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Sermon for the Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost – October 4, 2009
On their way to a justice of the peace to get married, a couple gets into a fatal car accident. Sitting outside of heaven’s gate, they are waiting for St. Peter to do the paperwork so they can enter. As they wait, they wonder if they could possibly get married in heaven.
St. Peter finally shows up and they ask him. Peter says, “I don’t know, this is the first time anyone has ever asked. Let me go find out,” and he leaves. The couple sits for two months and begins to wonder if they really should get married in heaven, what with the eternal aspect of it and all. “What if it doesn’t work out?” they wonder. “Are we stuck together forever?”
After another month, St. Peter finally returns, looking somewhat bedraggled. “Yes,” he sighs, “You can get married in heaven.”
“Great,” says the couple, “but what if things don’t work out? Could we also get a divorce in heaven?” St. Peter, red in the face, slams his clipboard onto the ground.
“What’s wrong?” exclaims the frightened couple.
“Please,” St. Peter sighs. “It took me three months to find a priest up here. Do you have any idea how long it’s going to take for me to find a lawyer?”
Actually, according to the official web site of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints - commonly known as the Mormons – it is possible for followers of that faith to undergo what is called a “celestial marriage… intended to last beyond the grave and through eternity…This does not indicate a marriage that takes place in heaven,” they say, “but rather a kind of marriage that is heavenly in nature; it is divine in its origin and potential.”
If you think you already enjoy this kind of wedded bliss – and I’m sure most of you do - forget about it. The Latter Day Saint’s web site goes on: “For a celestial marriage to occur, the man and woman must be sealed, or bound, by one holding the authority of God to perform such sealings, which can only take place in Mormon temples.” (Do I need to tell you that only those apostles recognized by the Mormon Church are authorized to perform such earthly and heavenly bindings?”
The Scriptural warrants for such a practice, the Mormon Church insists, are found in Mark 3:14-15 which says, “And he appointed twelve, whom he also named apostles, to be with him, and to be sent out to proclaim the message, and to have authority to cast out demons.” Just what demons have to do with marriage, I’m not sure and, frankly, I don’t really want to go into.
The second Scriptural basis is found in Matthew 16:19, when Jesus tells Peter, “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”
People have been binding themselves together on earth for centuries, long before birth of the Mormon Church in 1830.
Four hundred some years ago in England, couples became engaged through what was then an ancient ritual of joining hands and vowing to wed – known as “handfasting,” a popular practice that lasted in England into the mid-eighteenth century and in Scotland into the twentieth. “Handfasting was essentially a solemn, binding contract, and for many people the equivalent of marriage,” writes historian Marilyn Yalom. “Whether it occurred in the presence of two or three witnesses, as the church courts insisted…or whether it took place with no human witnesses, the handfasting betrothal could not escape the eye of God. Englishmen and women did not take their vows lightly,” Ms. Yalom writes, “because they believed that God was witness to their words. It is hard for us to imagine today,” she goes on to say, “in a time when promises are made and broken with the ease of throwing away disposable items, that people took them so seriously.”
Well, I have been marrying people for over twenty years and seldom have I encountered a couple who did not take their vows seriously. In fact, I remember, years ago, the temperature in my office taking a sudden nose dive when during a pre-marital counseling session the young man balked at having to say “until we are parted by death.” Considering the look the bride to be gave him, he almost met his demise that day. (Of course, if he did not take making a public promise seriously, he would not have hesitated to repeat after me.)
No, no one - at least no one that I’ve encountered - goes into a marriage with the intention of some day getting out of it. They mean what they say at the time. But times can change, can’t they? Circumstances can change; what was bound on earth can be unbound on earth, a practice that was actually far easier in Jesus’ day than in ours - at least for the men.
Today, in order to test Jesus the Pharisees ask him “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” Now, they know perfectly well what the law says. The Torah contains only one teaching on divorce, Deuteronomy 24:1-4, which begins, “Suppose a man enters into marriage with a woman, but she does not please him because he finds something objectionable about her, and so he writes her a certificate of divorce, puts it in her hand, and sends her out of his house; she then leaves his house.”
That’s all it took. Back then a husband could divorce his wife for virtually any reason; the wife was granted no such rights. The real issue for the Pharisees today has to do with the debate over the proper grounds for divorce. Just what constitutes “something objectionable?” Considering that men interpreted the laws, you can imagine the range of answers.
Wrote one ancient commentator, “If she does not accept your control, divorce her and send her away;” another said that all you needed to do was say, “At this time I divorce my wife, not liking her behavior.” One prominent rabbinical school allowed a spoiled meal to constitute “objectionable behavior.”
It’s just this type of hardness of heart that makes it necessary for a woman to receive a certificate of divorce, known as a “get.” Without it, she will not be able to remarry and, back then, a single woman – widowed or divorced – was as helpless as an abandoned child. (It’s no coincidence, some say, that Jesus’ teachings about divorce are followed by his blessing of young children; women and children holding little, if any, power in society.)
Remember that back then, and for hundreds and hundreds of years afterwards, marriage was essentially a business arrangement between families; “affairs of the pocketbook,” says Ms. Yalom, “rather than affairs of the heart. Men wed women who had dowries; women wed men who could support them.”
In fact, since arranged marriages were the norm in pre-modern times, brides and grooms did not enter into that relationship with the expectation of “loving” each other as we understand the term. Professor Yalom writes that “love began to take priority in marital arrangements as early as the sixteenth century, especially in England; it came to America with the Puritans in the seventeenth century; and it slowly began to dominate the scene by the late eighteenth century among the middle class.”
These days, of course, in our culture, love marriages are the norm. Even so called “shotgun” weddings seem to be a relic of the past. With something like 40 percent of American babies now being born out of wedlock, being a wife is not seen as a necessary prerequisite for being a mother.
Now, if Jesus had such high expectations of marriages that were essentially focused on family and finances, his expectations seem even more stringent when applied to marriages that are essentially focused on feelings. As we well know, feelings often have little in common with facts.
The reality is that our feelings are notoriously fleeting and fickle. The reality is that so many of those lavish, well-intended solemn vows to love one another “until we are parted by death,” fall by the wayside long before death occurs.
As in so many of his moral teachings, Jesus speaks of an ideal – “Be ye perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect” – all the while recognizing that perfection is impossible.
In an essay outlining why, in his mind, the Christian Church is not pacifist, the great American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr said that the Gospel is more than the law of love; the Gospel deals with the fact that people violate the law of love. “We might as well dispense with the Christian faith entirely,” he said, “if it is our conviction that we can act in history only if we are guiltless…The Christian faith sees the whole of human history as involved in guilt and finds no release from guilt except in the grace of God.”
What that means, I believe, is that as Christians we are under an obligation to remain as true as possible to the ideals of our faith – as in “Do not resist an evil doer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also” – all the while realizing that we can never fully live up to these ideals. But without such guiding principles, where would we be? To paraphrase the poet Robert Browning, Our reach should exceed our grasp, “or what’s a heaven for?”
So much of what Jesus teaches us seems to be beyond our grasp, to run counter to our nature, contrary to our wills. I don’t know anyone who has sold all he has and given it to the poor; I don’t know anyone who has not been angry with a brother or a sister in the community, an offense, Jesus says, liable to the same judgment as murder. And, I may be going out on a limb here; I doubt there’s anyone who has not committed adultery in his or her heart.
Jesus did not come to bear our perfection on the cross, but our sins.
Throughout his ministry, Jesus presents an ideal of human relationships in the family and in the community. He speaks of brotherly and sisterly affection; he speaks of self-sacrifice on another’s behalf; he speaks of a man being joined to his wife, becoming one flesh, not to be put asunder.
A monogamous, lifelong union between a man and a woman – as it was at creation – that’s the ideal of marriage; that’s what God originally intended; that’s how things were at Eden. But you may have noticed that we don’t live in Eden; in fact, Adam and Eve did not live there very long either, tossed out of the garden for their failure to live as God intended. For their failure, says Paul, God sent Jesus, the second Adam.
Because our best laid plans often go astray; because our love has limits; because we are not perfect, God sent us perfect love, one without limits. We here in this holy temple make no special claim on God’s attention or affection. All we can do when life does not work out according to plan - when trials, temptations or tragedies mount – is turn to God and to each other, assured of God’s presence, relying on his grace, confident that when we stumble and come up short, those arms which were stretched out on the cross for us are there to gather us in, here and in heaven’s gate beyond.