Sunday, Oct. 8 - 18th Sunday after Pentecost
Sayoko Nishida has written a book entitled Why Are Retired Husbands Such a Nuisance? She notes that Japanese men typically have spent the better part of their working years away from their wives and families, wedded to busy careers. Then they retire, go on a cruise with the wife and have such a miserable time that they return home and file for divorce. So she has opened what she calls a Retirement Cram School. She tells her students that it’s dangerous for couples to suddenly go on overseas trips after the husbands retire, and she recommends they start by taking one-day bus tours instead.
Well, I’m not so sure about the one-day bus-tour idea—maybe that’s a Japanese thing—but I think the larger strategy, as one person has put it, is “divorce prevention through marriage attention. ” [Timothy Merrill, tmerril.blogs.com (Oct. 2, 2006).]
This passage comes ’round every three years in the lectionary cycle, and I have avoided it for nine or twelve years. And for good reason. The last time I took it on, I took a beating for it. I used it as an occasion to do what I thought Jesus was doing—namely, telling people contemplating divorce to try marriage first. That only seemed obvious, and it certainly seemed to track along with Jesus in the text. But one of the things you find in this work is that people hear you say things you didn’t say, or they interpret them according to their own experience, so much that it always boils down to whether the preacher confirms their experience or contradicts it. So much pain goes along with divorce that this is understandable. They don’t want the church piling on. Well, apparently I left the impression with some that I knew nothing of the difficulty of marriage because I don’t know what it’s like to live in a loveless one. Which is true. And yet, love-filled or loveless, marriage can be difficult, and divorce always looms, even for those who say they would never consider it.
So to begin with, let me say that while Jesus’ teachings on some matters make things easier than the way people often approach them, on other matters he seems to make things harder. This happens to be one of them. By the time of Jesus, a Jewish man could literally obtain a divorce from his wife on the grounds of her burning his toast at breakfast. All he would have to do is to say in the presence of three male witnesses three times, I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you. Now, I sort of doubt that was a common thing, just like I sort of doubt that many people today get divorced too easily and on such flimsy grounds. I know what people say: since the divorce rate is so high, people are giving up on marriage too easily these days. Married people say that. Mostly married people who have never been divorced, don’t you know?! Back in the day, they say, people didn’t think about divorce; they just stuck it out and were happy to be miserable for the sake of the children or for the sake of society or for heaven’s sake. I think most people would admit, though, that staying miserably married is hardly noble.
The truth is, divorce is not really the death of a marriage at all; it’s a death certificate for an already-dead marriage. When a marriage is dead, if you don’t bury it, the decomposition stinks up everyone’s life around it. Having a funeral for a dead marriage may be the only loving thing to do.
Some of you have been in marriages like that. You know the pain and the loss that come with realizing that the marriage is over. You know the courage it takes to get out. You know the stain you have to bear and the scars on the inside that no one sees. You know the shame you feel and the challenge of holding on after divorce to relationships with people who once were your couple friends. This is no easy thing, and anyone who thinks that people are eager to give up on marriage too soon has not been in that position before.
Thank God this doesn’t happen in the church, right? Wrong. Statistically, even evangelical Christians in America get divorced at the same rate as the general population—about one-half of marriages end in divorce. The numbers are actually better, by the way, when you change the sample to consider those who attend church regularly. One sociologist estimates that Christians—whether Catholic or Protestant—are up to 50 percent less likely to divorce if they are regular attendees instead of once-or-twice-a-year churchgoers. So, sidebar note—church is good for your marriage. See you next Sunday.
Anyway, we know the church needs to be a place where we hold high standards and keep people looking to God’s ideal for marriage. But it also is a place where we can deal with reality, because we are not saved by works—even by the good work of marrying well and staying married well. We are saved by grace, and grace is strong enough to cover the sin and tragedy of divorce. Grace is strong enough to restore the people broken by it. And this is just what the church specializes in; this is where the bruised and the broken, the bitter and the boredfind new life and hope.
If you have been through a divorce, listen closely to me: you are welcome here, like any other sinner. There is no need to defend yourself in order for us to accept you. There is no defense for sin, but there doesn’t need to be, since forgiveness is the rule of the house in the house of God. Owning up to failure and expressing contrition instead of blaming an ex-spouse or asking others to excuse whatever ways you contributed to the marriage failing are spiritually healthy. No one needs to fear that repentance might put you on a blacklist. There is no office in this church that is off limits to God’s grace or to your service just because of divorce, even if wisdom demands that time for healing be given first.
But Jesus wants to take us back to God’s intentions for marriage in the beginning, not just so that we will remember the ideal and keep it before us, but so that we will not wait too long to tend to our hurting marriages.
When the Pharisees came to test Jesus on the question of divorce, they were asking about a difference of opinion between two prominent teachers of the day—Hillel and Shammai. Hillel was the more lenient and Shammai the more conservative. Jesus appears more conservative, but for deeper reasons than those based on law. He goes back to love, to the original matter of two people coming together in marriage and how that reflects God’s truest and highest intentions for people. He takes us back, in other words, to the beginning of things.
The only reason Moses later granted certificates of dismissal, Jesus says, is the hardness of hearts. And this gets to the root of much marital trouble. Something happens in a marriage—maybe a single event, maybe a long series of events, maybe events so subtle you don’t even know they are happening. But one thing happens for sure: a hardness of heart sets in. The word in the Greek that translates hardness can also mean “stubbornness” or “closedness.” One or both parties allow the heart to grow cold toward the other, to ice over, to get hard and impenetrable, to develop a certain stubbornness in relation to the other. The result is that the spouse can’t break through to tenderness any longer, can’t find a place inside any more, can’t live any longer as though life is a partnership of souls with one’s marriage mate. Sometimes, most times, the hardness develops as self-protection. One party has been hurt or neglected, and the vulnerability is so scary that closing off the heart is a way of numbing the pain by keeping the other person at a distance.
If that hardness continues long enough, these two cannot find a soft place with each other ever again. It’s like a sponge that is left out of water for so long that it hardens and gets brittle—you can pour all the water in the world on it, and it will only break into pieces. Even that is redeemable, because brokenness might mean the end of a marriage, but it does not have to mean the end of life or even the hope of ever loving again.
How much better, however, to see it coming and take steps to soften hard hearts before it’s too late! This is true in all sorts of relationships, not just marriage, of course. When friendship goes bad, don’t wait to let your heart harden. When a business partner betrays you, don’t allow your stubbornness to rule you forever. When a child or a parent disappoints you, don’t permit a shell to grow over your heart toward one that you know in your heart you want to love and be loved by.
I believe this is why Mark places the story of Jesus’ welcoming of little children immediately after this text on divorce. People were bringing little ones to him so that he might reach out and touch them. The disciples were dismissing the children as unimportant. Jesus says, Let the little children come to me; do not stop them, for it is to such as these the kingdom of God belongs. Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.
There it is. Receiving. Receiving is the key. When you receive someone into your life, you welcome that person into your heart. And Jesus shows us that by receiving children who could do nothing to advance his career or life or reputation because they amounted to nothing in that society but as potential adults and had no status in themselves—by receiving them as they were—he was showing the pathway of grace.
This is what we must do in our marriages if we are to practice divorce prevention by marriage attention. We must receive one another. We must open our hearts to one another. We must not dismiss our partners by deciding that they have no place inside us any longer.
We say it is more blessed to give than to receive. We counsel people in marriage to look out for the partner’s needs before one’s own, to attend more to giving than to receiving. But it is also blessed to receive.
We have all been touched this week by the way the Amish in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, have handled the horror dealt to them by a man who murdered five little girls. They are gentle Christians who have grieved in ways worth noting. But most remarkable to me is how they have forgiven the killer. How they asked us to pray for the killer’s family. How they have gone to the killer’s wife and offered her their prayers and assured her of their forgiveness. How they represented about half of those who showed up for the burial of the murderer. How they invited the killer’s wife to attend the funerals of the slain girls. How they welcomed her into their hearts instead of hardening their hearts. They received her and kept their hearts open in spite of their pain from the anger of what had been done to them.
Many marriages might be preserved if a husband started every day forgiving his wife for the few ways she hurts him and focused instead upon the hundreds of ways she helps him. And likewise, if a wife would accept a husband for who he is and receive him without demanding that he be what she wants him to be. (And you can flip the genders in both cases to make the same points.) You can’t change anyone else; you can change only yourself. That’s all the control you have or will ever have.
Look, this is not the whole story of every marriage. And every story is always more complicated on the inside than it is to outsiders. But learning to receive one another as a blessing from God, despite whatever else may be, might serve to prevent hardening of hearts and the death of some marriages. And that would be a blessing for us all.
under the chosen Sunday to hear audio of sermon (mp3 format) (beginning March 11, 2007).
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