18 Pentecost, Year B

"MOUNTAINTOPS AND VALLEYS"
A sermon by The Rev. Gene Tucker, given at Trintiy Church, Mt. Vernon, Illinois on Sunday, October 4, 2009
Proper 22 -- Genesis 2: 18 – 24; Psalm 128; Hebrews 2: 1 – 18; Mark 10: 2 – 9

“We live in the valley of the reality of human life. But God lives on the mountaintop. He invites us to the mountaintop, in order to lift us out of the depths of the valleys of our lives, onto a higher plane with Him.”

These words – which I can only paraphrase – hit me like a brick when they were spoken the other day.

For, you see, I’d been wrestling with what to say about the very difficult gospel passage we have before us this morning. I’d been wrestling all week with what to say. I believe these words came from the Holy Spirit. They were an immense help to me in formulating this reflection on Jesus’ words about marriage and divorce, which still strike us today with all the force that they did for Jesus’ first hearers .

For, at the heart of Jesus’ teaching about marriage and divorce is the matter of the mountaintop of God’s intent, versus the reality of the depths of the valleys in which we human beings often live.

The more I think about it, Jesus is talking about the heights of God’s intentions for humankind. For, I believe, we human beings are quite capable of digging into the depths of the valleys we often create for ourselves. We are often content to live there. In the process, we forget the mountaintop experience (and its wider vision) that God offers us.

So, as we usually do, we must begin by taking a look at the original context of Jesus’ teaching.

As we do, we see that there was a debate going on at the time in Judaism about the matter of marriage and divorce. As we look into the history of the question that was posed to Jesus on that day by the Pharisees, we learn that there among the rabbis, there were three major positions taken with respect to the grounds for a divorce:

Only for the most serious causes: This was the position of the School of Shammai, and it was the most conservative of the positions. It maintained that only sexual impropriety on the part of the woman provided grounds for a divorce.

For most any cause: The School of Hillel maintained that a man could divorce his wife for most any reason, including something as trivial as ruining his dinner.

For any cause: Then, there was the position of the Rabbi Aqiba, who said that a man could divorce his wife “Even if he found another more beautiful than she is.”

Thus, divorce seemed to be a “taken for granted” reality in Jesus’ day. There were those who seemed ready to exploit any and every possible loophole in the provisions of Deuteronomy 24: 1 – 4, which provided that a bill of divorce could be written by the husband when the wife no longer found favor in his eyes “because he has found some indecency in her.”

The question centered around the meaning of the words “some indecency in her”. We can see in the three major positions taken above, that there were widely varying interpretations of the phrase, “some indecency”.

Against this backdrop, Jesus – instead of falling prey to the Pharisees’ trap (by adopting one of the three major positions) – lifts the eyes of the Pharisees and His hearers to see the mountaintop of God’s intent.

He does so by quoting from Genesis, chapter two, citing God’s original intent for a man and a woman, saying, “But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder.”

Furthermore, Jesus prefixs to this statement a comment about Moses’ intention in allowing divorce, saying that it was “For your hardness of heart he (Moses) wrote you this commandment.”

Jesus acknowledges the reality of the valleys – the depths – of the human condition. There was, in Moses’ day, no shortage of “hardness of heart” (a term the Bible often uses to describe the attitudes of God’s Chosen People). There was no shortage of “hardness of heart” in Jesus’ day, either, as we can see from the three positions the various rabbis had taken. There is no shortage of “hardness of heart” in our day, either, as we can see from the divorce statistics, which show that about half of all marriages end in divorce.

“Hardness of heart” is a reality of the valleys of the human condition.

We struggle with that reality. So did the early Church, as we can see from St. Paul’s writing in chapter seven of his first letter to the Corinthians.

Here, St. Paul confronts the reality that there’s often a disconnection between the mountaintop of God’s intentions for human beings that Jesus describes and the valleys in which people often live. Paul struggles to bring the two together somehow. In so doing, Paul seems to allow the possibility of divorce and remarriage (see I Corinthians 7: 27).

The Church today continues to struggle with the gap that often exists between God’s intent for us and the reality of the imperfect human condition. For, if we are honest about it, we humans can sometimes meet with God on the mountaintop, gaining a new perspective about God’s plans for us, God’s high standards for the way we are to live. But, we remain human beings who are redeemed only in part. The old nature (as St. Paul describes it in Romans 7: 15 – 19, where we read, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. So then it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.”) hasn’t completely been transformed into the holiness that is God’s goal in being involved in our lives in the first place.

There’s no shortage of “hardness of heart”, is there?

We still live in a world where spouses find “some indecency” in their partners, and walk away from the marriage covenant.

And, like the world of Jesus’ day, some of them simply file for divorce because they’ve found someone “more attractive”.

As we look down through the years, we can see that the terrible toll that divorce takes on people who have gone through it hasn’t changed all that much:

In Jesus’ day, women who were divorced suffered terribly with a near-total loss of financial support, for it was a “man’s world” in which women were merely property to be possessed. (Thank God that aspect of the human condition has changed!) And, some scholars agree, it may be that Jesus was speaking out against the cruelty that the capriciousness of the men involved was inflicting on women in general.

In our day, spouses who divorce also face daunting financial problems as incomes are reduced, but expenses aren’t. Then, there is the emotional toll on spouses and on children. That, too, probably hasn’t changed all that much as the years have rolled along…people suffered in Jesus’ day, just as they do today, emotionally.

Our society seems to have lost its vision of the desirable aspects of upholding marriage as a durable, life-long commitment. For Christians, that is God’s view of the institution of marriage: that it is to be a life-long relationship between a man and a woman (here we come again to Genesis chapter two). That’s the mountaintop vision that God provides for the Sacrament of Marriage. But our society makes it entirely too easy to simply “walk away”.

And so, people do walk way, just as they did in Jesus’ day. We’ve even gotten to the point where they can walk away without providing grounds for doing so.

So, what should the Church’s role be in all of this? The following are offered in order to prompt your own reflection on the serious business of marriage and divorce:

The Church should uphold the mountaintop vision of God: As in all things, the Church is charged with upholding the best intention that God has articulated for humankind. Unless we keep in view at all times the principles we have received that come from God, we will utterly fail in our mission to bring God to the world, and the world to God. And so, with regard to marriage, we must uphold the sanctity of the marriage covenant, which is between a man and a woman, who enter into this covenant relationship in the sight of God with the intent that it shall be a life-long commitment.

The Church must recognize the reality of the human condition: People make mistakes. Yes, even Christians make mistakes (I hope this news doesn’t surprise you!) . Sometimes, divorce occurs despite the best intentions of those involved. Sometimes, it occurs because of sexual infidelity on the part of one of the partners. Sometimes, it happens because a spouse has simply walked away from the marriage. At other times, it becomes a tragic necessity when one spouse abuses another in some way (physically, emotionally, or financially). We are all imperfect people, people who often live in the valleys of life, where the mountaintop can’t be seen at all. With St. Paul, we all must admit that “We do the things we know we shouldn’t, and we don’t understand our own actions.” (I am paraphrasing what St. Paul said in Romans, chapter seven.)

The Church’s “balancing act”: I’m sorry, I don’t have a better word for it than “balancing act”. The Church is called to maintain the vision that God provides from the mountaintop. At the same time, the entire thrust of Jesus Christ’s coming among us is to redeem us from the miry clay which can be found in the valleys in which we often live, to bring the mountaintop of God’s intent into our lives, so that we can live on a higher plane with God. We – as the Church – are therefore called to reach out in love to those whose lives are marked with divorce, in order to heal the wounds that divorce causes. And, wherever it is possible, to bring such persons into a higher plane of life with God, a place where encounters with God’s intent on the mountaintop begins to change the lens through which we see our lives and the world.

Jesus’ words, heard today, are intended to shock us – I believe – just as His words (heard last week) about cutting off the eye, the hand, or the foot that causes a stumbling block were intended to shock His listeners into a new way of seeing what God’s intent is for those who are called into a new life with Him. Jesus seeks to shock us back into God’s view of things. For if we lose sight of the way God sees things, then we will sink into the depths of the valley, losing sight of the mountaintop entirely.

May God’s Holy Spirit enable us to see the mountaintop, that we might be lifted into God’s intentions for us. AMEN.