The Perilous Space Between the Gospel and the Bible

Mark 10: 1-12

A sermon preached at the Chapel of the Unnamed Faithful/Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary

October 3, 2006

TOP SEVEN REASONS YOU SHOULD BE GLAD YOU’RE NOT PREACHING ON THIS TEXT

7. You don’t even have to pretend that you’ve sifted through all the commentaries to sort out all the differences in marriage and divorce customs in the time of Jesus.

6. You don’t have to figure out how to keep the straight, married- but- never-divorced people in the congregation from tuning out.

5. You don’t have to face the look from divorced people in the congregation whose faces are saying, “I better not feel guilty when this sermon is over,” or even, “Maybe, but you didn’t know my ex.”

4. You don’t have to face the look from single never-been-married people in the congregation who are just wishing they could find someone to spend time with who is drug-free, disease free and doesn’t wince when you say “God.”

3. You don’t have to face the gay, lesbian, bi-sexual and trans-gendered people in the congregation whose faces are saying, “You’d better not say that God’s intention in creation is only fulfilled in heterosexual relationships.”

2. You don’t have to wonder whether the congregation will say, “Well, he’s from Texas, so what do you expect?”

1. You don’t have to flog yourself for not preaching one of the other lections instead.

So, why did I choose the text? Because I knew it would make me sweat, and I knew it would make me leap.

I needed to sweat because I hadn’t preached on this text in 20 years and the last time I did, I was a baby preacher and all I knew how to do was to try to tell the congregation what it all meant; to explain it to death. Preachers who spend their careers explaining texts to their parishioners Sunday after Sunday will come to the end of their careers and realize that they’ve committed the sin of holding the scripture at arm’s length, and, at some level, they will be desperately sad. Preaching is about having an encounter with the text; wrestling it to the ground, being thrown on our backs by it, and reporting the encounter to our people.

I needed to leap for the reason that we all need to leap; so that we don’t all end up as sad and pathetic as the Pharisees in this story.

So there was a crowd of people around Jesus, and a few of them, maybe hoping to rally the sad and tired moralists in the crowd, asked Jesus a question, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” This is a little like asking a federal judge in Chicago, “Has Chicago been known to have corruption in government?” It’s ridiculous, because they know the answer, and it’s pathetic because it shows how wrapped up they are in their own small world of rules and in the plot they are unfolding to trip Jesus up.

So, you can imagine Jesus sighing to himself, “Oh, Christ.. (or whatever his equivalent was). Then he decided to relate to their small world of rules, so he asked them, “What did Moses command you?” And having Deuteronomy 24 tattooed on their arms, they did that college football quarterback thing of looking at the game plan on the laminated sheet around their forearms. Having acted as though they had found the answer, they reported, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her.” I imagine them with a kind of Bill O‘Reilly going- in- for- the- kill kind of self satisfaction on their faces.

He responded to the Pharisees, “Yeah, well, I really can’t get inside Moses’ head to know why he did that, except that peoples’ relationships were failing and they needed a way to feel that they weren’t going to fall outside God’s love. Making up loopholes is what we do when we don’t know what else to do. It’s how we’re made.”

“But can I draw your attention to something else. It’s the thing God wanted in the first place...” and here Jesus speaks in the words of his tradition; that God had created man and woman for each other.

Now, here’s where we have to make the decision about whether we’re going to leap. The Bible, our family history, the book that forms us and shapes us, says that God’s intention in creation is that man and woman should be joined, so it appears the case is closed, if all you read is this verse. If the role in the world to which we are called is as rule enforcers, we need go no further. Jesus said it, I believe it, that settles it. Divorcees, tough luck. Gay lovers, too bad. Single folks, better get looking.

Except that leaves out the part when the disciples were arguing over who was the greatest, and he was so exasperated at their pettiness and smallness that he took a nameless, powerless person, a child, a personna non grata in the ancient world, put that little child in plain sight and said, “This is where it’s at.” Human custom was all against him. Human custom said that children should be invisible. But Jesus appealed to something deeper.

And it leaves out the part when a Canaanite woman who the disciples wanted no part of came to Jesus requesting that he cast a demon out of her daughter. He allowed as how his mission was really closer to home. He even used rough language with her, about throwing food to dogs. She said even dogs ate the crumbs that fell from the master’s table, and when she did, something happened in him. Imagine, the Son of God struck straight in the face by the Gospel, and he looked at her and said, “Wow, you’ve changed me” (or at least that’s what I hear).

If Jesus loved children and learned from Canaanites, then he was operating under radical instructions. And now the question is, “Did the radical instructions stop when he died?”

There are plenty of really intelligent, devoted Christians in this world who squarely believe that it’s dangerous to go beyond the limits of what Jesus said. You know what? They’re right. It’s very dangerous to be caught in the fantastically messy world between the Gospel and the Bible. The Bible is what people wrote down hoping in some measure to capture the fullness of the Gospel. But they had their own fears and constraints. They faced all manner of reasons why the cultural status quo was the best idea. And they made their decisions, and we’ve got to make ours.

Here’s where I am: Given how radical Jesus’ approach was to the rule minders of his day, given how he turned his attention so easily to those outside the established safety zone, I hear Jesus saying that God’s intention for us in creation is to be yoked (that’s the wondrous verb used in verse 9, “what God has yoked together”). We were made for each other. That’s it. So now we have the God given challenge and gift to find the person or persons to whom we are meant to be yoked. God did admit to a mistake in creation. Genesis tells us that God said, “It’s not good for the man to be alone.” That’s the point. We have the gift of discovering out of all creation who God intends to walk along side us. And so a man may walk along side a woman. Or a woman may walk alongside a woman. Or a man may walk alongside a family of his own choosing because his own family has dismissed him from their table. And they walk alongside each other because God said, “It’s not good to be alone.”