Faithful and Flexible
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FAITHFUL AND FLEXIBLE
The Rev. J. Donald Waring
Grace Church in New York
The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost
October 6, 2024
Some Pharisees came, and to test Jesus they asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” (Mark 10:2)
This past August our summer travels included a driving tour through the deep south. True, August may not be the optimal weather time to visit Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. But I had never before been to these states, and you go when you can go. One day in New Orleans we were walking around the city and came upon the Roman Catholic Cathedral of St. Louis. It’s an instantly recognizable landmark and a house of prayer, so I wanted to go inside. The day was extremely hot and sunny, so we were not exactly dressed for church. I was smeared up with sun lotion, dripping with sweat, wearing shorts, a polo shirt, sunglasses, and a hat.
Once inside the cathedral I was in the process of taking off my sunglasses, and changing into my regular glasses. A man in an orange shirt with a logo approached me and said, “You need to take off your hat.” He didn’t say please and he didn’t phrase it as a question. It was an abrupt and surly declaration. I was surprised, but thinking he might be a docent or some sort of official volunteer, I removed my hat. Then I asked him, “Excuse me, do you work here?” He replied “yes,” then “no,” then “does it matter?” He added, “taking off your hat is a sign of respect.”
Honestly, it was one of those moments when I was caught off guard. In retrospect, I wish I’d had the presence of mind to say: Suppose I show respect for God by covering my head and wearing a hat in church. Suppose I think it’s unfair that women get to wear hats in church and men don’t. Suppose I were wearing a hat that proclaims “I ♥ Jesus,” like this one (here the preacher shall put on the hat). In truth, I wasn’t wearing this particular hat in New Orleans because I only obtained it last week. On Monday some phantom donor left ten of these in the narthex of the church. They are brand new, and one can be yours if you want it. Just ask me[1]. Seriously, what would the man in the cathedral have done had I turned to face him wearing a hat that proclaimed love for Jesus? God, does wearing this hat in church offend or respect you? Alas, I didn’t get to press these points with God’s self-appointed little helper. After our brief exchange, he scurried away and left the building. It was too hot to go chasing after him.
Is it lawful for a man to wear a hat in church? In today’s reading from the Gospel of Mark (10:2-9), some Pharisees came to Jesus, and to test him they asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” The question was a trap. Anytime the Pharisees asked Jesus a public question, you can be sure they had ulterior motives. They were setting a trap. The scene reminds me of the old Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour cartoons that I used to watch as a kid on Saturday mornings. Wile E. Coyote was forever setting elaborate traps to catch the speedy Road Runner. Most of the traps involved cases of TNT, catapults, or jet-propelled roller skates that the Coyote procured from a mythical mail-order company called the Acme Corporation. The devices never worked, and left the Coyote holding an exploding stick of dynamite, or squashed beneath a huge boulder. Or the Coyote would walk off the edge of a cliff, and proceed some distance out into mid-air without falling. Only when he looked down and realized that he had no ground beneath his feet would he wave goodbye, fall to the ground far below, and disappear into a little puff of dust. But the Coyote would always be back the next day with a new trap to ensnare the Road Runner.
So it is today: the Pharisees are back with a new trap in hopes of catching Jesus. The trap involved the question of divorce. Scholars of antiquity generally agree that in the time and place of Jesus, divorce was a fairly common practice. Also the laws governing divorce clearly favored men. Lots of men were obtaining frivolous divorces. Yet at the same time they were all horrified that King Herod had divorced his wife to marry Herodias, the wife of his half-brother. John the Baptist had lost his head when he dared to denounce the situation. So the Pharisees, in the interest of getting rid of Jesus, were hoping they might lure him into condemning divorce with equal vigor, perhaps even mentioning Herod and Herodias by name. Or, if Jesus went soft on divorce, they could charge him with trivializing the Jewish ideal of marriage. It was a scheme straight from the Acme Corporation of mail order traps.
Jesus didn’t fall into the Pharisees’ trap. He neither relaxed the law, nor denied the inability of the human heart to fulfill the law. His answer was in two parts. First he asked them what Moses commanded. They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her.” But Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you.” It’s interesting to note that Jesus didn’t criticize Moses for writing this particular commandment. Divorce happens not because Moses wrote a commandment allowing it, but because the human heart, hardened by sin, can get to a point in marriage where divorce is the lesser of two evils. Divorce is the result of sin, not the sin itself. Indeed, too many people, already burdened with the pain of a failed marriage, have had their guilt made even heavier to bear by the notion that further sin lies in their obtaining a divorce. Not so, according to the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.
For the second part of his answer, however, it’s almost as if Jesus were speaking from the other side of his mouth. He took his disciples apart from the crowd. When they asked him to clarify what he’d meant, he revealed a much more conservative stance on the matter, upholding Adam and Eve in paradise as the ideal, and pinning the scarlet Letter-A on any and all who remarry after divorce. Is that what Jesus really taught? Perhaps you are reconsidering whether you really want to wear the “I Love Jesus” hat after all. No thanks, you. The hard line doesn’t suit you. The one-size-fits-all ethic actually doesn’t fit all. What is the relevance of an impossible ethical ideal for people who don’t live in paradise? In case you haven’t noticed, we don’t live in paradise. In the opening lines of his classic novel, The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne writes:
The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.
Life is messy. No one is perfect. Here is a young couple, for example, who rushed into a marriage they never should have entered. They are completely ill matched for each other and deeply unhappy. Are they stuck? Must they remain together for the rest of their lives? Here is someone else, a woman with a husband who abuses her physically and verbally. If she divorces him, can she not under God’s law move on with her life, and marry someone who loves, honors, and cherishes her? Is she stuck? It’s one thing to admire how Jesus, the Road Runner, avoided the Pharisee’s traps and sped along unscathed. But does he leave us behind with no possible escape from the prisons and cemeteries of our mortal existence?
The answer, of course, is no. Jesus does not abandon us to the grave, or throw away the keys to our prisons. We might turn to today’s reading from the mysterious book of Hebrews (1:1-4, 2:5-12) to learn as much. The letter, if indeed we can call it a letter, is more like a long love treatise in praise and thanks to God, for sending Jesus to share our humanity. For “a little while,” writes the author, God made Jesus lower than the angels so that he might taste death for everyone. Far from avoiding the perils and pitfalls of human life, God in Christ plunged into them. Jesus, our great high priest, sympathizes with our weaknesses. God is mindful of us. God made Jesus perfect through suffering. Thus, by sharing our humanity, Jesus is able to bring God’s children to glory. The mission of Jesus is to bring us out of error into truth, out of sin into righteousness, out of death into life. He comes to break oppression, to set the captives free.
How does he do it? He guides us along right pathways for his Name’s sake. He finds ways forward that are both faithful and flexible. As he demonstrated to the Pharisees and his disciples, he finds ways that both uphold the Commandments and provide pastoral provision for imperfect people. It’s a bit like the “I ♥ Jesus Hat” here. You can’t argue with the slogan. It is faithful, although we Episcopalians might phrase it differently on a hat of our own designing. “I Loveth Thee, O Lord,” might be the writing on our hat. The hat is faithful, and the hat is also flexible. It comes with a Velcro strap on the back that you can adjust to the size of your head, or the amount of hair you have – or in my case don’t have – which is why I was wearing at hat in New Orleans. We love Jesus because by the power of his Spirit, he does not abandon us in our prisons and cemeteries, but leads us into life that can be new and abundant.
What does it look like to hold onto the faith given to us, but be flexible enough to move forward in life? Many years ago at the beginning of my parish priesthood I served a large church as the curate. At some point along the way the vestry, staff, and rector got stuck on some issues, and concluded it was time for the dreaded annual touchy-feely, team-building, all-day workshop. To begin the day the consultant wanted to lead us in an exercise that struck most of us as a criminal waste of time. She gathered us in a large room, and we each had to promise we would not leave it. We were to mix and mingle with each other while the consultant sat at the head of the room playing music on a tape recorder. The only stipulation was that when she stopped the music we had to stand where we were. We could still speak, but with no music it would not be lawful for any man or woman to mill about the room.
For the first few moments the music went on and off intermittently, while we obediently moved about or stood still. There we were, a group of adults – each with a hundred other things to do – playing a form of musical chairs on a Saturday morning. Eventually the consultant stopped the music and did not restart it. We stood there for what seemed like an eternity while she sat silently at the head of the room. We asked if she might consider starting the music. Silence. We asked again, this time using the words “beseech” and “vouchsafe.” Silence. We asked her to break character and end the game, but she wouldn’t answer us a word. God’s silence. Nothing happened. We were stuck. We became annoyed and impatient. But we finally realized that the exercise was holding up a mirror, and calling us to be not only faithful, but flexible. At length one person suggested that if music were required for us to move, we should make our own and sing. Someone else suggested the Doxology, a song we all sang together Sunday after Sunday. The choirmaster (who was also required to attend the retreat) hummed a pitch, we all sang “Praise God, from whom all blessings flow,” and we captives walked free.
Normally I am not one to be moved by artificially imposed group dynamics. But I’ve always remembered the vestry exercise as a parable of what life in Christ can sometimes be like. The music stops. The voice of God falls silent. God’s people get stuck. Nothing happens. At such times God’s people need to consider that our idea of the perfect can be the enemy of what God calls good.
Staying faithful and moving forward, both at the same time, may for a little while seem paradoxical, but it is also possible. It is to be on the road to redemption with Jesus. It is to be following the one who gave himself for us, and is not ashamed to call us brothers and sisters.
[1] By the end of the day, all the hats were claimed.