But...and

"But…and" The Dover Church
October 4, 2009 –18th Sunday after Pentecost Scripture: Mark 10:2-16

I suspect that most of us think of marriage and divorce in “yes…but” terms. We say “yes” to marriage and all that marriage is, but we hold out the “but” to acknowledge that divorce happens. The problem with thinking like that is the “but” in the “yes…but” way of looking at marriage and divorce leaves a lot people, many of whom I love, well…on the but side of life: looking faulty, somehow less than those whose marriages held up.
I know divorce and what it does to people. My own parents divorced. I would not be overstating the case to say that the pain, struggle and consequences of my parents’ divorce has been absolutely formative in my spiritual development. My relationship with God grew out of the ashes of my parents’ marriage. Not having gone through that, I would not know God the way I do. The fact of the matter is that divorce is never light or painless. There is real struggle and unhappiness involved. And no matter how appropriate and necessary divorce is for those involved, they are still left feeling like they failed. “It didn’t work, but somehow I could have done better, I ought to have done better.” That is not a good place to be in or a way to go through life, feeling like a failure, trying to justify yourself to yourself.
And then there are the consequences: always feeling like you have to explain what happened and doubting that people fully believe you. “I know they’re thinking, “there must be more to this than he or she is letting on.”” And the truth is that most of us do doubt. Where before you were perfect, as in baggage free, now you have a history or track record. And there are the losses, the feeling of lost time, the loss of friends and social networks, the loss of standard of living, sometimes the loss of church. And, of course, if you are a church person you will have heard the lesson we heard this morning and you will feel like you have lost your stature before God. I know people are much more accepting of divorce these days than they were 30 years ago, but there is still this stigma attached, this sense of doubt of a person’s worth.
Which is why our Gospel writer tied Jesus’ great affirmation of marriage directly to his welcoming of the children, because marriage and divorce in God’s eyes is not a “yes…but” sort of thing. It is a “yes….and” life reality. Yes, marriage is everything the Bible holds it up to be. I will come back to what exactly that “everything” is in the months and years to come, as our society is pretty conflicted about that. So, yes, marriage is everything the Bible holds it up to be…and it does not work out for a lot of people. And then we see Jesus welcoming the children. We often miss the real significance of Jesus and the children, welcoming children and blessing them, literally taking them on his lap and wrapping them in his arms, because Jesus is only doing what we do every day with our own children. But in Jesus’ time children were non-persons of no consequence, without rights or voice or power. When you combine the two as Mark does, you have “Yes…and”. And I think that a lot of people who have been through divorce, even though they say they are good, feel somehow less….and Jesus welcomes them and blesses them too. Not because they are less or faulty, but because everyone is welcome and people doubt that means them too when they have been through a divorce. They doubt, God doesn’t doubt.
Think about it for a moment. If the lesson ended before the children appeared, where can the Good News possibly be in a lesson that damns divorced people? How could our God, a God who is, of all things, a God of steadfast love, mercy and forgiveness if we are to believe anything the Bible tells us, how could that God possibly throw that at us? That would make salvation seemingly beyond the reach of so many of us.
So what are we to do? On the one hand, we can be Biblical literalists and accept it literally. But what are the consequences of that? That 50% of the people in our society are damned? I’m sorry, but I just do not buy the whole “God loves the sinner and hates the sin” platitude thrown out by so many churches when facing really challenging questions of faith and morality. Tell me, please, where is the steadfast love in that? Pardon my vernacular, but… “to hell with them?” That’s Good News?
Or we can accept the prohibition of divorce as an unrealistic and statistically doubtful ideal which we should strive for nonetheless, even if makes the millions of people who find themselves in bad marriages miserable. But what are the consequences of that? That those of us who manage to pull it off and live a lifetime marriage commitment are somehow better than those who don’t? Tell me, please, where is the impartiality of God in that? Or that God doesn’t care about our happiness in this life? Tell me, please, where is the mercy of God in that?
Or, we can just ignore the whole thing as a relic from a past age in which people were stuck in unhealthy life situations and that was that. What are the consequences of that? That Jesus is irrelevant when it comes to modern marriage? That Jesus is of little help, is actually quite unhelpful, where the rubber really hits the road in our lives as married people? Tell me, please, if you can, what sort of Son of the Living God, what sort of Lord and Savior, what sort of Messiah does that make Jesus out to be? An irrelevance? Someone to be ignored?
I get so tired of theology that required unbelievable mental gymnastics to negotiate through. If our answers don’t make any sense when seen in the light of who and what we know God in Jesus Christ to be, and if we don’t want to just discard Jesus, then our answers must be wrong. God in Jesus Christ could not be damning 50% of the adults in our society. God in Jesus Christ is not setting unrealistic goals which only the very few, the best of us, can attain, even if that comes at the cost of real unhappiness for some. Nor did God bother coming among us in the person of Jesus of Nazareth to end up being irrelevant or an anachronism to be ignored. None of those solutions amount to Good News, do they?
Most of us have the hardest time believing that God loves us just the way we are, because we don’t love ourselves just the way we are. We always think we have to be smarter, richer, better looking, more pleasant or witty, whatever. I think this becomes especially the case when there is a big divorce hole in your life. “I am just not as good as all those people I see in church who are so happily married.”
I know that what I am saying flies in the face of core orthodoxy for many Christians. I assure that I not just trying to soft soap you, spoon feed you some permissive, liberal, anything goes theology. I take my theology seriously and I can assure you that I have given this text and texts like it a great deal of thought. I have come to the conclusion that what I believe Jesus teaches us in this lesson is real, hardcore orthodoxy, not the harsh, judgmental and damning theology other churches pass off as orthodoxy. I believe that my conclusion is much more consistent with the central facts we know about God in Jesus Christ, steadfast love, mercy and forgiveness, than a theology that damns people for divorce, that drives people from the faith and out of the church.
I promise to return regularly to marriage in the months and years to come. After all, that is where most of you are. Marriage, parenthood and ministry are my three primary spiritual disciplines. It used to be fly fishing and ministry, but my life has changed. By Spiritual discipline, I mean the place where I am most clearly exposed to the presence of God in my life. But for today, I wanted to get to share a word of hope and love with those of us who have been or are going through this difficult challenge.
The Good News of Jesus Christ is not just the words of Jesus Christ or the deeds of Jesus Christ, but the whole person and event of Jesus Christ, the god-man who rejected judgment and loved without condition. In Jesus Christ we come face to face with the living God as a human being. In Jesus we see that life is never “yes…but.” That’s for hypothetical situations. For real life, it is always “yes…and” for Jesus. That is truly Good News for those who want to know God.