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Sermon October 8, 2006 |
A Sermon Preached at
Ogden Nash wrote:
To keep your marriage brimming
With love in the loving cup,
When you’re wrong, admit it;
When you’re right, shut up.
But seriously, three weeks after her wedding day, Joanna called her minister. “Reverend, “she wailed, “John and I just had our first fight together! What am I going to do?” “Calm down,” said the minister. “It’s not the end of the world. Every married couple has to have a first fight sometime. The important thing is what you do next.” “I know, I know,” she continued, “so what am I going to do with the body?”
The volume of jokes about marriage tells us something about the nervousness and confusion the subject causes us. I want to be clear that I speak on this subject out of my own human history. I have been divorced and remarried. I have had a very painful marriage, a painful divorce and a very happy marriage. There’s a lot I don’t know about marriage and divorce, but I do know this: this is not an easy subject for any of us.
The gospels record that Jesus was beset by religious opponents bent on trying to trick him into saying something that would get him into trouble. Jesus’ comments on marriage must be read in that context. The trick they were trying to pull is not so obvious to us, but today’s question is a deadly trick. If Jesus were to answer this question about the legality of divorce by coming out in favor of divorce, he would look bad to the religious fundamentalists who would accuse him of being immoral. If he were to take a hard line against divorce, he would get in trouble with the king: Herod’s marriage was a second marriage and Herod had John the Baptist beheaded when John criticized it. Jesus’ answer—as his answers to these tricky questions usually did—takes the question to a deeper level.
The question he was asked was a legal question with a political purpose behind it. In that regard, it’s not so different from the way the question about same-sex marriage is posed in today’s political arena. It masquerades as a religious question but the object is to make political capital. So the first thing to note is that Jesus doesn’t answer the question as a legal question, but instead takes his hearers to the more important question of what marriage is all about in the first place. The question shouldn’t be “Is it lawful to divorce?” The question should be “How can we be one flesh?” Jesus doesn’t want us to be concerned about whether or not we can get divorced; he wants us concerned about how to be truly married. We would do well to worry less about issues of gender or divorce and worry more about how to be truly married.
Jesus takes us to the primal longing human beings have for a partner. Note that the value he points to is not procreation, but the value of intimacy, of becoming one with another human being. So the question is how do we do this? And the question is just as crucial whether your marriage is recognized by the state or by God alone. And it is just as crucial whether your union is your first or fourth. How do human beings truly marry each other? By becoming known to each other as fully as possible and by accepting each other as fully as possible. As simple as this answer sounds, it is amazingly difficult—as all of us who have life partners know. Richard and Ruth were married for 52 years when Ruth died suddenly. Going through some of her papers, Richard found a journal of Ruth’s hopes and dreams for their golden years together, something she’d written for a course on aging they were taking together. Richard was dumbfounded by what he read. “I never knew he was interested in doing any of this stuff,” he mourned. “I never had any idea what she really enjoyed.” 52 years of living under one roof is no guarantee that folks take the trouble to know each other or that they take the tremendous risk of being known.
Further, the grace to really accept each other once we know each other is truly a miracle—as most of us who are loved by a partner can tell you. In the cold hard light of day, most of us know how hard we are to live with. We know that our quirks, foibles and besetting sins can be a real trial for anyone. Actually to be loved by someone who really knows us is an amazing surprise.
Now I think it is no accident that these two features of human intimacy—fully known, fully accepted—are reflections of our ideal relationship with God. We begin each of our church services with a prayer that recalls the intimacy of God “to whom all hearts are open, all desires known and from whom no secrets are hid.” We stake our eternal life on God’s radical acceptance of us which we know in Christ who died for us knowing all our shortcomings.
As a spiritual institution then, marriage is something very different from the legal institution. As a spiritual institution marriage is a holy vocation, a calling to come to know and accept another human being in a relationship that only God can accomplish perfectly. It is not something that happens in a moment of time, it is a process. And to the extent that we are able to marry each other as truly as we are intended to, it is a relationship that offers us a glimpse of what it means to be fully known and fully loved.
May we all have the grace to follow Jesus to the question that really matters. May we be less interested in judging each other, less concerned about who’s right and who’s wrong and more ready to examine our own behavior. May we be more forgiving and quicker to celebrate the miracle of loving unions. AMEN