Standing in the Gap

Preacher: 
Glasspool, The Rev. Canon Mary D.
Date: 
Sun, 10/04/2009
Liturgical Year: 
2009
Liturgical Season: 
Pentecost
  • Length: 19:13 minutes (17.59 MB)
  • Format: MP3 Stereo 44kHz 128Kbps (CBR)

 

The title of this sermon is "Standing in the Gap". I want to be clear from the outset which "gap" I mean. I do not mean the clothing store in the mall. I do not mean the proverbial "gender gap" or “racial gap” or “economic gap”. The "gap" to which I am referring is that between the reign of God and the broken world in which we live. There is always a gap between the kingdom's ideal and the effects of sin. In a very real way, we live in that gap, and it is not comfortable. That gap is manifest in today's readings from Genesis and Mark in particular, which bring before us Creation and Jesus' teaching on divorce as found in Mark. It is not comfortable because the gap in which we live - the gap between the ideal and our reality, between God's intent and human sinfulness - is a place of no easy answers. Wisdom calls us to abide in that gap for a while; to stay with our discomfort, in the hope that from within that gap at the very heart of our discomfort, God will speak a healing word. Let's begin with the Gospel. Today's lesson starts with a familiar line: "Some Pharisees came, and to test Jesus they asked,..." (v.2). It's another legalistic contest in which the Pharisees are trying to entrap Jesus into contradicting the law. How many other times can you remember them doing that? "Teacher, ... is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor or not?" (Mark 12:14) "Teacher, ... in the resurrection whose wife will the hearty spouse of seven husbands be?" (Mark 12:23) "Which commandment is the first of all?" (Mark 12:28) "Who is my neighbor?" (Luke 10:29) "What do you say, Jesus? How do you interpret the law?"

 

"Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?" He answered them, "What did Moses command you?" (Mark 10:2-3) Now, my friends: here is the passage from Deuteronomy to which the Pharisees refer in response to Jesus' question. Listen:
 
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 and goes off to become another man's wife. Then suppose the second man dislikes her, writes her a bill of divorce, puts it in her hand, and sends her out of his house (or the second man who married her dies); her first husband, who sent her away, is not permitted to take her again to be his wife after she has been defiled; for that would be abhorrent to the LORD, and you shall not bring guilt on the land that the LORD your God is giving you as a possession. DEUTERONOMY 24:1-4
 
There's the law. A simple, straight-forward answer to the Pharisees' question would have been: "Yes - it is lawful for a man to divorce his wife." "Upon what grounds?", we might ask. Well, according to Deuteronomy, only the man has the power to write a bill of divorce; and the grounds can be that "she does not please him because he finds something objectionable about her"; in other words, just about anything.
 
"But why was this the case?" we might well ask. Because women had no legal standing in Moses' and in Jesus' times. Women were the property of men. They were, quite literally, "given" in marriage as a part of a legal contract that was worked-out most usually between two male heads-of-households. The law not only allowed divorce, it allowed divorce for just about any reason a man could think of.

 

To this Jesus says to the Pharisees not "yes" or "no"; but "Because of your hardness of heart (Moses) wrote this commandment for you." (V. 5) And then Jesus pushes behind Deuteronomy 24 to Genesis 1-2; behind the stipulation of the law to the story of Creation; behind the legality of divorce to the intent of marriage. In so doing, in the process of over-riding the legal aspects of Deuteronomy and going all the way back to the genesis of creation, Jesus says to the Pharisees, in essence: "You always come to me wanting to know if this is legal or if that is legal, bickering over minute details of the law. Why don't you look at God's intent? Divorce has to do with human brokenness. Marriage, partnership, life-long commitment has to do with God's plan."
 
So do we go back to Genesis to find the familiar story - of the creation of the first human beings. Specifically, to the story of the creation of the first man's helper or partner.
 
Walter Brueggemann, in his excellent commentary on Genesis, points out a fascinating progression in this part of the creation story. Brueggemann notes that in other Old Testament passages, God, Godself is the man's helper (He cites specifically Psalm 121:1-2 and Isaiah 41:10). But here in Genesis, there is a prior decision that God does not intend to be the man's helper. So that the progression is: not God/not alone/not any of the other creatures God has already created. God must create a completely new creation. And so God does. And Brueggemann writes:
 
The emergence of woman is as stunning and unpredicted as the previous surprising emergence of man. The woman is also God's free creation. Now the two creatures of surprise belong together. The place of the garden is for this covenanted human community of solidarity, trust, and well-being. They are one! That is, in covenant (2:24). The garden exists as a context for human community.
[Walter Brueggemann, Genesis in Interpretation. A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching, Atlanta, Georgia: John Knox Press, 1982, p. 47.]
 
What we need to note is that nowhere in this creation story does it say that the woman is to be subordinate to the man. The taking of woman from man implies no more subordination of woman to man than the taking of man from the dust implies man's subordination to the dust! The subsequent subordination of woman obliterates the divine equality of God's own breath breathed into humanity from the beginning. It is not an individual man or an individual woman who contains the image of God although each is a child of God. It is community, men and women together, in partnership, which is a more holistic picture of the image of God. God's intent from the beginning of creation was for men and women to be equal partners in the creative enterprise - not just procreation; but ongoing creativity in the life of the universe. Human sin distorted such intentions of God by rendering woman powerless - with no legal recourse against a bill of divorce, for example; no sense of her own self-worth as a child of God; and no identity of her own except in relationship to men. This brokenness is the result of human sin: specifically the sin of the dominance of men over women, which certainly can be found in the Bible - but not in the creation stories and not in anything Jesus taught or preached.
 
The making whole of humanity, as originally created, is the purpose of creation's "one flesh" ideal. This purpose of marriage was cited by Jesus in the face of his critics' recitation of the prescriptions of the Law that allowed for disunion as an accommodation to human failing. We need to understand Jesus' clear opposition to divorce in the context of Jesus' equally clear desire to support and promote women as the fully fledged human beings they were created by God to be. What emerges is the affirmation of marriage as a lifelong joining of two persons in a profound union - that is, "one flesh". "What God has joined together, let no one separate."
 
Does this mean that everybody ought to be married? No - I want to say, of course not! Just for starters, Jesus, himself, was not married; and there are other ways of living out the lives into which God calls us: living in a covenanted community, for example, or singly, or in partnership. As individual Christians, God calls us not just to particular jobs or careers, but also into relationships with one another. Above all, marriage is a vocation - a call by God for two people to become one.
 
You know, I've had the rather scary privilege of officiating at over 150 weddings during the course of 28 years of ordained ministry. And the words of the marriage service that cause me to shake in my pulpit pumps every time I say them, are right there in the introduction. "Therefore marriage is not to be entered into unadvisedly or lightly, but reverently, deliberately, and in accordance with the purposes for which it was instituted by God." (BCP,p. 423) I truly shake! Why? Because I wonder if I've done my best to prepare the two people standing before me - standing in the gap - for the sacred covenant of marriage. I wonder if we all - the larger Christian community have done all we could do to prepare young people not only for marriage, but also for the complexities and ambiguities of life. I wonder if a good part of our human brokenness and sinfulness lies not simply with the high divorce rate, but with the lack of preparation, support, and seriousness with which we should treat marriages before they ever begin. And few couples that I've worked with planning marriage give much, if any, thought to the ways in which their marriage will serve to benefit society, or manifest Christ's love in community, or provide hospitality for the stranger. Yet marriage is not an individual event - it is a community affair and affects the whole web of human social relationships.
 
We are standing in the gap. The Christian community experiences the tension of living the ideal and living the reality of the human condition at the same moment. God calls us, as women and men, to a profound equality inherent in our very creation. And yet we fall short of God's ideal.
 
And, my friends; we are in danger of a new, pharisaic legalism as we try to hold the kingdom's goal next to the realities of human life. In the Christian community we endlessly debate divorce, and whether or not we should bless people of the same gender in committed relationships, and other moral issues - too often restricted in definition to the sexual - in the framework of the simplistic reductionism against which Jesus stood. Permissibility ("Is it legal..?") is not the issue. Faithfulness to the reign of God is the point. Do we fall short of the kingdom? Yes - all the time. That's what we call sin. But the other kingdom norm is God's forgiving compassion for human weakness and God's constant offer of reconciliation and new life. And the healing word spoken by God at the very heart of our discomfort in the very center of that gap - is that both are true. The purpose of marriage created by God is the indissoluble and permanent union of two into one flesh. And God has infinite and gracious compassion for the brokenness of creation, perhaps no more poignantly lived than in the pain of divorce, the severing of one flesh. Standing in the gap - as we all do - there is only the cross to point our way: the cross of commitment, of compassion and forgiveness, the cross of God's profound desire for all creation to be reconciled in love. AMEN.
 
The Rev. Canon Mary D. Glasspool