“Marriage and Jesus”

October 8, 2006

Scripture Reading:  Mark 10: 2-16

Rev. Dr. Carol  L. Kerr

 Blue Point Congregational Church

This Thursday my sister’s divorce was finalized.  She had been married 20 years.  I was the minister who married them.  So much for that!  My sister and her husband were at the University of Michigan when I was a student there before I was a minister.   I remember meeting my sister’s ex-husband for the first time.  I was nineteen, he and my sister were twenty-five.  I remember his walking into the living room of the co-op, his curly hair and his very vivid blue eyes.  I remember thinking my sister was lucky to date him.   They loved each other deeply then.  They traveled around the world together.  They got married and traveled some more.  They returned to Ann Arbor, got jobs, bought a house.  They have two wonderful children.  But  imperceptibly there began a slow and painful unraveling.  I am not sure where it started.  How it started.  Who started what.  But, a sullen anger crept in like pollution corrupting the air they breathed.  There were job issues.   There was criticism and fighting.  Deep depression.  Long entrenched conversations held them hostage for hours as they tried to “work things out.”  Instead they wore each other out.  It seems the litigation, and separation lasted forever.  Finally, it is done.  At their wedding we celebrated ate cake and danced.  Thursday there was a message on my answering machine.   My mother’s voice,  “Did Cindy call you?  Their divorce is final.  I am glad that is over.  So much fuss.   I’ll talk to you later.”  Click.

This Friday, on the Today Show, Molly and Jason got married live before the national audience.  For several years now, the Today Show has picked a special couple to be married live on T.V.  They then spend months building up to the wedding.  They pick the wedding dress.  They pick the cake, the rings, Molly’s hair style, the honeymoon.  There were other couples competing to be selected.  They had to compete in Karaoke singing, Ballroom dancing, Fiancée fashionista, a “nearly-wed Game” an Obstacle course and an Iron Chef competition.  You can go on line and watch reruns of the wedding if you like.  They have special section that presents the “Bridal Diet Challenge” which states  “They're 5 brides about to say "I do," but first they're committed to saying "I don't," vowing to lose weight before they walk down the aisle. But can they handle the pressure of dieting while also trying to create the perfect wedding?” 

I have married many people, and as a counselor I work with many coupled trying to keep their relationship together.  I want to declare right now that every single thing that was on the Today show web site, and which they spent hours of national television time discussing and thousands upon thousands of dollars buying, the cake, the dress, the ring, the honeymoon, the bridal diet challenge… contributes absolutely nothing to the well being of the couple as a couple.  That is zero as to whether they are going to be happy or not when they are married.  The total lack of concern about the true well being of the relationship bothers me a lot.  For millions of viewers the message is don’t worry about who you are as a couple just spend a lot of money on the dress, and buy these shoes and everything will be alright.   It is the merchandizing of commitment and love.  It is a sham.  Thinking about the depth of pain, and the long anguishing road that my sister and her ex-husband had to travel to arrive at Thursday, the fact that the Today Show presents marriage in such a superficial and ridiculous way on Friday makes me sad.  I am beyond righteous outrage, just sad.   How do we get off this merry-go-round?

Ironically this same week my sister’s divorce is finalized and Molly and Jason get married on the Today show, the churches recommended Bible reading is Mark 10:2-16.  In this passage Jesus talks about marriage and divorce.  Usually Jesus was a foe of legalistic doctrines and literal interpretations of the Jewish tradition.  He gets in trouble for breaking Sabbath laws.  He says, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”  He appears shockingly nonchalant when it comes to observing strict laws on ritual purity.  “This man eats and drinks with sinners!” people protested.  His friends were a wretched lot of tax collectors, prostitutes, sick people, and uneducated fishermen.    That is why it is so shocking when we hear how Jesus responded to the question:  Is it OK for a man who has divorced his wife to get remarried?  We want him to say what Davie Crockett the great American said, “First be sure what you are doing is right, and then go ahead.”  But, instead, Jesus says that anyone, man or woman, who divorced and remarries is committing nothing less than adultery. 

Some of you here today are divorced.  This statement of Jesus can hurt a lot.  I can guarantee you that I am not going to call my sister and say, “For your information, Jesus thought  divorce was sinful and if you get remarried you are committing nothing less than adultery.  Have a nice day!” 

On the one hand, I can soften Jesus’ position a bit by explaining the context in which he was speaking.  In ancient societies, where women rarely owned property, marriage meant a guarantee of support for the most vulnerable members of the society – woman and children.  Without the protection of the laws against divorce, women were totally at the mercy of their husbands and fathers.  In criticizing those who advocated easy divorce (and there were many in Israel who did so in his day), Jesus puts himself on the side of the weak and the vulnerable. 

Even so, Jesus’ position is a tough one.  Jesus would not like our current statistics.  That is that 50% of all marriages end in divorce after lasting on the average of 7.5 years. 

However, did you know that 80% of all divorced people get remarried?  Why is that?  Why do people who know how hard marriage can be, people who have experience the pressure cooker of interpersonal dynamics and have lost, try marriage again?  They are the ones who prove the quips about marriage to be true “The trouble with wedlock is that there’s not enough wed and too much lock. (Christopher Morley)  Or,  “The most happy marriage I can picture… would be the union of a deaf man to a blind woman.  (Samual Coleridge) 

Even with the tremendous difficulty in marriage.  Even with the huge divorce rate.  I think there is something in marriage that people long for none the less.  It  is the same thing that Jesus was talking about and didn’t want give up.   It has to do with words we hear in a wedding service, word such as “sanctify” and “holy”, “fear of God.”    And most of all, the old archaic church word “covenant.” 

In the movies, “Shall We Dance?” staring Richard Gere and Susan Sarandon.  Mrs. Clark, played by Sarandon, is talking to the private investigator Mr. Devine, played by Richard Jenkins.  She hired him because she thought her husband, Richard Gere, was having an affair.  When she finds out that he isn’t having an affair – he’s only taking dance lessons – she dismisses the P.I.

Before they part, a conversation ensues:

Mrs. Clark:  “All these promises that we make and we break.  Why is it, do you think, that people get married?

Devine:  “Passion.”

Clark:  “No.”

Devine:  “That’s interesting, because I would have taken you for a romantic.  Why then?”

Clark:  “Because we need a witness to our lives.  There are a billion people on the planet.  I mean, what does any one life really mean?  But in a marriage you’re promising to care about everything:  The good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things.  All of it, all the time, every day.  You’re saying, “Your life will not go unnoticed because I will notice it.  Your life will not go unwitnessed because I will be your witness.” 

Instead of the Karaoke singing contest, or the Obstacle course, I think the Today Show should test how well the couples are good at being witnesses for each other.  Mitch Albom of the Detroit Freepress suggests these questions:

*Have you ever seen your partner first thing in the morning?

*Have you ever seen your partner throw up?

*Do you know the exact temperature that makes your partner say, “It’s too cold?”

*Is it within 10 degrees of yours?

*Have you ever seen your partner actually clean a room.

*Have you met your partner’s friends?

*Could you stand them once a week?

*Can you make your partner laugh?

*Can you talk all night to your partner without getting bored?

If the contestants answer “No” to any of these questions they flunk the witnessing test, get kicked off the Today show and have to try again next year.  Furthermore, good witnessing is not refusing to see what you don’t want to see.  So, the next batch of questions the Today Show should ask are these:

*Do you think your relationship is special because “We don’t fight!”

*Are you certain of your love because “We like all the same things!”

*Do you say, “I don’t care if my partner ever earns a penny; money doesn’t matter in a marriage.”

*Do you ever say, “I know my partner has a nasty temper, but it will get better once we’re married.”?

*Do you model your relationship after a Hollywood couple?

*Do you have different views on having children, but figure you’ll work it out during the marriage?

*Do you think your mother’s and father’s problems will never happen to you because you’re “different.”?

*Is your favorite thing about your partner, when you’re really being honest, his or her shape?

*Do you ever say, “If it doesn’t work, we can always get divorced?”

If the answer is yes to any one of these questions the couple gets kicked off the Today Show and has to come back in a year and try again.

Finally, the last set of questions the Today Show should ask before a national audience.

• What would you do if your partner got a debilitating disease?
• What would you do if your partner suddenly went bald or got obese?
• What happens if your partner wants to move and you don’t?
• What happens if you had a sick child?
• What happens if one of you cheated?
• What happens if your partner said your parents were “impossible?”
• What happens if you achieve your dreams but your partner fails?
• What happens if it’s the other way around?
• What happens if you wake up one day and suddenly feel trapped?
• What happens if you fall out of love?

If the couple answers “It won’t be a problem, because we love each other so deeply.”  Well, that is not the right answer.  They have watched too many other Today show weddings.

The right answer is something like the one Mitch Albom suggests:  I don’t know.  Marriage is a shared risk.  We know we have a deep respect for each other, we love and like each other, and we are committed not just to the other person, but to the idea that a marriage itself is worth preserving.

That couple wins the contest and can get married on national TV.  I hope they get the Today Show to blow a lot of money on their honeymoon too. 

In the traditional wedding service there is a funny line that no one understands.  It goes:  “Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God, and in the presence of these witnesses, to join together this man and this woman in holy matrimony; which is an honorable estate, instituted of God, and signifying unto us the mystical union which exists between Christ and his Church.”   A couple will say “I love you and I give myself to you and for you.”  A Christian couple says that and they say more.  They say, ‘I love you as Christ loves his church, steadfastly and faithfully.”  Grace is essential to Christian marriage, this grace is the presence of Christ.  The way they act toward each other is in the image of the love of God and God’s Christ for them.   The way Christ loves the church is the way  God lives out his covenant with Israel.  Even when the promises are threatened God reaches out again and again to his people. 

I think my sister and her husband got tripped up on some of the things on the last list of questions a couple must deal with.  Dreams failed, they trapped each other, they fell out of love.  We all struggle mightily with these things, and hope to survive through them. Some couples manage to survive those questions and other don’t.   None the less, most everyone still wants what marriage offers in the end.  It is an unnamable holy thing –  our presence witnessing to the other, like Christ is ever present in the Church.