TWENTIETH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
Prayer of the Day: Sovereign God, you have created us to live in loving community with one another. Form us for life that is faithful and steadfast, and teach us to trust like little children, that we may reflect the image of your Son, Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord.
“Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.” Mark 10:11.
“Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.” Genesis 2:24.
If you are going to preach on the text from Hebrews or the Psalms, then you would be well advised to use alternative texts for the gospel lesson and the reading from Genesis. That is because these two texts carry with them a tremendous load of interpretive baggage that will determine how they are heard and processed. Of particular concern are those persons in the congregation who are divorced; persons struggling with issues of gender identity; and, of course, gay and lesbian folk who may not see themselves in either the creation story or Jesus’ remarks on marriage and divorce. Thus, in my opinion, if these texts are to be read in worship, they must be addressed in the sermon.
A few points need to be made with respect to the gospel. First and foremost, it must be emphasized that the question put to Jesus about divorce is a man’s question asked by men in what was (and to what a large degree still is) a man’s world. In first century Judean culture, divorce was the prerogative of men. Women could not divorce their husbands.[1] In a world without equitable distribution, alimony or child support, divorce imposed a disproportionate burden on wives. Divorced women had the option of returning to their father’s household, though there was no guarantee they would be well received. A divorced woman brought shame on her family. If the divorced woman had no family to which she could return, her future was even more bleak. In the world where Jesus lived and moved, divorce was an instrument of oppression against women and perhaps their children as well.
Jesus responds to his opponents’ question about divorce by expanding the scope of the discussion. Jesus would have them know that Moses had quite a bit more to say about marriage than how to end it. Jesus reaches back to the creation narratives from Genesis, also attributed to Moses. God created men and women to be “partners.” They were to support and care for one another in a covenant relationship of mutual faithfulness. Of course, then and now, marriages fail for numerous reasons. But the point to be made is that the failure of a marriage does not mean that the partners’ responsibility for one another is at an end. Here it is important to make the point that persons who have ended their marriage and yet continue to honor their obligations to support their spouses and care for the children born during the course of the marriage are not the equivalent of the men Jesus addresses who would simply dispose of their wives for a newer model. Divorced couples who continue to cooperate in raising their children, honoring obligations incurred during the marriage and maintaining a caring (if not romantic) working relationship are to be applauded, encouraged and supported-not judged and condemned.
Lurking in the background here is the issue of domestic abuse. These words of Jesus concerning divorce, taken out of their context, have lent support to the false belief that God would have a person remain in an abusive marriage rather than seek divorce or separation. As with the sabbath, marriage was made for the wellbeing of people, not people for the institution of marriage. When a marriage ceases to be a sanctuary of love, human maturation and security for all family members, it must be set aside just as surely as the sabbath must be set aside in the interest of human health and wellbeing. God does not will for anyone to be abused physically or emotionally. This point must be made emphatically. It would also be helpful to list in the bulletin for Sunday contact information of persons and agencies providing assistance to victims of domestic abuse.
And now we come to the Genesis reading. This story has been widely cited as a “proof text” for the proposition that the Bible views marriage exclusively as a life long partnership between one man and one woman. Of course, that is not the case. The Bible recognizes polygamy and concubinage (sexual slavery) as legitimate forms of marriage. It all depends upon which texts you chose to fixate. This is the problem that always arises when we approach the Bible with our own concerns and agendas. We desperately want the Bible to give us a hard and fast definition of marriage. But God is not particularly concerned about that. The quotation of what appears to be an ancient saying about a man leaving his mother and cleaving to his wife comes at the end of the story. It serves more as an illustration than a prescription. What God is concerned about is loneliness. “It is not good,” says God, “that the man [earth creature] should be alone.” If we read this text from the standpoint of God’s priorities rather than our own moral, political and societal interests, I think we come to some very different conclusions. God wills for human beings to experience friendship, love and intimacy. It is not good for any human being to be deprived of these good gifts.
Finally, a word about Jesus’ allusion to the first chapter of Genesis in which the poet declares of the human race, “male and female [God] created them.” Genesis 1:27. This verse is often cited as a proof text for the proposition that one is either male or female with no room for any other sexual or gender identification. Yet the poet’s language throughout the first creation narrative puts the lie to this notion. God separated the light from the darkness, calling the light “day” and the darkness “night.” Nonetheless, the moon and the stars light up the night sky and shed their light upon the face of the earth. There are caves and ocean depths where the sun’s day light never reaches. God separated the land from the water, yet millions of square miles of the earth’s surface are occupied by intertidal zones, marshes, swamps and wetlands that are neither entirely land nor sea-all of which are critically important to the world’s ecological health. Why, then, should it surprise us that human sexual attraction and gender identity fall on the same diverse spectrum? It is important that our gospel and the traditional creation texts with which it is paired be proclaimed in a way that all people can see themselves in the sacred narrative as persons God made “good” and persons God wills to know friendship, love and intimacy.
This is a lot to cram into a single twenty minute sermon. That is why I question the wisdom of the creators of the common lectionary in juxtaposing our readings in this way. I think these issues are better addressed in a discussion setting where the whole biblical witness can be brought to bear. Nevertheless, for those of you preachers who feel bound to the dictates of the common lectionary, I wish you a double share of God’s Spirit this Sunday. You are going to need it.
Here is a poem by Rickey Laurentiis about a kind of loneliness that might well reflect that of Adam. It is the sort of loneliness that God means to eliminate.
Trans Loneliness
Why doubt I’d grow breasts a ‘Natural’ way?
Am I not ‘Real’ Flesh? Am I not enworthied sway
of that Biology? Not ‘Cis,’ you think me ‘alien’?
Loose? Do I so estrange? Wouldn’t I be, monstrous, the ‘Gorgon’
Lady with my two ‘new,’ added, latest ‘Eyes’ budding from the Chest
Plate O it hurt—the nips (eyes turned her into a ‘monster’ ) that gaze best
At a gracious, ‘specious’ World sends Fists. But I took my Estrogen
Chill, my Antiandrogen, over some several years, then ‘broke’
my ‘Chill’ to stern the Heart—
That it? Then I ‘urged’ Progesterone into the Regimen,
Pills that nearly broke my heart, except I ‘bloom’d’—beware I am
A Beauty, with Spices added. I ‘bleed.’ Can I pray
Such radical, natural ‘unsurgery’ upon my Fungible self is enuf
Trans? enuf Woman? (Black as I am?) And Soy.
God’s-child. Tho some surgery be our choice, Martha, our right to ‘appeal’
& so revise what Lonely, happy ‘Sovereignty’ of the Body we claim,
I can’t afford it. So I learned to ‘express’ my Body piecemeal,
No ‘cancer.’ Didn’t I rise again in the am to cry ‘pearls’? Please, Friend, girl, answer.
Source: Poetry (July/August 2024). Rickey Laurentiis is an American poet who was raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. They are the author of Boy with Thorn, a work that earned them the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and the Levis Reading Prize and the PEN/Osterweil Award. Laurentiis’ poems have appeared in Boston Review, Feminist Studies, The Kenyon Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, New Republic, The New York Times and Poetry. They have been translated into Arabic, Spanish and Ukrainian. Laurentiis is the inaugural fellow in Creative Writing at the Center for African-American Poetry and Poetics. They are also a Lannan Fellow. You can read more about Rickey Laurentiis and sample more of their poetry at the Poetry Foundation website.
[1] This was not necessarily the case for Judaism in the diaspora where Jews were subject to the laws of foreign jurisdictions in which they lived. This may be why Jesus expands the prohibition on divorce to include women.
Peter's Outer Cape Portico 