Sunday October 6th, 2024 Worship

I always seem to get the difficult texts the week that I’m out of the office and have less time to prepare my sermons. I was so excited to glance at the sermon texts on Monday morning to find Jesus’ teaching on divorce, instantly becoming envious of all my colleagues who opted to celebrate St. Francis this weekend and do a blessing of the pets instead. I’ll have to remember that for next year! Yet, I think being away when I have challenging sermon texts is good because it gets me out of my usual sermon writing routine and allows me to be open to new perspectives on what the Gospel is trying to convey. Lord knows I needed that this week because I was not looking forward to preaching on this Gospel! But, like usual, my colleagues and the Spirit came through with glimpses of some paths forward.
I was out of the office this week at a retreat at Seabeck for Lutheran clergy in our first three years of call. Our topic this year was stewardship, which again I wasn’t super excited about. As someone in my last year of this first call training, we usually had time in previous years where someone would remind us over and over that we just have to ask for more money and that will fix our budget problems, so we didn’t really want to listen to that for another three days. Instead, we spent most of the time talking about all the other kinds of stewardship beyond financial stewardship and giving. We talked about stewardship of relationships, of time, of our selves. These themes of stewardship that really stick out as we hear the readings this week.
During this first call retreat, I was also introduced to a lot of new to me poetry, including the work of Irish Catholic poet and theologian Pádraig Ó Tuama. If you have never experienced his poetry, it is beautiful and thought-provoking. We did an activity our last night with his poem called “The Facts of Life.” Before I go any further, I want to take a moment to read it for you now because it deeply influenced the way I thought about our readings today.
As I listened to this poem being spoken on our retreat, I couldn’t help but hear the way that our Scripture readings for today undergird all the important points that Ó Tuama is making about the facts of life. That we were born, and we will die ; or as we are reminded on Ash Wednesday, we are created from dust and to dust we shall return. As we are reminded again this week in Genesis too, we are earth creatures! That we are created for companionship and for community. Whether that is found in marriage, in friendship, in parenthood, or in mentorship. We are created to love and to be loved.
Yet, anyone who has ever been in any kind of relationship knows that it is possible to hurt the ones we love and to have them hurt us in return. It is a fact of life that at some point, our hearts will be broken. But, it’s also a fact that they will not stay broken. It is a fact that sometimes we will love enough and sometimes we won’t. And there can be so many reasons for that.
Our current life circumstances are vastly different than the religious and social laws of Jesus’ time. This decree was trying to protect women, who would have been outcast if they had been divorced. Women didn’t have the agency to call for a divorce unless it was under very specific, difficult to prove circumstances. Marriages were designed for political and social advantages, so it’s trying to discourage men from abandoning their wives every time a seemingly better opportunity comes along. This reading is grounded in how we care for each other in relationships, instead of just seeing relationships as an obligation to fulfill. Women couldn’t work, couldn’t own land, couldn’t do so many things if they didn’t have a husband or a father to do them for her. So as frustrating as that system is to us today, Jesus is advocating for women and children here, to bring them into a higher place in society. He isn’t saying 2,000 years later that we must continue to be in harmful, painful, unloved situations. We are created to be in relationship and to love; we are worthy of those things in life.
Yet, we are taught still today that we should be ashamed when marriages end in divorce, even without expressly being taught. But, because of the way that people respond when someone shares that they are divorced or are getting divorced. Whether that be certain denominations not allowing divorced people to receive communion or the “I’m so sorry” filled with pity that people get as a response to this news. I can think of so many incredibly unhappy people who have stayed married because they were told that is what they must do. Yet, I can also think of someone who threw a divorce party to celebrate that they were finally separated from their spouse. This Gospel reading, when taken out of context, causes such incredible amounts of pain. I don’t think anyone, or at least most people, enter a marriage expecting it to end in divorce, even when people get married for the wrong reasons. So, I don’t think it’s the place of the church to add more pain and hardship.
It is a fact of life that we are created for community, for relationships, for love. None of those are required to be romantic. But we are created to care for others and to be cared for; yes, even us introverts. But it is also a fact that we deserve to be loved, to be seen. The reality is that this doesn’t always happen in marriages. We get a lot of “shoulds” in life, the assumptions that we have for ourselves or that others have for us, and it is okay to come back to these facts of life. That we are creatures made of dust, breathed into by the love of God, created for relationship with God and everything else that God created. When we remember these things, we free ourselves to drop some of the shoulds along the way.
Just like the activity that we participated in on our last night, I invite you to think about what other facts of life you can come up with and encourage you to keep coming back to those. When life is painful, difficult, or uncertain, we can remain grounded in these facts. Admittedly, some are more comfortable and comforting than others, but they are all still facts of our existence. And, may you continue to be reminded that you are created to be a part of community. I know that isn’t always easy, but it is a fact that we do not have to live out our existence alone. That we can be seen, be loved, be cared for just the way God sees and cares for us. We get to do that for each other in this life. Or, in the words of Pádraig Ó Tuama:
So you might as well live
and you might as well love.
You might as well love.
You might as well love.