Church on Morgan
May 3, 2015 | Mark 10:2-12
Good morning of a quick scripture reading from Mark 10 to through 12. Some Pharisees came and to test him they asked, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?" He answered them, "What did Moses command you?" They said, "Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her." But Jesus said to them, "Because of your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you. But from the beginning of creation, God made them male and female. For this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife. And the two shall become one flesh, so they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate. And in the house, the disciples asked him again about this matter. He said to them, "Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her. And if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery." Thanks be to God. So I feel like the first thing I got to say is don't leave, and the second thing I got to say is it's going to get worse before it gets better, all right? It's going to get worse before it gets better this morning. So this is interesting. Did you know that there's lots of things that Jesus didn't talk about, plenty of things he didn't talk about that we talk about all the time? And then there's some things that Jesus did talk about a lot that we don't talk about. And divorce happens to be one of those. In fact, there's these long treatments of divorce given by Jesus in three of the four gospels. In fact, Jesus addresses divorce twice in the gospel of Matthew once here in Mark for twelve verses and then also in Luke. If that wasn't enough, then later on Paul just wants to make sure that the early church hasn't forgotten. So in 1 Corinthians, he picks up on the theme again. In the Methodist church, a lot of mainline denominations, we use this thing called the "lectionary." Anybody know what the "lectionary" is? Raise your hand. Yeah, a few of us, right? So in the "lectionary," it's basically like you're assigned to preaching and it's on a three-year rotation, right? And so the "lectionary" is that the wisdom of the church over the ages found that there's a variety of things that we need to hear from, and we need to hear from a variety of places, from the Old Testament narratives, and the Psalms, and the New Testament gospel, the New Testament letters. And so every Sunday, there's four scripture readings that are assigned to the church, and it's on a three-year rotation, and many churches preach out of that "lectionary." In fact, we'll do more of that in the future. It's a way that avoids us from having to do series called "sorry, not sorry," because the reason we do a sermon series called "sorry, not sorry" is because for a long time we've only preached the things we wanted to preach, and so every once in a while we've got to just mess up and say there's some other stuff in there that we don't really like, and we're going to talk about that for a little while, right? Which is like not a super fun post-Easter sermon series, but that's where we're are. We're trying to be honest about this, but I tell you about the "lectionary" to say that passage we just read, it's in the "lectionary." It's assigned preaching. Not every scripture in the Bible is assigned, obviously, there wouldn't be enough time, and so the church had to decide what are some of the really key texts that the Christians need to know about, and one of those is Mark chapter 10. In fact, it's assigned this year, and not only is it assigned this year, but it's assigned this year on October 4th, which we hope will be our launch Sunday at our new building, which I can promise you I won't be preaching on divorce on our first Sunday at our new building, right? But this is what I've realized, I've been married 12 years, I've probably missed church 12 Sundays in those 12 years, I've never once heard anybody preach about divorce. We as the church, we have just sort of dodged this, we've dodged this issue. Some folks say it's because we've given up, the church is thrown in the towel when it comes to marriage, the statistics that we hear, about 50 percent of marriage is ending in divorce, and those are the exact same numbers in the church as outside of the church. Some people debate that, but that's kind of like reality. At some point, I think the pastors and churches just sort of said, "Forget it, it's not working anyway, so let's just quit talking about it and ignore that it's there." As I thought about this this week, there's a number of really difficult texts. This is one that makes me cringe. There's a number we could choose, but I felt like when I think about our community and as your pastor, it's really important that especially in our community, we have a good understanding about what marriage and divorce is because we have so many young people, so many single people, so many newly married people, and the truth is most Christians will never hear Mark 10 until they're already married and their marriage is about to fall apart and they come to the pastor and say, "Talk to me about divorce, how does that work?" And I got to open up Mark 10 then, right? I would much rather do it now. And so as I started to think about our community, I'm sorry for this, but I want you to sort of see this just in the last couple of years, like if you're single, this could be a pretty good place to hang out if you'd like to not be single. So I stole some of these, J.V. and Brittany, they were my first wedding here at Edenton Street. I didn't tell them that, right? Nobody wants to be sort of break in the pastor. But we got through it and they're still hanging in there and we're pumped that you guys are with us this morning. We got off J.V.'s Facebook page, so don't friend me, I'm just saying. Also, what are some more of these, Richard? I just grabbed some this week. So this is Ben and Sarah Starr. Sarah used to be Sarah Stewart, Mike and Gay are her parents. They come here. Sarah runs young life in the Bahamas, multiple, whatever. And she's moving back next month and she's going to be a key part of our community. They're super excited to join us. They sort of tune in from a thousand miles away. But Sarah and Ben were my second wedding, notable about that wedding was it was the second wedding so I felt like I knew this thing, right? And I got confident and I decided that I didn't need to stick to the script. And so when we're doing the vows, I just sort of had this extra like, "I've got this." And so they're the first and only couple and hopefully the last one that had to pledge to each other for sickness and sickness. There was no health. I just was like, "Guys, I don't know what that means. I'm so sorry. We'll fix it later." But as I was doing the vows, I'm like, "And sickness and sickness." I couldn't. It was like, I lost it. So anyway, but they're healthy, we're all right. Hunter and Nicole, many of you know, they sort of hang out with us occasionally. These are like CrossFit champions. We got a pretty good looking crew, by the way. Next, we've got in here Lindsey and Richard, such a sweet couple. This was one of the more recent sort of weddings. This was on New Year's Eve, Supercool, marched out to Aldang Zion, or however you say that, which was awesome. Jordan and Kristen, Kristen's on her Bachelor at Weekend right now, and Charleston and Jordan is coming back from work. Really sweet couple. They're getting married on May 24th in just a couple of weeks. And they're here most weeks. Derek and Carrie joined the church last week. I've already stolen photos off Instagram and thrown them up there. They're getting married this August. And then look at this. This is the way to do it people. Come on. Got Kylie and Andrew got engaged just a couple of weeks ago outside the church and they'll be getting married. I guess September, October, it's on my calendar I promise. But I mean, we are sort of like growing our church through marriages, right? I mean, this is just sort of a season where every month I'm getting new opportunities to stand there for this really incredible moment. And I feel like as your pastor, I owe it to you and you owe it to yourselves to know what Jesus had to say about marriage and specifically about divorce in this passage. And so we're going to do a little bit of context here real quick. But in that passage in Mark chapter 10, the Pharisees who were kind of like Jesus arch nemesis, they're trying to trap him. They're trying to test him. And so they're asking him a trick question. And the trick question they're asking him is, when is divorce permissible? Now the assumed kind of here's what's going on. They heard rumblings that Jesus might not be a big fan of divorce. But Moses said in Deuteronomy chapter 24 in the Old Testament that if you divorce your wife, you're to write her a letter of certificate. This was actually a really progressive thing in that day and age. Only a husband could divorce a wife, a wife couldn't divorce a husband. And when a husband divorced a wife, he could simply just say, I divorced you, I divorced you, I divorced you. Literally, that's true. You've maybe heard that before. And it was over. And now in that society, women were really dependent on their husbands for financial sustainability. And so if this husband decided to just divorce his wife and send her off, nobody else is going to marry that woman. And so she's basically incredibly susceptible to all sorts of harm and no financial sort of gain or whatever. And so God's provision in that through Moses, he said to the people, if you divorce your wife, you write her a letter of certificate so that she can remarry, basically. You don't sort of marry these women and then discard them and let them sort of die in poverty. You give them a shot to get married again. And so one of the great sort of early traditions of the people of God is that we would, through God's instruction, give a certificate of divorce to women because God's pro women, right? You love this. But the Pharisees, these religious teachers, they had heard that maybe Jesus wasn't real big on divorce. And so they want to catch him in front of people. And they know Moses said, if you get divorced, give them a certificate, but they had heard rumblings that Jesus wasn't. So they asked him, Jesus, tell us, tell all of us as we're listening here, Rabbi, when is it permissible for someone to get divorced? And here's their deal. If Jesus says that it's not permissible to get divorced, then he's going against Moses, right? He says, it is permissible. There was a lot of debate in that day about for what reason you could get a divorce. There were two different camps. In fact, I got a quote that sort of summarizes it here, but this is based on Deuteronomy chapter 24. This was the debate among the rabbis. There's two sort of influential rabbinical teachers who lived one generation before Jesus, one's name's Shammai and the other's Hillel. And just real quick here, it says, the school of Shammai said, "A man may not divorce his wife unless he has found unchastity in her," as it is said, and this is a quote from Deuteronomy 24, "because he has found in her indecency in a matter," right? So the school of Shammai says, if your wife has been indecent, if she's had an adulterous affair, you can divorce her for that. But the school of Hillel said, you're going to get an insight into how whacked out Bible studies can be, right? But the school of Hillel says that he may divorce her even if she burns his food, because friends, remember, as it is said, because he has found in her indecency in a matter, right? And so these rabbis are saying, if there's anything about her you don't like, if she burns your food in any matter, you can divorce her. So they're teed Jesus up. He's either going to say, "I am against divorce," to which they'll say, "You're against Moses, you're not teaching the truth." Or even if he says he's for divorce, he's going to have to take a side and say, "When's it permissible?" For any reason at all, or just for sexual immorality, right? And basically, I love this, this is brilliant, Jesus is an incredible teacher, and I'm reminded of that every time I sort of dig into the scriptures, but he says basically to the folks there, "Listen, you want to talk about details, let's call a timeout and talk about marriage, all right? You're trying to trap me on the details, you're a big fan of Moses, let me remind you of what Moses said, before he ever talked about anything in Deuteronomy 24, let's go back to the beginning of the story. And he quotes for them Genesis chapter 2, also sort of understood to be a book of Moses. And he says, "In Genesis 2, what did Moses say?" He said that when a man leaves his father and his mother, when he leaves and he clings, or sometimes the scriptures, old scriptures, would say cleave, right? This leave and cleave, when he lings, when he leaves and he clings to his wife, they become one flesh. So like any great politician, Jesus sort of doesn't answer the question. He's been asked, he answers the question, he wished he'd been asked. And he says, "You want to fight about details, let me tell you about marriage," right? And in this idea, cling, the Hebrew word that's often translated, cleave, it's the same word for glue. It's like if these two people, he said, "Let me remind you of marriages," it's when a husband and a wife, they leave their families, they join, and they become one, they're glued together. And the image would be something like this, I love graffiti, right, installs. And so somebody had put a van off the wall sticker on there, right? Somebody else came in and tried to remove it, and then somebody very clever wrote, "Can't get it off the wall, get it." So the image of what the scriptures are saying about marriage is that there's this gluing that happens. There's this gluing. Two, they sort of, they become one, and what Jesus is reminding them of is, "You're asking me when is divorce permissible?" And he's essentially saying to them, "When is it permissible? I'm not even sure it's possible." This is Jesus' approach. He sort of questions the question. There's a lot of colloquialisms we could use for this, but you know, you can't sort of unscramble the eggs, right? This is the idea. You can't unglue what's been glued. At least not easily without some significant sort of damage. You can't unone what God has made one. And that's why it's so important for us as Christians. This is part of the truth, and I told you it was going to get worse before it gets better. I promise you, we'll get on the other side of this, but that so many people in our culture they will say something like, "Why do I need to get married, right? It's just a piece of paper." And what God is sort of telling the people of God is that it's not just a piece of paper, right? Marriage is about more than a financial relationship or a physical relationship. It's more than about just two physical bodies that join or some legal arrangement. It's way more than just a piece of paper. There's something deeply spiritual that happens when two people commit to give themselves to each other for the rest of their lives and join physically in the presence of God and friends. It's this one thing that can't be undone and at least not easily. And so Jesus, he questions the question, he says, "When is it permissible? Permissible, I'm not even sure it's possible." And this is, it's interesting, just a few verses later. We probably won't talk about this, but in chapter 29, Jesus, he even sort of, another one of these, sorry, not sorry passages, but he tells the folks, "Unless you leave your brother, your sister, your father, your children, to follow me, you can't follow me," right? The one exception, the only people that don't list in there is your spouse, right? The one exception, there's this idea that something about marriage is so permanent that Jesus doesn't even challenge it when he says to come follow me. Like, you may have to leave your parents, you may have to leave your children, you may have to leave your town, but you will not leave your spouse. And I think we know, like on some level, that there is this sort of permanence to marriage. In my own life, my parents got divorced about 12 years ago. And I know that marriage is permanent because 12 years later, there's not a Thanksgiving or a Christmas or a phone call that happens where one of them isn't still struggling with the relationship with the other or the consequences thereof. My dad's on his third marriage and he's still talking about my mom, right? There's a permanence there. This is not sort of like good or bad, this is just reality, right? And so the disciples, when they hear this in Matthew's account, this is their response. If you're paying attention, this is what you'll say if you're a single person. You'll say, because the disciples said to him, "Well, if that's the case, probably better not to marry," right? If that's the case, I should probably say single, right? Because in this age, not unlike ours, marriage was seen as like, it feels good, it seems like the right thing to do right now. And if it doesn't work out, then we'll just sort of split. And in his day, it was even worse. Men would just be like, "You burnt my food. I divorced you. I divorced you. I divorced you. I divorced you on with it. Where's the next one?" Right? And that was their understanding of marriage. It was that light. Simply spiritual, significant here is permanent you can't run from, and the disciples go, "Well, if that's the case, then I probably should not even get married." And it's also why in the church, for those of us who are married, when we hit sort of that rough patch, that divorce is like the last resort. It's not sort of the first thing we go to, or the second thing, or the third thing, or the fourth thing, right? The divorce is this last resort. And as the church, where people who fight against any sort of shallow understanding of marriage, where it can just sort of be picked up and dropped off again. Because we understand that there's something more going on here, that it's more than just a piece of paper. But Jesus is also a realist, right? And so while they ask him, "Is it permissible?" and he says, "I'm not even sure it's possible." We also recognize, even if it's not possible, we know that it happens. It happens. The divorce is real. And occasionally, a marriage has become so dark or abusive or destructive that it can't continue. There's even some allowances made for this in the scriptures. And Matthew's gospel, he says, "If there's infidelity, you don't give up on your marriage, but for the case of infidelity." In Paul's letter, he talks about not only infidelity, but also desertion, right? This idea that if you're married to someone and they leave you and they move across the country and they're married to someone else, there's not much you can do about that, right? So there's these allowances. There are these occasions where a divorce, yes, Jesus says, is permissible. And it happens, but we have to hold this tension of, "Is it really possible?" And so in closing, I just want to say a couple of things sort of pastorally about who we are as a community and what this means for all of us in the room, whether you're single married or divorced, right? If you're single, maybe it's better not to get married. This is deep and stuff, right? It's hard. Get somebody who's been married for more than a year and ask them what that's been like, like after they've had two beers, right? You don't know until you know, okay? And we can't just sort of up and run out of this on this gig. And for those of us who are married, we've got to remain to keep this sort of our last deal. But I want to especially think about what it means for us as a community. For those of us who are divorced, have been divorced and to those of us who aren't in the way that we relate. And, you know, I think it's bad enough that as a church, we dodge this issue that we just won't even preach on the text or talk about it. But even worse than the fact that we will dodge it is often our response, that while we wouldn't preach it and talk about it and don't have the guts to do it, as soon as we start seeing it in our community where relationships break down and people get divorced, more sadly, our reputation has been that that's an opportunity for us to shame and to shun, right? My parents were leaders of our church for my entire childhood. They were youth leaders. They sat on the elder board. They were there every Sunday. They did every single post you could imagine. Some of their best friends were in that community. And the moment that they got divorced, there were a whole lot of people who stopped answering our calls immediately. My parents were immediately removed from their positions on the church leadership, right? And sometimes even in our church where we may not be sort of wired as conservatively as dramatically, right, there's still these subtle ways that we begin to go, right, like, "Oh, how could they?" And we shame and we shun and we act better than in the rest. My friend, Eric Huffman, who's a great preacher, if you want to listen to a truly great preacher, check out my man Eric Huffman, he's at a place called the Story in Houston, Texas. And he told this story a couple of weeks ago about, they're starting a service much like ours. They're celebrating communion every week. And one week, this man starts walking up to him sort of tears in his eyes. And he's making this sign across his chest, which is kind of like a universal in church world. Like, I don't want to receive communion, but if you'd say a blessing or prayer or something or anything, it's just a totally fine thing to do. But Eric said, you know, sometimes people do that because they have gluten allergy, and I wanted to make sure that this guy knew we had gluten-free wafers, right? So the guy's coming up, he's got tears in his eyes, he's like, "Look, man, are you sure? We actually have gluten stuff. I don't know what the deal is, but we have gluten-free if you'd like to partake." And he says to him, the man says to him, "Yes, like, no, I can't receive communion. Father, I'm divorced," right? To which my friend said exactly what I would say to you if you ever said that to me. Two things. First, don't ever call me Father again, you know, that's freaking weird, and two, this is the body of Christ, broken for you, take and eat, right? This is the position of the church. This is our response, is that for so long we've been a people who've been known when it comes to divorce, to shame, and to shun, and instead we are called to extend grace. We even see this in God's impulse and genesis, okay, divorce is a reality. Well then, at least when it happens, we're going to treat people with dignity and we're going to send women off of the certificates so they're not left to fend for themselves, right? We fight for marriage as long as it might be preserved, and then when it can't any longer, we support and we grace and we extend hospitality and we walk through it with one another. We remember the woman who's caught in adultery, right? In these Pharisees want to kill her like they're allowed to by law, and Jesus says, "I don't condemn you." In fact, he says, "Whoever hears without sin, go ahead and throw the first stone," right? And just to be clear, like the sin we're talking about in Jesus and Mark's gospel, he says it's adultery, right? To break a marriage to sleep with somebody else, that's adultery. You know what else Jesus said was adultery? Anybody who lusts after woman in his heart, right? So anybody who's lusted at all, we find ourselves by Jesus' standard in the exact same camp as those in some ways who've been married and now divorced, right? We don't stand on some higher ground. We all sort of come to the table sinners, weak in need of mercy and grace. And then the second thing, not only do we extend grace to those in our community rather than shame, but we also grieve with them, right? We grieve with them. I think as a church, it's fair for us to say divorce sucks. It absolutely sucks. I know that personally. My parents divorced. Three of my four aunts and uncles are divorced. My grandparents are divorced. We've got one marriage still holding strong in my extended family. And that's the healthy side of my family, right? Like the other side, we don't even talk about it so dysfunctional. So it's, I know sort of the reality and the pain of this. And last, I just want to remind you that not only do I know, not only do so many of us in this room know the pain of divorce, what it means to try and unwind something that's been made one and the permanence and the pain that will be there for a long time. But we have a God who says that he understands and he can relate as well. A really fascinating passage I've never noticed before, but in Jeremiah chapter three, God uses this language. God basically says, I've been through a divorce myself. And he talks about his people Israel that God's chosen people walked out on him. That they literally uses the word earmuffs kids, but he says that they've gone around like a whore, his people cheating on him with every other God and people group. And he waited there hoping that they would return and they never returned. And so God has issued them a certificate of divorce. God identifies with the pain of what it means to be divorced. This is weeping sort of portion of the scripture in Jeremiah where God goes, I know what it's like to you. It's horrible. I wouldn't wish it on anyone and for single people, you might want to think twice before you jump into something like that and married folks, please, this is not our first resort. And there is hope and joy in marriage. I read a statistic this week that two-thirds of couples who say they're very unhappy now, if they hang together for five years, will be happy again. There's a permanence to marriage that we fight for and we stick out and we hold on to with everything that we've got until we can't do it any longer. So it's divorce permissible. I'm not even sure it's possible, but it happens. And when it does, we'll be a community that grieve with those who walk through it and who extend grace in the name of Christ. Let me offer a prayer for us this morning. God, we thank you even for hard words, for words of warning. I know, I think about this week, all week long, I've been thinking about my brothers and sisters who have gone through a divorce who know this pain. My prayer is that they would know how much we love them and grieve with them, that they wouldn't feel shamed or shunned in this place, but they would know that they're loved, that we see ourselves in exactly the same place as they have been. And I honestly got my prayers that they would be able to say amen today, that they would be able to say I wish somebody had sort of preached that to me 20 years ago or 10 years ago, and that for those of us who haven't yet entered into that covenant that we would have ears to hear this day, that we wouldn't handle marriage flippantly, but we would know this is more than just a piece of paper, but God, you've wired us for each other. And when you make us one, it is not so easy to become unwind. So God, we praise you that you continue to extend grace. You bless new marriages and new relationships, and you bring new life to dead and broken places, and we pray that you would do that in our community. We pray that we would be a city on a hill when it comes to marriage, that people in our city would see that we fight for marriages, not just our own but each others, and that we walk with those who are hurting in the midst of divorce. God thank you this day for a hard word, and we're sorry but we're not sorry that you've spoken. It's in your name we pray, amen. [BLANK_AUDIO]