Community Christian Church
Dr. Roger Ray, pastor August 28, 2010
Proper 17
Jeremiah 2:4-13
4Hear the word of the Lord, O house of Jacob, and all the families of the house of Israel. 5Thus says the Lord: What wrong did your ancestors find in me that they went far from me, and went after worthless things, and became worthless themselves? 6They did not say, “Where is the Lord who brought us up from the land of Egypt, who led us in the wilderness, in a land of deserts and pits, in a land of drought and deep darkness, in a land that no one passes through, where no one lives?” 7I brought you into a plentiful land to eat its fruits and its good things. But when you entered you defiled my land, and made my heritage an abomination. 8The priests did not say, “Where is the Lord?” Those who handle the law did not know me; the rulers transgressed against me; the prophets prophesied by Baal, and went after things that do not profit.
9Therefore once more I accuse you, says the Lord, and I accuse your children’s children. 10Cross to the coasts of Cyprus and look, send to Kedar and examine with care; see if there has ever been such a thing. 11Has a nation changed its gods, even though they are no gods? But my people have changed their glory for something that does not profit. 12Be appalled, O heavens, at this, be shocked, be utterly desolate, says the Lord, 13for my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, and dug out cisterns for themselves, cracked cisterns that can hold no water.
Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16
Let mutual love continue. 2Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it. 3Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though you yourselves were being tortured. 4Let marriage be held in honor by all, and let the marriage bed be kept undefiled; for God will judge fornicators and adulterers. 5Keep your lives free from the love of money, and be content with what you have; for he has said, “I will never leave you or forsake you.” 6So we can say with confidence, “The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can anyone do to me?” 7Remember your leaders, those who spoke the word of God to you; consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith. 8Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. 15Through him, then, let us continually offer a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that confess his name. 16Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.
Once or twice a year, a guy in my position is called upon to perform a wedding ceremony. Weddings and funerals are the only time that most people go to church and in each instance I am painfully aware that the majority of the people in the room are absolutely dreading the whole thing, listening to music they don’t like, wearing clothes that don’t fit and most of all, enduring a sermon which is something they have avoided like salmonella since they were kids.
So I try, I try extra hard for weddings which will be populated by people who, if given a choice, would probably rather endure a beating with a length of log chain. The desire to be original, insightful, helpful can drive a preacher to the point of reading poetry and the lyrics of love songs.
I realized very many years ago that if you want to look up the word love, you can be buried in ascriptions to praise. Love makes the world go round, love is all we need, yummy yummy yummy I’ve got love in my tummy. Poets, philosophers, scriptures and musicians all can’t seem to say enough good things about love.
But turn your attention to marriage and you don’t find much to use in a wedding ceremony. You look at the Bible and discover that the only time Jesus mentions marriage is when he is telling people not to get divorced….. which is the same thing Paul says….. so we have two guys whom tradition tells us were never married telling everyone else to remain in a state that neither one of them would touch with a ten foot pole.
This is not a new dilemma. No less a thinker than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said: Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished. The French say that “Marriage is a romance in which the hero dies in the first chapter.” And our own native Midwestern comic, Garrison Keilor, lays the problem at the feet of the sameness of intimacy saying, “It is true that you can get a man to make a commitment to monogamy but even though you can teach a bear to ride on a bicycle, you know that he would really rather be out in the woods doing what bears do.”
The truth is that the institution of marriage has taken many shapes over the centuries. The Ward and June Cleaver, married with kids and a house forever ideal is more noteworthy as an exception than as the common rule.
In an evolutionary sense, monogamy came into being to connect a father to his children long enough to provide food and protection while the children were young and vulnerable. Anthropologically, marriage became useful in providing for the stability of a culture, in securing blood lines for the transfer of farm land and property.
In the last century, as most of the population has moved out of agriculture and we have evolved in our construction, food supply, child rearing and property laws, the institution of marriage has been under a lot of pressure to come up with a reason to remain intact. In fact, one domestic law attorney told me a few years ago that 90 cents of every dollar spent in attorney fees is spent in divorce and child custody matters. Before marriage even became such an optional arrangement, Jeannette Winterson said, “Marriage is a plate glass window begging for a brick.”
Now that the glue which holds marriages together is no long the need to work the farm, protect the kids from wolves, or bring home a bag of salad mix, we have to go deeper. Now that we no longer need to live in a pack to survive, we have to think about how a long term committed relationship brings meaning to our lives.
I can’t remember which journalist first made this observation but I find myself in total agreement with the saying that it isn’t that divorce is so bad, it’s just that loving the same person for a long long time is so good.
As most of you know, my father passed away early on Thursday morning. He was 90 years old and had lived more than seven years longer than my mother to whom he had been married for more than 60 years. Every year that he lived without her was more difficult than the year before. No one else could seem to really manage to keep him company and over time he lost interest in anything that this world has to offer.
My parents were not perfect parents. They did a lot of things right and they did some things wrong which still leave me perplexed about how they could have been so blind….. but what they did well was love one another and, so, when my brothers and I place his ashes in the grave next to our mother tomorrow afternoon we will probably be doing the only thing we’ve done for him that really makes sense in the past seven years.
They did not grow apart. They did not develop separate interests or life goals. They were like two arrows shot from the same bow which remained on the exact same arc of life through three generations. That’s not something you see very often and it may not even be something that many of us could stand or want but it was as close to a Norman Rockwell marriage as I have seen.
Most Sundays we have only one scripture reading but I always study the three texts and the Psalm which will be read in most liturgical churches across the globe on each Sunday of the year. I kept the Jeremiah reading in the liturgy this morning in spite of its rather arcane and exclusive language because of its closing image:
The prophet chides the people for abandoning a way of living which has blessed them and nurtured them in favor of a self-gratifying life which he calls “a cracked cistern.”
I’m not saying that the institution of marriage is exactly like a cracked cistern but you have to admit that the image fits in many ways. We have attempted to make marriage a one size fits all which doesn’t fit couples for whom the relationship has become toxic. It doesn’t fit for same sex couples. Sometimes that Norman Rockwell image works great in one season of your life and it becomes a noose around your neck in another.
We, who have abandoned all religious guilt and legalism…. We who live in a new and liberated world view, we have to get back to talking about love in the same sentence as marriage…. We have to get back to meaning or we will see this institution continue to crumble.
Our epistle lesson today is one of the many holiness codes, or morality codes found through the Bible. The paragraph hits on dozens of topics which are taken together as just proverbial advice on how to live a decent life. He mentions honoring marriage and being loyal but the text starts with the admonition to maintain mutual love, and in spite of all of the evolutionary, anthropological and cultural changes which have taken place since this text was written, that is a principle which deserves to be preserved and honored.
In a recent bust of self expressing on a social media site, I announced to my internet connections that I was finished with doing social work with friendships…. That I had been burned for the last time. Some of my friends asked that I say a bit more about what I considered to be a true friendship.
For me, at the very foundation, a healthy relationship needs to have at least three virtues: there should be honesty, consistency and mutuality.
Honesty because you cannot have a long term relationship which is polluted by hidden agendas, gossip or saying one thing to your face and something else about you when you are not around. Consistency because people who are so mentally unstable that they present as your best friend one day and your worst enemy the next are simply too dangerous to allow to be anywhere close to your emotional heart or your physical heart. And mutuality or reciprocity is probably the most important over the long term. Both people have to be both giving and taking. If one makes constant demands but never makes any deposits, staying in that marriage, or friendship or relationship is not healthy for either party….. one becomes a crippled dependant and the other becomes a crippled enabler.
No relationship is ever equal but they should always be reciprocal. Someone will always earn more than the other. One will be good at some things and the other will be good at others. But some of us were brought up to be helpers and nurturers and some of us were brought up to be perpetual children and those two will often find one another in both gay and straight relationships but in the absence of genuine mutuality, resentment grows and anger is always present, whether your are conscious of it or not.
As the famous monk, Henri Nowen said, resentment and anger can paralyze even the most generous of hearts. In many relationships, if you give without receiving, then the recipient grows to feel entitled and then it is not longer a gift…. You are being robbed and no one ever takes that very well for long.
For a relationship to remain in mutual affection, the very character and contract of the relationship has to be renegotiated regularly. What works for two 22 year olds will probably not work very well when they are 32.
Dietrich Bonheoffer was in a Nazi prison awaiting his execution when his younger sister was about to be married. Prior to his arrest, she had asked her brother to perform the wedding but from his prison cell he wrote to her and her betrothed the sermon he would have delivered. The most memorable part of that sermon for me was his emphasis on forgiveness.
Forgiveness, he says, is the only soil in which love can grow. When you live in close proximity with another person who can help themselves to your thick socks or sign one of your checks, then there will be a need for forgiveness or your closets and drawers will be bulging with resentment.
People will often tell you that a particular thing ended their marriage….. an incident, a unforgivable mistake….. maybe that happens sometimes but, as we say in counseling, “if you hear hoof beats you think horses and not zebras.” In almost every case, there was a house full of resentment before the affair, or the insult or the forgotten anniversary.
I think there are some marriage deal killers. When there has been physical abuse of either partner or children, I never recommend that a couple stay together. And while some people have the strength to survive addictions to drugs, alcohol or gambling, not everyone does and I understand when someone doesn’t even want to try. Some couples survive an affair but most don’t…… and if you’re thinking you might be one of the lucky ones who can get away with it….. remember what I said about horses and zebras.
Sometimes economic differences or differences in child rearing values are just irreconcilable.
The big five: addiction, domestic violence, unfaithfulness, and irreconcilable economic or child rearing issues can be poison in the well. I am rather less sympathetic when someone over the age of 8 tells me that they are not happy. The person you are with doesn’t owe you happy…. If you want happy, you need to get to the store and get your own happy.
That is to say, if the relationship is just not working…. If the joy, the attraction, the shared life is gone, then unless it is one of the big five, I don’t think that you should just thrown in the towel….. that’s when you renegotiate, communicate, get help if you need it, take a vacation….. that’s when you ask yourself if your “forgiver” is still working. That’s when you look on the closet shelf and under the bed for where you have been storing some resentment that you need to get out to the garbage can.
One of the now deceased psychiatrist, Scott Peck’s more troubling books is entitled “The People of the Lie.” The lie from which he draws the title of his book is the lie which the world teaches us to tell from the cradle to the grave, that lie is “I am innocent.” Peck argues through several very convincing chapters that most of human evil springs from that lie.
In a religious community we talk about confession of sin and forgiveness but almost everywhere else we are taught to blame everyone and everything else before accepting any personal responsibility. And that, he argues, and I believe, is where most of us cease to grow and where many marriages cease to thrive.
The assurance of pardon is not in our every Sunday liturgy by accident. It is there for a very profound reason.
It is there to get us in the practice of both confession and forgiveness. It is there as a refusal to be trapped in the snare of the lie that we are innocent. We are not innocent but we can be forgiven, especially if we are willing to go first in the forgiveness department.
Don’t put your faith in the cracked cistern of commitment without reason. We no longer stay together for a farm, or family or a pension fund and so, let us learn to stay together out of mutual love grown in the healthy soil of forgiveness.
Roger L. Ray, D.Min. Pastor Community Christian Church
4806 E. Cherry Springfield, MO 65809
(417) 877-7821 "I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits. I believe that what self-centered men have torn down men other-centered can build up." (Martin Luther King, Jr. - Nobel Speech)
