It seems like we’ve been covering most of my least favourite Bible passages of late, so perhaps I should have expected this one to come along - "Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her”. Another winner!
And what a good passage to have on the day of a baptism! Certainly it serves as a subtle way of informing any divorced parents who may be visiting us today, and who may be thinking about getting their children baptised, don’t bother coming here!
"Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her”. That’s our stance, and we don‘t want any no good adulterers or adulteresses around here, nor your children of questionable origin!
Now, before someone actually does get up and try to punch me, I should point out that if there is a finger here being pointed at persons who have failed in their marriages and have been divorced and remarried, that finger is pointing squarely at me!
I am a divorcee, and I have remarried, and the church (not this church but the greater Diocese) never lets me forget that!
I received my synod badge the other day. This gives me the privilege of getting access to the 2006 sessions of the synod of the Anglican Diocese of Sydney. It’s a privilege I’m afraid I rarely take advantage of. Even so, I was fascinated this year to see that they’ve inserted some letters under my name - ‘ACIC’.
In truth, I’m not entirely sure what these letters stand for, but I’m guessing that they stand for ‘Acting Curate in Charge’, which, if correct, means I must have been demoted again!
I used to be ‘Acting Rector’. I’ve never been permitted to become full rector of this parish, despite having now been here for 15 years. I’m technically still a casual in this position, whose tenure is entirely subject to the whim of the Bishop, and I think now I must have descended still one step further down the ecclesiastical ladder!
In truth, I really don’t care what label they apply to me here, so long as I’m free to continue to do the work I feel called to do. Even so, I know full well that there is only one reason that I get this label, and that is because I am one who has been divorced and has remarried, and so in the eyes of the establishment I will always remain a second class cleric, and should consider myself lucky to have been allowed to continue in this ministry at all.
Of course, it’s possible that I’ve misinterpreted this badge, and that the letters actually stand for, “Arch-Chancellor in Constantinople!”, but I don’t think so.
In truth, as I say, I really don’t care what label people apply to me personally, except in so far as it is a testimony to the fact that they will not let me forget my failings. And yet it was Jesus Himself who said, ."Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her”. That seems pretty final, and who are we to question the Lord Jesus?
No wonder the historic church has always viewed divorced persons in such a dim light, and refused to baptise their offspring.
By maintaining a high standard, and excluding divorced and/or adulterous persons from the fellowship, we maintain the purity of the faith community as a whole. Of course, for the person on the other end, the experience is something like having someone put the boot in when you’re already doubled up on the ground!
A woman by the name of Doris Mae Golberg wrote some lines which summed up for me my experience of divorce:
I have lost my husband, but I am not supposed to mourn.
I have lost my children; they don’t know to whom they belong.
I have lost my relatives; they do not approve.
I have lost his relatives; they blame me.
I have lost my friends; they don’t know how to act.
I feel I have lost my church; do they think I have sinned too much?
I am afraid of the future,
I am ashamed of the past,
I am confused about the present.
I am so alone,
I feel so lost.
God, please stay by me, You are all I have left.
At this point, in my experience, the church regularly responds by putting the boot in. That’s what happened to my parents when they were divorced. I copped my share when my turn came, and I’ve since been through it with so many friends. Is this really the attitude we think that the Lord Jesus would have us take?
Personally, I think that even a minimal amount of Bible study would suggest to us that judgement is not the final word of the Lord Jesus in this matter, and it may not even be the first word. For one thing, in the very passage we read this morning, where Jesus seems to speak so aggressively towards divorcees, that dialogue is immediately followed by him welcoming the children indiscriminately!
As I’ve suggested already, those who make distinctions between people on the basis of their marital status, generally pass judgement not only on the remarried couple, but equally upon their children, who are judged as being the unholy offspring of an adulterous and sinful relationship!
If Jesus Himself had taken this attitude, we might have expected him to say, “Let the children come to me. Do not hinder them, except for those of dubious parentage, who I’d prefer you kept well away from me!”
Jesus does not make any distinction between the children. He embraces them all, regardless of their race, their colour, their gender, or their parental pedigree! And just as He does not withhold his love from any of his children, Jesus is on record as refusing to judge someone who was caught being openly adulterous!
If you are a student of the Bible, you will remember the passage from John 8, where the religious leaders drag the poor girl before Jesus and ask him whether they should stone her as an adulteress, according to their law. Jesus says, “Let the one who has never made any mistakes cast the first stone”, and when they all disappear, Jesus says to the woman what I think are some of the most beautiful words in all of Scripture, “I don’t condemn you either!”
The church has too often been quick to condemn. Jesus though rarely condemned anybody. Indeed, to be quite blunt about it, the only people we see Jesus condemn in the New Testament are not weak and sinful people who have failed, but pompous, self-righteous religious people who think the sun shines out of them.
In line with that, let me suggest to you that this verse about, "Whoever divorces his wife and marries another”, might not be about judging divorced or remarried people. It may be solely aimed at those who use the law to justify their selfish activity.
The context, you will remember, is that Jesus is dialoguing with the religious leaders about the law.
The religious leaders of the day had an issue with Jesus - namely, that he seemed to be flouting the law by being overly merciful, as in the case with the adulterous woman. Conversely, Jesus had an issue with these religious leaders - namely, that they used the law to excuse themselves from their moral responsibilities.
The classic example of this is seen a couple of chapters earlier, in Mark chapter 7, where Jesus lays into the Pharisees for allowing the practice of ‘Korban’, whereby a member of the faith community could dedicate some of his belongings to God and so make them tax-exempt, such that he would not be required share his dedicated goods even with his parents, or anybody else who had a legitimate claim upon him!
If there’s one thing Jesus couldn’t stand, it was people using religion to try to legitimise their sinfulness. If you’re going to be greedy, and not allow your parents to live in your home with you, don’t pretend it’s because you’ve dedicated those extra rooms to God, so that they can only be used for worship. And likewise, if you’re going to trade in your wife for a younger model, don’t try to make out that you’re doing something morally legitimate by offering her a certificate of divorce first!
Let me give a very concrete example of exactly what we’re looking at here. Earlier this year I went down to Melbourne to do a TV segment with John Saffran and Father Bob on a show called, “Speaking in Tongues”. One of the other guests that I met up with there was a fascinating woman who had worked as a professional wife for some years in Tehran.
She was not a sex-worker. She was a professional wife. And her clients were not sleeping around. They were having half-hour marriages.
In Tehran it is legal to have more than one wife, but it is not permitted for a man to sleep with a woman who is not his wife. So these men would come to this woman’s flat and marry her. Half an hour later they would issue her a certificate of divorce and go home (back to their original wife, I suppose). Now I don’t think they had a cleric on hand to perform the marriage, but I remember her telling me how there was a way of getting around the formal wedding ceremony too.
The bottom line is that these guys figured that their consciences were clean. They hadn’t done anything wrong. They hadn’t slept around. They hadn’t committed adultery. They hadn’t dishonoured their original wife or this woman. They had simply had what was in the eyes of God an entirely legitimate half-hour marriage. And in that context, Jesus says, “what a load of crap!”
The issues, as I see it, is not particularly to have a go at people who stuff up so much as to deride people who think they can legitimise their selfish behaviour through issuing legal certificates of marriage and divorce. In truth, it doesn’t make any difference. Sleeping around is sleeping around, selfishness is selfishness, adultery is adultery, sin is sin. Be a man and own what you are doing!
Jesus was a straight talker, and he urged us to be the same. He urged us to speak plainly, letting our ‘yes’ be ‘yes’ and our ‘no’ be ‘no’. It’s all about integrity! It’s all about being honest about who you are and what you’re on about. There’s no need to pretend that you’re not a sinner. We’re all sinners. We are the company of sinners who live by the grace of God in the cross of Christ. We’re a community of people who live upon those words of Jesus, “I don’t condemn you either”.
If you’ve failed, well .. so have I, and that’s OK. If truth be known, my failures as a husband are only the beginning of my many failures, but that’s OK. Christ still loves me and I’m working on it, and thankfully in the church (well, in this church at least) we’ve learnt not to put the boot in, but to support one another in our struggles.
‘Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery!” True? Absolutely! So if you’re planning on trading in your partner for a younger prettier model, well … you do what you gotta do, but please don’t come and tell me that it’s OK in the eyes of God because:
* You had a dream and God told you to be with this new woman or
* You know the new woman is the one God intends because she’s a Christian or
* Because you don’t think your first marriage was ever properly consummated or
* Because you’ve given your first wife a certificate of divorce
Because I’ve heard them all before (yes, I have), and because Jesus has heard them all before, and because no amount of appealing to the by-laws of the Word of God is going to legitimate what is simply an act of human selfishness.
So if you’re going to sin, as Martin Luther said, “sin boldly”, but be a man about it and own up to what you are doing, for be assured that while Christ always has room for another sinner, but He seems to have very little space for self-righteous hypocrites.
Now ... I’m sure that someone is going to challenge me after the service today and tell me that I’ve been overly lax on sinners this morning, most especially adulterers, and maybe that‘s right.
Certainly I don’t want to give you the impression that Jesus said that adultery is OK. Of course it’s not. Nothing that damages other people and destroys families is OK. But frankly, I don’t think that the church - this church or any church - is really in any danger of going soft on issues of marital infidelity. I think the far greater danger is that we get caught up in the same self-righteous hypocrisy that the Pharisees were known for, and look down upon those who do stuff up.
Sin happens. Adultery happens. If it’s happened to you, it’s not a lot of fun. If you’ve been the one who initiated the problem, it probably didn’t end up being much fun for you either!
In the end, the word of Jesus that we all live by is the one he gave the adulterous woman, “I don’t condemn you either”, and neither should we condemn one another.
