Speaker 1: Loves it. Loves it. When we make something creative with the relationships in our lives, culture will change. Love expands to fill it up. Today is the fifth Sunday of Eastertide in the Christian calendar.
I know you're all counting. You're not. You're not. You're not counting. But this is the fifty day season that follows Lent's forty days, and we have been considering how the resurrection makes life strange.
Our series is called Strange New World and what we're looking at is the infrastructure of our life together as it's shaped by the event of Easter. Now we started out with the Eucharist as this ritual Jesus insists we remember him by. Then we talked about mission where we grapple with what it means to be sent into a world as followers of Jesus to participate in the renewal of all things. Last week we waded into the waters of baptism. Today you even witnessed baptism so how cool is that?
On a baptism Sunday at Commons, we are reminded what it looks like for grace to flow through ordinary substance. And it's through this sacrament of water that we see we are not meant to do faith on our own. We are called to follow Jesus into the waters and into a wider family. So far, we've seen how Eucharist and mission and baptism are these communal practices of faith. But, of course, we're not done.
We're still in the series. And today, we're gonna talk about marriage and partnership. I did it. I totally did it. Alright.
Let's pray. Loving God, to whom all hearts are open and all desires known, Thank you for the mystery of what it means to gather. As we pray and hear other people's stories and listen to the scriptures and connect and serve and sing, we sense something of your design in it all. That the best of what the church can be is so good. It is so good for our bodies.
It is so good for our inner life. It is so good for the world. And before we take a moment to try to settle ourselves a little more, I thank you for all of the saints and sinners who have struggled to make the church what it is today. We wouldn't be here without people who cared about finding you where two or three are gathered. And now, we consider marriage and partnership and all of our very human feelings about love, we take a deep breath to remind ourselves that we are here in this present moment, And whatever hurt or longing we hold, you know it.
And we are safe with you. Amen. So in my late twenties and into my thirties, I had a bit of a decade long crisis when it came to marriage and partnership. I was living in Vancouver, honestly, for me, a terrible place to find to find love. Great place.
Just tough place to find love. So while I was trying to date through grad school and pastoral ministry, I picked up a bit of a side hustle, wedding officiating. Now I had a religious license to do weddings thanks to my ordination process, and it was then that I was invited by a couple of entrepreneurial friends to join a team of wedding officiants called Young Hip and Married. It's a real company name. And after I joined Young Hip and Married, I got into a bit of a discussion with someone from my church who didn't think it was appropriate for me to use my religious license to do weddings outside the church.
Now, I didn't think I had any problem with it as I consider all love to be sacred, and it was such an honor to be invited as clergy to make a ceremony sacred for couples. Also, Vancouver plus grad school was so expensive that sometimes a minister just needs to get paid. But still, this person's challenge, it did vex me. And to my surprise, it was resolved by the voice of God or something like that. So I remember taking a run at Jericho Beach and wondering, was it okay?
That I officiate all of these weddings. And as I ran and panted, an idea struck me with such strength. I had to bend over, like, just to collect myself. It occurred to me that officiating weddings was how God would heal me. Sitting at the feet of other people's love stories, inside or outside of the church, would renew my imagination for love.
So I finished that run, never ran again, and I proceeded with confidence. I have married over 200 couples, and their stories of partnership have healed me. So today, we're gonna talk about what's God got to do with it, healing or wrecking, elevated or subordinated, and love infrastructure. And I tell you this story about my journey to love through wedding officiating because I believe it's representative of what it feels like to find God here and now. Yes.
Absolutely. You can learn things about love and partnership from the bible. But it's not as simple as looking up the word marriage in the back of the bible on your bookshelf and finding 10 verses for lasting love. What you find in the scriptures is patriarchs with one or more wives and concubines, Job losing everything and his wife saying, curse God and die. You get a sexy piece of ancient poetry between the Shulamite woman and her beloved shepherd in the Song of Songs with no guarantee that their passion maps onto marital vows.
You get wisdom from Proverbs like better to live on a corner of the roof than to share a house with a quarrelsome wife. You get advice from the Apostle Paul like marriage is necessary for church leadership, a circle of mutual submission can counter Roman household codes. You get Paul himself saying, honestly, I wish you'd all stay single like me. It's a challenge to find the wisdom we need for marriage and partnerships today, but it is not impossible. So we'll focus on Jesus' teaching about marriage in Matthew 19, and it starts in the context of healing.
So Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem, and large crowds followed him, and he healed them there. Some pharisees came to him to test him. They asked, is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for Amy and every reason? Now in this tableau, two things are side by side. The first is that Jesus goes about the work of healing the world even as he turns toward Jerusalem and moves toward his own death.
Like this guy, he can't help it. If you're hurting, he wants to help. And the second is that the Pharisees, these popular and pious religious leaders say, what about this broken thing? A man divorcing his wife for any reason, can you heal that? Now the pharisees are trying to drag Jesus into controversy.
They're a part of this Jewish reform movement and Jesus is getting up in their authoritative territory. So what happens is they hit him up with this rabbinical debate. Divorce, it's a given, they say. But can a man divorce his wife for any cause? And the debates happening at the time were between the house of Rabbi Shammai, known for strict and traditional interpretation of the law, and the house of Rabbi Hillel, known for a more lenient and patient understanding of the law.
And the Pharisees are asking Jesus to weigh in on the law of Moses in Deuteronomy from one side or the other. But he doesn't take the bait. Instead, he goes back to the beginning. Jesus replied, haven't you read that at the beginning, the creator made them male and female and said, for this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. So they are no longer two, but one flesh.
Therefore, what God has joined together, let no one separate. Jesus quotes Genesis one twenty seven and two twenty four to say the same thing that he said in the Sermon on the Mount. Here's God's good intention. You are created and you grow up to create. You'll leave one home and start another.
Let no one break apart what God puts together. It seems like a lofty ideal. Right? And when we're faced with ideals, it is easy to, like, squirm a little bit. I mean, not to brag, but I have a pretty great marriage and even it falls short of an ideal.
It's not like Jonathan and I never hurt each other or take these shoddy paths to getting our needs met. We got married later in life, and we don't have children or any pets. Don't throw anything. So does that mean that our family is less than God's ideal? What about divorce and separation?
What about abuse? What about bad dating apps? What about mental health crises and tragedy and loneliness within a partnership? What about not even wanting to get married in the first place? Where does any of that fit into an ideal?
Now it's important that we keep what Jesus is saying in perspective. Jesus isn't a marriage and relationship guru. He's not. He's speaking to pharisees about over, laws given in strictly patriarchal context to couples joined together in their youth through arranged marriages within antiquities shorter, much shorter lifespans. And still and still, an ideal rises up through the cracks in culture to say at least this much, God loves it.
Loves it. When we make something creative with the relationships in our lives, culture will change. Love expands to fill it up. But the pharisees, they're unhappy with his answer. Don't give us Genesis.
We're asking you about the law of Moses. It's in the law where the rubber really meets the road. Why then, they asked, did Moses command that a man give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away? Jesus replied, Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning.
I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife except for sexual immorality and marries another woman commits adultery. Jesus, he sticks to his guns peacefully, of course, like the pacifist that he is. But seriously, he doesn't seem to let anyone off the hook here. The law covers a multitude of sins, but union is meant to last a lifetime, and that's intense. So let's dig into it.
Speaking to this group of men, Jesus says, sure, the law makes concession, but that says more about you than God. Now, it was actually easier to get a divorce in the ancient world than it is for us today. Scratch that. It was easier for men. Men could divorce women for a whole host of reasons.
A loss of a woman's looks, too much rose all day, an unpleasant disposition, arguments with in laws, sickness, and adultery. And while it seems like Jesus is making a concession for sexual immorality, he takes it a step further and says, men, if you waltz out of that marriage and into another, you're committing adultery yourself. And I wonder if we can read a challenge to a double standard here. After all, the Deuteronomy text talks about a woman receiving a certificate of divorce because the man finds, oh, you know just something objectionable about her, only to have it happen to her with another husband. I'd argue that Jesus is in fact holding up a high standard for marriage here, siding with the more conservative rabbinical take.
But Jesus is also reigning in a double standard. It's easy to read so much of what Jesus says all the time as instructive. But sometimes, Jesus is simply descriptive. Unions are places for flourishing. If someone breaks that bond, it splits a couple in two.
And haven't we all felt that tearing? Either because you know of a breakup or you're on the verge of one? Maybe you're even working on healing a rip in a relationship no one even really knows about yet. Can you hear the comfort in this text? I know sometimes these verses have been used to clobber people who need to get out of unhealthy situations.
But just knowing Jesus put language to this rip can be a way to receive consolation. To know the hurt that you feel was not what God wanted for you in the first place. Now, if this were the end of this text, I think we could all just go home now. Okay. God wants perfect unions.
Chop chop. Get to work. But this is not where the conversation ends. In fact, it is where it gets strange. The disciples hear Jesus' response to the pharisees and they say to Jesus, if this is the case, it is better not to marry at all.
And Jesus replies, not everyone can accept a teaching like this, but only those to whom it is given. Then he says, for there are eunuchs who were born that way, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others, and there are even those who choose to live as eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let anyone accept this who can. Now is everyone clear about who eunuchs are? They're a person of the male sex who has been castrated.
In the ancient world, kings regarded eunuchs as ideal to serve in their harems. But for Israel, being a eunuch excluded you from the sacred assembly. So Jesus is countercultural in a couple of ways here. First, Jesus seems to subordinate what he has just elevated. First he said, yeah, two people.
They come together as God intends. Maybe, you know, they have some kids if they can and then they grow old side by side riding their e bikes around town into their seventies. And I can make that joke because I have entered my e bike era. Proudly. That's right.
So on the one hand, yeah, Jesus is saying couplehood. It's great. He's also saying it's not everything. Now it could be that this eunuch language is hyperbolic. Some scholars suggest that's what Jesus is doing here, using the term to refer to anyone who decides not to enter into marriage like himself.
While marriage was the norm in the Jewish culture, there were these communities like Qumran and the Therapeuti who practiced celibacy so that they could better serve others. Real or exaggerated, Jesus is making a point. He's saying, people who have been marginalized or choose to sidestep this form of family have something important to offer this strange new world. The community of God does not grow because we have offspring to grow it. The community of God grows because the spirit of God works through all of our lives to bring about healing and to share that healing so that everyone everyone, no matter if they're divorced or happily married or sexually marginalized or single for a lifetime, everyone can find belonging and purpose as followers of the resurrected Christ.
Jesus blesses union and then reorders it. He says that God has more in mind for unions than just two people in his culture arranged or betrothed to one another for marriage. And God has more in mind for just two people in our culture marrying because they have sweetly fallen in love. I think what Jesus is saying here is that the love of God which he embodied, it cannot and should not be contained. Jesus shows us that he is weaving together a new family, one where those baptized are our sisters and our brothers, our siblings.
So what does all of this look like then? What kind of marriage and relationship advice do we even take from an unmarried messiah and scriptures that say very different things about an institution that keeps changing? If you're married or about to be, what does God want for your marriage? If you're separated or divorced, what does God want next for you? If you're happy and single or single and frustrated, what can God do with that?
And what does any of this have to do with Easter? Honestly, these questions are impossible to answer easily, and I am fine with that. Matters of the human heart and changing cultural norms and discrepancies in power embodied in embedded in the ways that we treat one another and even in our own legal system make easy answers when it comes to human coupling something I would rather avoid. What I am into is the way God keeps loving me and healing me through my partner. He's the best.
What I am into is the way God gives second chances to the ways we form family. What I am into is standing up as a pastor who officiates weddings and believing that the ceremony is sacred when two people say to their community, we are going to love each other and we are going to heal each other and, oh my gosh, we would really love your help along the way. I mean, isn't that the good stuff? And still, before you go, I want to offer one more metaphor to help us when we think about marriage and relationships, being about more than just our own happiness and our own households. I'm gonna meander a bit, but then I'm gonna bring you back.
So in his book, Palaces for the People, Eric Kleinenberg writes a chapter called Safe Spaces. And he means actual spaces in cities, what he popularized as social infrastructure, meaning spaces that shape how people interact in a place. And in this chapter, Kleinenberg goes to West Philadelphia to observe what changed in rundown neighborhoods when empty lots and abandoned houses were remediated. Now, these spaces were transformed into what he calls pocket parks. And when they studied the effects of these pocket parks, they found that 39% reduction in gun violence in and around abandoned buildings that were remediated and a 5% reduction around vacant lots that were fixed up.
Even more, this is wild, the crime didn't just shift to other neighborhoods. It was gone. They couldn't measure it. Kleinenberg argues that it's easy to focus our attention on what we think the problem is, like the criminals. But we'll see real change when we focus on places that bring out the best kind of behavior, pocket parks.
Pocket parks. What if that's what we're building with the love in our lives? What if we cultivate the kinds of relationships that people love to be around? And that kind of change starting at home actually elevates the state of our city and the world. I have got to believe that love taking up space in our run down stories might be at least as impactful as a pocket park.
Think about it. You know those relationships that you love to be around. They make you feel like you can be yourself when you're in their company. There's something constructive with how they deal with their conflict. They don't operate with this constant pettiness or scarcity.
Maybe that's what we're doing. Maybe that's what we're doing with our love. We're making these little parks with our unions where love can flourish. And from there, what is bleak, what is sad, what is violent and lonely will eventually flee. Let us pray.
Loving God, risen Christ, supportive spirit. This strange new world that we live in is one where you do not stop making what is old or broken or misguided into something new. Resurrection is taking up space in our love lives, whatever our relationship status might be. So as we go today, spirit, won't you spark in us a renewal of love? Enter the places where we are hurt and we are worn down and heal us of all that harms us.
Help us to get healthy when it comes to our relationships and give us good spirit, the company that we need. Amen.
Speaker 2: Hey, Jeremy here, and thanks for listening to our podcast. If you're intrigued by the work that we're doing here at Commons, you can head to our website, commons.church, for more information. You can find us on all of the socials commonschurch. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel where we are posting content regularly for the community. You can also join our Discord server.
Head to commons.churchdiscord for the invite, and there you will find the community having all kinds of conversations about how we can encourage each other to follow the way of Jesus. We would love to hear from you. Thanks for tuning in, have a great week. We'll talk to you soon.