October 4, 2009
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
There’s a story about a young man who tells an older man the happy news of his engagement and asks his older friend if he ever considered getting married. The older friend replied that he used to think about it all the time but wanted to wait for the perfect woman. He says that he traveled the world and finally found the perfect woman. She was spiritually deep, grateful, beautiful, and generous.
“And did you marry her?” asks his friend. The older friend shook his head and said, “She was, unfortunately, looking for the perfect man.”
The passage we have this morning for a pastor is fraught with peril. Not only does it address marriage and divorce, but almost unwittingly, we find ourselves in diverse worlds of interpretation through our assumptions about law, gender, creation, mystical union, children, and the Kingdom of God. When I read this passage assigned for today, I first went looking for another text to preach on.
As a church that’s known as a “family-oriented” church, these verses are often distilled down to simplistic teachings about family: Jesus likes marriage, dislikes divorce, and dislikes remarriage even more; and he is pro-child. This one-dimensional reading does no justice to the richness of these verses. Yet this is what many of you have heard, or expect to hear today. Perhaps more than any other teachings in Mark, Jesus’ words about family affects us in very personal ways.
I decided to preach from this lesson and to address the issue of divorce, often the pressing concern you have when you hear this passage. Since Christians cope with the implications of divorce in our families and workplaces every day, we should not shy away from addressing it too. My prayer is that you will have a fuller understanding on how God ultimately loves us in relationships that often go beyond our own human ability to do so.
Law of Moses
In today’s Gospel, the Pharisees ask Jesus a question about divorce. In several occasions, the Pharisees engaged Jesus with controversies. They objected to Jesus eating with sinners; they questioned Jesus’ behavior on the Sabbath; they challenged the way he and his disciples ate; they demanded a sign from heaven; and now they question him regarding his understanding of Moses’ law on divorce.
They asked Jesus, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” Jesus didn’t answer right away. He asked them, “What did Moses command you?” The Pharisees said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her.”
According to rabbinic sources, a husband could initiate a divorce from his wife by giving her a document called a get, which terminated the marriage and made it possible for the woman to enter into a subsequent marriage legally. Jewish men in their lifetimes could marry more than one woman, at least in theory, and so did not need a divorce in order to marry again.
In his reply, Jesus changes the topic from a legal issue into a theological one. Jesus said, “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.”
It seems so simple on the surface doesn’t it? Clear-cut and black and white—Jesus says that divorce shall not be permitted and that’s the end of the discussion.
Like most scripture, however, once you begin to peel back the onionskins of history, culture, and context, you begin to see a picture and a message that is not so evident in a simple reading of the text.
It was common knowledge that a man could divorce his wife, so the question from the Pharisees is clearly a testing one. True to his teaching custom, Jesus answers not the question asked, but instead, offers constructive teaching on the broader, covenantal context of God’s realm. God’s action is that marriage is a matter of one flesh, made good or ill within a broken world that needs redemption. Jesus does not want his disciples to see divorce as acceptable actions even though it is permissible within Mosaic Law and was an established Jewish custom.
Divorce is Not a Sin
Divorce is wrong because of the damage it does to those involved, not because it breaks the law. Jesus reminds the Pharisees that marriage is not a legal contract, but a spiritual covenant—two individual lives made one by God’s divine blessing.
Divorce is not a sin in terms of being a wrongful act. Divorce happens as the result of the condition of sin, where broken people live broken lives in a broken world. Divorce is not evil so much as it is unfortunate and injurious. Divorce is simply more evidence that we are not perfect and desperately in need of God’s healing grace.
Thirty years ago (1979), Robert Benton directed the film version of Avery Corman’s heart wrenching story, Kramer vs. Kramer. The story revolves around a young couple—Ted and Joanna Kramer (played to perfection by Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep)—and the devastating impact of their divorce on each other, and their young son, Billy. Ted Kramer is an up-and-coming advertising executive. Joanna is a frustrated, stifled, and neurotic housewife feeling trapped and irrelevant in her role as spouse and mother, and Billy is an ordinary little boy who cannot understand why his life is being ripped apart.
Joanna needs space and time to regain her sense of self, so she leaves Billy with Ted. Ted is forced to reevaluate his priorities and become both father and mother to Billy. When Joanna decides to fight for custody of Billy, all the heartbreak and violence of divorce comes to the fore. The film dramatically exposes the “everyone loses, nobody wins” aspects of divorce.
Kramer vs. Kramer does an excellent job illustrating that divorce isn’t evil, though it does violence to everyone involved. “Who is to blame?” is not as helpful a question as, “what went wrong?” and eventually, “how do we move forward from here?” It is a story not only of “the fall,” but also a story of redemption. The “sins” of divorce are the lives damaged, the insults flung about, the vengeful rage, the intention to do harm, and the short-sighted selfish focus on getting what one wants no matter who gets hurt. Divorce is never simply the breaking of a legal contract—it is the breaking of promises, hearts, security, and what defines “normal.”
So, is it wrongful to divorce? Yes, but not for the many of the reasons we often hear. Divorce happens to imperfect people—in other words, all of us. It is difficult to imagine anyone living in the world today whose life has not been touched by divorce. All of us are broken, all have sinned, all stand in need of God’s loving grace and forgiveness. No one enters into the sacred covenant of marriage intending to end it with divorce. No one pledges love and life and faith to another person with the desire for it to decay and fall apart. No couple creates a family with the hope that one day circumstances will conspire to destroy it. When it happens, it is not an occasion for judgment and condemnation—further violence and shame offer no hope for redemption. Treating divorce as a legal contract is no answer—real community is built on something greater, something deeper.
The resolution to Kramer vs. Kramer is Joanna’s epiphany that Billy is best served by the relationship and bond he has forged with his father. The ability to break from our selfish desires, to see the best for another, to make sacrifices at personal cost, and to do the right thing in the midst of terrible choices—these are the qualities of redemption that yield new
beginnings. Divorce is tragic, but it need not be the end of the world. Grace, love, forgiveness, mercy, compassion, kindness, and a host of other fair and just practices can transform the tragic into the hopeful and holy.
God’s Unlimited Love
We all have limits. We may love someone, we may be willing to do almost anything to help them, but sometimes you simply have to set the limits. You would do almost anything, but not quite everything, even for love. You have your limits.
And yet, Jesus says that God is different. There appears to be no limits to the love of God.
Our Gospel lesson ends with Jesus receiving the little children. The disciples evidently perceive the little children as a nuisance, and want to send them away. But Jesus refused to send the little children away. Instead, Jesus received them, hugged them, and blessed them.
Furthermore, Jesus says that in all of this, the kingdom of God is being made manifest in these little ones. The realm of God is not only being demonstrated, but the very nature of God is also being demonstrated. God is the one who brings people together. God desires that people who, having been once brought together, ought to stay together. God is the one who refuses to send these “little ones” away. Instead, God is the one who receives and embraces these little ones.
We normally read this passage as two separate stories. We say that here Jesus is teaching about divorce and then Jesus is teaching about the need to receive and bless little children. But might we also read this as a passage that is mostly about God? Maybe we are seeing here the great difference between God and ourselves.
We have limits. We make promises, and with good intentions we plan to stay together forever. But people get sick, people disappoint, people become trapped, addicted, distant, and estranged.
Nobody I know wants divorce, or advocates divorce as a general rule. But we have our limits. Sometimes we find it impossible to keep our promises. Sometimes promises are broken for all sorts of “good” reasons.
While we all love our children, they can be very demanding. To bring children into the world is to severely limit our adult freedom. Children must be cared for. Children are utterly dependent on others to do things for them that they cannot do for themselves. So, many adults elect not to conceive children.
But in both of these situations in today’s Gospel, Jesus makes clear, in the strongest possible terms, that, God is not like that. God is the one who, from the very beginning, makes union, communion, and togetherness part of God’s world. God is the one who brings individuals together into community. That’s how we got the church. God took us as different individuals—many of us quite unlike one another—and has brought us together into communion in the church.
When a woman in Jesus’ days separates from a man in divorce, she becomes vulnerable like a child and placed at risk. Realization that we are human beings who have limits upon our love—limits upon our ability to stay with other people and to keep our lives bound to theirs—must be set alongside a counter truth—the love of God does not have such limits. We can attempt to separate ourselves from God, but Jesus implies here that God does not separate from us. We can come to the limits of our ability to love and to persevere in love with others. But God does not come to the same limits.
Here in the Gospel of Mark, we are on our way to seeing just how far God in Christ will go for us—all the way to death on the cross.
And on his way to the cross, Jesus takes a moment to teach us. Once again, Jesus has set the bar rather high. The disciples of Jesus are to marry and not to divorce. The disciples of Jesus are to have love, compassion, and mercy for the needs of the “little ones” whether they are children, the poor, the disabled, the sick and infirm and those who are divorced. In so many ways we will fail to live up to his reign’s demands. After all, we have our limits.
But spread like a banner over all that, is an affirmation that God loves us limited human beings in a limitless divine way. We fail to love, but we have a God who forgives our failures, who loves us despite our limits to love in return. We are not perfect and we’ll never find that perfect spouse.
Today’s Gospel is not the bad news of setting the moral standards so high that there is no way that we are able to make it. I am saying that today’s Gospel is the good news that despite our inabilities, limits, and failures, God is limitless loving and always faithful. Thanks be to God!
Let us pray.
Dear God, you have summoned us, sought us, found us, and bound us to your love. We celebrate your resourceful, seeking love. We give thanks that, even though we sometimes fall away from you, you never let us go. You keep coming for us, seeking us, and reaching for us because of your limitless love. Give us the grace to love our lives, to relate to our sisters and brothers, that in some small way others might see some of your reaching, seeking, embracing love in us. Amen.