Rev. Tara Barber
The Community Church of Sebastopol
October 5, 2003
Mark 10: 2-16
Today’s texts are challenging. Challenging to interpret and even more challenging to live.
So what do we do with Jesus’ words? How do these texts fit with your beliefs, with the way you live your Christian faith?
About 10 years ago, I was in a church book group. One book we read, Becoming a Thinking Christian by John Cobb, challenged us to really look at our faith and our beliefs and then take it one step further. Cobb asks us to become theologians. Now, keep in mind this was 10 years ago in my life, before seminary, before anything like that. Cobb asks us to become theologians to create a system for ourselves that encompasses how we interpret scripture, what we believe, and how we live our lives.
Honestly, I don’t think I finished reading the book. I was worried that my faith might not hold up to such scrutiny, that it might not make logical sense. I was afraid that my beliefs were kind of random, and no common thread could be found. And I already knew that I was quick to dismiss those scriptural texts that were violent, sexist, and out of step with contemporary values.
And in ten years, it wasn’t just seminary that gave me courage to take that hard look at my Christian faith. It was living my life. Trying to make sense of the losses, confusion, the surprises, the challenges, the joys and God’s amazing presence through it all.
So let’s be theologians for a few moments. Looking more closely at the texts, we find that the Pharisees are trying to trap Jesus, as usual. This question about divorce follows Herod’s taking of his brother’s wife as his own. Herodias is the new wife, and after John the Baptist critiques the new marriage, Solamae, her daughter asks for John’s head on a platter. So when Jesus is questioned about divorce, it isn’t simply an ethical question, it is an opportunity to expose Jesus as an enemy of Herod.
That’s one approach – to do some historical criticism and educate ourselves on what surrounds the text we read in the Bible. Being educated is important, but it also makes it pretty easy to dismiss the text and say that it doesn’t seem to have meaning for me here, now. These texts do not really fit here, do they? Divorce is generally accepted as a way to end a bad relationship and start over.
And what about the other teachings? I don’t think anyone would argue that we could all use more child-like wonder and openness in our approach to faith. And yet, to say that no one will enter God’s realm except as a child doesn’t sit right with my intelligent, adult sense of faith. Most of the time I like being an adult and I don’t think I’d trade anything for going back to being thirteen all over again!
The third teaching places the greatest challenge on our lives. Jesus’ response to the question about how to inherit eternal life goes well beyond the 10 commandments and demands that we give everything away. Jesus is talking to someone who is wealthy, someone for whom inheritance and privilege shapes his view of faith.
Yes, it’s too tempting to either take the teachings as literal or to dismiss them because they don’t fit our world view.
I think there is another approach. The challenge of these texts is that they push us to look at our lives, and to somehow bridge the call of faith with how we are in relationship with our possessions, with God, and with one another.
At best, the Bible leads us into a deeper relationship with the sacred, and with the world.
As Christian people, we are called to engage all of ourselves – our life experiences, our ability to think critically, and our willingness to dwell in mystery and wonder.
I dwell in possibility – that’s a borrowed line, and also one that is true for me. And I see possibility all around…. Most definitely in teenagers and in the spark in your eyes, in the Friday noontime protests, and in sappy movies. That last one was part confession. I love a good romantic comedy. I am drawn to the stories of love found amidst all that gets in the way – and I like it that the movies end with the idea of living happily ever after. Cinderella, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Sweet Home Alabama – I don’t care about seeing the reality of married life – I like it that these movies stop where they do. I want to rest for a couple of hours in the possibility of love that is larger than life. I want to live in hope for all that is good and magical.
Today’s texts deal with laws. The Pharisees and the questioner are asking Jesus to tell them what to do. And following the rules isn’t enough to get us to that place of wonder and possibility. What these texts point us to is a higher ideal. The great stories, the Biblical stories and the classics, also take us to the place of striving for the ideal.
It’s like in the story of Les Miserables. On the one hand there is the righteous police officer who follows all of the rules, who also never seems to be fully alive. He spends his life searching for Jean Valjean so he can get him once and for all. In the end, what is he left with? Nothing. On the other hand, at the beginning of the movie, do you remember when Jean Valjean gets out of prison, he is looking for something to eat and he is directed to the house of a bishop? He has a great meal, the bishop offers him a place to sleep and in the middle of the night, Jean Valjean steals the silverware. He punches the bishop on his way out, and he leaves. A short while later he is brought back by the police, with the silverware – and what does the bishop say? He says, “Oh, you forgot to take the silver candlesticks. Didn’t you know you were meant to take these as well as the silver? Did you misunderstand that I had given you these things as a gift?” I don’t know about you, but to react in this way when somebody just took my silver is unthinkable. Somehow, that bishop could see God’s ideal. He could see that Jean Valjean was more than a convict, more than a thief, that somehow, Jean Valjean was a gift of God and it was only grace and forgiveness and giving him an example of God’s love that could turn things around for Jean Valjean.
That is an ideal way up here (Tara reaches above her head). What I think what these texts ask us to do is to look way up there at the ideal. What is your ideal? What are those stories that connect your life and your faith and how do these texts help us get there?
Jesus’ teaching about divorce challenges us to live in right relationships. To live with fidelity to the people in our lives. That’s the ideal.
Ideally, we would all let go of our adult certainty; of the power we wield because we’re bigger, older, have more resources. We would be as open and wonder-full as children.
We would not think of God’s realm as something to inherit, like we inherit our grandmother’s silver. Living in God’s realm is only possible when we let go of all else that has become a god for us. Maybe that is success, accumulation of possessions, or status, power, or wealth, or even certainty. Ideally, with God at the center, we could trust that God will provide what we need, and we would have no reason to worry about how to inherit God’s grace.
But let’s face it, those are really hard things to do and certainly impossible to do alone. And that is why we have created the church – so that together we can strive for God’s ideal. Barbara Brown Taylor says it this way. “…the church exists so that God has a community in which to save people from meaninglessness, by reminding them who they are and what they are for. The church exists so that God has a place to point people toward a purpose as big as their capabilities, and to help them identify all the ways they flee from that high call. The church exists so that people have a community in which they may confess their sin- their own turning away from life, whatever form that destructiveness may take for them- as well as a community where they may repent of their fear, their hardness of heart, their isolation and loss of vision, and where- having repented- they may be restored to fullness of life.
Jesus expects the righteousness of his disciples [and that does include us] to exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees…In Jesus it is possible to see what right relationship with God and neighbor looks like. It looks like justice. It looks like compassion. It looks like life lived in a covenant of ferocious, saving love….” She concludes: “My true aim is to live as God wants me to live- and as Thomas Merton once wrote, ‘I believe that the wish to please God does in fact please God.’”
Toward the end of Les Miserables, after living a life of exemplary faith, Jean Valjean says to a leader in the unfolding revolution, “…you have love. That’s the only future God gives us.”
In this time and place, in this complicated world, love is the only future. Living toward God’s ideal, living in the covenant of ferocious, saving love, is our only hope.
And so I ask you: What laws do you live by? What ideals do you strive for? What is it that is your true aim? And where is God’s ideal leading you?