"Mr. Cheney" said Bernard Shaw, "Have you noticed any post nomination "contradiction or hypocritical shift " in Mr. Lieberman's positions?"
Where do you stand Mr. Bush, Mr. Gore on the R U486 Pill? Queries Jim Lehrer.
We've seen a lot of news on the debates this past week. First, we heard how many hours and how much energy was spent by all the candidates just getting their act together. What could be said? How would it be received? How did it appear?
There was a lot more feeling in these debates that there was not much to be gained but one misstep, one true gaffe, wrong turn navigating the rocky waters of the commentators could turn it all. All won or lost on the answer to one question.
That's what kept going through my mind as I worked on the sermon for this week Jesus in the midst of a serious debate. Jesus was in a far more precarious position than the candidates are. The Pharisees were gunning for a charge of blasphemy, a charge that by the way was punishable by death. So much more than a national election was hanging on the probing questions brought by the Pharisees. This confrontation was just one more attempt to find the flaw, to dig in the knife, to wheedle out an incriminating statement from Jesus.
And what made this seemingly simple question "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?" even more hazardous is that the parties that were asking it didn't agree with one another. The Pharisees of Jesus' times argued over the meaning of the divorce law as implied in Deuteronomy 24:1. There it states, "Suppose a man enters into marriage with a woman, but she does not please him because he finds something objectionable about her..." The school of the famous Pharisee Hillel interpreted this passage to mean that a man could divorce his wife if she so much as burned supper. The school of the equally famous Pharisee Shammai stated that only infidelity justified dissolving a marriage. It was a running debate, two sides against each other, like Republicans and Democrats arguing over health care in Congress. And so the Pharisees try to trap Jesus by drawing him into their debate, forcing him to take a stand on the Republican or Democratic side of the issue.
As in so many of these hostile attacks Jesus takes control, turns the discussion around and challenges the challenger. "What did Moses command you?" he asks. They respond quoting from Deuteronomy, "Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and divorce her." But Jesus says...........
...........I've got to tell you, I have always hated preaching on this text. We get it with a few variations in three of the gospels and when it comes up I always hope Doug is preaching. This answer that's coming from Jesus has always seemed to me so uncharacteristically harsh. If the Gospel is anything, it is good news. Is this good news? As I stand here looking at many of you who are divorced, as I know the pain that has meant for many of you. I know how bewildering this text comes across, and I dread it.
The Jesus I know is the Jesus who goes to a cheating tax collector and invites him to follow me. The Jesus I know is the Jesus who sits down to dinner with sinners and outcasts. The Jesus I know is the Jesus who meets an unsavory woman at the well and offers her living water. The Jesus I know is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. On the other hand, I don't want to run scared from the texts that are challenging. I can't just dismiss those parts of Jesus message that are uncomfortable. I want to take seriously Jesus saying that we should forgive not seven times but seventy times seven. That the last will be first and the first last, that we need to take up our cross.
So what are to make of it when Jesus answers the Pharisees who want to allow for diverse with these words: "Because of your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you. But from the beginning of creation God made them male and female. What God has joined together let no one separate.
Jesus does not sidestep the question by any means. He faces it squarely, only he refuses to fight in the ring the Pharisees had laid out for him. They wanted to talk about a man's rights under the law. What did the law say, how would the law adjudicate. Jesus wanted no part of that discussion. Jesus spoke instead of God's will. They wanted to talk about what they had permission to do. Jesus spoke of what God had created them to do.
They wanted to talk about marriage as a legal arrangement. Jesus spoke of it as a union grounded in the genesis of the world. It was a stroke of genius on his part, to move the whole debate from the realm of law to the realm of grace. He refused to argue with the Pharisees about all the ways they could manipulate the law to accommodate human weakness. He knew they would do it anyway, and that was fine. That was what the law was for--that was why God had made it in the first place--to give hard hearted human beings something they could lean on, to govern them, when their own instincts for justice were shot.
But the law was not the same thing as the loving will of God. If anything, the people had the law because they had refused the love of God, so Jesus reminded them where they had come from. He refreshed their memories, lifting them out of their divorce court mentality and setting them back down in the garden of Eden, where a man and a woman were neither one of them whole until they found one another, where their union with each other was rooted in God's union with them and they became partners in creation--creators of true friendship, creators of children, creators of the human family.
"You've lost the vision," he all but shouted at the Pharisees. "You have wandered so far down the road of making allowances for all the awful things people can do to each other that you have forgotten where everything began, back in the garden, where human beings honored their relationship with God by honoring their relationship with one another and all the creatures of the earth clapped their hands for joy. Marriage is not a human invention with a one year guarantee. It is a divine creation for growing the human soul."
Of course it's hard, of course it breaks down
and of course people cannot always pull it off, but don't mistake
the sad statistics for the truth. The truth is that human beings
were made for relationship, and that the union of husband and
wife is not a legal arrangement but a fusion of flesh and blood.
Separate the two and they both bleed, a little or a lot. All of
creation bleeds with them, because God's will for humankind is
communion, not separation; merger, not divorce.
I guess you can hear that as some new law handed down by Jesus.
It's possible to use it as a club to beat people who are already
down. But I have come to see that Jesus didn't mean it that way
"Keep the vision." That is what I hear him saying--not
a word of law but a word of grace--a dose of divine memory to
heal the human leaning toward amnesia. There is as much good news
in it for those of us who are divorced or remarried as there is
for those of us who are planning our golden wedding anniversaries,
not to mention those who have never said, "I do" and
who get weak knees just thinking about it.
Whoever we are, God wants us to remember where we came from and what we were created to be. Our failures are real but they are not definitive. God's purpose is. We may act like a bunch of plaintiffs and defendants, all of us hunting the loophole that will set us free, but that is not the truth about us. The truth is that we are partners in creation, made in God's image for relationship with one another. Our freedom cannot be found apart from that truth, only within it. So what God has joined together, let no one separate. And what we have separated let God join together, until we have found our partners, both human and divine, and all the creatures of the earth clap their hands for joy.
Amen.