Community of the Broken and Blessed - 10-3-21
Deuteronomy 24:1-4; Mark 10:2-16
Deuteronomy 24:1-4
Suppose a man enters into marriage with a woman, but she does not please him because he finds something objectionable about her, and so he writes her a certificate of divorce, puts it in her hand, and sends her out of his house; she then leaves his house and goes off to become another man’s wife. Then suppose the second man dislikes her, writes her a bill of divorce, puts it in her hand, and sends her out of his house (or the second man who married her dies); her first husband, who sent her away, is not permitted to take her again to be his wife after she has been defiled; for that would be abhorrent to the Lord, and you shall not bring guilt on the land that the Lord your God is giving you as a possession.
Mark 10:2-16
Some Pharisees came, and to test him they asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” He answered them, “What did Moses command you?” They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her.” But Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you. But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.” Then in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter. He said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.” People were bringing little children to him in order that he might touch them; and the disciples spoke sternly to them. But when Jesus saw this, he was indignant and said to them, “Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” And he took them up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them.
Prayer – Sovereign God, you make us for each other, to live in loving community as friends, sons and daughters, sisters and brothers, wives and husbands, partners and companions. All too often the faith community looks at broken relationships as failures, unredemptive and way too fallible. Teach us once again to choose love, blessing our relationships with commitment and devotion, blessing us with a child’s wonder and trust, that our loving of one another indeed reflects your blessings and love for us – as individuals and as a community – amen.
You are at your favorite ball park where your team is doing what they always do, playing just good enough to make you believe but not good enough to win the championship, just good enough to break your heart. If you are a NC football fan you are quite familiar with this feeling.
The stadium public address announcer says with much enthusiasm during a break in the action: “Would you please turn your attention to the scoreboard for a special message?” In big letters it says, “Britney, will you marry me? Blake.” The camera zooms in to section 121 to show Blake kneeling in front of Britney. The crowd starts cheering and chanting, “Say yes.” You want to join in the cheering, but you can’t. You know too many Britney’s and Blake’s who did not stay joined. You want to yell, “Think hard,” but it is too late. With tears in her eyes, Britney nods her assent and the crowd goes wild. Britney may have second thoughts – would you marry someone who takes it no more seriously than to propose at a TCU, UT or A&M football game?
The internet has multiple websites explaining how best to propose. It is amazing people my age were able to get married without these directions. If you plan to pop the question on Valentine’s Day do not go to a romantic restaurant or you may find yourself upstaged by someone else with the same idea. Think twice about surprising your possible future spouse by tucking the ring inside a dessert. This seems self-explanatory. None of the internet suggestions I found encouraged the prospective married person to think about what it means to be married.
You might guess that scripture might be a good place to look for help on how to propose, but you would be wrong. Have you read how husbands find wives in scripture? Boaz buys some land and gets a wife as part of the deal. God tells Hosea to go marry a prostitute. King Solomon thought quantity was the way to go. In the Book of Judges, the men in the tribe of Benjamin were instructed to go to a party and hide in the tall grass. When the women come out to dance, they are to grab one and carry her off. One law in Leviticus says that if your brother dies and you are a male then you have to marry his widow. I can imagine that may be a little unsettling for some of us.
But somehow couples keep coming to the church to bless their unions. The relatives gather, the organist plays, the mothers nervously light candles, the minister asks who brings the blessing of the families. The father of the bride struggles to remember his line. The minister speaks knowing that no one is listening. The minister asks, “Will you?” The handsome prince says, “I will.” The beautiful princess says, “I will.” They promise for “better or worse, richer or poorer, in joy and sorrow, in sickness and health, to love and cherish, as long as they both shall live.” They kiss, take a lot of pictures, leave under a shower of birdseed or bubbles and then the hard part begins. As I often say at weddings, “A wedding is a day, a marriage is a lifetime.”
When the romance starts to fade questions start popping into their heads. Why didn’t he help with the wedding? Why is the garage his? Why does he expect credit for every little thing he does around the house? Why does he get to keep his last name? Why does she keep talking about the wedding? Why is the bedroom hers? Why doesn’t she give me a little credit for helping around the house? Why didn’t she understand that when I said she could paint the kitchen any color I meant any color as long as it was white? Married life includes lots of decisions and when the decisions start going the wrong way in the mind of one or the other, then it is easy to understand why we wanted to yell “think hard” to Britney and Blake.
Our text from Mark this morning is one of the more difficult gospel passages we as ministers must encounter and honestly I really would prefer to skip it. In our modern day world where more relationships end up in divorce than stay together what are we to make of Jesus’ tough words on divorce? I have the divorced T-shirt and early in my ordination process it resulted in rejection by the Presbytery I was a member of at the time. What Jesus did was come down hard on being true to commitments.
When this passage is heard in 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. 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, and that’s totally understandable; especially if Jesus imagined these words being addressed to individuals. But here’s the thing, I don’t think he did.
The Pharisees come to Jesus itching for a fight. A battle is raging between two schools of rabbinic thought on the issue of divorce. The Hillel school says a husband may dismiss his wife for virtually any defense – including the eggplant parmesan Valerie fixed once – OMG was it awful and she should have . . . well if we had a Hillel home she would have been sent packing. On the other hand, the Shammai school takes a stricter position, saying that man may only divorce his wife on the ground of infidelity. A lack of commitment is winning the day. Husbands are abandoning their wives. The women are left with terribly few choices and the Pharisees are not there out of concern for the family.
Note how Mark sets up the scene – ‘Some Pharisees came to test him and said, ‘Is it lawful . . .’ This isn’t a casual – or even intense, for that matter, conversation about love, marriage, and divorce. It’s a test. Moreover, it’s not even a test about divorce, but about the law. There were, you see, several competing schools of thought about the legality of divorce. Not so much about whether divorce was legal – everyone agreed on that – but rather under what circumstances. And with this question/test, the Pharisees are trying to pin Jesus down, trying to label him, trying to draw him out and perhaps entrap him so that they know better how to deal with him.
And Jesus is having none of it. He deflects their question away from matters of the law and turns it instead to relationship and, in particular to God’s hope that our relationships are more than legal matters but instead helps us to have and share more abundant life. Hence the turn to Genesis, questions of marriage and divorce, he argues aren’t simply a matter of legal niceties, but rather are about the Creator’s intention that we be in relationships of mutual dependence and health.
In fact, Jesus goes one step further and takes what had turned into a legal convenience – typically for a man who sought a divorce – and pushes his questioners to see that the law, indeed all law, was and is intended to protect the vulnerable. When a woman was divorced she lost pretty much everything – status, reputation, economic security, everything – so how can they treat this as a convenience, Jesus asks, 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 the spirit if not in letter.
Jesus isn’t speaking to individuals, he is making a statement about the kind of community we will be. In fact, he’s 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.
Now, here’s the interesting part for me. Even though the discussion up to this point has been about divorce, I don’t think that’s really the heart of what’s going on here. Which is why I’m glad the lectionary includes the next verses describing the reaction of Jesus’ disciples to those bringing children to Jesus to bless and, more importantly, Jesus’ reaction to more of the same.
Jesus has announced his intention to go to Jerusalem to die, and, in response, his disciples argue about who is greatest. Jesus in turn tells them that to be great is to serve, and that the very heart of the kingdom he proclaims is welcoming the vulnerable. In fact, he 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 him. Now, on the heels of this conversation about the purpose of the law, some folks are bringing their children to be blessed and the disciples keep trying to keep them away. And Jesus intervenes, forcefully, saying that welcoming the kingdom pretty much means welcoming children, that is, the vulnerable, those at risk, and those in need.
The whole passage I think is about community. But it’s not the kind of community we’ve been trained to seek. It’s not 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’s 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 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.
This is what the church was originally about – a place for those who had been broken by life or rejected by the powerful and who came 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. But, goodness, that is hard to remember. 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 being broken isn’t 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 gatherings on Sundays are local gatherings of the broken and loved and blessed, of those who are hurting but also healing, of those who are lost but have also been found, of those that know their need and seek not to simply to have those needs met but have realized that in helping meet the needs of others their own needs are met in turn.
Can we look at this passage not so much as instructions about divorced but instead as an invitation to see our communities as those places where God’s work to heal and restore the whole creation is ongoing, not by taking away all of our problems but surrounding us with people who get it, who understand, and care, and help us to discover together our potential to reach out to others in love and compassion? Can we, tell our people that we are communities of the broken but we are those broken whom God loves and is healing and is using to make all things new?
We are, in short, communities of the broken and blessed. And that can be a hard message to hear because it runs contrary to conventional wisdom about strength and security. But it can also be life-giving, not only to those who know themselves to be broken and wonder if this is the place for them, but also to those of us in denial, seeking relentlessly to make it on our own, even if it kills us. If so, then we are one broken and blessed community – thanks be to God – amen.