What God Has Joined, Let No One Put Asunder

Charlotte Collins Reed
Christ Episcopal Church
October 4, 2015

22 Proper B

A small group of clergy and lay leaders got together this week at St. Raphael's just down the street and began to make plans for this year's Interfaith Thanksgiving Service.  Some of us have been sitting around the Interfaith planning table for a while.  For others, this was their first planning meeting.  Each year for decades now, this group has planned a thanksgiving service that brings all of us together and focuses on what we have in common, rather than what divides us.  As we talked this week about possible themes for the service, we realized that this Thanksgiving service is what keeps is connected to each other in a world that tries, in a variety of ways, to divide us.  Coming together once a year as we do is a bit like a family reunion.  Perhaps your family reunions are different from the ones I have been too, but if the reunion draws people who are connected by a common ancestor two or more generations back, not everyone knows each other.  We often do not have a lot in common in terms of politics or religion, so fortunately we have family stories to share and talk about, and those stories are what keep us connected to each other.  At our Interfaith Thanksgiving Service, the three faith traditions that come together are the three Abrahamic faiths, so we, too share a common ancestor, and we all give thanks to the same God.  We also noted at our that, even though we only gather once a year, when we gather and give thanks together, we have a bond that has served us well in times of crisis.  After 9/11, for example, we were able to come together, Jews, Christians, and Muslims, stand together, and pray for peace.  Each of the clergy and lay leaders gathered last Monday morning believe that our own faith is strengthened when we live as people who are connected to each other.

Job, on the other hand, is feeling quite disconnected this morning.  In a story that develops over many chapters and raises more questions than answers, Job finds himself tested by Satan and disconnected from his health, his family and friends, his belongings, and his future.  The story raises disturbing questions about God when we hear God agree to let Satan test Job's faith right up to the limit of taking Job's life.  While the intent of the story is to wrestle with the problem of why bad things happen to good people, the story also points to the fundamental importance of being connected with other people as part of our being connected to God.  Job feels quite disconnected from everything and everyone, including God, as he sits on the dung heap this morning.

The Pharisees are not the least bit interested in connections this morning as they arrive to test Jesus.  The gospel is clear that the  the Pharisees have come to test Jesus, not to get his thoughts on divorce.  What the Pharisees really want is to trap Jesus.  When they ask "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?" they full well know the answer.  Deuteronomy 24, verse 1 allows a man to write his wife a certificate of divorce.   So, if Jesus answers "no," he will be contradicting the law of Moses.  Jesus will also be in trouble with the Romans, since just four chapters ago, John the Baptist lost his head, literally, for criticizing Herod Antipas who had divorced his wife to marry his brother's former wife.  If Jesus says "yes," he will have raised an abundance of legal and theological questions about marriage.  The Pharisees seem to have Jesus in a loose/loose situation, which is right where they want him.

At this point, Jesus may not be squirming, but we are.  I doubt any of us came to church this morning to hear Jesus talk about divorce.  This is perhaps one of the most difficult and painful gospel readings in our lectionary and evidence, once again, that I don't pick them-I just preach them.  We hear hard words from Jesus, ones we would rather not hear and ones that cause great pain.  The Episcopal Church takes the issues of marriage, divorce, and remarriage very seriously, but Jesus' words this morning are far more strict than church teaching.  Jesus' words are uncomfortable at best, and at worst leave people feeling alienated from the church and from the gospel.  Is making people feel marginalized and vulnerable what Jesus intends?

Jesus responds to the Pharisees with scripture as he usually does when being tested.  But Jesus does not respond with the passage from Deuteronomy that the Pharisees have in mind.  Jesus raises the stakes much higher, as Jesus typically does when being tested, and reminds us of the stories of creation.  Those stories remind us that we are all connected, not just those who are married.  Jesus' answer to the Pharisee's question about divorce is really a teaching about all those places where hardness of heart separate us from each other, where the vulnerable are exploited and people are pushed to the margins of society.  And the vulnerable and the marginalized are exactly the people Jesus seeks to draw into the Kingdom of God.  The law in Deuteronomy allowed a man to divorce his wife, but not vice versa.  Women who were divorced, along with their children, often lived in poverty, where they were among the marginalized and the vulnerable.  When Jesus finishes with the Pharisees test, he takes little children into his arms and blesses them.  The disciples try to shoo the children away, because children had no honor or status in society.  But Jesus chastises the disciples because, again, the marginalized and the vulnerable are exactly the people Jesus wants to draw in.

This morning, Jesus holds before us the deep connections God intended for us in creation and intends for us now.  In the midst of a world divided by politics, the ever widening chasm between rich and poor, our failure to come together and find solutions to gun violence, those divide between who have food and those who need it, Jesus calls us to live as people who are connected to each other. Jesus has taken a simple but divisive question and raised the stakes.  In the stories of creation, what God has joined together is not just those who are joined in marriage, but the whole human family.
Amen.