Marriage and Perfect Love
Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost
October 8, 2006
One of the things a Christian minister is often called upon to do is to help couples as they prepare for a marriage service. That’s what they often think it’s all about: the marriage service and not marriage itself. By the time a typical couple comes to a minister, their minds are made up. They’re going to get married; now all they have to do is book a church and set a date. Right?
Well, in our Episcopal tradition, a couple will face more questioning from the minister than they might expect, especially a young couple. Why do you want a church wedding? Why, in fact, do you want to be married at all? It may sound strange and un-Christian to your ears, but I for one am no less offended by a happy unmarried couple living together “in sin” than an unhappy couple living together in a loveless marriage that never should have taken place.
Furthermore, I remind you that you are just as married if you are wed by the Bishop in the Cathedral as by the Justice of the Peace down at City Hall. Although we pride ourselves on separation of church and state in this country, the church is acting as an agent of the state when it performs a wedding ceremony.
But that’s not the important part. From my point of view—the man with the stole and the collar—the important thing is the blessing of a union. That’s what the church is up to in a wedding. Offering God’s blessing through the sacrament of holy matrimony.
A sacrament, as you may remember, is an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace, given by Christ as sure and certain means by which we receive that grace. Christ performed his first miracle at a wedding, so we know that he attended and approved of the practice.
This sanctification of marriage, our recognition of holy matrimony as a holy sacrament, is why a minister in our church will sit down with a couple before a wedding and have some serious talk. You don’t have to be a minister to know by experience that getting married in a church makes you no more immune to divorce than getting married by a justice of the peace or some Internet minister.
Divorce is not a pleasant topic, but it is right there in today’s Gospel reading. I could choose to preach about beautiful weather or the need for better football coaching. But let’s stick to the Gospel.
Some Pharisees ask Jesus, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” Jesus was going around breaking the Sabbath and consorting with sinners, so surely they could catch him being overly liberal about this. But no. Instead of making things easier, he made them harder. You are married, you must remain so. End of story.
End of story. In the typical manner of the Gospel of Mark, we don’t hear a sermon by Jesus. We hear a question, an answer, then—bang! off to the next question, off to the next miracle. Sometimes with Mark, we are left behind wondering, Is that all? In this case, a married person, an engaged person, a divorced person may be asking, Is that all for me?
In the quick-paced world of the Gospel of Mark, Jesus didn’t spend a lot of time spelling things out. That was left for the other Gospel writers, where we are given more detail, more context. We know from seeing Jesus through the eyes of all four evangelists that Jesus had the most perfectly developed pastoral sensitivity ever—a way of speaking straight to the heart of the questioner, speaking straight to the soul of the seeker.
In this case, the questioners were Pharisees trying to corner Jesus. This doesn’t make the Pharisees bad people. Their style of learning and debate involved pinning down a theologian on the tiniest of details—and seeing whether a theologian or theology could stand up to the pressure. They learned that Jesus could stand up to anything. After facing down he devil, a mere Pharisee was nothing.
Jesus silenced the Pharisees with their own weapon. They appealed to antiquity—to Moses. So Jesus went back one more step—to “the beginning of creation.” Moses was trying to be kind, but God the Creator wants fidelity. In other Jesus sayings on divorce, he refers to adultery—and the commentators say that the Greek word choice makes it clear that Jesus is talking about the idea of multiple marriages being adulterous. Remember that sleeping with another man didn’t make a woman open to divorce—it made her ready for death, as death was the penalty for adultery. That is, for women caught in adultery.
Here is where Mark is revolutionary: Jesus here says a woman should pick a husband and stick with him. He makes marriage vows applicable to both parties. Men and women are subject to the Law. A woman is not property to be disposed of when she displeases. Neither man nor woman should set aside a mate. Humankind, Jesus tells us, should mate for life.
So on the one hand Jesus is elevating women in the marriage covenant, making them equal—the ethical consequence of the two becoming one flesh. But on the other hand, Jesus is making it impossible for mismatched men and women, even in the most dangerous and dramatic situations, to voluntarily separate themselves. We have heard that hard teaching over and over: “What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.” That is a hard teaching. Jesus specialized in hard teachings because they contained the purest truth.
You have heard me say before that if you want to quote one verse in the Bible, you have to consider it in the context of the others. How does this teaching on divorce fit in with his other teachings? Especially, how does it match what Jesus says about divorce elsewhere?
The Sermon on the Mount in Matthew is a good place to look. It begins with soft teachings, the sayings that no one will argue with: blessed are the merciful, the peacemakers, the meek, and those who mourn. Of course. The Sermon then goes on to the hard sayings. Jesus takes an ancient teaching and cuts to the heart of it—the message is that if you even think about this sin, you are guilty. The thoughts that lead to the actions are as important, perhaps more important, than the actions themselves.
Think about these sayings:
• Jesus comes with a New Covenant—but you have to be stricter than a Pharisee because the Old Law was based on truth.
• The Law says to do no murder—but you may not even be angry with another.
• The Law says not to swear falsely—but you may not even swear at all.
• The Law says an eye for an eye—but you may never retaliate.
• The Law says to hate only your enemy—but you must love your enemy.
• The Law says adultery is a sin—but you may not even have a spark of lust in your heart.
• The Law says divorce is allowed—but you may not end a marriage.
Seven sayings. Seven hard, hard sayings. Seven sayings that Jesus knows will not, can not be kept by mere humans. We will lust, we will become angry, we will be tempted to hate. It is not possible for us mere humans to do otherwise.
Oh yes, Jesus included another hard saying right after those seven: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
That’s all. Simply be perfect. Be perfect, even though perfection is impossible because only the Father in heaven is perfect. We are given this impossible teaching over and over. God is perfect, so strive to be like God and do not be satisfied with less.
Jesus knows we are not perfect. Yet he holds out perfection as our goal. We are allowed to fail, to start over, to try to make things right in our messy lives on earth—that is the very definition of repentance. God wants us to be rid of anger and hate and lust and all other mistakes we make in our spiritual and moral and ethical lives, the mistakes that lead to murder, to war, to broken promises, to divorce. When we fail, we ask forgiveness. When we recognize our sins, we see more clearly our need for redemption. When we catch ourselves seeking our own will, we must repent and turn back to God.
We want to be perfect in our love, in the way we follow Christ. But as perfect as we want to be, only God’s love is perfect. This is why the minister sits down with the eager couple and says, “Why do you want to be married? Why do you want God’s blessing on your union? Why do you want to make promises in front of church and priest and God Almighty?” We pray and work through every question we can think of, asking this: Do we find God in this relationship? Will God be at the center of this relationship?
If the answer is yes, then there is a wedding and—in a perfect world—the couple lives happily ever after. In this imperfect world, we sometimes get it right. We discern well and live through a holy time with one another, though even the best marriage is hard, hard work.
But also in this imperfect world, we sometimes get it wrong. With the best intentions and all the prayer in the world, we get it wrong and marriages fail and our lives become battered and scarred.
That is not a time when Jesus turns his back on you. That is not a time when Jesus says, You broke the rules so no salvation for you. No, that is a time when Jesus knows that he held out perfection as our goal and we broken, stiff-necked people failed yet again. That is the time when Jesus takes us in his arms and says, You have loved because I first loved you. You can love again because I always will love you.
So we repent. We give our broken lives to the Lord again and again. We strive for perfection, knowing we may fall and fail, but that at the last we are saved in the perfect love of Christ.
Amen.
October 8, 2006
One of the things a Christian minister is often called upon to do is to help couples as they prepare for a marriage service. That’s what they often think it’s all about: the marriage service and not marriage itself. By the time a typical couple comes to a minister, their minds are made up. They’re going to get married; now all they have to do is book a church and set a date. Right?
Well, in our Episcopal tradition, a couple will face more questioning from the minister than they might expect, especially a young couple. Why do you want a church wedding? Why, in fact, do you want to be married at all? It may sound strange and un-Christian to your ears, but I for one am no less offended by a happy unmarried couple living together “in sin” than an unhappy couple living together in a loveless marriage that never should have taken place.
Furthermore, I remind you that you are just as married if you are wed by the Bishop in the Cathedral as by the Justice of the Peace down at City Hall. Although we pride ourselves on separation of church and state in this country, the church is acting as an agent of the state when it performs a wedding ceremony.
But that’s not the important part. From my point of view—the man with the stole and the collar—the important thing is the blessing of a union. That’s what the church is up to in a wedding. Offering God’s blessing through the sacrament of holy matrimony.
A sacrament, as you may remember, is an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace, given by Christ as sure and certain means by which we receive that grace. Christ performed his first miracle at a wedding, so we know that he attended and approved of the practice.
This sanctification of marriage, our recognition of holy matrimony as a holy sacrament, is why a minister in our church will sit down with a couple before a wedding and have some serious talk. You don’t have to be a minister to know by experience that getting married in a church makes you no more immune to divorce than getting married by a justice of the peace or some Internet minister.
Divorce is not a pleasant topic, but it is right there in today’s Gospel reading. I could choose to preach about beautiful weather or the need for better football coaching. But let’s stick to the Gospel.
Some Pharisees ask Jesus, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” Jesus was going around breaking the Sabbath and consorting with sinners, so surely they could catch him being overly liberal about this. But no. Instead of making things easier, he made them harder. You are married, you must remain so. End of story.
End of story. In the typical manner of the Gospel of Mark, we don’t hear a sermon by Jesus. We hear a question, an answer, then—bang! off to the next question, off to the next miracle. Sometimes with Mark, we are left behind wondering, Is that all? In this case, a married person, an engaged person, a divorced person may be asking, Is that all for me?
In the quick-paced world of the Gospel of Mark, Jesus didn’t spend a lot of time spelling things out. That was left for the other Gospel writers, where we are given more detail, more context. We know from seeing Jesus through the eyes of all four evangelists that Jesus had the most perfectly developed pastoral sensitivity ever—a way of speaking straight to the heart of the questioner, speaking straight to the soul of the seeker.
In this case, the questioners were Pharisees trying to corner Jesus. This doesn’t make the Pharisees bad people. Their style of learning and debate involved pinning down a theologian on the tiniest of details—and seeing whether a theologian or theology could stand up to the pressure. They learned that Jesus could stand up to anything. After facing down he devil, a mere Pharisee was nothing.
Jesus silenced the Pharisees with their own weapon. They appealed to antiquity—to Moses. So Jesus went back one more step—to “the beginning of creation.” Moses was trying to be kind, but God the Creator wants fidelity. In other Jesus sayings on divorce, he refers to adultery—and the commentators say that the Greek word choice makes it clear that Jesus is talking about the idea of multiple marriages being adulterous. Remember that sleeping with another man didn’t make a woman open to divorce—it made her ready for death, as death was the penalty for adultery. That is, for women caught in adultery.
Here is where Mark is revolutionary: Jesus here says a woman should pick a husband and stick with him. He makes marriage vows applicable to both parties. Men and women are subject to the Law. A woman is not property to be disposed of when she displeases. Neither man nor woman should set aside a mate. Humankind, Jesus tells us, should mate for life.
So on the one hand Jesus is elevating women in the marriage covenant, making them equal—the ethical consequence of the two becoming one flesh. But on the other hand, Jesus is making it impossible for mismatched men and women, even in the most dangerous and dramatic situations, to voluntarily separate themselves. We have heard that hard teaching over and over: “What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.” That is a hard teaching. Jesus specialized in hard teachings because they contained the purest truth.
You have heard me say before that if you want to quote one verse in the Bible, you have to consider it in the context of the others. How does this teaching on divorce fit in with his other teachings? Especially, how does it match what Jesus says about divorce elsewhere?
The Sermon on the Mount in Matthew is a good place to look. It begins with soft teachings, the sayings that no one will argue with: blessed are the merciful, the peacemakers, the meek, and those who mourn. Of course. The Sermon then goes on to the hard sayings. Jesus takes an ancient teaching and cuts to the heart of it—the message is that if you even think about this sin, you are guilty. The thoughts that lead to the actions are as important, perhaps more important, than the actions themselves.
Think about these sayings:
• Jesus comes with a New Covenant—but you have to be stricter than a Pharisee because the Old Law was based on truth.
• The Law says to do no murder—but you may not even be angry with another.
• The Law says not to swear falsely—but you may not even swear at all.
• The Law says an eye for an eye—but you may never retaliate.
• The Law says to hate only your enemy—but you must love your enemy.
• The Law says adultery is a sin—but you may not even have a spark of lust in your heart.
• The Law says divorce is allowed—but you may not end a marriage.
Seven sayings. Seven hard, hard sayings. Seven sayings that Jesus knows will not, can not be kept by mere humans. We will lust, we will become angry, we will be tempted to hate. It is not possible for us mere humans to do otherwise.
Oh yes, Jesus included another hard saying right after those seven: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
That’s all. Simply be perfect. Be perfect, even though perfection is impossible because only the Father in heaven is perfect. We are given this impossible teaching over and over. God is perfect, so strive to be like God and do not be satisfied with less.
Jesus knows we are not perfect. Yet he holds out perfection as our goal. We are allowed to fail, to start over, to try to make things right in our messy lives on earth—that is the very definition of repentance. God wants us to be rid of anger and hate and lust and all other mistakes we make in our spiritual and moral and ethical lives, the mistakes that lead to murder, to war, to broken promises, to divorce. When we fail, we ask forgiveness. When we recognize our sins, we see more clearly our need for redemption. When we catch ourselves seeking our own will, we must repent and turn back to God.
We want to be perfect in our love, in the way we follow Christ. But as perfect as we want to be, only God’s love is perfect. This is why the minister sits down with the eager couple and says, “Why do you want to be married? Why do you want God’s blessing on your union? Why do you want to make promises in front of church and priest and God Almighty?” We pray and work through every question we can think of, asking this: Do we find God in this relationship? Will God be at the center of this relationship?
If the answer is yes, then there is a wedding and—in a perfect world—the couple lives happily ever after. In this imperfect world, we sometimes get it right. We discern well and live through a holy time with one another, though even the best marriage is hard, hard work.
But also in this imperfect world, we sometimes get it wrong. With the best intentions and all the prayer in the world, we get it wrong and marriages fail and our lives become battered and scarred.
That is not a time when Jesus turns his back on you. That is not a time when Jesus says, You broke the rules so no salvation for you. No, that is a time when Jesus knows that he held out perfection as our goal and we broken, stiff-necked people failed yet again. That is the time when Jesus takes us in his arms and says, You have loved because I first loved you. You can love again because I always will love you.
So we repent. We give our broken lives to the Lord again and again. We strive for perfection, knowing we may fall and fail, but that at the last we are saved in the perfect love of Christ.
Amen.
posted by Michael+ at 12:04 AM
