20 Pentecost Proper 22
6 Oct 2024
As I pondered what to say to you today, knowing these are not texts that easily preach themselves, I came across these words from one preacher: “Babies, not Pharisees – babies, not even well-behaved disciples – are the picture of the Kingdom of God.”[1]
It all boils down to this. We adults spend far too much time concerned with either the mundane or those things over which we have no control and we worry far too much about salvation (what is right and what is wrong in the path to obtaining eternal life) than about just living.
Children are those for whom we must care. They don’t take care of us, they don’t run the world. In the same way God will take care of us if we do not try to make the rules. Yes we need rules to make our life here safe and tolerable and healthy, but we tend to make rules to control others. Stop lights and roundabouts so we don’t crash into one another, but not book bans. Sometimes I think God would just like us to quit meddling in other people’s business and take care of what really matters: creation and each other.
Jesus speaks of how we are justified before God: not by marriage or divorce, but by faith. In his answer to the question asked by the Pharisees, Jesus actually places both parties on an equal footing when he says, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.” Notices that Jesus speaks of women divorcing husbands as well as husbands divorcing wives. That is not in Torah.
Sadly, this passage has been used and abused over the centuries to prohibit divorce and to demean and abuse women. Jesus, however, never teaches that which would lead to harm, and a bad marriage most certainly can lead to great harm. But he is right when he says it is not lawful, for it is not legality as we think of it, but the natural order as intended by God. In that order, as God intended, there would never be abuse of one human by another and in that sense mistreatment of a spouse, and mistreatment of children, is a violation of what God intended the natural order to be. The law of God, the way of God, is the way of love. It is, alas, our nature as humans to make ourselves into gods and dispense our own will on others.
Our reading from Hebrews even addresses this, but in a way that is difficult to see. Jesus is the model for us to follow and he leads by being one of us and suffering like us and for us. It is the unique message of Christianity, the stumbling block for so many.
What, then, is the message for us in this place and this time? It is NOT that marriages should never end and it is NOT that those who do lead, as Job did, a blameless life will not have bad things happen. Rain falls on the righteous and the sinner alike.
I believe that the message is about how we should try to conduct our lives. Jesus is our model; his words and actions our guideposts.
We will not live lives that are free from sorrow; bad things happen. Hurricane Helene did not differentiate between those on the political right or left, nor Christian from Jew or Muslim, or for that matter non-believers. Job may have believed everything was caused by the will of God; I am more inclined to believe that sun and rain fall on all of us equally; evil is caused by human intention.
We all inhabit this one beautiful and frightening world. I think that Jesus says God intends for us to live in it with love and respect for each other, which then leaves us the all the resources we need to practice the beatitudes, to worship our God, and to love each other and the world in which we dwell, every golden piece of it.
[1] Sermons that Work. Proper 22, Year B. The Rev. Jacob Smith rector of Calvary – St. George’s Episcopal Church in New York, N.Y.
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