Candy Coating

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

10.28.12; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Job 42:1-6; 10-17

It is candy season, that great festival of sweet-tooth gorging that we’ve come to know as All Hallows Eve.  The sheer volume of America’s Trick-or-Treat confection consumption just boggles the mind.  In the year of our Lord Two Thousand and Eleven, for instance, Americans bought six hundred million pounds of candy to celebrate the season.  Six.  Hundred.  Million.  Pounds.  

That’s the equivalent of 16 billion fun size Snickers bars.  I pulled together a few quick calculations, assuming one-point-five inches in length per fun size bar, and figured that if you mushed those together into one long Snickers bar, it would wrap all the way around the Earth at the equator, then stretch all the way up to the moon, and then wrap all the way around the moon with a few thousand miles of Snickers left over dangling in space for passing extraterrestrials.

We eat  a whole bunch of candy, we do, although this year we may be hunkered down in our basements as Sandy howls “Trick or Trick!  Trick or Trick!” through the trees outside.  So the rule for Halloween candy purchases on the East Coast this year is changed.  Instead of picking stuff you aren’t going to eat before the first kid comes to your door, pick candy you both like and can see yourself living on for a week.

I like candy, I do.  But too much candy, well, it’s just not good for you.  Take my very favorite candy in the world, which would be sour gummy cola bottles, particularly if they are very slightly stale, which makes them even more satisfyingly chewalicious.  I can put down a pack of sour gummy cola bottles in thirty seconds.  

But if that was what I had to eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, each day and every day, I’d hate it.  And my teeth would implode, and I’d gain fifty pounds.  It would be horrible.

I feel sort of that way this political season when it comes to economics.  On the one hand, we have one political party telling us the same thing that they’ve been telling us for thirty years.  To balance the budget, they say, you just have to cut taxes and everything will magically fix itself through the miracle of Keynesian economics.  Of course, the promised budget cuts that would have need necessary to make that work?  They cut programs that people need, or that funnel money into your congressional district, so...let’s just put that off a bit, why don’t we?

On the other hand, we have a political party that is telling us that all we have to do is soak the rich, and once we’ve shaken down Daddy Warbucks for every penny he’s got, everything will be fine.  But most of the rest of us are asked for no sacrifice, no shared effort. Nothing significant is expected of us.  What we get is highfalutin’ talk, coupled with a diet of dessert, sweet sugary nothing.  The real meal is nowhere to be seen.

There are two stories, or the conclusion of two stories, in the passage we heard from the Book of Job today.   Job is a fascinating, challenging, and complicated book, one that includes some fascinating tensions.  Most significantly, Job is woven together out of two very distinct components.   The first component contains a story, told in simple prose.  That part of Job runs from chapter one verse one through to chapter two verse thirteen...and then stops, only to restart again in chapter forty four verse seventeen.

That’s the familiar tale.  Job, an honest, faithful, and successful man, gets tested by Satan.  He loses everything he has, his wealth and his children and his health.   But through all of his loss, he refuses to reject God.   Even confronted with three “friends” who challenge him, he remains steadfast.  Finally, after the test is complete, Job gets rewarded.  He gets back a better house, more wealth, a very large volume of sheep, and apparently, even better children.  ‘Cause you know, if you lose children, replacing them makes it all better.

He has seven sons, and three daughters, and it is the daughters who are particularly special, so special they get special names.  Jemimah means “dove,” which symbolizes gentleness.  Keziah means “cinnamon,” which is fragrant and valuable.  And Keren-happuch means “box of cosmetics.”   Seriously.  It literally means “container of eyeshadow,” which...I guess...means she was attentive to her appearance.  Better than naming her “Lipgloss,” I suppose.

 It’s an old story, likely a retelling of an ancient tale of a pious man that wasn’t even originally part of the Jewish tradition.  The name Job, scholars note, is not a Hebrew name, and neither are the names of his three friends.  But this story has cross-cultural legs, perhaps in part because it is relatively simple, easy, and straightforward.  Do right, and be steadfast, and you will be rewarded.  Couldn’t be easier.

But as it was brought into the telling of the Jewish people, it got richer and more complex.   Into this older tale was woven a related but different story, one that was considerably more complex than the simple story we’ve been taught.   It’s a dialog between Job, his friends, a young man named Elihu, and finally, the Creator of the universe.   It is told entirely in poetry, written in language that indicates it came from the pen of a scholar with a gift for the art of writing.   It relates Job’s faithful challenge to God, and God’s reply.

I have done nothing wrong, Job says.  I have served God all my life.  If I have held up my end of my commitment to God, why should God not protect me?  His friends challenge that assertion, insisting that Job must have done something to justify what he is experiencing.  Job refuses to cede the point.  Back and forth the conversation goes, until finally God himself arrives, and Job...having been heard...stands down.

That poetic center comprises thirty-nine and a half out of the forty-two chapters of the book.  It is theologically challenging, rich with meaning, and not the sort of thing that can be easily or simply encapsulated.   It’s the high-fiber existential core of the book, demanding sustained attention and focus.

But as this book is popularly presented, what we mostly get is nibbling away at the outer shell, the easily understood, straightforward tale of a righteous man rewarded.   We get the simpler part, the easy-to-digest fable, with the long heart of poetry and struggle and suffering and godforsaken loss taken out.

And that, as a people accustomed to immediate gratification, is kind of what we want to hear.  It was hard, says the story, briefly, but then he got riches beyond even his wildest avarice!   Things were bad, says the story, but he just stuck it out with his sticky stick-to-itiveness, and then it was extra-super-awesome, as pouring out of heaven’s bounty come fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, a thousand donkeys, and a lifetime supply of unusually effective air freshener.

If that’s the total of our takeaway, just the easy part, then we do not understand recovery or restoration, of either self or country.   If all we want is the candy, the sweet crunchy shell, then our encounter with the reality of what it takes to rebuild life and relationship after loss or collapse, after crushing failure or betrayal will be beyond us.  We will expect it not to reach deep into us, and not to change us.

A little sweetness in life is fine and dandy.  But if all we want is the candy, then we will not have the strength that real relationship with God gives us...both as a people and individually...to do what must be done to fix the broken things around and within us.  

Leaders and Tyrants and Bosses, Oh My!

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

10.19.12; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Mark 10:35-45

This last week, I put in my last order for the last batch of books for the last two classes of my formal education.  My Doctor of Ministry program won’t be the last time I take classes, but I can’t imagine that I’m ing to press any deeper into the degree world.  

And so those final books are wending their way to me via Amazon, another great big stack of Leadership Literature, all of which I’ll diligently read my way through.  Over the last few years, I’ve encountered plenty of great big useful ideas in the materials I’ve read, practical stuff that will come in handy as I work to navigate the highly complex multitiered corporate hierarchy here at Poolesville Presbyterian Church, Inc.

But I’ve also encountered stuff that isn’t about leading.  It’s about what I like to call “Leadershipping.”  The “leadershipping realm” is that strange world in which a river of jarn pours like an everflowing stream from the mouths of CEOs and organizational consultants whose brains are filled with every possible buzzword.   If you’ve spent any time in the modern American workplace, you’ve tten to know these people.  

These are the folks who stand at the head of the table with their Powerpoint  clicker clicking away, who talk about how important it is to leverage the dynamic convergence of synergistic and visionary partnerships.  They will smile and nod serenely about the need to proactively integrate transparent and holistic win-win paradigms into all mission-critical core competencies.

And for confidently casting their powerful spell of magically delicious leadershipping words, they’re getting $300 an hour plus expenses.  Or...more likely than not...they’re your new boss.   It’s amazing how often things work out that way.

Leading human organizations is and has always been about power.  Individuals who project power and who present themselves as confident will always move to positions of  authority.   And when it comes to understanding power and the dynamics of power in human groups, I’ve found myself also formed by books that step outside of the realm of modern corporate leadershipping and into the realm of war.   

Those ancient classics include the works of 19th century Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, and the two-thousand-year-old wisdom of Chinese military philosopher Sun Tzu.

There, power is more clearly about power.  Leadership, for von Clausewitz, involves the capacity to pursue one great decisive aim with force and determination.  The successful leader must be audacious and self-confident, cunning and shrewd.   They must be willing, said von Clausewitz in “The Principles of War,” to be absolutely demanding, and severe to the point of cruelty.  They must be driven by deep passions, by consuming ambition, by fierce pride, or by a burning and all consuming hatred of their enemy.

For Sun Tzu, writing in China five hundred years before Christ, the art of war revolves around those same practices, coupled with a profound skill at deceit.  To overwhelm an enemy, the enemy must have no idea what it is you intend.  Subordinates also must have no idea what it is you intend, and the control of information should be carefully managed to insure that no-one knows any more than they need to know to accomplish your goal.  Deceiving your own troops is equally important, so that you can lead them boldly into a place where they have no choice but to fight to the death.

Looking at how he built Apple, I think Steve Jobs might have spent some time with both von Clausewitz and Sun Tzu.  Leadership in war and leadership in business may be more closely related than we think. 

But this approach to leadership and power is not at all what Jesus lived and taught.  If anything, Jesus seems to have presented a polar opposite ethic for leadership.    The section we hear in today’s reading from Mark’s spel expresses a completely different view of what it means to lead, and what it means to have power.

It’s a story divided into two discrete sections.   The first section is the recounting of a request from James and John, the sons of Zebedee.  The request is a straightforward one.   In Mark’s Gospel, they come to Jesus, and ask:  “When you’re  sitting on the throne in heaven, can we get the best seats?”   Luke gives us no details about James and John, other than to say that there was some dispute ing on about who was going to be the greatest.   

In Matthew 20, we hear the same story, only this time it’s James and John and their first century helicopter mom.  It’s Momma Zebedee who comes to Jesus for a Parent/Messiah conference and...showing that mothers in the first century were not all that different from mothers today...asks that her exceptional boys be given special consideration.

Jesus, who at this point already has a strong sense of where he is being called, challenges them.  Do you have any idea what you’re asking?   The answer, of course, is that they really don’t.  With the image of a powerful, kingly messiah still etched into their consciousnesses, they think that to share in what awaits Jesus will mean positions of prestige and power for both of them.

But Jesus knows already that his path leads to some significant unpleasantness.   In response to their question, he tells them that yes, they will get to share his fate.   “The cup that I drink you will drink,” he says.  In saying this, he’s evoking an image of suffering from the Hebrew tradition, where drinking from a cup often means unpleasantness.   As I suffer, you too will suffer.

Then, after he lets them know that he can’t give them what he asks, the other disciples get a whiff of it.   Then the disciple drama kicks in, and Jesus is forced to call a time out and gather them around to explain what it is that actively being a leader means in the Kingdom.

It means a very different thing than what they are used to.  Greatness and power, Jesus tells them, are ing to be completely flipped on their heads.  He makes it clear that he understands what power looks like in the world.  Power in the world looks very much like the power that...well...we encounter every single day in the world around us.

Be it political, economic, or military, Power obscures and controls as it seeks its own end.  It manipulates the world around it to deepen its own strength.  It does not shy away from the application of violence and coercion, wherever and whenever it is necessary.  

It has always been this way.  It was that way in China five hundred years before Christ.   It was that way in Europe in the mid 19th century.  It was certainly that way in Judea in the first century, as Rome and the Herodian dynasty played that game.

But Jesus tells his disciples, and tells us, that power in the Kingdom of d is different.  Those who would be powerful in d’s kingdom set aside the yearning for control over others, and become instead their servants.   It’s a complete inversion of everything we understand about power, and about what it means to be in a position of authority.

We find this unsettling, because we think we understand power.  We’re sure that power looks like strength and confidence.  Power moves boldly around the podium, tall and strong, reading the talking point rhetoric from teleprompter like a boss.  Power is surrounded by the trappings of material success, by the well-written, best selling books, by hundreds of millions of dollars, by the roar of partisan crowds.  It is as bright and shiny as a well polished ceremonial blade.  

But in all of the Gospels, Jesus tells us that power does not look like that at all.  In Mark and Matthew and Luke, we are told power looks like a servant.  And in John, Jesus doesn’t just teach it with words.  He takes water and a cloth, and he cleans the feet of his disciples.  

As  a nation, we’re thinking a great deal about what leadership means right now, or we should be.  As we consider what Jesus taught, we’re forced to recognize that our standards may stand in tension with him.

As individuals, we need to consider both how we respond to power and how we express it in our own lives when we are given it.   Do we truly value the humble and the gentle?  Do we really show humility and a servant ethic when we are called upon to lead?

Because no matter how much we study it, we don’t seem to have tten it.  

So let’s work on that a bit, and listen, and with the disciples struggle to understand.

Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.

What We Don’t Have

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

10.14.12; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Mark 10:17-31

Human beings are creatures of habit, and I am no different.  As a connected pastor in this electronic age, I have a morning ritual.  On waking, I pray first thing before popping out of bed, but unlike many of my pastoral brethren and sistren, the next thing I do is not to pop open the twitter app on my smartphone.  That begins a day in ways that are unconstructive, in the same way that waking up and doing a quick hair-of-th’dog-that-bit-ya shot of Jim Beam is probably not the best way to get ready for a day at the office.

I generally forbid myself internet before the morning’s essentials have been completed.  The boys have to have been gently or-not-so-gently encouraged to eat and double-check homework and school materials, and to wear clothing that at least gives the appearance of being clean.  If it can stand up on it’s own, this is a sign that perhaps it should be in the dirty clothes hamper.  The dog has to have been walked.  The kitchen has to have been straightened up a bit.  I have to have my own breakfast, usually granola and a cup of piping hot go-juice, which I sip while reading through the entire paper.

When I finally settle in for a morning of laundry plus study, or laundry plus writing, or laundry plus blogging, I have a similar pattern.  I check my different email accounts.  I check Facebook, scanning for things of interest across my social network.   Then I read the sites I feed, which always somehow manages to include car sites.  It’s an old habit.  I’ve always loved cars, ever since I was a tiny lad with a boxful of Matchbox cars.    The bigger and the faster and the more inaccessible, the better.  Generally, though, this is a love that exists in the abstract.

As gorgeous as they are, I don’t really want a Maserati Grand Tourismo Sport or an Aston Martin Vanquish.  Alright, well, maybe I want them a little bit.  But the fact of the matter is, our lives and the way we use our cars bears no resemblance to the fantasy.  This is particularly true where I live.  In Annandale, it’s all stoplights and high density.  Just pulling out of my neighborhood typically takes a minute or two, as a long column of cars whooshes by, each one perfectly spaced so that you could *almost* pull out...but not quite.

In fact, I think we long ago passed the point where cars set us free.  They do not.  We cannot live in our society without them.  For a generation, our neighborhoods and subdivisions have been built not on a human scale, but on an automotive scale, and we’ve structured our lives around them...to the point where our cars define our existence.  We do not own them.  They own us.

I was reminded of this when searching the web for prayers about possessions this week.  For some reason, I found myself on the website of Joel Osteen ministries, that big shiny happy teevee festival of Perfect Hair Glistening Teeth Name-It-And-Claim-It Best-Life-Nowness.  There’s a page for prayer requests, with a hundred and fifty character limit.  Reading it was...well...it was heartbreaking, and not just because I care about grammar and syntax.  Every second, a new prayer appeared, and a frightening number of the prayers were for and about cars.   These were not sixteen year old boys asking Jesus for Shelby GT500 Mustang Convertibles.

These were prayers from the desperate.   These were people whose old cars were their failing lifeline to the world.  They were struggling, and in debt, and the car that got them to work or to their doctor had broken down, and they didn’t have the money to fix it, and could Jesus please find a way to get the money or maybe fix it?   One anguished prayer request, offered up in desperation, actually ended with the words “broken speedometer,” the AMEN chopped off by the 150 character limit.  It was like Twitter for the damned, working under the assumption that Twitter isn’t hell already.

And it was a reminder, bright and clear, that the things we possess can easily become the things that possess us.

That warning is the entire point and purpose of the teaching we hear from Mark’s Gospel this morning.   The story, which is recorded here and repeated in Luke 18 and Matthew 19, describes another question being brought to Jesus.   Unlike the challenge from the Pharisees which we heard last week, this question comes from someone who is not challenging or testing Jesus.  It’s from a man who is approaching Jesus with a genuine question:  “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”

The response from Jesus is to recount six of the ten commandments, more or less. The six commandments he recounts are the latter half of the Mosaic Decalogue, which is what scholars call the Ten Commandments when they don’t want you to know what they’re talking about.   Interestingly, these are the six that have to do with how we relate to other human beings rather than how we relate to God.   All of them are in essentially the same form we hear them in Deuteronomy 5 and Exodus 20...except for the final commandment.  You know, the one about coveting and desiring stuff.  

But the man recognizes these statements, and tells Jesus that he has kept every one of the commandments his whole life long.

Of the three Gospels that recount this story, Mark is the only one that capture the reaction of Jesus to this man, and it’s not a hostile one.  Jesus recognizes the authenticity of his desire to live a good life, and as Mark says, he loved him.

The answer he offers up next is not intended to be a curse, or to set an impossible measure for this man.   Jesus is simply telling him the one thing he was missing.  All you need to do to follow me, says Jesus, is sell everything you own, give the proceeds to those in need, and follow me.

Ack.

The man goes away grieving, and shocked, and it is impossible, from an honest heart, to blame him.    What is being asked of him?   He’s being told to let go of everything he has, and to commit himself fully to Jesus.   There’s not a one of us who’d have had a different reaction.  Let go of everything?  How could we even begin to consider it?

Jesus talks to his disciples as this good-hearted soul wanders away despondent, and his words to them don’t exactly clear things up.  He tells them that it is immensely difficult for the wealthy to enter heaven.

Historically, this is where Christianity has begun to waffle.  

Hearing from Jesus that it is harder for a rich person to enter heaven than for a camel through the eye of a needle, pastors like to comfort their congregations with a story they found in their collections of sermon anecdotes.  

That story told how the “Eye of the Needle” is the name of a small gate into Jerusalem, which camels would pass through but it was sorta tight and you had to unload it and re-load it.   If you’ve heard that story, let me note that it is completely and utterly without any basis in the historical record.  There was no such gate.  That story appears to have been made up at some point in the late 19th century.

What Jesus is saying is exactly what he was saying.  It’s taking a thousand pound animal, and cramming it through a one/half-by-two millimeter opening.  It’s not impossible.  Given patience and a very sharp exacto knife, this is entirely doable, but it tends to be messy and time-consuming, not to mention extremely unpleasant for the camel.

That’s not good news for us, because we are a wealthy people.   None of us live a life anything like that of a first century Judean.  Even an unusually wealthy man would have had nothing like what most of us take for granted.  I’m not talking about smartphones and nav systems and giant hi-def flat screen tvs and giving your daughter a BMW M6 convertible on her sixteenth birthday.  I’m talking hot and cold running water, and lights that turn on and off at the flick of a switch, and access to antibiotics.  

We are a wealthy people globally.  If you look at the net-worth of the average American household following the crash of 2008, we went from having...on average...$126,000 in total assets to $77,000 in total assets.   That may have been a forty percent drop, but it still meant that the average American household was in the ninetieth percentile of wealth globally.   The truth of that is driven home by spending any time in the rest of the world.   We are a wealthy, wealthy people.

And the habits and patterns of that life are difficult to let go.  We like the power that comes with wealth, and the patterns of social relationship that come with wealth.  It holds us, and it defines us, and it keeps us from seeing the world as Christ saw it.   The great challenge, for all of those who encounter material prosperity, is how to prevent that from defining us, grasping us and keeping us from responding when Jesus asks us to put it all down, and to follow him.

That’s our struggle, and it’s a struggle worth having.

Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.

The Bridge

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

10.07.12; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Mark 10:2-16

So why should I even care about history, asked one of my boys this week.   What does it matter?   In large part, this question came because first quarter interims are coming out, God help us.   But it’s also a legitimate question.  Why care?  Why does history matter, in this era of tweeting immediacy and that-was-so-five-minutes-ago forgetting?

It matters for a whole bunch of reasons, but one of the most significant reasons is that it radically deepens our understanding of our world.   It creates connections, lets us see trends, or shows us the peculiar ironies of life.   It’s necessary for citizenship, but it’s also a deep ground of poetry and creativity.

There was an odd historical echo this week, which I caught in a recent article about a bridge in Rome.   The bridge is called the Milvian bridge, which spans the river Tiber.   Evidently there’s been a trend there started by an Italian novel.   The trend involves two teenagers in love.   To show your love, you take a padlock, lock it to a lamppost on the bridge, and then hurl the key into the Tiber.   We’ll be together forever, it says, with the kind of great romantic flourish that really really works when you’re sixteen and your whole world is that other person.

There are two problems with this.  First, everyone got into it.  It became the thing that every single teen couple did, to the point where there were so many padlocks weighing down one of the lampposts that the lamppost collapsed.  Then, of course, the locks started going elsewhere...on grates, pretty much anywhere.  The bridge became absolutely cluttered with locks.

Then there was problem number two.   When you’re sixteen, forever is...well...shall we say, just a little bit shorter than eternity on a cosmic scale.  If my memory of high school relationships serves, all of eternity tends to be average between two weeks and two months.   And so not only did locks pile up, but so did the angry graffiti, as jilted seventeen-year-olds scrawled their displeasure at their betrayal.  

And this was a problem, because the Milvan bridge isn’t exactly new, even by Roman standards.  It’s not like the Wilson Bridge or the American Legion Bridge, or any of those other spans across the Potomac that make images of commuter hell dance in our heads.  The Milvian bridge is truly ancient, dating back to the year 206. 

It also has a particularly important place in the history of Christianity.   In the year 312, there was a battle on that bridge that changed the entire direction of our faith.   In the mess and struggle that was the Roman empire, two leaders were vying for power.  There was Maxentius, who had claimed power in Rome.  And there was Constantine, who was consolidating his power in the East.   As the story goes, Maxentius arrayed his forces to block access to the bridge, with the river at his back.   When Constantine was marching his army to the city, he had a vision of the Greek letters Chi and Rho in sky, with the Greek words En Touto Nika around them.  Those letters are the “CHR” in Christ,  and that phrase means “In this Sign, Conquer.”  And so...in perhaps the single most impressive misinterpretation of a vision in the history of Jesus...Constantine took this as meaning that Jesus was going to wipe out all of his enemies.   He ordered his troops to put the symbol on their shields, and on October 28, 312, Constantine’s army routed Maxentius, confidently killing thousands upon thousands of his troops in the name of Jesus.  

Maxentius himself drowned in the Tiber trying to flee, but Constantine recovered his corpse, chopped off the head, and then paraded through Rome with the head on a pole.  Again, I’m not sure how that works with the whole WWJD thing, but maybe Constantine hadn’t gotten the bracelet in his welcome pack yet.

Constantine soon after declared Christianity the official religion of the empire, and Christian faith and political power were fused.   Conversion became something done at the edge of a sword, and the radical, transforming ethic of love for neighbor and enemy became more of an afterthought.

Of all the promises that have been sworn and broken on the Milvian bridge, that was perhaps the most significant.

Todays reading from Mark’s Gospel is all about commitments made and broken, and it’s one that is particularly hard on our ears.   Jesus has been challenged by a group of Pharisees on the question of whether it was acceptable for a man to divorce his wife.   His response is intense and uncompromising.   Even though divorce was a part of ancient Jewish practice, Jesus seems to take an absolutist line on the issue.  

When they ask if it’s acceptable, he comes back at them with another question.  What does Torah say?   The Pharisees know the answer to this, of course.  In Deuteronomy 24, a man is given the right to divorce for pretty much any reason.   Jesus comes back at them with more primal Torah, reminding them that the creation stories of Genesis speak of men and women as inescapably woven up together.  They become one flesh, part of the same thing, and that cannot be divided.

Back in the privacy of a home, Jesus goes further in his conversations with his disciples, explicitly stating that remarriage is adultery, for both men and for women.   And here, most of us struggle.   I know I do.  How can this be so?  It seems remarkably harsh and unforgiving, even in context.

But now, as the reality of divorce is all around us, it is a real struggle passage.  Can we honestly say that anyone who remarries is sinning as they rebuild their life?   Is rediscovering the ability to not just trust another but love another after a relationship has fallen apart sinful?

I don’t think, in grace, that’s where Christ would be trying to take us now with this teaching.

Instead, I take several things away from this passage.  

First, I see that Jesus radically values our connectedness to one one another.  When he describes marriage, he’s not presenting it as a legal contract between two persons or between two families.  He doesn’t understand it as something that implies ownership.   Instead, he presents marriage as part of our created nature and purpose, part of the most primal understanding of how human beings were created to live together.   He also doesn’t see that connectedness as something that is mediated by gender imbalances.  The two are one, equal.

Second, I’m reminded that in truth, it’s important not to imagine that divorce is ever quite as complete a distancing from the other as we might think.  That’s not because there’s a difference between legal status and existence.   That’s not just because of kids and the juggling craziness of managing that life.   It goes deeper than that.

Part of that depth comes from our history.  We are creatures of story, who built our identities from the layers of experience that have formed our lives.   Our narrative shapes who we are, and the memories of both hope and pain are an integral part of our being.  The experience of ending a relationship, as hard as it might have been or as necessary as ending as it might have been, it remains a part of our story.  Those parts of us are always there.

But a larger part comes from the spiritual ground of Christ’s teachings.   If we are all connected and woven together by the eternal love of our Creator, are we ever truly separate from someone, even someone that we have closed off relationship with?    That bridge remains between human beings, no matter how defaced it might be with graffiti or how stained it might be from the blood of battle.

Third, and from those grounds, I think it is vital for us to understand “adultery” as Jesus did.  Adultery is not just the physical act of canoodling with that zaftig intern who flashes her thong at you.  It begins and has its root as a state of the heart, a way of thinking that stands in the way of covenant relationship.   Where Jesus talks about it in Matthew 5, he makes it clear that this is what counts.  Where relationships are broken, that brokenness is not random.  It starts inside.

And the damage that divorce does can worm its way deep into a soul.   Not the legal part of the divorce, mind you.  But the hurt that comes from the real thing, the breaking of that connection is real, and intense.  I’ve walked with friends through that process, and I’ve seen how deep those wounds can go, and how long they can last. 

But that souls might be wounded and hurt, that their state of heart might be in need of healing, that doesn’t mean Jesus is asking us to condemn or cast them aside.   The church has taken that route in past, shunning and judging and condemning.  But that was never part of the true path, any more than the slaughter on the Milvian bridge represented Christ’s true nature.   

Jesus never did that himself, not ever.  Those who still carry wounds are to be welcomed, and comforted, and as time and sustained grace make able, restored.   That means finding the strength to trust in covenant relationship again.  That means really being able to come to terms with one’s own history, reconciling oneself to what was, and not allowing it to poison what might be.

Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.