Love and Reality

Scripture: Mark 10:2-16

Good morning friends. What a gift to be here together this morning. This morning’s gospel is a little more of a challenge than usual, so let us be in prayer together.

Loving God, we need your grace. Dwell with us here in this place. Open my mouth to share wisdom. Open our hearts to your word to us. Open our eyes to see your kingdom among us. You are the one we rely on. Guide and strengthen us, we pray. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

I have to say that, honestly, I was not excited to preach about this week’s gospel lesson. The main topic is divorce – the Pharisees ask Jesus if it’s okay to get one, and he says, no, because marriage changes two people into one person. How can you split a person apart and have that be God’s will?

There is some political background here that explains why the Pharisees ask Jesus this question in the first place. The king of Judea at the time – Herod – had divorced his wife so that he could marry his brother’s wife. She had divorced the brother to be able to marry Herod. It was more drama than Princess Di, Prince Charles and Camilla.

John the Baptist, Jesus’ mentor, had spoken out against this as wrong, and as a result, Herod put him in jail. But when someone put him up to it, Herod had John killed, rather than go back on his word. As you can see, it was a big risk in those days to even comment on the local king’s domestic affairs. The Pharisees know this, so asking Jesus about divorce is another attempt at painting him into a corner. And instead of agreeing or disagreeing with the law handed down by Moses, Jesus goes back to the basic meaning of marriage in the creation. He goes beyond and above the law.

There’s a way in which Jesus is speaking out in favor of the vulnerable by going against divorce. Even today, divorce usually affects women more than men, in terms of economics. In Jesus’ day this was much more extreme. Women without a husband were left destitute if they had no male relatives to support them. Imagine the insecurity that kind of an arrangement would inspire! If a husband who decided to use that threat, even the possibility of divorce would be enough to take advantage of his wife’s vulnerability. “Because of your hard-heartedness,” Jesus says, “Moses made that law for you. But it’s not what God intended.”

So that’s some of the background to what’s going on in the gospel lesson this morning. But the big, glaring thing that’s sitting in the foreground for me is what happens in our lives today around divorce. I have plenty of family and friends who have been through divorce, and some who even midway through the process right now. I would imagine many of us have been through the experience ourselves or have seen someone we love go through it. And as Jesus faces down the Pharisees, he sure makes it sound pretty simple, as though choosing to get a divorce were like choosing to go to a new restaurant, instead of an old favorite. Divorce is painful enough, not something that most people choose happily or thoughtlessly. I don’t want to add yet another layer of guilt over something that is as much a tragedy as it is a sin.

And yet, here’s Jesus saying, ‘that’s not what God wants for you,’ and I want to say back, “Well, we can’t always do that.” Which leaves this huge gap – a chasm – between what God wants for us, and what can happen instead. One of the Greek words we translate now as sin has a meaning from archery of falling short and missing the mark. At its most basic, divorce represents our limits as humans – that there are some things that can’t be forgiven, some divides too deep to bridge, and some wounds that are simply fatal to a relationship. There is Jesus’ vision of love, and there is reality.

Divorce, of course, isn’t the only way we can fall short of God’s intentions for us, of course. It just has the dubious honor of being relatively public – something that all our friends and family and extended networks eventually find out about. By contrast, someone might betray their marriage vows by abusing their spouse for years without anyone besides the victim knowing for sure what is going on. Or what would it be like for us if, every time we held a grudge everybody in the church, and all our friends and family, knew it? I guess it depends on what kind of a grudge you’re holding. In love, Jesus calls us to forgive, but in reality it’s a hard thing to do.

What’s ironic, in a way, is that one of the things Jesus calls us to do is to love and care for those who are vulnerable and in need. This is an ongoing refrain. In the second section of our gospel lesson, he shoos the disciples away when they try to keep little kids from coming to him. Instead of sending them away, he welcomes the children, hugging them and blessing them, caring for them in their vulnerability. And yet, even though this is something so important to Jesus, our falling short on our care for the vulnerable rarely gets the kind of local publicity that a divorce does.

In this passage, Jesus is inviting us to be part of the kingdom of God. What does it mean to live out a good marriage, and to live out good friendships, and to live out good relationships with our families, and with our co-workers and neighbors and random people on the street – what does it mean for our relationships to say that we are Christian? How does being part of the kingdom of God affect them? I’d like to lay out four ways.

First, there is treating others the way you’d like to be treated. Jesus talks about the married couple as being one flesh. This means seeing the health and well-being of your spouse tied to your own well-being. Decisions are made as a unit, for the good of the whole. Each person shares. The orientation of the partners goes from personal to joint. The reality, of course, is that sometimes we don’t feel it or remember it. According to one expert on the human mind, the way our memories are structured, we always are more aware of our own contributions and less aware of the contributions others make. Our own memories keep us falling short!

The Christian promise actually broadens this principle beyond marriage. In his letter to the Corinthians, the apostle Paul describes the whole church as the body of Christ. What would a church look like if we saw each other as being of the same body – that our needs and joys are shared – and that we cared for each other accordingly?

Second, there is forgiveness. Every Sunday we pray, “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Forgiveness is not exclusive to Christians, but it is one of Jesus’ key teachings. And marriage is a great place to learn how to do it, and then get ongoing practice. But forgiveness is required in all our relationships. And learning to give up our rights when we’ve been hurt, to release them and to end the cycle of hurt, these are gifts of the Spirit and signs of God’s grace in a world so often bent on revenge and retribution.

Third, there is care for the vulnerable. Relationships in the kingdom of God are marked by respect, even for those who have little conventional power. Jesus calls the children to come to him, and he blesses and cares for him. This is something we’re called to imitate in the life of the kingdom, to regard with care and love those who might otherwise be overlooked or at a disadvantage.

Finally, there is the fact that all of our relationships rely on God. When we make marriage vows in a Christian wedding service, there is an acknowledgement that God’s covenant and God’s faithfulness under gird our own. In the same way, our fellowship in churches, in families, as neighbors, as friends, all rely on God’s grace. The huge gap between love and reality, must, ultimately, be filled by God.

This week, I did some work caring for my front lawn. As I recently learned, having a nice, healthy yard with lots of thick grass is the best way to prevent weeds. As it so happens, my yard right now has a lot more weeds than grass – clover, crabgrass, dandelions, something that looks like a houseplant, I don’t even know. The way to help the grass grow is by over-seeding. First you rake away the dead grass and grass clippings, cut the remaining grass down really short, and cast new seeds on the bare spots, where, if you water twice a day for two weeks, the seeds will sprout and grow, and crowd out the weeds. Ideally, this is done every year. We’ve been in the house three years and I’ve never done it before. I got about half a trash can full of stuff by raking the yard, and the yard is not that big. And big chunks and knots came out where the crabgrass gave way, so I put in some new dirt there, along with the new seeds.

What if our goal in our relationships were to encourage the good plants and crowd out the weeds? What if we were to sow encouragement and kindness, faithfulness and peace? Thankfully, we are alone in this journey. God walks with us, providing the light, sending the rain, raking away the dead grass in our hearts, and making room for the new seed so that when it lands, it will grow and flourish, leading us into that shining realm of God. Thanks be to God, Amen.