October 4, 2009 Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost,
World Communion Sunday
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Psalm 8; Mark 10:2-16
Let No One Separate
For the sake of full disclosure, let me say that I speak as someone who has
experienced a devastating divorce and an extremely happy remarriage. There are
people who would interpret today’s gospel passage to say that, because of my
divorce and remarriage, I should not be allowed to be a member of a church, let
alone its pastor. Likewise, there are people who would not understand how you
could read today’s gospel lesson during worship and then immediately after the
final amen celebrate a same-sex marriage. They would say that Jesus is
confirming that marriage is between only male and female.
But there are many ways to interpret any scripture passage, including this
one. Fundamentalists of all faiths believe there is only one way to read any given
verse, and that is their way. Many mainline Christians tend to read scriptures
anxiously, wanting to know the one true and right meaning to every passage and
hoping to high heaven that they can live with it when they figure it out. But Jesus
was first century Jewish, not twenty-first century Christian, and so he was not
burdened with that obsession for scientific certainty about scripture’s meaning.
Jewish interpreters have published books of midrash with literally hundreds of
ways to read a single verse. The Apostle Paul has examples of this creative
approach to scriptures in his letters (see Galatians 4:21-5:1).
Scripture is a tool to help us live, and as such each passage must be able to
serve very different people in very different circumstances. A screwdriver can
be used to install a switch-plate or open a can of paint; one use is not right and
the other wrong. The essential question is not whether any given scriptural
interpretation is using a passage in a right or wrong way, but does it help us with
what we need now? Does it show us the way toward the realm of God from right
here? Does it help us get there?
What seems most useful to me here and now in today’s passage is not a
legalistic interpretation about marriage, because that was what the Pharisees were
after, not Jesus. That line of inquiry came from and led to hardness of heart,
which Jesus condemns. If we look instead at the way the combination of
teachings in the gospel passage build on one another we will see a vision emerge
of life on earth as it is in God’s realm. This vision can inform our efforts for
peace and social justice as well as our spiritual quest to follow the way of Christ.
Jesus teaches in today’s passage that God is a force that holds things
together. He says, “Let no one separate that which God has joined.” Our human
compromises that enable us to separate and divide and divorce arise not because
of God but because of our hard-heartedness. To the soft heart of God, there is no
end to the unity of marriage, even after divorce, because God sees that we are all
one. We were as much one with our spouse before we were married as after; we
are as much one with all people as with our spouse. You can’t be any more one
than one, and that is what Christ sees (and hopes we will come to see) we truly
are.
In the gospel of John Jesus prays what the United Church of Christ takes
as its motto, “That they may all be one,” but our oneness already is real because
God is in all and all are in God. Jesus preaches this radical oneness throughout
the gospels. We are to love our neighbor as our self because our neighbor is our
self, joined with us in the great unifying common self of God. When we see that
integrity we learn the full meaning of fidelity.
The great 20th Century theologian Paul Tillich defined sin as a condition of
separation from God, from one another and from our true self. The sin of divorce
is not just the act of a couple splitting up, it is the act of seeing the other as an
object separate from our self. From that false vision proceed all the thoughts,
words and deeds that cause division between us.
What God has joined together, let no one separate. Our job is to try to
hold our self together, and hold together our relationship with one another, and
hold together our relationship with God. To be whole, we need all three.
We fail, of course, because we are not God, we are imperfect human
beings. No one understood this better than Jesus, and no one met it with more
compassion, forgiveness and mercy. The fact is that we need divorce because we
do things or say things to one another that result in our falling apart, and we need
remarriage to start over and try again. We need all the complex structures that
human laws create because we cannot keep Christ’s two simple laws of loving
God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength and loving our neighbor as our
self.
But even as he has compassion for us, Christ calls us to be working
steadily against the temptations and weaknesses of our human nature. Christ
calls us to be idealists, to live by the ideal that is expressed in the saying, “What
God has joined together, let no one separate.”
The members of this congregation who attended the Mission Committee
lunch in July identified five areas of concern to focus on in the next year or so.
They were: hunger; climate change and resource use; nonviolence; spiritual
renewal as a foundation for social action or as a way to change the world in and
of itself; and health care and the problem of social isolation. Each of these is
trying to address a form of separation, a way in which society has failed to love
its neighbor as itself and failed to love the power in the universe that works to
hold things together.
If we could see as Jesus is trying to get us to see, as God sees, poverty
would not be acceptable to us no matter what the benefit to us of exploiting or
ignoring others; the destruction of the earth for selfish profit or comfort would be
seen as the greatest crime people could commit against themselves as well as
against God and all other beings; all forms of violence would be seen as self-
destructive and not worth the cost; our individual spirit would not let itself be
divided from its source of renewal and power and blessing for any reason; the
vision of our oneness would not let us rest while some lacked health care or
suffered social isolation. But our society does not see as God sees, so our task is
not only to try to address these five areas, but to try to share the vision of
oneness that underlies them all.
The gospel passage adds another dimension to this. Jesus has said, “What
God has joined together, let no one separate,” and then the next thing that
happens is what? The disciples try to separate the children from Jesus! As I
explained last week, this was the socially acceptable thing to do in that culture.
Children were not given the status of people. They were objects—the lowest and
the least. By rebuking the disciples and calling the children to him, Jesus makes
it clear that everyone is included, that God has joined everyone together, even
the least.
Whom today does our society exclude the way Jewish society excluded
children in first century Palestine? Look at the liberation struggles of the past
century and you will have a good list. Women, people who are not white, people
who are not Protestant Christians—those struggles are not completely over; but
the struggle that is most recent and intense is for the liberation of those God
created male and female who are oriented toward people of the same sex. If you
put the two halves of today’s gospel passage together it is clear that if Jesus were
here today, he would have called not a child but a gay or lesbian person into the
circle of inclusivity and said “Let no one separate this person from the beloved
community.”
In other societies, I could see Jesus pulling someone else into the circle.
In a circle of Israelis, it would be a Palestinian, and vice versa. In Rwanda and
the Congo, Hutus would be pulled into the Tutsi circle, and Tutsis into the Hutu.
In a progressive church it would be a fundamentalist Christian, and in a
fundamentalist, a progressive. God has joined us together on this earth. Let no
one separate.
The final teaching Jesus gives is, “Whoever does not receive the realm of
God as a little child will never enter it.” This is a verse we could easily interpret
dozens, if not hundreds, of ways. No one knows exactly what Jesus had in mind,
and maybe that was intentional on his part. It is like a Zen koan. The more we
ponder it, the more spiritual wisdom we gain.
So let me offer some interpretations that I have been taught out of the
mouths of children just this week, specifically little Ophelia and Emelia who both
attended the Stewardship dinner on Friday evening. Here is what it means to
receive the realm of God like a child. It means Ophelia walking up to the coffee
hour table at the end of the evening when it has been put back in its usual Sunday
place, looking up at the adults around her and pointing over her head at the
empty table and saying, “Where are the snacks? Why aren’t the snacks here?”
To receive the realm of God like a child is to hold on to the realm’s vision and
hold out for its ideal. It is to yearn for the all inclusive, always present feast of
the beloved community. It is to see how things should be and to speak out for
them to be that way and to ask why not. It is to hunger and thirst for God’s realm
on earth the way Ophelia was yearning for the snacks.
Or to receive the realm of God like a child is like Emelia with half the
brownie in her hand and half in her mouth. It tastes so good, that half. It tastes
so good that even though her mother is telling her she can’t have the other half,
she is going to move her hand to her mouth as quick as lightning and stuff the
whole thing in before her mother can take it away. To receive the realm of God
like a child is to let nothing stand in the way of getting all that goodness into our
lives, no matter what social pressure tries to block us. Because unlike brownies,
the more the realm of God fills us up the better, and the more we feed our self the
way of Christ the less selfish or cranky we become.
To receive the realm of God like a child is to be like both Ophelia and
Emelia, full of the joy of being included at the feast of the beloved community,
and infecting the world around us with our joy.
So let us celebrate the great victory of marriage equality for all with
abandon today after church, and the great joy of two people clearly joined
together by God who finally are no longer separated by law, but really truly
married like everybody else who is married in Vermont. What would a child do
who received such joy? I want to see everyone here stuffing brownies or at least
crackers in their mouth after worship—not just half, but going for the whole
thing! Because if we can win the freedom to marry for all, which tastes so sweet,
then we can go on to eradicate hunger, stabilize global climate and resource use,
end violence forever, and bring spiritual renewal and health care and social
inclusion to all. We can be a world that lives in true communion. Let’s not stop
until we have the joy of the whole thing!
Let us pray in silence. We are one with God already—so what God has
joined together, let nothing separate. Let us experience this oneness in our heart
right now in wordless prayer…
Sermon 10/04/2009