position in society. I heard a biblical scholar say that until the last couple of centuries, women were seen as unfinished men, Somewhere in the womb, a baby would stop developing and those things that would make one male didn't develop.

Genesis adds a lot to that argument. It was only after a male was made did the idea of a woman ever come up. Now, that's true for this, the second creation story. The first creation story has God making humankind in his own image, male and female. However, this hermaphroditic nature of God isn't developed any further.

If we go further into the creation narratives, we get to the most famous parts of the Old Testament - the Garden of Eden. Now, we all know that because women are weak and easily swayed, Eve ate the bad fruit and compelled Adam to eat it as well. Adam must have been under Eve's seductive spell for him to do something so disobedient to God. It's all women's fault. Snakes have to crawl. Man has to work for food and shelter and child-birth would hurt, really, really bad. Thanks a lot, Eve.

When Lot and his family left Sodom, it was Lot's wife that looked back and was turned into salt. And, in Sodom, Lot's host refused to allow the mob to rape Lot and sent his daughter out instead. See, girls just aren't as important men.

In the Mediterranean basin even up to fairly recent days, women were property, not really different than sheep or furniture. Men would barter with the father for the hand of the daughter. Arranged marriages are still the norm in some parts of the world.

By the time of Jesus, Jews were monogamous in that men only had one wife at a time. I don't know when that changed. Abraham, Isaac and many others in the Old Testament had multiple wives, or concubines sometimes picked by the wife.

Polygamy is still practiced in parts of Africa and even in parts of Utah. The news has been filled with articles on the cult figure in a split off of the Mormon faith.

Arranged marriage, polygamy and the like are not about women, they are about man and his power and control.

Divorce, in Jesus day, seems to have been solely a man's decision. Again, it's hard to know about first century Palestine's customs. Apparently, a man could divorce his wife at will. I would suppose that this was held over a woman's head if she displeased her husband. But what would become of the woman? She would be an outcast, like lepers, tax collectors and prostitutes, which is about the only job a divorced woman could do.

So, Jesus turned this back on the religious elite and said that God joins a man and woman and humans cannot simply destroy the bond God has made. In that society, the woman always suffered in a dovorce. I think that was a strong motivation on the part of Jesus.

Throughout the Gospels, Jesus takes on the Pharisees' interpretation of law. Remakes it to reflect God's incredible justice.

In this same reading, today, Jesus comes to the defense of children. Another invisible and voiceless part of society. Children were to be blessed. Their innocence to be honored and copied.

Golly, first women and now children. Next thing you know, Jesus will be eating with tax collectors. Oh wait, too late. Jesus did that, too.

It seems that wherever he went, he disrupted the conventional wisdom. He offered alternatives to the stale tradition that rewarded male privilege and kept women, children and certain professions in a perpetual under-class.

It's even more the pity that for 2 millinium the Church has done the very thing its Lord and Master tried to expunge from both society and religion. Even in our beloved Episcopal Church, it wasn't until 1967 that women could be voting deputies at General Convention. And, of course, women have been ordained to the priesthood since 1976. As you know, the Presiding Bishop elect of the Episcopal Church is Katherine Jefferts Schori.

But this sermon isn't about women's rights. It's about how we treat each other. It's about how we live into the society's stereotypes of how we are supposed to act. In a society where women and children where chattel property divorce was tantamount to putting the woman and probably her children, at least her female children, on an ice flow.

Where is power and privilege seated today? Who are the powerless in society? And, do we value them as children of God, or as so much property?

It may be hard to believe, but there is an active slave trade right here in River city. Men and women, boys and girls who are sold to be field workers and more often for the women, sex slaves. These are people kidnapped in places like Guatemala and Honduras and smuggled here in inhuman conditions. Some are people that paid a smuggler to bring them into the US. However, the smuggler, called a coyote, allows them to pay on credit. The debt they roll up is impossible to be paid, so it is taken out in trade. The debt never goes down and the people trying to escape economic hardship find them selves slaves unable to go to the police for fear of their owner.

There are more subtle forms of dehumanization. So called victim-less crimes like pornography. What does it say about women that we reduce them down to breasts and sex acts? And that doesn't even touch the child pornography market. So much meat sold to a despicable sub strata of human being. Body image. Girls learn from an early age that skinny everywhere except on their chest is a good thing. Look at all the new cases of anorexia and bulimia among the people our children consider role models.

We don't have to look far to find dehumanization. The Abu Graive scandal happened because the inmates were seen as less human, less worthy of compassion than their American captors. A congressman making congressional pages into objects of lust. The Nigerian Arch-bishop, as I mentioned last week, that referred to the Episcopal Church, you and me, as cancers on the Anglican Communion that must be excised.

Jesus told the Pharisees that God allowed their type of divorce because of their hardness of heart. How hardened are our hearts when it comes to those who are different than us? Who do we write off regardless of what our actions do to the other?

I met a young man recently who actually believed that he owed society absolutely nothing. He had no moral obligation to those in need. He saw everyone as being other. He actually had no real morals. It was all about what he could get for himself. It was very sad.

His mother raised him by herself; a victim of being regarded as nothing worth support or respect. And now, there is another amoral, self-centered, angry young man on the streets.

We as a society have written he and his mother a bill of divorce and have left them to take care of their own needs with out the skills or sense of community that they so desperately need.

Jesus wouldn't write them off. He does not divorce anyone. Paul says that the closest image of Christ's love for his church is the love of a man and wife. Divorce distorts that image. Christ's love for the Church, meaning all of us, is indelible. He cannot divorce us. He won't divorce us.

We are imperfect people living in an imperfect world. People get divorced, legally and figuratively, every day. Our hearts are hard, cynical. Jesus sets the standard. By loving the Church throughout all of its infidelity, he tells us that even in the midst of our human frailty, no one dissevers to be written off as less than human.

God humbled himself to come to us in human form, to live and die with us. If we divorce the poor, the outcast, the strange, we, in essence, divorce Christ. And that he will not allow. Jesus, the bride-groom, loves us in spite of our imperfection. And if won't write off the people who killed him, who are we to write off anyone?