Sermon For October 8, 2000
Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost
CHRISTIAN GOSPEL: The Creator's Intention ~ Mark 10:2-16
SERMON: A "Good Enough" Marriage
If I was looking to be safe, I would have chosen just the last part of the scripture passage and talked about what it means for us to approach God as children with openness of heart. The first part of the passage dealing with divorce is a critical one for our society. It's important for us to think about as Christians trying to live faithfully in this time, this place. Passages like this touch us too closely and they're words that we really don't want to think about. It's much easier to think about "Jesus loves me, this I know." It's much easier to think about the commandments. But this idea of divorce touches all of our lives. Because we have friends, we have family members who are divorced. Some here in this room have gone through the experience. All of us who are married have at one time or another have wondered, "What did I do and how did I get myself into this relationship?" Marriage is hard and relationships are tough to nurture. Then we come here and hear the scriptures and Jesus says, "The laws about divorce that Moses wrote down were for your hardness of heart knowing that you were incapable of dealing with relationships all by yourselves." Then he went on to say something that is even more difficult for us, "If you divorce your wife and get remarried, you commit adultery." He uses a legal term. "If you divorce your wife and she remarries, she commits adultery." Pretty harsh words, condemning words. It's not surprising why people have been driven from the church over many years because of the things that they heard coming from the pulpit or coming from the Good Book. We don't like to be told that we have made a mistake, that we have sinned. We don't like the word sin at all. We would much rather just say, "Well it just didn't work out and so this was better for all." But if we understand sin to be something that separates us, something that destroys a relationship, certainly divorce qualifies as sin. That's not to say it's any more sin than lots of things that we do in our lives. We could make a whole list about ways in which we can have the protection of the law and still be sinful: manipulating your relationship, abuse-verbal and physical, lying to a mate, "spinning" events for our own purposes. All of those things are sinful. Using a relationship for our satisfaction with little or no concern for our partner. That's a sin too. All of these things are behaviors that separate us. Even though sin isn't a word that we like to have come out of our mouth, that's what we're talking about when we talk about divorce.
These aren't passages that I would have chosen on my own. Now, for some ministers, it's an opportunity. I have a friend who was divorced in seminary. This passage provided him with the opportunity to talk about that divorce and the impact on his life. He focused very strongly on the sovereignty of God. He was personally tormented by the ways in which he felt that he had fallen short of what God expected of him in his life. His divorce was just another way that he could point to how he had fallen short and how much he was in need of God's forgiveness and God's direction in his life. He lives his life with a heavy burden of responsibility, finding it hard to celebrate the free love of God. He had no qualms in pointing to his divorce and calling it sin. But like I just shared with you, he would include that in a whole list of things that he would also consider to be sin. Now, our society responds to divorce with lots of good advice. You can pick up a woman's magazine at the grocery store anytime you want and you're almost guaranteed that there will be an article in that issue about relationships or divorce and then you'll get some advice along the way about how to deal with such things. I've got two articles that I tore out of women's magazines to put into my ministerial files through the years. One of them is from 1991 and it provided the title for the worship bulletin and the sermon today, A "Good Enough" Marriage. The writer of the article talked about the impact of divorce on children. It said, no matter what you want to say, divorce has a negative impact on children. You can talk about the destructiveness of a bad marriage and how it might be better for the kids to get out of that relationship, but one of the truths that is not always obvious is that sometimes the kids don't realize the depth of pain in a parents' relationship until the divorce comes. Only then are they in the middle of the debate. The author of that article advocated that people should stay together. We've always said "stay together for the good of the children." She doesn't put it that way, but that's what she's talking about. She says, "It's overwhelmingly more valuable for children to have two parents to raise them up than it is for them to be shuffled from one to the other or having only one parent to raise them up." And she says, "You should look for ways to resolve your difficulties so that you can have a good enough marriage to provide a stable upbringing for your children." Now the other article goes back to 1982 and it starts out with an even more dramatic thing -- small anecdote: the bride is standing there getting ready to walk down the aisle and her mother comes up and leans over, whispers in her ear, "Now you'll know what real loneliness is." This article talks about the height of expectations we bring to marriage and how difficult it is to fulfill those expectations. Our society pushes a romantic view of relationship: lots of sex and lots of fun and a perfect binding of two souls into one. But again, those of us who have put in our years one or two or ten or forty or fifty know ~n most cases marriage is a lot of work. We have to compromise, we have to learn to adapt, we have to sort things out with the other person. If we come in with expectations that everything is going to be heaven as soon as we get that ring on our finger, then we will surely be in for disappointment and pain because it's just not going to be that way. This author has good advice, saying, "Don't depend on your spouse for everything, find a wider social network where some of your needs that your spouse can't meet can be met. Find people that enjoy doing some of the things that you like to do, but your spouse doesn't like to do." You can look and find couples that do exactly that, follow that good advice.
Good advice only goes a certain distance down the road. As people of faith there is more to be said than good advice. If we think that spin doctors began with presidential campaigns here in the United States, then we don't know anything of history at all. Because the spinning was going on a long, long time ago and we can find it here in this passage. Mark likes to talk about the disputes between Jesus and the authorities of the day and so the Pharisees come to challenge Jesus. They're not interested in what he has to say about divorce. What they want to do is to commit himself to one position or another so that those who disagree with him will turn against him. There is a debate going on in Judaism about when divorce is appropriate. The Law of Moses gave a man authority to divorce his wife when he chose to but it didn't say anything beyond that. Many men felt justified in doing what they wanted to do because they could say, "Look here is the law. Why do you point a finger at me? I'm doing just what it says here that I'm allowed to do." Jesus refuses to get committed to taking one position or another. Instead he moves it up to a higher plane and he draws on scripture, much like the candidates call on Presidents of the past for good inspiration. He says, "Well, you ask me this question about divorce. Tell me what the Law of Moses says." They repeat the words back. Jesus says, "Now let me use the scriptures to raise the standards." He refers to words in the Book of Genesis. "Two shall become one flesh, that what God has joined together let no one break apart." The Pharisees are unsuccessful in their attempt to get him to jump into the middle of political turmoil. He doesn't leave it there. Mark uses a phrase "in the home," to describe a small, private conversation following the public statement. Here we find Jesus' difficult words: "If you get divorced and get remarried, you're committing adultery." It doesn't seem that there is anyway around that one. The friend I mentioned earlier said that if he wanted to, he could try to explain away the scripture. But he felt it was very clear that Jesus was against divorce and didn't want that to be a part of our vocabulary. Others will say, though, that you have to read and interpret the scripture to understand what's going on. One commentator suggested that what Jesus is doing is dealing with the issue of legalism and spirit. He's saying that you want a ruling. You're looking for somebody to hand down a law so that you know what you can do and what you can't do. He said, "You're asking this out of a hardness of heart because you don't want to deal with the reality of a relationship. You don't want to be talking about what it means to love someone. You want a rule so that you can do what you'd like to do." When he says that it is adultery if you get remarried, he is pointing to the reality that you don't just start over again with a clean slate if you get a divorce and get married again. There is always a past relationship. There is always the impact of that on your life. It's always something to be dealt with. This commentator suggests, and I would agree, that Jesus is not saying, "That's the old law. I'm going to make a new and tougher law." Jesus is saying, "Laws are for those who need laws, but what's more important is to figure out relationships."
In the Presbyterian Church about ten years ago there was a debate about sex outside of marriage, about sexual orientation and gay relationships, the whole gamut of human sexuality. Scholars came together to try and sort out some way for the church to deal with all of the many sexual issues that we are presented with today. What the report advocated was not a new legalism or a black and white recipe for who was good and who was bad or what was allowed. Instead they moved it to an entirely higher plane, a more demanding and challenging plane. They chose a word that was not very catchy to describe their position. They talked about something called "justice love." Justice love is a way to get around the rockets shooting up in the air and the warm feeling inside and the physical attraction of one person to another . Justice love points toward the true meaning of love: a concern for the other person. It says if you want to talk about a relationship outside of a legal marriage, you need to apply the standard of justice love. What is nurturing? What is caring? What is constructive? Whatever word you'd like to use. If you take that definition of justice love and apply it to many marriages that have a legal approval, we find they are unjust relationships. In other words people, who are living together as husband and wife but have a disrespectful or destructive relationship, are still carrying on a sinful relationship. Theirs is an unjust love. It's a standard that all of us come under. Not just the ones who go to the court and get a divorce. Not just the ones who choose to try and do it right the next time and get remarried. All of us come under this challenge. Are our relationships loving? Are our relationships true? Are they honest? Do we care about another person? Do we try to maintain our commitment to what we have said we would do? These are all extremely important issues for us. It is not a clear matter of saying that divorce is a sin and everybody else is righteous. We are all sinners in one way or another. We are all called on to experience God's love in our life, to accept God's forgiveness, to live our lives with care and compassion for others. I pray that God's Spirit will speak to you this day and guide you in living with justice love. Thanks be to God. Amen.