Poolesville Presbyterian Church
10.07.12; Rev. David Williams
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.
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