October 7th, Proper 22

Readings here!

So this was my second Sunday as a priest, and Fr. John left me all alone to preach and preside. I have to say it was exhausting in a way I was not totally prepared for! At any rate, this sermon was a tricky one--divorce--my own exhaustion--feeling nervous about getting everything right. Anyway- it all seemed to go smoothly enough, which was a great relief.

Here is the sermon:

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            This week, in an effort to take it a little slow and easy, Billy and I watched a few movies at home. One of them was a classic movie from 1967, The Graduate. I had never seen the movie--but had been wanting to for a while. Billy had seen it countless times, but agreed to it this week knowing (I think) that I needed some easy movie watching to recover from all the excitement of last weekend. For those of you who haven't seen this movie, it centers of a man named benjamin who has just graduated from college. He returns home to his parents house, and returns to their expectations of what he should be doing with his life. They can't stop telling people about their award-winning, track-star son. And they clearly want him to go to graduate school, and succeed in business like his father. Benjamin however seems from the very beginning to be wary of his parent's desires for him. He beings an affair with an older, married woman--and it seems to be in part because he just wants to do something different. But then he falls in love with the married woman's daughter. About three quarters of the way through the movie, I paused the movie, and demanded that Billy tell me if the movie turned out okay. I wanted him to tell me if Benjamin married the daughter in the end.  I am hesitant to tell you all this story because I fear that you might see me as a fool. But despite your esteem for me dropping significantly in revealing how much I desired the main characters of a movie to be married (whether or not it made the movie a good movie), I still think there is something worth saying about our expectations of marriage and what our Gospel lesson tells us about divorce.

           

            Billy wouldn't tell me how the movie turned out, I had to watch the rest of it to find out what happened--but as I was thinking about this Gospel text, I couldn't help but think about how culturally and societally we (and especially I) put our eggs in the basket of the happy ending marriage. I had to wonder what problems I thought Benjamin might have solved by marriage. Or perhaps more honestly, what problems did I think marriage might solve? Benjamin was lacking a sense of fullness to his life, and as a viewer, I hoped that marriage would fill that void and help him to feel more complete. I think this issue of void and wholeness that I confronted in "The Graduate" is very closely related to our Gospel text today. 

            I need to begin a study of this text by acknowledging that it text is hard to hear. And even harder to hear as sacred. In many of the commentaries I read this week, helping to put this Bible passage in context, the advice was to find some way not to preach on this text. But I am afraid I cannot seem to find a way around it. I don't want to leave us thinking that scripture only thinks divorce is wrong.

            I have an equally hard time hearing our passage from the hebrew Bible. I know some of the ways in which the idea of woman coming from man's rib has lead to mysogonist, anti-woman understandings of the Bible. I also think a text like this does not leave a lot of space for gay and lesbian relationships. Nor does it really deal with those among us who have never been married.

            I think the best way to handle a difficult text is first of all to actually look at the text, and try to see if it really says what we hear it to be saying. And also listen to see if it might be saying anything else to us. This text seems straightforward enough, but as we examine it, I hope you will see that there is far more to this Gospel than divorce is wrong, and little children are good.

            The Pharisees come to Jesus to ask him a question, but it is revealed a moment later that they already know the answer to the question they are asking. Clearly they too have been prepared in debate prep. But they ask a question hoping for something out of Jesus. Like a debater, they are hoping they can provoke Jesus into saying something un-popular, or maybe hoping that they can catch Jesus being a flip-floper, or maybe they are hoping that Jesus will say something that contradicts the law that they already know. After Jesus turns the question back on them, the Pharisees answer what Moses said in the book of Deuteronomy. But then Jesus answers their quotation of scripture with one of his own, he quotes from that passage in Genesis we just heard.

            First of all, the Pharisees and the disciples are interested in talking about divorce, which gives us an important clue that people were struggling two thousand years ago with divorce just as we do now. They are asking about divorce because people are getting divorced. And second of all, Jesus in quoting from scripture again shows us the way that our Holy Scripture has the tendency to say more than one thing. Moses said one thing about divorce, but this passage from Genesis indicates another. The disciples (like you and me) might have still been confused about what exactly Jesus was going for. Jesus is not the most clear sort of speaker after all. His favorite mode of communication seems to have been parables which tended to leave his closest friends and followers with quizzical looks on their faces. So they get back inside, and the disciples ask Jesus for a little more specificity. That's when we hear Jesus point out that second marriage is like adultery.

            I think the question we have to ask our selves is what mode is Jesus talking in? Is Jesus speaking in hyperbole, like he does just a few verses before when he tells his disciples "If your eye causes you to sin, tear it out"? Or is Jesus speaking plainly? I think it serves us well to think about the conversation he has just had with the Pharisees--They are talking about law and Moses. I don't think Jesus is trying to establish a new law. Remember, we are supposed to understand that the Pharisees are people who think they can get to God by following all the rules, Jesus comes into conflict with them because he does not agree. So when we hear Jesus say if a woman divorces a man and then remarries it is adultery we hear a rule, but let us think of the debater prep and perhaps re-think it as hyperbolic rhetoric. From this we can generally understand then that divorce is not an ideal outcome of a marriage, and I suspect we all feel that. Certainly there are relationships and marriages that are troubled, even violent and dangerous, and there is no doubt that those should be ended. And what more than that? It is hard to say, and I think if we do say more, we are probably putting words in Jesus' mouth--I don't think we can take this passage and turn it into any hard and fast rules that help us to negotiate our lives.

            Before we think we have a handle on this passage, we have to look at the concluding verses about children and the kingdom of God. This is another passage where it could be interpreted as a rule, we have to receive the kingdom of God as children or else we can never enter it. But again, I don't think Jesus came here to set up barricades to God, in fact it was precisely the opposite. Jesus is a living, walking, talking symbol of God's love breaking in and interrupting human history. Upsetting our notion of rules that lead us to God, showing us that God will come to us. So this line about children and the kingdom of God, certainly it shows us the special place for children in Jesus' estimation, but more than that, if we think of children as the most vulnerable, the most unprotected, the most in need of nourishment, perhaps the most dependent--then we can begin to understand Jesus' particular love of children. They are the ones most in need of love, and too the most able to understand their dependence on others. For a child they depend on their parents, their siblings, maybe even their grandparents for their day to day survival, but also their day to day love. From this, in the language we use for God, as we describe God as the father (and occasionally as loving us like a mother) we can see too that  when we recognize God in our life, we too are in the position of children, realizing our dependence on God. I think we as Americans have a hard time with this idea of the dependence on God, I think we tend to have a hard time with dependence on anything but our own smarts, and our own deserving hard work--but this is how the kingdom of God flips everything on its head. And certainly we could view our lives with out God in them--we are rational beings who have a scientific understanding of how the world works. But we here assembled on Sunday mornings are those who do feel God's love, or at least desire to feel that connection. We are those who find deeper, greater meaning in our gatherings, feel the way that we have a greater sense of wholeness in one another and through the gift of the Holy Spirit. We are those who feel a sense of wholeness in the Eucharist that we share each week.

            I end up thinking that Jesus is not trying to tell us that we should never get divorced no matter the circumstances, but rather Jesus is reminding us all of the broken-ness in humanity and the fullness we encounter with God. In an ideal world, we would find that fullness reflected in all of our human relationships, and when marriages and relationships are at their best, I think we do encounter that kind of wholeness. And in moments and relationships where we do not find that, we are reminded of our humanity, our voids, and we are reminded of our dependence on God.