annual-ish mea culpa

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 6^th, 2024

ORDINARY SUNDAY 27

 

 

READINGS

Hebrews 1:1-4

Psalm 26

Mark 10:2-16

 

Because we are a liturgical, lectionary following (more or less) faith community I am faced with the ritual encounter with Jesus’ teachings on divorce almost annually. Because on the whole I’ve moved around far too much, and no I’m not running from something, just as Lord Byron would have called it, a restless soul, because I’ve moved around a lot I’ve tended not to have to preach on this passage and its parallels in the same place too often. Last year I escaped it because I was not yet with you, next year I’m going to be lying on a Hawaiian beach sipping pina coladas or something. Today I have no wriggle room. It is my annual mea culpa.

Because of course to those of you who are not visitors it will be well known that I stand here not only as a divorced person, but as a remarried person, with as it happens children on either side of the equation. Enough about me, Except to say that honesty is I think the best policy, and the severity of Jesus’ teaching is not to be trivialised.

So what this becomes is an exercise in which academic people call “hermeneutics”; loosely, the science of interpretation. As we can probably all remember from our secondary school days every text is open to a plethora, even an infinity of realistic interpretations. Jesus teachings on divorce and remarriage are in their biblical versions pretty much unambivalent, and yet most Christian bodies across the world, with the slightly slippery exception of the Roman Catholic Church, have chosen to ignore them. What is going on? And for that matter are they to be put in the same category as Paul’s teachings on hair length and hats, or are they, because they are apparently the words of Jesus, to be given extra weight, red ink perhaps, and in that case do we then have what scholars call a “canon within the canon,” biblical texts that are more important than others, to be taken more seriously than others?

These are big questions and we can probably save them for when you join in a theological studies programme, which of course I hope you all will at some stage in the next decade or two or three. But I put it out there because I believe the biblical texts are not something to be trivialised. A colleague who, sadly, died recently, once shocked me by his declaration that he was not going to have his life ruled by an old book. I cannot be so dismissive. The 66 books that make up the form of the Bible preferred by Protestants, or the 72 or sometimes 73 books in the Bible as accepted by the Roman Catholic Church, (which I prefer unashamedly), came to be collected together through sweat and tears and even blood, as Christ-followers sought to determine which books most accurately convey the will and the purpose of God, as revealed in Christ. It’s a long story. But it is not just an old book, but a collection of books that point to the heart of God.

So what do I do as a divorced and remarried person when it tells me that I am an adulterer, and indeed that by remarrying I have made Anne adulterous too? Put that way it sounds pretty brutal, and it is.

My response is to acknowledge who I am and where I’ve been. Strangely in my pastoral career I have often found this sad story to be encouraging for those for whom I have cared and to whom I have listened. While I am obviously not recommending that every clergy person should have a divorce, I have found on the whole that people have responded with relief that a person with their collar back to front is a person with glitches and scar tissue. But that is no excuse. My starting point must be that I acknowledge that I made bad mistakes in my life.

My continuation point is more important. The story of Jesus is the story of divinity meeting us in the dark struggles of being human. I came not to condemn, says Jesus, and we see that he meant it in his warm compassionate and welcoming attitude to so many of the struggling people that he met in his public ministry.

I am in any case relieved when it comes to the question of being adulterous that Jesus makes it quite clear that ogling, a human tendency that a great deal of our advertising industry is based on, and to which certainly many males and perhaps even some females have not been completely impervious, is basis enough on which we should all – well all of us who admit to this weakness – be plucking out our eyes.

In the end I think the question comes down to that struggle for integrity or authenticity. When, infamously, televangelists announced that they have had an affair but it’s all right because the devil made them do it, I suspect they are falling short of that very flexible question of integrity. I hope and pray that I and others who have sought to serve Christ despite the flaws in our lives do not fall into that obscenity. I hope that those of us who have gone through the painful journey of marital breakup and perhaps the joy-filled journey of discovering new love will have always been seeking damage control for children, decency in relationship with estranged partners, and a sort of never-ending acknowledgement, but not ongoing brutal self-castigation, that this has been an error, a glitch, a sin, in our journey as we seek to follow Christ.

We live in a remarkable age. I often feel the boundaries have been erased too radically. I remember with wry amusement our youngest son coming home from secondary school one day and announcing that it was terribly embarrassing that his biological parents were still married to each other, as he was, he said, the only one in his year group who had to suffer such shame. I remember both sons, and I usually avoid telling family tales, shrugging their shoulders and asking what was for dinner when told that a family member was gay. I remember, years after my divorce, talking with my daughters about the life-mistakes that I had made, which had been briefly publicised following my wrongful dismissal nearly a decade ago: There was neither surprise nor condemnation from these strong young women who had the most right to judge and find me guilty.

It is always possible for us to indulge in cauterising, numbing our conscience. Macbeth speaks of it when he speaks of being so far in blood that sin will prick on sin. But ultimately it is up to us to be honest about our lives and to seek in both the highs and the lows of our journey to find ways by which we may proclaim and glorify our risen Lord.