rending asunder

 

SERMON PREACHED at St MARY’S, NORTH OAMARU

ORDINARY SUNDAY 27 (3^rd October) 2021

Readings:

 

Job 1:11, 2:1-10

Psalm 26

Hebrews 1:1-4, 2:5-12

Mark 10:2-16

 

 

I love it, every few years when this reading about divorce – either in Matthew Mark or Luke (I so like John!) – comes up in our lectionary. So, for those of you who don’t know my story: yes I am divorced and remarried. There: a disclaimer! But it raises the question “How do we read the bible?” 

Another personal revelation: I doubt if any here were particularly aware of it, but a few years back some unglamorous aspects of my personal history were aired for about 24 hours across New Zealand media. The fact that they were was my own choice, because someone in a powerful position was making statements about me that implied that I was a far more heinous creature than I actually am – and lest these shady hints seem interesting I can assure you I am an utterly boring human being. Nevertheless as the storm in a teacup continued I was most upset, amid an edifying chorus of support that arose despite my obvious failings, when a solitary and sensationalist columnist in a tin pot local paper accused me of hypocrisy. I preached, he alleged,  one thing in a pulpit while practising another. I could assure him, if he ever bothered to listen, that I had never preached on human failings in matters moral, sexual or otherwise marital in any context at any time. 

But, as is so irritatingly human, I remember several years later primarily that one vicious poke amongst the countless outpourings of support. It’s hard, being human. I hope I tell the story not to wallow in my own self-importance, but because at the heart of all my teaching I hold dear the belief that Christ meets us at the very centre, or to put it in another perspective, the very darkest depths of our being human. At our fail-point. 

Most of us, and I include myself, aren’t very interesting, in our darkest depths. Our stories will not make, as Emmylou Harris once put it, the News of the World. The movie about me or about you will probably not be made. Yet it is in our “me-ness” that Jesus meets us. In our mediocrity, our ordinariness, Jesus meets us. And, for various reasons, the matter of divorce that Jesus addresses here, sternly, has become a factor in most of our lives, either personally or by extension through the lives of friends and family.

Jesus’ teaching was it seemed pretty much not negotiable. Some of you will know that I am writing the history of the diocese (I remind you of that from time to time not to big-note myself but so that I have compulsion to continue in what is not always a labour of love!). In the 1890s our Dunedin Synod, alongside that of our Presbyterian neighbours, issued warning after warning to the national government that divorce laws must not be weakened. The clear teachings of Jesus, they argued, must not be diluted. 

Long after my father died I learned that, in the 1950s, he divorced his first wife. To the best of my knowledge he never received communion again, for the Church of England forbade a divorced man to receive the sacrament. 

Were these strict law-protecting synodspeople in the 1890s and through to the 1960s right in their attempts to preserve strict regulations? By the letter of the law they were right. Yet in their literalism there was no room for human weakness. Our world is more nuanced now, and so as it happens is our church, though the battles were fierce. I certainly still could not receive a clergy licence in the Diocese of Sydney.  

Yet today we know that some people, women and children especially, have been forced to abide in hells under the guise of the sanctity and indissolubility of marriage.

We know too that there are disproportionately high statistics on domestic abuse emerging from the highly patriarchal Diocese of Sydney, and from its clergy marriages in particular. As one writer put it, “The emphasis on the indissolubility of marriage in [Sydney] diocesan teaching has been a powerful factor in trapping women in violent marriages.”[1] The writer adds “In some cases we are told we cannot be on music teams, or teach Sunday School classes, or lead in prayer, because as divorced women we are inappropriate role models.” In Dunedin we can be proud that our women were at the forefront of the move to permit divorced women membership of women’s groups.

Domestic violence, abuse … or just sheer energy-sapping misery – these were often ignored by those who argued for a not-negotiable approach to the question. Yet there are other Jesus-sayings about the letter as against the spirit of the law, and about millstones and causing little ones to stumble. These might equally be applied when we wrestle with seemingly bald Jesus-statements that I for one have so clearly disobeyed.

Depending of course on our attitude to the bible we might realize that there are many commandments that we disobey each day, each time we gather to worship. Few of our women wear hats in church these days – or keep silent! Few of us gouge out our eyes when they cause us to sin. This last Jesus-saying in particular flies in the face of almost the entire advertising industry, which is based on the premise that we will always covet those things that are better than what we already have; that Jaguar, this coffee, those pills will make our life all we want it to be.

Every time the strict teaching of Jesus comes up in the lectionary cycle my first response is to cringe. I know my story. But I know too the context in which Jesus was teaching, when divorce was effectively the end of a woman’s life, when Herod like a patriarchal celebrity traded – (and executed, as did the founder of the Anglican Church) – wives on a whim, when women and children were no more than commodities. 

While the bible is not as Dan Brown seemed to suggest given to secret codes, the equivalence between first century words and contemporary meaning is not always direct. Jesus delivered a harsh teaching as a warning to opportunist men who would dispose of women as little more than unwanted property. We might extrapolate from this reading far less about marriage and far more about selfishness in other aspects of our contemporary, throw-away society – discarding everything from effluent to McDonalds plastics to the lives of living creatures, human and others, as if they were no more than a worthless commodity.

Jesus' words still ring powerfully true – and I know for one that I fall short of their fulfilment.  But that is why day by day we turn back to the Christ who by his Spirit enables us to grow into the likeness of the God who loves, forgives, and restores us.

 

 

 

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[1] “Abused Clergy Wife’s Message to the Church.” ABC News October 22^nd, 2018.  https://tinyurl.com/s5vctzdu. Accessed October 2^nd, 2021.