What God Has Joined Together
We are nearing the end of our September and October sermon series on hot topics. We have covered our Culture War in this country, the challenge of forgiveness, Christian responses to the environment, war, and homosexuality and today is divorce. It has been truly amazing to hear the conversations that you have had with one another. It has been something of a safe way for you to talk about how your faith affects how we live in the world right now, without feeling pressure because you are talking about your faith. Much like last week, although it is very different, the scriptures cited in the conversation about divorce are myriad. So, again, I have a handout through which we will walk together. As with all of our sermons, this is not the end of the conversation; rather my hope is that it will invite you to ponder, to pray and to dive into our holy scriptures more deeply. Please pray with me.
It has been called an epidemic and the downfall of the nuclear family. It has been blamed for everything from the decline of American culture to troubled teens. With just a few exceptions, the subject of divorce is not really a hot topic, although perhaps it should be. But, divorce, in the context of many Christian churches is often still seen as something for which a person should be deeply ashamed. Yet regardless of what we might say about it, divorce has touched nearly all of us. According to most statistics, if current trends continue, almost half of all marriages are likely to end in divorce. This of course varies according to age, education level, employment status, ethnicity and family history. But no matter the circumstances, divorce is all around us. According to Jennifer Baker of the Forest Institute of Professional Psychology in Springfield, Missouri, “50% percent of first marriages, 67% of second marriages and 74% of third marriages end in divorce.” Divorce is so much a part of our culture that it has become something like a new normal. And as a pastor, I have seen the damage that this new normal has caused. I have seen what divorce does to children. I have seen what it does to those who work to prevent it through counseling and prayer, but it happens anyway. I have seen what divorce does to the core ties that bind families together.
I have shared before that I am a child of divorce. Because I was just a kid, I have very few memories of my parents together. In fact many of my clearest memories begin when my dad moved out into an apartment in town. My mom worked at the bank during the day and got a job on weekends in the summer at a BBQ stand at the park downtown while my brother and I entertained ourselves with babysitters sometimes, but a lot of the time with our imaginations. For the most part, not a lot about our lives changed. My dad had always been away a lot with work, so not having him around all of the time wasn’t new. But what was new was that our house started to feel like a kind of tomb. It was still the place where we ate dinner together that my mom prepared. It was still the place where we built forts in the back yard and played ping pong in the basement, but it felt hollower somehow. It was a home, but it would also become the steady reminder that our family was broken.
I hated explaining what happened. I feared telling where my dad was because I could barely do it without crying. I dreaded school open houses and soccer games because everything felt like a chance for the “normal” families to see the truth about mine. At the time, my brother and I fought like crazy. We each knew the other’s softest, most vulnerable places and we would find ways to torment each other regularly. But when it was clear that the only constant we could count on was each other, we grew a bond that to this day, could withstand anything that is thrown our way. At the time it felt like my world was falling into a black hole and those years stand out as some of the most painful. And I know from many of you, that I am not alone in carrying this wound. For a lot of us, divorce will be a scar forever, albeit one we can learn to live with, but one that never goes away.
But as if the pain of divorce is not enough, I have heard from many of you that just when you were hurting the most you experienced the added pain that comes with shame- the feeling of being disgraced and ashamed, dishonored and guilty and a lot of this has come from the Church. This shame has come in the form of a priest telling you that you are living in sin, or from what you have heard from the Bible or from the guilt put upon you by people who thought you to be unholy or unfaithful. Like our exploration last week, the Bible is not even of one mind on the subject, so we will spend some time exploring these scriptures for ourselves.
It wasn’t until I was in seminary that I learned that the Bible even addresses divorce. Because like many of you, I heard that the Bible lifts up so-called “family values,” I always assumed that meant that only stories of perfect families could be found inside our holy text. I thought that the Bible would include these “good families,” and of course because “good families” know nothing of divorce, it seemed to me that the Bible would not even mention the subject. Yet, our first encounters with the beginning of the conversation about marriage and human relationships is found in the Torah, which in Hebrew means learning or instruction, but is usually translated as Law. The Torah refers to the Five Books of Moses, also called the Pentateuch and includes, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, which is where most of our biblical mandates about marriage relationships are found.
The first scripture is found in the Book of Genesis. We referred to it last week when Adam sings out, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.” He sings, in celebration of the holiness of two people, woven together in love. And in Leviticus the authors begin to lay down the framework in which Israel is called to holiness in right relationship with God. Leviticus 20 bases its instructions on the call for Israel to be holy. Holiness in this context means obedience to the divine commandments, specifically the command to separate the clean from the unclean. It is in Leviticus, that we learn that it is no longer acceptable to sacrifice children or to consult mediums, both of which were viewed as pagan practices. It is clear that it was the authors’ intention for the faithful to use these instructions to bring every aspect of human life into contact with God’s call for holy living. In Lev 20:10 we read, “If there is a man who commits adultery with another man's wife, one who commits adultery with his friend's wife, the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death.”
In the Book of Deuteronomy, it quickly becomes clear that sex was not considered to be a matter of private moral decision, but rather something of interest for the entire community. The laws that follow aim to regulate sexual behavior, primarily out of a recognition that the whole community has a stake in the establishment of holy relationships. In Deuteronomy 22, we see the word divorce for the very first time. The values of fairness and male dominance are immediately evident, as it gives a newly married man the right to test his wife’s virginity. We read, "If any man takes a wife and goes in to her and then turns against her,and charges her with shameful deeds and publicly defames her, and says, 'I took this woman, but when I came near her, I did not find her a virgin,'then the girl's father and her mother shall take and bring out the evidence of the girl's virginity to the elders of the city at the gate. "And the girl's father shall say to the elders, 'I gave my daughter to this man for a wife, but he turned against her;and behold, he has charged her with shameful deeds, saying, "I did not find your daughter a virgin." But this is the [evidence] of my daughter's virginity.' And they shall spread the garment before the elders of the city."So the elders of that city shall take the man and chastise him,and they shall fine him a hundred shekels of silver and give it to the girl's father, because he publicly defamed a virgin of Israel. And she shall remain his wife; he cannotdivorceher all his days.” But, if it is proven that the man’s accusation is correct, the woman is allowed to be stoned against the house as a sign of the shame she has brought to the family.
Two chapters later in Deuteronomy 24, we read something a bit different. It is more like a soap opera and tells a story where a man has married a woman and he is quite unhappy because he has found something wrong with her; he writes a bill of divorce and sends her away. She remarries and her second husband dislikes her and gives her a bill of divorce. The catch is that her first husband cannot come back and remarry her. It looks like a case for the TV pop psychologist Dr. Phil. But we learn that for the Israelites, divorce was permissible in some circumstances. Second, divorce serves as the legal documentation for women to legally remarry. We read, "When a man takes a wife and marries her, and it happens that she finds no favor in his eyes because he has found some indecency in her, and he writes her a certificate of divorce and puts [it] in her hand and sends her out from his house, and she leaves his house and goes and becomes another man's [wife,] and if the latter husband turns against her and writes her a certificate of divorce and puts [it] in her hand and sends her out of his house, or if the latter husband dies who took her to be his wife, [then] her former husband who sent her away is not allowed to take her again to be his wife, since she has been defiled; for that is an abomination before the Lord, and you shall not bring sin on the land which the Lord your God gives you as an inheritance.”
The harshest language about divorce comes in the book of Malachi, where we read, “For I hate divorce, says the Lord, the God of Israel, and covering one’s garment with violence, says the Lord of hosts. So take heed to yourselves and do not be faithless.”
I mistakenly assumed that because he wasn’t married, Jesus had nothing to say about divorce. But he kept quiet about few things, so we have at least two instances, recorded in the Gospels, of Jesus commenting on the matter. Apparently, divorce was a topic of some debate at the time in which Jesus lived. The Pharisees themselves were divided, I assume because the Torah, as we learned, is divided, so they went to Jesus to test him and perhaps to secretly learn of a new way in which to examine the Law. Both the Gospel of Mark and the Gospel of Matthew record the encounter. In Mark, we read, “Some Pharisees came, and to test him they asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” And Jesus being a good Jew, answered them with another question, “What did Moses command you?” The Pharisees responded by referring to the Law, saying, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her.”5 But Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you. 6But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ 7‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, 8and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. 9Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”
And he also says "And it was said, 'Whoever sends his wife away, let him give her a certificate of divorce '; but I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except for [the] cause of unchastity, makes her commit adultery; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.” As we learned last week, any reading of the Bible is a selective one. Because we know that Jesus’ ministry was about protecting the least and the last, many scholars believe that his condemnation of divorce is about protecting the vulnerable and in the case that would be women. In the ancient Near East, it was nearly impossible for women to survive without a man, so divorce would have cast them outside of the community, thus jeopardizing their lives.
These two pieces of scriptures have been the source of much of the shame and debate about divorce in the Christian church. Before the late sixties, divorce occurred, but it was rare and generally viewed as something about which a person should be embarrassed or a reason to be excluded from the Church entirely. On September 4, 1969, Ronald Reagan, then governor of California signed a bill into law that would create the possibility for a no-fault divorce. Reagan contended that "He wanted to do something to make the divorce process less acrimonious, less contentious, and less expensive…” He also made divorce a whole lot more available. While I don’t agree with Christians who say that God condemns divorced people, it has become quite clear to me, that divorce being something like a new normal, is not cause for celebration.
Many of my peers have become victims of this new normal and have given birth to a new sociological term: starter marriage. The name sums it up, as it is a first marriage of people less than 35 years old that lasts five years or less and ends before the couple has children. The term, a play on the expression "starter home", appears as one of the footnotes in Douglas Coupland's 1991 novel Generation X, but was popularized by Pamela Paul's book, The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony (Random House Publishing, NY 2002). Paul argues that many young people enter marriage in a similar manner to the way they purchase their first home and her thesis is that although these marriages are begun with the best of intentions, they are often doomed from the start, due to unrealistic expectations of marriage and relaxed attitudes toward divorce. But surely there is a holy place that the Christian Church can find between shaming those who are divorced and creating a culture where it is seen as an easy option when things get difficult.
If the Church is not focused on shaming people, we need to put our energy into supporting marriage. And I have seen few churches do this well. In our church like in many churches, we don’t talk about divorce. We don’t share when our marriage is struggling or when we are in pain. We don’t talk about what we need or ask for support for fear of judgment. We don’t seek guidance as to ways we can help our children feel safe and loved even as they are affected so profoundly. We cannot continue to be surprised when marriages fail if we keep silent on the subject. There is a lot we can do as a church. We can help our young people remember that what is important is the marriage, not the wedding. We can be intentional about creating places where new couples are nurtured and supported. We can be focused in our efforts to provide safe places for us as Christians to talk openly about the difficulties that arise in marriage. We know deeply that God has not just joined couples together, but brought all of us together to support each other. May we live into this call as people of faith. Amen.
Harper Collins Bible Commentary Edited by James L. Mayes (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2000) p.207
Excerpted from Jack Cashill's What's the Matter With California citing Michael Reagan’s words in his book Twice Adopted