Spoiling a Good Thing

Sermon for Sunday, Oct. 4 (World Communion Sunday)
Scripture: Mark 10:2-16

I was sitting in my office a couple weeks ago, when I decided to look ahead and see what the lectionary readings were for today, World Communion Sunday. I imagined some wonderful scripture about unity in the spirit, loving one another, being at peace with our neighbors – something with a real unifying, loving message, something perfect for a Sunday in which we celebrate the worldwide nature of the Christian Church. Imagine my disappointment and surprise, then, when I discovered the nature of this morning’s gospel lesson. Divorce? On World Communion Sunday? Really?

“Maybe I’ll preach on the Old Testament text,” I thought to myself. But then I discovered the OT text is the story of Job losing everything. We’re 0 for 2 on easily preachable texts. So I turned to the epistle lesson – Hebrews. “Oh, I can make that work,” I said. But after awhile, I finally decided to preach on the Mark text, the discussions on divorce between the Pharisees and Jesus and the disciples and Jesus. After all, this is why I practice the discipline of lectionary preaching – sometimes I’m forced to preach texts I’d really rather not wrestle with from the pulpit. But that’s the hand we’re dealt today, and so we must begin our exploration into the subject of divorce.

Let me start by saying what this sermon is not. This sermon is not a polemic on one side or the other of the debate about whether or not divorce is okay for Christians. I will not stand here and tell you the moral standing of divorced persons, and I will not tell you that either side of the debate places anyone on moral high ground. As we see right off the bat in this text, the argument over whether divorce is permissible, proper, legal, or even Christian is the argument of the Pharisees. They wish to engage Jesus in debate and see who Jesus will side with. Such a Pharisaic debate is not our concern this morning. Jesus refused to get sucked into such a debate, and I will not allow us to get sucked in this morning.

Regardless of how you feel about the properness or morality of divorce, the reality is that each one of us knows someone who has been through a divorce at some time. Divorce is so common in our society that this is a fact that we cannot ignore – each of us knows someone affected by divorce. That is the first reality we must admit this morning. The second is that divorce is a human institution – it is a human concept, a human decision, a word serving as a label for one type of broken relationship. Divorce signifies a broken relationship with little to no possibility of reconciliation. There are times when marriages reach a point where divorce is really the only option.

And as with all broken relationships, there is a great amount of pain and hurt involved. This is the third and final reality we dace. Divorce is not some impersonal moral dilemma. It is a deeply personal, deeply troubling thing – and the hurting persons in the midst of that struggle should be our focus. So as Christians intent on sharing God’s love, our concern with divorce should not be whether it is the right decision, or whether it should be allowed. Rather, we are called first and foremost to concern ourselves with and to be in ministry with those who are hurting in these difficult times.

The Pharisees could not resist the human temptation to debate this moral dilemma of divorce. They ask Jesus, point blank, “As the leader of a new religious sect, what is your take on divorce? What’s your divorce agenda? Do you think it’s okay for people to get divorced?”

Jesus, sensing the Pharisees’ real motive is to test him, draws the attention toward the divorce laws found in the Torah – in Deuteronomy 24. As the Pharisees proudly assert, these laws written by Moses allowed a man to divorce his wife, even if the reason for divorce was that she wasn’t pleasing to him anymore. But then Jesus explains to them the reality about the divorce laws in Deuteronomy: Moses created these laws, not God. The men displeased with their wives created divorce, not God. And humans are concerned with the debate about divorce, not God.

These divorce laws in the Torah arose from human debates that Moses was called on to settle. As Jesus is teaching the Pharisees, the laws of Torah do not necessarily reflect God’s will. God doesn’t want divorce to occur. Divorce is never part of God’s plan. But what that REALLY means is that the actions that lead to failed marriages are never part of God’s plan. God created the covenant of marriage, and we humans created the covenant of divorce. We created it by failing to live up to God’s expectations. Very soon after God established marriage, we humans found ways to destroy those relationships, and to this day we humans do things that break the marriage relationship beyond the point of reconciliation. We commit adultery. We abuse our spouse – physically, verbally, or emotionally. We fail to treat our spouse as an equal partner. We fight with our spouses. We keep things from our spouses. We neglect our spouses. We tolerate our spouses rather than love them to the fullest of our ability. We act as the flawed people we are. And every marriage has flaws. Every marriage is damaged by our sinful, human actions from time to time. And none of that, whether or not it leads to divorce, was ever God’s will.

Our human sinfulness has brought divorce into the realm of possibility. And because of our human sinfulness, in some instances divorce is the only decision left. But here’s what Jesus is trying to get the Pharisees to understand: while we humans are concentrating on divorce, God is concerned with marriage. Our focus is in the wrong place when we get into the debate about divorce. The Pharisees focus is in the wrong place when they try to goad Jesus into the debate about divorce. Notice that when they ask Jesus his thoughts on divorce, he quickly moves the discussion to God’s thoughts on marriage.

You see, the Pharisees are asking the wrong question. They want to know what happens when a marriage has crumbled to the point where it cannot be saved. But Jesus points out God’s intentions for marriage, and that the real question they should be asking is how they can avoid marriages from crumbling in the first place. When we entrench ourselves in the debate about divorce, we neglect the more important issue: why are marriages reaching points of irreconcilable differences in the first place? What are we doing to create the human need for a Deuteronomical divorce law? More than focusing on broken relationships, we should be focusing on prevention of broken relationships.

If we followed God more closely in our marriages, Jesus wouldn’t have to weigh in on the divorce debate. If we took better care of our marriages, if we really loved our spouses like we should be, then Moses would never have needed to write up a process by which we can get certificates of divorce. If we just listen to God in the first place and actually love one another, this debate wouldn’t be a reality in our world.
It’s a matter of preventative care. The Pharisees only concern themselves with what happens when our marriages are deathly ill. But Jesus tells them that with the proper preventative care, sometimes the death of a marriage can be avoided. So the question before us is not about the location of divorce on the moral compass. We are not to be concerned with such frivolous debates in this arena. The question before us goes much deeper. For those of us that are married, the question is, “What am I doing to strengthen my marriage? What am I doing to prevent this relationship from breaking down?” For those of us that are not married, the question is, “What am I doing to help others strengthen their marriages? What am I doing to prevent marriage relationships from breaking down? And if I do marry in the future, what will I do to build up that relationship rather than tearing it down?”

The reality we face today is that there are some things in our world that God simply doesn’t weigh in on. There are some things in our world, created by our sinfulness, that God does not give us a clear answer about. Divorce is one of those things. We are left to wrestle with the question on our own, without the straightforward answer we desire. We may not like it, and we may not understand it, but try as we might, we can’t always get God to answers the questions we bring before the throne. All we can do is seek to live into God’s will for our lives, seek to live in relationships that never require an end, and most of all, the best thing for us to do is seek to live in peace with one another. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.