Is It Lawful? Genesis 2:18-24, Hebrews 2:1-18, Mark 10:2-9 October 5, 2003, Year B, Proper 22 The Rev. William V. Livingston, Rector Church of the Resurrection, Starkville, Mississippi Is it lawful? We ask the question in so many ways. As a priest, I generally hear the question in such forms as: Does the Church allow . . . ? Is it a sin to . . . ? You fill in the blank. Perhaps because of my natural tendency toward paranoia or perhaps because of the conversations that follow such questions, I anticipate that the person knows the answer to his own question, wants me to free her of the guilt of her actions, or wants to trap me into an answer in which I unknowingly take sides in a debate or can somehow be accused of apostasy. Jesus had taught. And taught. And taught some more. In his teaching and in his living, he had brought the Kingdom of God near, revealing the nature of sin and the cost of discipleship. He had spoken with love and joy and welcome to sinners, to all who recognized they had fallen short of their Creator's ideals, with a message of hope, of redemption, of repentance and new life. Again and again, Jesus had taught those who came to hear the lessons of God's love for them, about God's desire that men, women, and children learn to live in communion and love. Over and over, as word of his teachings and his miracles spread, those religiously right stepped forward out of the crowds to do their best to trip this Jesus up. They were the ones who were knowledgeable about the will of God. They were the experts. After all, God's will had been revealed in Holy Scripture, once and for all. They knew the Law. This know-it-all, young radical; this Galilean son of a carpenter, what did he know? "We'll get him this time," they thought. "Teacher," they asked, chuckling behind their hands, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?" He could recite the ancient Law of Moses and alienate today's audience, or he could speak to today and violate tradition. I doubt they cared which answer he gave, as long as his words could be used against him. Jesus turned the question back on them: "What did Moses command you?" They knew the loopholes. Well, of course it was lawful; they knew Moses had said it was okay, that a man could divorce his wife anytime he wanted to, just by deciding to do it and drawing up the necessary paperwork." "Why?" asked Jesus. "Why would Moses do this, knowing that in the creation stories God had created Adam and Eve as equals, bone of each other's bone, flesh of each other's flesh, for eternity? Why?" The religiously correct had no answer for Jesus, and he refused to be tricked into betraying the will, the dream, the desire and intent of God in favor of the letter of the Law. "I'll tell you why," he said. "Because of your hardness of heart; because God knew that your self-centeredness would lead you away from one another." Human beings -- even the best ones -- fall short of God's dreams for them. God's dream is that each of us live in God's love and in love with our neighbor, and that each couple be divinely joined, joined with God as the "third partner" in the marriage, and that all who witness this divine union respect and uphold it, that no one dare to separate it. But, fortunately God knows that we fall short. I am sometimes asked if divorce is a sin. Many times I hesitate answering because I have no idea of what "sin" is for the questioner? It is a word we throw around so glibly. Do we mean something that condemns our souls to eternal damnation; something that denies us God's grace? Fortunately for all of us God is more forgiving than that. If, however, if by "sin," we mean its Hebraic meaning of missing the mark, as when an archer misses the bulls-eye, yes, with this understanding of sin, divorce is a sin. I have never met an engaged couple who wanted to give their futures to each other: "till you get sick, till you go broke, till we don't get along." However, for about 50% of couples who dreamed - lofty dreams, noble dreams, sublime dreams -- their dreams went sour. Perhaps they somehow never adequately and wholly chose to become irrevocably one, or, despite actually making an eternal covenant, slowly grew apart, allowing irreconcilable differences to determine that one person could no longer abide another. For those of us today who have lived through the pain of divorce (and I include myself among them) whether our own or others', we see that we have missed the mark -- missed the mark for reasons we can name and for unknown reasons that haunt our nights. We have not lived into the relationship we dreamed on our wedding day or on which we asked God's blessing. Divorce epitomizes the tragedy of shattered relationships. Marriage and divorce affect many more than just those who sign the forms and enter or dissolve the legal contracts. They often affect our parents, friends, and siblings, who wrestle with the part they played or failed to play in a marriage that didn't work; and they certainly harm our children as their schedules and lives must be forever altered. Of course, the reality is that there will continue to be divorce. And it will be painful. No contract, prenuptial agreement, certificate of dismissal, or any other carefully crafted parting of the ways can get us off without the pain. We rejoice, therefore, when two people do manage to become one, and we share in heaven's mourning when that unity is shattered by divorce. Having so labeled divorce as sin, if we mis-read this Gospel text only as Jesus' teaching on marriage and divorce, we risk either setting up or falling into the legalism trap of the religiously correct. It becomes another attempt to "test" (rather than to receive) Jesus. Throughout the Gospels Jesus never answers such questions. For to do so would pull legalists even deeper into their entrapment, and Jesus came not to trap sinners, but to bless them. Instead, we need to focus on the question, "Is it lawful?" And here is where today's teaching about divorce touches our world and our church. Divorce is not just about a man and woman. It's about all of those places where we have become hard of heart and have failed to recognize each other as "bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh;" places where we tear and unbind, sometimes mercilessly, the ties between us that God made at the foundation of creation. Human relationships are shattered. Can we agree on that? Not all, not always, but shattered enough that we are startled by unearned acts of kindness, by undeserved forgiveness, when wars stop and enemies reconcile. The unity of humankind is shattered every day by the many scourges of injustice: racism, sexism, poverty, hunger, homelessness, war. We are constantly violating the fundamental principle: let no one separate what God has joined. Pick up the Bible or read any account of world history, and we know human relationships have been shattered from the beginning. Whatever God intended in the mythical Eden, the dream died as Adam and Eve failed their first encounter with evil and as Adam and Eve's dream for their children died with Abel at the hand of Cain. From its beginning in Genesis through its ending in Revelation, the Bible is an account of one divorce -- one failure, one missing the mark -- after another, dreams shattered, fresh starts undone but always responded to by God's grace. God wants us to conduct ourselves in keeping with God's will so that we might be a blessing to our families, our neighbors, and ourselves. However, when we fail to keep his perfect standards perfectly, our failures remind us that our only hope is -- and always was -- that God loved humanity enough take on our flesh, to climb upon the cross and to extend to us the open tomb. If this is true for anger, adultery, oaths, retaliation, and enemies, it must also be true for divorce. So, now what? We have three basic choices, we can mirror the secular world, in which all is ephemeral, transitory, and self-centered; we can chase the lost Garden and turn its onetime ways into laws based on human tradition which any failure, any deviation is grounds for condemnation and rejection; or we can accept God's invitation to step into our lives and clean up one mess at a time. When we quit substituting human traditions for the commandment of God, it will no longer be a matter of what can we get by with. It will be a matter of what we are called to. We are a family, a people, and a world that suffers from divorce of all kinds. So, it is precisely that world that God in Christ enters -- not with hopelessly high standards and not just with a hope to ultimately end divorce, but with a higher vision to heal all of us who suffer from missing the mark; to heal our hardness of heart, and to help us recognize once again that we truly belong to each other, we belong to the world we call home, and we belong ultimately to a God who has, for all eternity, refused to divorce us.