SERMONS

By Rev. Anthony B. Robinson
Sabbatical Interim Minister
Mark 10: 1 – 16

October 4, 2009

As we gather today, on this World-Wide Communion Sunday, we have on our hearts the suffering of those hit by devastating storms in the Philippines and tsunamis in Indonesia and Samoa. Later in the service, I’ve asked Rev. Ta’amu of the Samoan Congregation and Cabug Kluessner of the Filipino Arts Collective to share brief updates with us, and also to be available for further conversation following worship. If you would like to give to a special offering to disaster relief work make a check to Bethany with “disaster relief” in the note area. Will you pray with me?

Today’s gospel lesson continues our reading from the gospel of the year, Mark. Jesus is on his journey to Jerusalem and to the cross. As he travels, he teaches. He teaches about the ways of God and what it means to live in God’s realm and walk in God’s way.

Today’s text falls into two parts. The first has to do with marriage and divorce. In the second, children come to Jesus, the disciples try to shoo them off. But blessing the children, Jesus says, “Let the children come to me.”

There are many issues and many emotions that may arise in response to these few verses. I will probably not touch on nor certainly do justice to them all. For instance, while I support marriage equality for people who are gay and lesbian, I will not address that directly, though I hope the implications of the message will be relevant to such covenanted partnerships.

I do want to try to get at the heart of what I hear Jesus saying to us here, both in his words about marriage and divorce, and then in the second part, his blessing of children.

So let’s begin with the section on marriage and divorce. What I want you to notice is how the conversation begins, and how Jesus redirects or reframes that conversation.

The conversation begins with some Jewish leaders coming to Jesus and asking, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” This was really a set-up, kind of trap for Jesus. In first century Judaism, as in twenty-first century America, people were often polarized around hot issues, dividing into two mutually exclusive camps. Among Jews at that time, divorce was not a debatable issue. The hot topic was the grounds for divorce. What made divorce permissible or lawful?

Some, pointing to Mosaic law, said a man could divorce his wife (yes, you heard that correctly, in Jewish society of the time men could divorce their wives; women could not, however, divorce their husbands). So the issue is really the lawful grounds by which a man might divorce his wife. Some said a man could write out a certificate of divorce and send his wife away for virtually anything. The other camp has stricter, more limited criteria, for the lawful grounds for a man to divorce his wife. There was the low bar camp and the high bar.

So it’s a set up. They try to get Jesus to take one side or the other. Are you in this camp or that camp? Whose side are you on? Take a position, let us put you in one box or the other.

Here’s what I want you to notice. As Jesus avoids their trap, he redirects the conversation from divorce and the grounds under which it is permitted, to marriage. He goes back beyond Mosaic law to the creation story to speak of marriage. In doing so, Jesus reminds everyone that there are bigger issues here, that marriage is a gift of God and part of God’s way of ordering creation.

So marriage and divorce are not about getting what I want. Marriage is not reducible, as we often speak today, to getting our needs met. Nor is divorce, as those who question Jesus would have it, not simply a matter of what I can get away with or what I can do and still claim to be on the right side of religious law and respectability. To the polarized parties arguing how what qualifies as the right criteria for a man to get ride of his wife, Jesus says it’s not just about you, there’s something bigger here.

Lately, I’ve had the opportunity to think and to feel rather deeply about marriage. In July, our son, Nick, was married. And later this month, in fact the day before my last Sunday with you, our son Joe will be married. As a minister, I have performed, officiated, at many weddings, hundreds. None of these prepared me for the tide of emotion, of grief and of joy, that the weddings and marriage of our own children, has involved.

Jesus quotes from Genesis and the creation story, “For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother and shall be joined to his wife.” Until it was my own son, I didn’t really notice, much less “get” the power and the truth of those words.

Moreover, and as many of you have also noticed, weddings today tend to be a very big deal, often involving significant expense. As Nick no doubt tired of hearing me say, there were more people at his bachelor party than there were at our wedding. I’ve even written about the high-cost of weddings and what a scandal that is.

Now I am having different, or at least further, thoughts about the matter. I wonder if the current generation is trying in the best way they know how to say to themselves and to the rest of us, a simple but profound thing, marriage is a big deal. It’s a big deal. It matters. Remember too that the current generation has seen a higher rate of divorce in their parent’s generation than any previous generation in American history.

Jesus is saying it too, albeit a little more eloquently, marriage is a big deal. It has to do with God, with mysteries too deep to fathom, too large to grasp. It has to do with the heart and soul of numbers of two human beings but really many more. Sometimes marriage has been reduced to something far less, to the impoverished language of “having my needs met,” and the like.

That’s what Jesus is objecting to here. He’s objecting to reductions of the great mystery and gift of marriage to a pretty selfish calculus; what are the grounds on which I can divorce my wife, send her away, and still claim to be a respectable, law-abiding citizen? It’s all about me. Jesus calls that “hardness of heart,” and he’s right.

In the verses which immediately follow, Jesus speaks in private with the disciples. Now he has not just Jewish culture and law in mind, but Greco-Roman culture. Greco-Roman culture was more like our own in that both women and men could divorce with husbands or wives respectively. But here too he objects to reducing this to what I want or what I can get away with. He says, “A man who divorces his wife so he can marry someone else commits adultery against her. And a woman who divorces her husband so she can marry someone else commits adultery.” (Message, translation).

So, again, Jesus is challenging ways of using religion and law to get one’s selfish way and then to have it look legitimate. To that he says, marriage is a big deal; it’s about God and it’s about the souls of other people. People are not throw-away, not consumer items.

Does this mean that divorce is always wrong, never necessary or never to be permitted? I don’t hear it that way. Sometimes divorce is the lesser evil. Some marriages are broken beyond repair. And just as there is grace and forgiveness of sin for those who stay married (Lord knows we need it!), so too there is grace for those whose marriages end in divorce.

Let me read to you a wise and heartfelt reflection from a woman who experienced divorce.

“I watched my husband marry again in two years’ time and saw him happy with a wonderful woman who my children tell me is much better for him than I was. (And I wholeheartedly agree with them.) I watched my children shake in their lives, in their different ways, as they too faced the truth and grieved the ending of a marriage. I saw us all lay down a hope of a future with one mother and one father at the centre of Christmas gatherings with our children and grandchildren.

“I wept as I laid down forever the image of myself as a ‘respectable’ married woman and a person who holds to the vows that she makes and can make things right for people. All of that was the first part of living my own truth. It not only reformed me into a person who believed she was due for a totality of giving and receiving love, it also reformed me into a very human being who could make major mistakes on the journey of life, who had to live with that and own that and who found this could sometimes make her a more real human being.” (Dorothy McRae-McMahon, Everyday Passions: A Conversation on Living, p. 92)

I believe good and lasting marriages are to be deeply valued and highly honored. I also believe that simply being or staying married does not mean that we are the right or the righteous, nor does being divorced means we are somehow wrong or disqualified.

All of us, married, single, partnered or divorced, are saved and justified by God’s free grace in Jesus Christ, not by our own doing. Moreover, the church has an important ministry in supporting and strengthening marriages, and the church has an important ministry of healing with those who have been divorced.

This leads then to the second part of this lesson, the part where Jesus receives and blesses children. The disciples, ever the fall guys, tell the kids to “get lost” which ticks Jesus off. He says, “Let them come to me.” He adds, “Truly I say to you whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.”

What’s going on here? What’s at stake? Is Jesus saying that children deserve his blessing or entry into God’s kingdom or realm because of some quality of their own? Is he saying, to be more precise, that children merit his blessing because of their innocence or purity?

I don’t think so. Moreover, I don’t think children are all that innocent. Oh sure, compared to adults, children are in a relative sense “innocent.” But wholly innocent or pure? I don’t think so. Children can be wonderfully kind and they can be truly selfish. Children can be pure and delightful and they can be mean and nasty. Let’s not get foolishly sentimental here.

So, if Jesus is not saying you should be innocent and pure like we sometimes wish to children are, what is he saying? Why does Jesus take the rug-rats and bless them? And why do the disciples regard them as nuisances to be shooed off?

Children in that time and culture were second, third or no class people. They had no rights. They had little, if any power. They weren’t important. From the standpoint of power and status they were nobodies.

Today, at least some places, it’s different. Children in our culture are often somebodies sometimes to the point that some kids get the mistaken idea that the whole world revolves around them.

The point is one Jesus makes elsewhere, the broken, the sinners and outcasts and little people, will enter the Kingdom before all the “good” people because they know their need of God’s grace, of God’s mercy. The children Jesus blessed, these “nobodies,” may not “know” that, but they “receive” the Kingdom of God, the blessing of Jesus, as a gift. They can’t claim to be deserving or entitled. They provide a contrast to the religious leaders who come to Jesus at the beginning who want to justify themselves, to establish the grounds on which they can divorce and still consider themselves right and respectable.

Jesus blessed the children and said the disciples could learn from them about entering God’s kingdom because there was no way they deserved a blessing or entrance to God’s presence. They had no resume. They were not entitled by their smarts, power, or achievement. It was all grace.

And that is the way it is for all of us. It’s not about how right or righteous we are; it’s not about whether we have succeeded in marriage (or not), it’s not about whether we are really important people and thus entitled to God’s notice and approval. Before God all of us are un-entitled. All of us are without claim. None of us deserves blessing or grace. All of us are sinners standing in need of grace.

You and I are “saved,” healed and restored by God’s gift of mercy and forgiveness in Christ, not by our merits or achievements. That’s why Jesus welcomes the children and tells the disciples to learn from them.

So let me conclude this sermon with a prayer titled “Grace.” One October day, a few years back, this was the prayer prayed in worship by a member of the congregation who had been asked to lead our prayers that day. I found it powerful and hope you do too. Why don’t you close your eyes and we join in a together in a spirit of prayer?

“God of ancient times and of this October morning,

God of all times

And of all places

Help us to remember how to understand

that mystery which is called grace.

Grace.

We have forgotten again that

Your everlasting grace is not

Something we can earn.

Though we know better,

We have saved up the evidence of

Our good thoughts and good deeds

Like bright coins in a bank,

Waiting for the day when we could cash them in.

Our houses and hands are clean.

Our taxes are paid.

We voted, we mulched, we cleaned the gutters,

We composted and recycled and did our homework.

We volunteered, we called our mothers, we kept our promises

And paid our bills.

We only read good books, we pulled all the weeds, and stayed

Away from the TV.

We ate sensibly, worked hard, went to bed on time.

We drove politely. We were sensitive, and of course,

When we failed at any of this,

We added our guilt to the bank.

Like children earnestly offering up handfuls of pennies,

These are some of the coins we plan to exchange for your everlasting love.

We hold them in our hands, demanding our reward,

Disappointed in the silence.

Didn’t we try hard enough?

Please.

Some of us are out of strength for the fight.

Our hands are bleeding from holding on so tightly

to the ends of our ropes.

Others of us are feeling competent and in control today.

But every one of us needs to remember that grace is not the reward,

Not the end of our efforts.

Grace is the beginning, the astonishing gift that asks only to be used.

We open our hearts to that gift now . . .

Amen.”