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About Divorce...October 04, 2009 Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost Listen to part one of this sermon Listen to part two of this sermon t might be my imagination, but when this passage we just heard from Mark comes 'round every three years I believe I can hear it landing in the sanctuary with a shuddering thud. Could just be me, I suppose, but I don't think so. Did any of you hear it, or feel it as Cathy read? I'm thinking that everyone present has in some form or fashion been touched by divorce. How could it be otherwise in a land where the divorce statistic hovers in the 50% range? Now, as I anticipated our worship this morning during the week, I got to thinking about all of the other passages of scripture attributed to Jesus that could fall with a thud but somehow don't. Some of these are quite beloved. I'm thinking of passages like the Beatitudes for instance: "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness…Blessed are the pure in heart…Blessed are the peacemakers... Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." We don't normally get all exercised about failing to live up to these powerful admonitions, evidently unconcerned about whether we experience the kingdom of heaven or not. How much time and energy do you spend being pure in heart or hungry for righteousness and peace? How about the lesson concerning how many times we should forgive someone, isn't it seventy times seven times? Think of Jesus' favorite topic, all the parables and teachings about money and related themes. Those often whiz by. Or, remember the line about seeing the speck in someone else's eye while missing the log in your own? All these lessons might pinch a bit here and there, but they don't land in the room with the same whump! For some reason we don't take these as personally. Usually they don't hit us in the gut, even though they clearly could. We take them aspirationally -- don't we? -- imbued with a lot of loving forbearance on the part of God until we come closer to the mark. The church needs to take some responsibility for this discrepancy in our responses. Historically the church has had a penchant for over-emphasizing personal issues related to sexual morality, as though these matters were of far graver concern than matters of, say, idolatry, mercy, compassion, justice, generosity, righteousness, peacemaking and so forth, which actually consumed far more of Jesus' attention. We know for certain that he didn't go to the cross because of his teachings about divorce. That said, Mark reports that one day Jesus was confronted by some who wanted to trip him up about the legality of divorce. Both Jewish and Roman law were in play. This sort of test for Jesus happens a bunch of times in the gospels, generally concerning contentious matters of the day. And as on other occasions, Jesus was presented with a no-win situation since evidently there were a variety of strongly-held opinions on what was actually lawful. Now in a close reading of the passage, we see that Jesus agrees that divorce is lawful if only for the reason he describes as the hardness of human hearts, meaning human weakness and fallibility. But that isn't what God intends. And so he turns the question around from divorce to the ideal of marriage as a bond of covenant love. The divine ideal is that two become "one flesh," that is, they share their lives so intimately and thoroughly that they cannot be completely themselves without each other. But the fact is human fallibility intrudes and we do not live up to the fullness of divine ideals; there's a gap between what God wants and what we actually experience. In cases where that gap becomes unbearable, divorce can become a lesser evil than trying to maintain an unfulfillable relationship; that's when the law might appropriately be invoked. But Jesus' point is that the law is not an ideal, only an allowance for human fallibility. [1] I think it's likely that Jesus' saying is meant less to lay down any given law than it is to be a continuing reminder of the gap between God's intentions for us and our living up to those intentions. Pointing out this gap humbles us, but it also calls us toward better realizations of God's aims. [2] Not unlike God's aims for justice, righteousness, peacemaking, mercy, forgiveness and so forth. We always get into trouble whenever we lift biblical passages from their contexts. When we do this we make them smaller, they become less useful, even dangerous. Mark reports Jesus making a sharply nuanced point here and we should pay attention. And the point has to do with our missing the mark on God's loving aims for us. But Jesus has other sharply nuanced points to make as well that shape our reading and understanding of this one. I had a vivid lesson about this early in my ministry. Within the small local community where I worked there were several other churches reflecting a broad range of Christian expression, including a rather conservative "Bible-believing" church -- at least, that's how they advertised themselves. As you know, that adjective, "Bible-believing," was intended to infer they had a so-called higher view of scripture than other churches. But as for that, I liked the pastor of that congregation. He was an earnest, humble man who was constantly trying to do the right thing. He was much too serious a person to be my friend, but I respected his personal integrity and he developed a fondness for me as well. I think he thought of me as still theologically unformed and ripe for influence. Now its not so many decades ago that a large chunk of the church would have routinely stipulated that marriage was of the highest concern, even in a situation like this one. It would have arrived at this conclusion in part, because of a text like the one we're discussing. But in its reading of that text other cultural prejudices were in play, including the role of woman generally. In this way the church was ignoring Jesus' concern for justice. Yes, he had a high view of covenant love between two persons, but note that the two become one. There's a leveling effect in this relationship where both are valued equally, even adored, by one another and by God. In God's economy, justice is a facet of genuine love. The question, What does love require? is a very good one whenever we're facing a difficult decision. The loving thing sometimes flies in the face of convention. Jesus teaches this. He routinely challenged the conventions of his day based on the larger purposes of love, doing what love required. What did he say the law boiled down to, after all? Love God with everything you've got and love your neighbor as you love yourself. n a rather uncharacteristic display of public emotion I blurted out to the pastor in the middle of the grocery store, "My God, man! You gotta get her out of that house. You gotta get them separated! And you've gotta do it now! Your responsibility is to love them, and today loving them is to protect them from one another and from themselves!" He was taken aback by my vehemence and after a moment he mumbled something and walked out. Yet this wasn't done at the expense of love's largest purposes which embrace a forgiveness that is bigger than our failing and a grace that swallows up our weakness. Remember that this love had its defining moment on a cross that broke the back of any human failure, weakness or oppression that prevents us from becoming what God intends. Over and over again we're able to return to the starting gate, thank God!, ready to run the race. As Paul put it, "This one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus. Let those of us who are mature be of the same mind." [3] Previous sermon: The Defining Characteristic of Authentic Christian Community • Next sermon: Making Space for God's Abundance All past sermons |
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