Rev. Eugene N. Nelson, Jr.
The Community Church of Sebastopol
February 15, 2004
Matthew 19:3-12
A while back I was having a discussion with a church member about the church’s changing stand on homosexuality. Not all churches, needless to say, but certainly ours and many others. He told me, “It is very difficult for me because from the time I first started going to church, I have been taught that homosexuality is a sin. It is hard now to hear the church reinterpreting everything – why was it a sin before and it is not a sin now?”
I had to agree with him. When I was growing up I learned that homosexuality was a sin. End of discussion. If it was true then, why isn’t it true now? How can the church change it’s teaching? Of course not all churches have changed their teachings, certainly ours has and may like ours.
It is a challenge, but as I was thinking about it, the church has done this on many issues over the years, changed its teachings and reinterpreted the scriptures. And I would argue, probably the most dramatic change in interpretation has been the church’s position on divorce. I think you would be hard pressed to find a Protestant church in America today, certainly in Northern California, where you would ever hear a sermon condemning divorce. That wasn’t true a generation ago. Things have changed for the church. With so many divorced people and remarried people in our pews, with divorce so much more common than it used to be, most churches today are working hard to welcome divorced people and to overcome previously entrenched prejudices. I recently say a sign outside a Nazarene church advertising “Divorce Recovery Workshop.” You would never have seen that sign in a Nazarene church a generation ago. Here you have a fundamentalist church sending a clear message that divorced people are welcome. No one, no pastor I know, wants to return to a time when the “stigma of divorce” kept people away from the church – or when people who got a divorce felt like they could never go back to church.
Quite a change. All of which makes the words of Jesus, which we heard in our text today, all the more difficult to understand and certainly to preach on. For he has harsh words about divorce and seemingly condemns remarriage after divorce. “And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for unchastity, and marries another commits adultery.” What are we to make of this? What can be said about such a teaching in Sonoma County, 2004, in a state where over 50% of marriages end in divorce! What is the church to do? What is the church to say when the Lord of the church has such strong words to say – words, I suspect, most of us would not agree with.
I suppose we could just say the benediction and go home….but let’s jump in and see where we end up.
There are feminist theologians and others who suggest that this text can actually be seen as liberating for women. Perhaps here is a place to start. The Pharisees ask, “Can a man divorce his wife for any cause?” and then point to the Law of Moses. It is hard to tell if their question is sincere or if they are merely testing Jesus’ resolve on a subject that was touchy even in the first century.
But looking to the Law of Moses, in Deuteronomy 24, we read that if a man found something objectionable about his wife, he could write a certificate of divorce and send her out of the house. He could do this. This law comes from a patriarchal world where a man could make this decision about whether or not his wife was welcome in the home. But scholars point out that while the law did not directly challenge this male control, it did put some constraints on it. At least the man had to produce a certificate of divorce which indicated a wife had been legally divorced by her husband. This then provided her with the opportunity to remarry without the suspicion of adultery. It gave her some protection in this male-dominated society. Not much, to be sure, but some.
Biblical scholar, Thomas Long, says that Jesus strong words about divorce might have actually been some good news for women. In his words, “Remember, in Jesus’ day, divorce was essentially the equivalent of abandonment. No certificate could cover up the fact that divorce involved, at least to some degree, the social desertion and the devaluing of another human being – the wife and mother… Thus Jesus allows no room for the practice of divorce in a culture where divorce is an assault on the value of persons, an abuse of power, and a trivializing of faithful commitments.”
So, on the one hand, perhaps a liberating word, a word proclaiming that women cannot be simply cast aside like so much unwanted baggage. But, also an uncompromising word. Jesus won’t give an inch. “What God has joined together, let no one separate... If you divorce your wife and marry another, you commit adultery.” As much as I want to, it is hard to soften or explain away such strong words. Again, how do we receive such words in a culture where divorce has become so common? How do churches address what Barbara Dafoe Whitehead has termed the “divorce culture” of America, a culture in which divorce is now no longer an unusual deviation from the norm, a culture in which marriages are dissolving on a scale that Jesus and his disciples could scarcely have imagined.
As I was reflecting on this sermon and this difficult text, I was reminded of an old Leon Russell song: “I’m up on a tight wire…one side’s ice, the other’s fire.” In preaching this sermon I feel like I’m up on that tight wire today, and indeed, the church is as well. I’d rather ignore it, as I said – let’s just sing a closing hymn and go home, but how can you ignore it? As I have been reflecting on it this week, there are three additional points that occurred to me, not all of them easy ones. The first is this: I hear Jesus saying that it is important for the church to do all it can to affirm and nurture marriages and committed relationships as places of sacred, steadfast and unbreakable trust. We must not be afraid to say that this is a place where we seek to promote and nurture marriage, family, and commitment, a place where the commitments people make to each other are taken seriously, indeed where such commitments are viewed as nothing less than sacred and where people are encouraged to honor them and keep them. It is a hard thing to say in a popular society, Brittany Spears and all the rest, where such commitments are so often trivialized. But not here. Here we dare to use the language of enduring covenants, not limited contracts. So we affirm committed relationships.
Secondly, as difficult as it is to say this, I believe Jesus would have the church be a place where we are not afraid to confront the culture of divorce and its social consequences, especially the consequences for children. There’s no way around it: when a marriage breaks up, children suffer. And I think we have to be honest about that. I’m sure many of you are familiar with Judith Wallerstein’s exhaustive study of the children of divorce. She was beginning that study when I was in seminary and I actually took a class from her. She has followed her study group, now well into adulthood. She talks about what she calls “the unexpected legacy of divorce,” and documents the long-term damage done to children when marriages dissolve.
In April, 1994, Barbara Defoe Whitehead published in Atlantic Magazine what became a passionately discussed article in which she argued that the two-parent family is better on the whole for child-rearing than are single-parent and stepfamilies. She pointed out what had long been known but no one really ever wanted to confront: three out of four teenage suicides occur in households where there is an absent parent; eighty percent of adolescents in psychiatric hospitals come from broken homes; five out of six adolescents in the criminal justice system were raised by one parent.
Jean Bethke Elshtain of Vanderbilt University writes that the most important indicator of childhood problems – from poor health to poverty to behavior problems – is whether a child grows up in a two-parent or single-parent or no-parent household.
Hard words. In fact, part of me is regretting that I even chose to go there, because I know so many wonderful single-parent families and blended step-families where adults and children care for and sacrifice for each other each and every day; so many divorced parents, in this church, who, though no longer married, understand they are still parents and take that responsibility seriously and do a wonderful job. I think of single parents, and let’s face it; they are overwhelmingly mothers. Trying to raise a family, keep a job – they are heroines and they need our support. Hard words. Not words of condemnation or judgment, and I hope you didn’t hear them that way, but words that do remind us that, no matter how amiable a divorce might be, or how necessary, it is never neat and clean. There are consequences. No one would say that someone should stay in or keep children in an abusive or dangerous relationship, of course not. That would never be said in this church. But still we have to confront, as I said, there are consequences of divorce, some of them painful and long-lasting, and we in the church need to be honest about that.
And the people I know who have gone through a divorce already know something of this. I really don’t know people who have taken divorce lightly, even when deep in their hearts they know it is it is their only alternative. No one I know thinks that divorce is wonderful; no one gets married in order to get divorced. In the words of Max Stackhouse of Princeton Theological Seminary, “When they marry, people hope and plan for a stable, constant, faithful relationship of mutual support and care. When the marital relationship begins to break down, when it becomes intolerable or even vicious, no moral person can avoid feeling shame and guilt. Even if one partner becomes convinced that the spouse bears most of the blame, each is still haunted by the feeling that perhaps, ‘I, too, am guilty.’ Usually when we probe the feelings of people whose marriage is ending, we find exactly what the Bible tells us: an ideal has been compromised.” I think of people I have talked with who have agonized over this and so often they’ll say, “I can’t believe I’m doing this, I’m tearing my family apart.” There is so much blame, even though they’re not solely responsible, sometimes, clearly they are hardly at all responsible. But there is that sense of anideal being compromised, something being lost that should never have been lost.
Which then leads to a final comment on this challenging text. Bottom line is this: the church – this church - remains a place of welcome, acceptance, healing and new life for all people. A pastor shares this true story: A divorcing couple came together with their family and friends and their pastor in the church sanctuary. Together they participated in a unique service, a service for “A Recognition of the End of a Marriage.” The man and woman faced each other and spoke of their pain and failure, and of the seeming inexorable nature of their separation; of loneliness and the need to learn new ways of relating; and of the sense of death which both were experiencing. They asked each other for forgiveness and pledged themselves to be friends, to stand united in caring for their children and to be civil and responsible to each other. They thanked their friends for their willingness to share this moment of pain.
In the words of the pastor: “Everyone there shared the excruciating pain of human brokenness, the irrevocable fracture in a relationship that had once brought joy and fulfillment. The divorced couple wept, as did every member of that gathered group.
“When the man and women returned to their seats, we sat in an aching silence for what seemed an interminable time….Finally we rose and said together: ‘We affirm you in the new covenant you have made; one that finds you separated but still caring for each other and wishing each other good will; one that enables you to support and love your children; one that helps to heal the pain you feel. Count on God’s presence. Trust our support and begin anew.’”
Now that’s church. “What God has joined together…” We have this ideal, this wonderful ideal, an ideal worth reinforcing every chance we get, for such a relationship, such a marriage truly is a precious gift to be celebrated with thankfulness. We have this ideal. But as people of faith we are also well aware of the tensions between the ideal and the actual conditions of human life, we know human imperfection, human failure. And we struggle to live with these tensions. And the church, a very human institution, struggles to live with these tensions as well. So yes, we affirm marriage and committed relationships and do all we can to nurture and support them. But we also acknowledge that we are people on a pilgrim way, people who still live east of Eden, who see the Kingdom of God but who have not yet arrived; people whose closest relationships will sometimes erupt in anger, misunderstanding and hurt, whose bonds of trust will sometimes be broken, whose marriages and commitments, as much as we want to maintain them, will sometimes falter and rupture.
And it’s right here that the church needs to meet us. As one colleague has said, “No one should abandon a sacred relationship without making every effort to heal and transform the brokenness….But when that struggle has been engaged deeply and honestly and still has not succeeded, then the church must reach out to its hurting people with a faith that embraces the past in forgiveness and opens the future in hope…Without compromising its essential commitment to the ideal of faithful, monogamous marriage, the church needs to proclaim that divorce is sometimes the alternative which gives hope for life, and that remaining in a marriage is sometimes the alternative which delivers only death…In the searing pain of human brokenness there is forgiveness, hope, and the opportunity to seek a new fulfillment along a new path.”
Friends we are all up on that tight wire. We all live in the tension between our ideal of what marriage, covenant, commitment should be and the harshness and pain of our experience in a sinful world. And so we open our doors on a Sunday morning and all are welcomed, all are affirmed, all are invited to embrace the future with hope because surrounding and supporting us all, as Jesus taught, is God’s everlasting love and God’s always amazing grace.