Back in the days when I was layperson, I would sometimes amuse myself as I listened to the readings by speculating on what the preacher would do with the texts that were read. Sometimes I would hear something strange or challenging, and wonder whether the preacher would take on that challenge. In such cases, I was usually disappointed. I came to learn over the years I attended Episcopal churches as a layperson that there were preachers who did everything they could to avoid discussing difficult texts. There were some, of course, who always avoided preaching on the texts at hand.
For me, preaching is all about that struggle with the text, wrestling with it to try and find some word to say to my congregation. As I said last week, I like to face those challenges head-on, in part because I don’t want anyone to judge me as a homiletical wimp. Sometimes, it’s hard to find something to say. Sometimes the texts seem barren, or so alien to our lives that they are irrelevant, and sometimes, they seem banal. Other times, it’s just the opposite. The lectionary might present us with three texts that are so interesting, so rich, so challenging, that it’s difficult to find one’s way through.
This set of propers is just such an occasion. We are reading from two of the theologically richest books of the bible, Job and the Letter to the Hebrews, and the gospel today presents us with some of Jesus’ hardest sayings, hardest particularly for our culture. These words of Jesus are so hard for us to hear, because they seem so foreign, so antithetical to our contemporary culture. Divorce is a reality. Some of us have been through painful breakdowns in relationships; certainly we all know people whose marriages have ended in divorce. Few of us would say that divorce is never wrong, but few would also say that divorce is never the appropriate end of a marriage.
So our tendency is simply to disregard such statements when we come across them in the Bible, and especially when we hear Jesus saying them. Simply to dismiss them as ancient relics, though, fails to do them justice, and fails to wrestle with their implications. Jesus’ words about divorce do not come in a vacuum. Mark puts these words in response to a question from the Pharisees. But it’s more than a question, it’s something of a contest or attempt to trick or trap Jesus.
The grounds for divorce made for a lively debate among Jewish rabbis in Jesus’ day, and the Pharisees’ question was intended to get him to commit to one side or other, the side of leniency or strictness. But as is often the case in the gospels, Jesus responded here, not with an answer, but with a question of the Pharisees. He used their answer as a way of criticizing them. God allowed divorce in Torah, because of human weakness—hardness of heart, but God intended that male and female be together. Here, Jesus seems to allow for divorce, on account of adultery, and he also seems to allow wives to sue for divorce.
We are tempted, as Christians often are, to read in these words of Jesus, these words in favor of life-long commitment between husbands and wives, and his criticism of the disciples for not allowing children to come to him, that what Jesus is espousing are what have come to be called “family values.” The connection between family and Christianity has become so strong that in many minds they are synonymous. Many of us have only found our way back to church through marriage and child-rearing, and we view the church as a last bulwark against all that assails the family in contemporary culture. But it’s not quite so simple as that.
Jesus had many things to say that undermined the family in favor of the community of his disciples. He rejected his own family in favor of his disciples in chapter 3 of Mark, and later he will speak of conflict within families, brother taking up sword against brother. So Jesus’ message was not, primarily, about family values. When we come to his statement here about welcoming children we are inclined to interpret it somewhat sentimentally. I am always reminded of the mid twentieth century art work of the American painter Warner Sallman. You may not recognize his name, but I’ll wager all of you are familiar with his paintings. Sallman’s paintings are kitschy, emotional, childlike, showing Jesus with long blond hair, blue eyes. There’s one where he’s sitting in a green meadow, surrounded by children and lambs.
It’s the sort of image that continues to tug at our heartstrings, because it seems to depict a simpler time when nuclear families were intact, and Christianity was a part of everyone’s life, times when the bumper sticker “the family that prays together, stays together” was descriptive not nostalgic.
It’s that sort of nostalgia that drives much of our political discourse concerning family values. Politicians and pundits appeal to an idealized past when white middle class families had fathers who provided financially for their families, wives were stay-at-home moms, children were well-behaved. Of course the politicians who appeal to such imagery are very often no better at keeping Jesus’ teachings than those they criticize the most. I won’t bother reciting the litany of conservative politicians who have gained and retained power by appealing to family values but have divorced and remarried, or had affairs, or the like. We seem to quickly forgive them, or ignore their misdeeds.
We like the idea of family values, and want our politicians and churches to pay lip service to them, but we don’t necessarily want too close scrutiny paid to our own lives. And of course, every time the church emphasizes “family” it is being exclusive, it is driving a wedge between certain kinds of “families” and those who don’t have such relationships. Thus singles, gays and lesbians, people who are divorced or widowed, single parents, or couples who don’t have children are left on the outside, looking in. The community that Christ is bringing together invites all into relationship, not just people who live in traditional American families.
We struggle in the tension between ideal and real. The reading from Job presents another kind of ideal picture, that of Job, a righteous man, who was successful economically. The two went hand in hand, for in the ancient near east, as is often the case even today, people see a connection between their relationship with God and their financial well-being. “God helps those who help themselves.” Throughout the Hebrew Bible, those who are faithful to God the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are rewarded with wives, children, wealth in cattle and sheep.
The book of Job undermines that connection. Job is suddenly beset by all manner of disaster. His wealth vanishes, his children are killed, and finally, he is forced to suffer from a skin disease. But why? That is the question this book tries to answer. As we read, we may be struck by just how very strange the world of the book of Job seems to be. In the first place, Satan (translated here as “the satan” literary the adversary, or prosecuting attorney, to use our language) seems to be on relatively good terms with God. It is God who brings Job to the satan’s attention, “Consider my servant Job.” Satan draws the obvious conclusion, he’s a righteous man because he’s got an easy life.
Having watched her husband lose everything, and losing it all with him, Job’s wife urged him, “Do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God and die.” Her response to Job’s suffering, and her own, is very human, comprehensible, even warranted. When you’ve lost everything, I mean everything, anger and despair are perfectly appropriate. But what fascinates me in her response is not her statement, “Curse God, and die” By the way, those words were so harsh that ancient scribes replaced the word curse, with bless. No what’s interesting is the question that she asks Job first, “Do you persist in your integrity?”
What does that question mean? From Job’s response, we get some sense of its intent. For Job, being righteous meant accepting what happened to him as coming from God, the good and the bad. As Jesus said, “the rain falls on the just and on the unjust.” In fact, that answer will not suffice for Job, In the coming chapters he will challenge God to help him understand his fate, he will ask God to explain; in short, he will put God on trial. But throughout his ordeal, one thing remained certain, Job persisted in his integrity. He maintained his faith in God. His actions, his statements, everything he did in the book, was an attempt to understand who God was in light of his faith in God.
Now, don’ get me wrong. I am not saying that people who suffer pain, or loss, or hardship, should simply accept it as God’s will. No, it’s perfectly appropriate to question God, to question one’s faith, to feel despair. What I’m saying is that Job’s response to his plight was in perfect keeping with who he was. It was who he was. It came from his deepest sense of who he was, it came from his soul. When Job challenged God, he was speaking from his integrity.
That’s a word that is hard to say in this day and age. We look around at our culture, our political discourse, our celebrities, we look even at ourselves and too often we find, not integrity, but competing selves, masks that we display to particular audiences or groups of people. I’m no better at this than anyone else. We even do it with God. That’s part of the reason we see so many hypocrites in our culture, politicians who rail against gay marriage, pass defense of marriage acts, then are themselves caught in affairs, Clergy who spout morality but do the same, good Christians who are caught for financial misdeeds.
Our role as Christians and as the Church is not to decry immorality, but rather as Jesus and Job did, to live with integrity, to approach all of life, and all of our relationships with honesty, open-ness, and sincerity. If we do that, aspire to that, we will do more than keep this or that commandment, we will show god’s love in the world.
