Over the past 100 years our country has undergone enormous changes in how we understand marriage.  We live in a culture that enthrones sexuality and romance, and yet marriage is on a steep decline.  Few of us even know why anyone would pursue marriage, especially as many of the marriages that do take place end in divorce and acrimony.  In today’s passage, Jesus clarifies what makes marriage important, and what we will find is a vision of marriage that has the power to communicate something amazing to the watching world.  It is a calling that is both sobering and exhilarating, a calling that is matched only by the calling by which Jesus lived his own life: the counter-cultural life of celibacy.