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Sermon - Divorce and Christianity - 8th October 2006
St Aidan's West Epping 8:30am
Readings: Job 1:1, 2:5-12, Psalm 26, Hebrews 1:1-4, 2:5-12, Mark 10:2-16
The stories of Jesus talking about divorce and how he dealt with the vulnerable little children seem to be a strange juxtaposition. However the closer you look at them you will see a very positive association. In the Old Testament a man was allowed to divorce his wife simply by saying, “I divorce you. I divorce you. I divorce you!” Women were very vulnerable. They were cast out by their husband and had no support what so ever. Jesus was trying to say that you couldn’t do that. Both parties to a marriage should be required to be committed to the relationship. It is a very laudable concept. While I do support the concept I can see that there are times when divorce is the only process for a failed marriage. In each relationship there is usually fault on both sides as none of us is perfect. In many ways divorce has been elevated in Christian circles to the level of the unforgivable sin. There is no such thing as the unforgivable sin, for God’s forgiveness through Jesus is absolute. We read, “… what God has joined together, let no one separate.” However, how do we now if God has not declared the marriage over and that the partners are in need of separating?
The story of the little children reminds us that everyone is welcome in God’s presence even the vulnerable and the unimportant. No one is excluded, poor, disadvantaged, people of a different sexual orientation, people of every race or creed, even the divorced and the sinful.
Christians have not been as skilful as was Jesus at avoiding the divorce business. Churches have created elaborate legal systems for determining when a marriage may be declared void. In our church I am supposed to write to the Bishop for permission to remarry. In the Roman Catholic Church a real legal court is established, however if you were not married in a Catholic Church then by definition your marriage is void. Others are experimenting with ritualising divorce, such as the Uniting Church. One cannot come away from this story without the sense that Jesus would have declared both approaches attempts to put human traditions in place of God's intention for humanity. A failed marriage represents a human tragedy for everyone involved. The pastoral responsibility of the church community is to participate in healing, not in exacerbating or legitimating the tragedy of human hard heartedness. By the time most couples resort to divorce, the rift between them is too great for reconciliation.
Like most clergy, I have been working hard to counsel couples contemplating marriage to work at gaining basic respect for each other and the ability to negotiate differences before they get married. Other programs aim to help couples and families strengthen their commitments to each other or to help single parents rear their children. None of these programs can help those who fall into the category of the "hard hearted," those persons who lack compassion and refuse to make a change of heart. Jesus was looking at the selfish individualism of the Pharisees’ when he made his comments in answer to their question. He was not telling a battered woman that she and her children must risk physical and psychological torment every day just to avoid divorce.
By treating marriage as grounded in God's creative love, Jesus removes it from the realm of law. The first-century audience was familiar with marriage as a contract. As with any contract, it could be nullified. Indeed, marriage contracts often anticipate that happening. Sometimes people enter into marriage assuming that it will not last. They set upper-nuptial agreements. Usually, it is the wealthy who do that. Jesus did not think new laws would create the spirit in which disciples would live out his teaching. Sometimes people think that Jesus is merely the product of a stricter society. In fact, the legal protections around marriage were much more individual in his day than in ours, as I mentioned earlier. The questions he poses about a hard-hearted or utilitarian view of marriage are still crucial for our reflection, not because we want tough laws against divorce, but because we seek to make Christian families what God intended them to be.
We all love children. However, we all find it difficult to avoid romanticizing the ideal of the child. We look at some characteristic of children, like innocence or dependence or acceptance, as the meaning of "become like a child". However, ancient societies lacked such romantic notions of childhood. Jesus directs his comments to adult male disciples who are shoving away the "non-persons." In the early church, the Luke’s version of this story, which substitutes "babies" for "little children" (Luke 18:15-17), was used to support the practice of receiving children into the community through baptism, as we still do today.
Today, Jesus would not use comparison with a child to score the point about who belongs to the kingdom of God. In all things, whether it is in relation to divorced or the care of the vulnerable, I think our aim should be to practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty.
This sermon created using the New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol VIII, Abingdon, Nashville. 1995