Sermon, by Pastor Joel
Twentieth Sunday After Pentecost
October 6, 2024
Genesis 2:18-24
Psalm 8
Hebrews 1:1-4; 2:5-12
Mark 10:2-16
The context of this sermon is
100% written by a human
Once in a while, along comes a gospel that in 2024, gives a pastor a little trouble. This week, I got especially lucky, because the first lesson is also a bit of a minefield. In the first lesson, we hear in the story of creation that God made a companion for man from his rib, and that companion – his helper and his partner - was a woman. And then, to add fuel to the already tricky fire, in our gospel we have Jesus talking about divorce and basically saying that anybody who gets remarried after divorcing is committing the sin of adultery. So two doozies on one Sunday.
In part, these are problematic texts because of how they have been interpreted and used throughout history: as weapons against people who step outside whatever is considered proper, moral behavior by the judgers at the time. More often than not, that was the church. But of course, as we are seeing in our times, the words of God can also be used for political purposes.
In any event, the idea of man’s coming first, and woman’s coming second, and her being a helper, seemed to further the idea that one should be subservient to the other. Of course, that is not what the lesson says at all: it talks about these two people – these companions - becoming one – not one and a second. But a lot of time, the Bible is read a lot more conveniently for whoever is in power at the time and wants things a certain way.
The gospel’s lesson on divorce is also uncomfortable. We all know people who are divorced, and we have probably all been to weddings where some of them remarried. If they are our family and our friends, we likely wish them well both times. Nobody gets married thinking they will divorce. I have counselled many couples through the breakup of their marriage, and it is usually the most painful thing they experience - full of grief, anger and worry – for the kids and for themselves, and even for their former partners. Those of you who are sitting here with long marriages also know that it isn’t easy. What people need when they experience a difficult break-up is compassion and support, not the kind of emotion that Jesus appears to be expressing today. Yet this passage has also been used to shame and judge.
But is there another way to look at what Jesus is really saying. Always, we must consider the context of when and to whom he was speaking.
In Jesus’s day, divorce was especially easy: a man said the words, wrote a document, and poof! – he had cast off his wife. There is some debate about whether woman could truly do the same – Jesus suggests she could – but how much did that matter? Women had less power in society and were more vulnerable. What’s more, not much is said about the children in such a marriage –we can assume that child custody laws did not give mothers equal standing.
So Jesus, in a world where divorce can happen in an instant, is saying divorce is wrong. But why? By calling a halt to frivolous divorce and remarrying, he is speaking to men who would cast their wives off with little to their name. Might he be amending an accepted understanding of the law, to protect the vulnerable? Jesus, we know, was a clever speaker: his inclusion of both husbands and wives in that last sentence about adultery, makes them equal to each other.
Now it is still not ideal – and it still doesn’t speak very well to us today -- except for one significant part in there. Jesus was not one to keep things the way they were because they had always been done that way. He didn’t overlook an injustice in society because it was tradition. He challenged that thinking. He broke those rules. He pushed society ahead. He looked at the world as it was, and he said, this is not gospel-led, and he argued for change.
Jesus was a disrupter, after all. We can’t forget that when we interpret his words. He didn’t want the world to stay as it was, he wanted to it to become better. I truly believe that he would have wanted us to understand that it is more important to be loved and loving and in a healthy relationship than anything else.
How do we know this? Consider the last lines of the gospel. “Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the Reign of God as a little child will never enter it.” And what do we see in our children when they are young? Judgement? An obsession with rank or race or gender or sexual orientation? No, we see our children feeling joy and wonder and curiosity. We see them being open to the people they meet.
There are days when we need to read the verses in the Bible many times to figure out what we might be missing, to hear the message that God, in 2024, might want us to receive. And then we come to a passage like the one at the end of the gospel and it is revealed to us what truly matters. Not the law, but the grace. There lies the real challenge: to remember who we were before the human world changed us, to reclaim that openness, and, in doing so receive the Reign of God. Amen.
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