Sermon for 20th Pentecost
It Is Not About Divorce
By The Rev. Eric Christopher Shafer -
Today’s Gospel text, Jesus’ seemingly harsh words about divorce, is NOT one of my favorite texts in the Bible. Well, to be more truthful, I like to try to be away on the weekend every three years when this text appears in our lectionary. It is just that Jesus’ words seem so harsh and so many who hear them today have experienced divorce in their own lives or in the lives of family and friends. And, these words have often been used as a “club” against gay and lesbian people. So many hear these words as words of judgement on themselves or their friends and family.
I have preached on this text previously and noted that, in a time when women and children were treated as property and when, in some communities, a husband could divorce his wife simply by saying “I divorce you” three times, Jesus’ words on divorce and the equality of men and women in marriage, would be seen as quite progressive, even radical.
However, today, I want to suggest another way to look at this text.
I believe these words are not addressed to individuals but were rather meant to be helpful to and descriptive of a community. And that view makes a big different in their meaning for us today.
When this passage is read at church, we tend to hear it in an intensely personal way. This is particularly true, of course, if you have gone through a divorce, or your parents have been divorced, or someone close to you has or if you are gay or lesbian. All of this has the end result of hearing this passage as addressed to particular individuals and feeling ashamed or angry or hurt or embarrassed. That reaction is totally understandable, especially if Jesus was speaking to individuals when he spoke these words.
However, I do not think that is what Jesus was doing. I do not think Jesus was speaking to individuals when he spoke these words and that makes Jesus’ words much different from their “face” value as we hear them today.
Note, for instance, how Mark sets up this scene: “Some Pharisees came, and to test Jesus, they asked ‘Is it lawful…’” Did you catch that? This is not a casual conversation about love, marriage, and divorce. It’s a test. Moreover, it is not even a test about divorce, but about the law. In Jesus’ day, there were several competing schools of thought about the legality of divorce. While most everyone agreed that divorce was legal in Jesus’ day, they disagreed over the circumstances in which divorce would be allowed.
So, what we have here, once again, is an attempt by the Pharisees to pin Jesus down, an attempt to label Jesus, to draw Jesus out and perhaps entrap him so that they know better how to deal with him in the future.
And, as usual, of course, Jesus is having none of it. Jesus quickly deflects their question away from matters of the law and turns it instead to relationships and to God’s hope that our relationships are more than legal matters, that they help us to have and share more abundant life.
That is why Jesus asks about Moses - questions about marriage and divorce, Jesus argues, are not simply legal niceties. They are rather about God’s intention that we be in relationships of mutual dependence and health.
Then, Jesus goes one step further and takes what had turned into a legal convenience – typically for the man who sought a divorce – and pushes his questioners to see that this law – indeed, all of Jewish law – was and is intended to protect the vulnerable. That all of Jewish law was intended to protect the vulnerable.
In Jesus’ day, not too dissimilar to today, in Jesus’ day, when a woman was divorced she lost pretty much everything – status, reputation, economic security, everything. So, Jesus asks, how can they treat this topic as a convenience, let alone a debating topic. The law is meant to protect the vulnerable and hurting and every time we use it for another purpose we are twisting it from God’s plan and, indeed, violating it in spirit if not in letter.
Jesus is not speaking to individuals, he is making a statement about the kind of community we will be. In fact, Jesus is inviting us to imagine communities centered in and on real relationships; relationships, that is, founded on love and mutual dependence, fostered by respect and dignity, and pursued for the sake of the health of the community and the protection of the vulnerable.
And, here is what I find even more interesting: Even though the discussion up to this point has been about divorce, I do not think that is really the heart of what is going on here.
Just look at the next verses describing the reaction of Jesus’ disciples to those bringing children to Jesus to bless and, more importantly, Jesus’ reaction to the same.
Again, let’s look at the context for this scene: Jesus has announced his intention to go to Jerusalem to die and, in response, his disciples argue about who is the greatest. Jesus in turn tells them that to be great is to serve, and that the very heart of the kingdom he proclaims is about welcoming the vulnerable. In fact, Jesus says that whenever you welcome and honor a child – one who had the least status and power in the ancient world – you were actually welcoming and honoring Jesus.
And now, on the heels of this conversation about the purpose of the law, some folks bring their children to be blessed by Jesus and the disciples try to keep them away. No surprise, Jesus intervenes, forcefully, saying that welcoming the kingdom pretty much means welcoming children, that is, the vulnerable, those at risk, and those in need.
This whole passage, I believe, is about community. But it is not the kind of community we have been trained to seek. It is not, that is, a community of the strong, or the wealthy, or the powerful, or the independent. Rather, this is a community of the broken, of the vulnerable, of those at risk. It is a community, in other words, of those who know their need and seek to be in relationship with each other because they have learned that by being in honest and open relationship with each other they are in relationship with God, the very one who created them for each other in the first place. The very community in which divorced and broken people can find a home.
This is what the church was originally about – a place for all those who had been broken by life or rejected by the powerful, a place to come to experience God through the crucified Jesus as the One who met them precisely in their vulnerability, not to make them impervious to harm but rather open to the brokenness and need of those around them.
Paul reminds of this in his words in I Corinthians:
Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God
(I Cor. 1:26-29).
Like it or not, part of being human is to be insecure, to be aware of our need and, in light of the cultural preference for strength, power, and independence, to be embarrassed by our need. For this reason, Paul, following Jesus, reminds us that to be broken is not something to be ashamed of. Rather, to be broken is, in fact, to be human. And to be human is to be loved by God and drawn together into relationship with all the others that God loves. Which means that our gatherings at worship here at Mt. Olive are local gatherings of the broken and loved, of those who are hurting but also healing, of those who are lost but have also been found, of those that know their needs and seek not simply to have those needs met but have realized that in helping meet the needs of others their own are met in turn.
Thus, I am suggesting that we look at today’s Gospel lesson not so much as instructions about divorce but instead as an invitation to see our congregation as a place where God’s work to heal and restore the whole creation is ongoing, not by taking away all our problems but by surrounding us with people who understand, and care, and help us to discover together our potential to reach out to others in love and compassion.
Jesus is telling us that we are communities of the broken, made up of broken people whom God loves and is healing and, indeed, using to make all things new.
We are communities of the broken and blessed. Gathered to hear God’s word, receive God’s forgiveness, share in God’s meal, and go out from here, still broken, but knowing we are blessed and loved by God and, thus, given another chance, made new by God to live another day in God’s love.
This is a place, the place, for you and me, married, single, divorced, broken and blessed as we all are. Broken, yes, but also forgiven and loved by God. Today and every day.
Amen.
(With thanks to the Rev. Dr. David Lose).
The Rev. Eric Christopher Shafer
Senior Pastor - Mt. Olive Lutheran Church
Santa Monica, California
Sunday, October 6 & 7, 2018
