Sermon from June 24, 2001
If in my dealings with people I could choose to come across as an invincible man or as a vulnerable man, I would choose to be a vulnerable man of conviction. Let me try to explain. First, I am vulnerable in the sense that I never hear about another person's sins without realizing how easily I could do them. Left to myself, mine is a heart of darkness. A book I read when I was 19 years old taught me my first lessons in this. Hudson Taylor, a veteran missionary to China in the 19th century, said after many years in China, "I never knew how bad my heart was." I say that to you today about myself. That is why I need Jesus Christ to be my Savior today as much as I did the first day I believed in Him.

Second, I am vulnerable in the sense that I never hear about another person's sins without trying to understand why the person behaved that way. I don't believe that most people do the terrible things they do just to show the world how bad they are. They do them for reasons that make sense to them. I want to know what made sense to them about their action; not to excuse them but to relate to them as a real human being like myself. They are not sermon targets or statistics of evil or "the enemy." They are people with hopes and dreams and terrible failures. I need to get inside their souls, if I am to have the right to be heard.

Third, I am vulnerable in the sense that I want to be a man of unshakable conviction. Having unshakable conviction renders us vulnerable to criticism and hoots of derision. But I don't believe we can be compassionate unless we are people of conviction. I have listened to maybe hundreds of people confess their sins to me – some reluctantly, some less reluctantly, none with glee. When we sin, our act does something unpleasant to us. We feel guilt or shame or disappointment in ourselves, or we see other people hurt by our actions. We get defensive, angry, haughty when we are called to account.

But is it compassionate to say to people in their sins, "It's okay"? It is not okay, and they don't need anything so much as to say, "It is not okay. It is not okay in me. It is not okay between me and the people I have hurt. It is not okay between me and my God." To be a person of conviction makes that sense of personal responsibility possible, and that is an act of compassion.

Can we become a congregation of vulnerable people? In our dealings with people shall we choose to come across as a congregation of invincible Christians or as a congregation of vulnerable Christians? Choose with me to be a congregation of vulnerable Christians of compassionate convictions. Christian love means intending and (where possible) for the sake of Christ sacrificing ourselves in some way for the other person, regardless of who the person is and what we might get for our efforts. Approaching other people in this vulnerable manner is a powerful embodiment of loving our neighbor as we love ourselves. Let's see if we can make this work in situations affected by the words of Christ in Mark 10:10-12.

When they were in the house again, the disciples asked Jesus about this. He answered, "Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her. And if she divorces her husband and marries another man, she commits adultery."

Because of this passage, I do not think I have ever said to someone, "You should get a divorce." I have suggested that one partner leave the house and take the children, when the situation has become abusive, but I have never said, "Get a divorce."

In late winter, 1988, I preached a sermon on divorce from the text we consider today in Mark 10. "Our first reaction to Jesus' words," I said, "is to look for loopholes, to bargain, to soften the blow of His words. That's why we don't hear him speak and race to confess our failure and restore to honor God's will for marriage."

In the next breath I said, "Many of you here are divorced. Some of you are remarried. What's done is done. It is not my responsibility or my wish to lash divorced and remarried people with Scripture and send them away feeling guilty or aggravated. I suspect all of you who have experienced divorce have had more than your share of guilty feelings. Divorce is not the unpardonable sin, but it is sin. If you have confessed and repented of that, then let's get on with your life."

Within hours, a woman from our congregation sat in my office. "You just don't understand what I've been through," she said. She proceeded to tell a horrible story of what her ex-husband had done to her. Given her circumstances, my well-intentioned sermon had seemed harsh and uncomprehending.

It was another episode that reveals how risky and difficult it is to step into the circumstances of people who have built some part of their life without God. The human wreckage is often very great. That episode reveals also how impossible it is for the Church not to step into the circumstances of people who have built some part of their life without God. That necessity raises a profound issue for me as a pastor and for us as a congregation. Can we follow Jesus Christ in His utterly gracious and redemptive treatment of people who have stepped outside the will of God? Do we want to follow Him in that? I do want to. I don't say that I do follow Him as I should, but I want to.

Jesus' conclusion follows naturally from what He said in verses 6-9. God created marriage to be an exclusive, lifetime relationship between one man and one woman. Anything less than that adulterates God's creative intention. Right here, we need to stop and take a look at the powerful word adultery, which wakens strong emotions in us. We need to pay attention to its meaning, not just the emotion it awakens.

To adulterate something means "to debase (it) by adding inferior materials," (The Random House Dictionary of the English Language, 20). Consumer Reports recently did a study of St. John's Wort, an herbal medication used to help some people who suffer with depression. They compared samples from a dozen or so brand names. The differences were dramatic. The least expensive was the purest. Some of the more expensive were mixed with other ingredients. They had adulterate their product.

Adultery in the Bible means that divorcing and remarrying debases God's intentions for marriage to be an exclusive, lifetime relationship between one man and one woman. The Seventh Commandment says, "Thou shalt not commit adultery." Jesus, in verses 10-12, simply draws the obvious conclusions and offers no exceptions. That is why our first reaction to Jesus' words is to look for loopholes, to bargain, to soften the blow of His words. Mark has presented Jesus' teaching like this in keeping with everything else in Mark 8:31-10:53.

In these chapters Mark develops his theme of a suffering Messiah by repeating a threefold pattern three times in these two chapters. Here is the pattern. Jesus' prediction of His suffering and death is always the first part of the pattern. The second part is always some inappropriate, uncomprehending response on the part of His disciples. The third part of the pattern is always Jesus' reply to the disciples' response in which He challenges, encourages, and teaches them what it means to be followers of a suffering Messiah. Then, an episode or series of episodes follows, which reinforces what it means to be followers of a suffering Messiah.

The key to this third part of the pattern comes in Mark 8:35. Jesus laid down there the radical principle of what it means to be followers of a suffering Messiah. "Whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it." In that statement He completely inverts the values of ordinary life. In chapters eight and nine, as we have seen, Jesus applies that inversion of values to specific areas of human experience.

He applies it to marriage here in Mark 10:10-12 and says in effect, "Losing your life for me and for the gospel means that you will make every sacrifice in order to fulfill the Father's intention for marriage." Remember: Jesus came to teach Israel a new way to be Israel, and to teach humanity a new way to be human. That new way involves a restoration of God's creative intention for marriage.

The operative word there is restoration. If our calling is to be a congrgation of vulnerable Christians of compassionate convictions, then we have to live between two realities. On one hand, we followers of Christ are to make every sacrifice in order to fulfill our Father's intention for marriage; on the other, we have to do this as people who have often made a mess of our Father's intentions. So, how do we live well in that ambiguous situation?

First, there is another way in which we Christians can hold on to our conviction that God created marriage to be exclusive, lifetime relationship between one man and one woman. If your marriage has ended in divorce, confess it to God as sin. It is not the unpardonable sin, and if that is how you have been made to feel about it, it is time to get over that. But divorce is still sin, and if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Don't bring up the sins of your ex; deal with your own responsibility before God.

Second, we hold on to our conviction that God created marriage to be an exclusive, lifetime relationship between one man and one woman. If we surrender this, we surrender a strategic beachhead in the Church's spiritual warfare. We hold to our convictions best by helping people here grow a vital relationship with Christ. It may sound trite, but "the family that prays together stays together." If each person in a marriage seeks God without mere lip service, that marriage has a significantly greater chance of celebrating its golden anniversary. Strengthening you in your faith is the greatest gift we can give to your marriage.

Few institutions care if your marriage lasts. Some state legislatures around the country are stirring to shore up marriage, and we may wish them well. But on the whole states have done very little to encourage marital stability. In Delaware, e.g., you can get a divorce long before you decide who will have custody of the children or distribute the property. It is a powerful, institutionalized way for the state to say, "We have no compelling interest in the preservation of your marriage."

Churches care, because we have our roots in the creative intentions of God. We also know how much work it takes to make a marriage permanent. We also want it to be permanently good and growing. That takes work, and it may require skills we have to learn. We can point you to people who can help you learn them. We do that at BVBC by offering Preparation for Marriage classes that give couples help at the beginning of their marriage. Inside BVBC and outside our church body we offer seminars and retreats and counsel for deepening and restoring marriage. We intend to build into our life here at BVBC on-going help for marriages and family. Our goal is some day to offer enrichment for marriage that covers the entire life cycle.

Third, I would like to make a proposal to you in the form of a question. Jesus says what He does about marriage and divorce in Mark 10 in a way that allows no exceptions. However, the pastoral concerns of Matthew differed somewhat from those in Mark. The Gospel of Matthew often softens the stark challenges of Mark or Luke. In Matthew an exception is made in the teaching on divorce. Infidelity opens the way to divorce and remarriage. The pastoral concerns of the Apostle Paul offered another exception. Abandonment opens the way to divorce and remarriage.

The Pharisees who were trying to trick Jesus said, "Moses permitted a man to write a certificate of divorce and send her away." The passage in question is Deuteronomy 24:1-4, which implies that divorce might occur for any reason. The Pharisees seemed to be on solid ground, whatever may have been their motives for testing Jesus. Then, Jesus takes one of those giant steps that mark Him as a spiritual genius. He makes a statement that undermines everything the Pharisees were trying to do. He does so by going behind the human action to more fundamental issues of human life.

"It was because your hearts were hard that Moses wrote you this law," Jesus replied. His reply raises questions. We want to ask, "Yes, but Moses wrote it nevertheless, didn't he?" "Does Jesus mean Moses was wrong?" "If Jesus says that Moses was wrong, does He not call into question the religious authority of the Old Tesatment?" "More to the point, and here is my proposal, if hardness of heart justified divorce and remarriage in the mind of the great Moses, does not hardness of heart still justify them now?" Here are two scenarios.

First, suppose a couple that has been married five or six years gets a divorce on grounds of mutual incompatibility. Are we prepared to say to them, "You cannot get married again, unless you remarry your ex; otherwise, you commit adultery"? I ask you men and women to think about yourselves in your late 20s and early 30s. Think about all the sexual temptations you felt. Marriage is a protection against those temptations. If we withhold marriage from a man and a woman, what practical resources can we offer them to cope with our erotically charged, sexually disordered culture?

You say, "They could do it, if they had self-control." Yes, they might be able to do that, if they had lots of help, and many single men and women in this congregation are living chaste lives before God. But the Apostle Paul spoke with frank realism to Christians of his day, whose desire was never to marry but to remain virgins for the sake of Christ. He said in 1 Corinthians 7:8-9, Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I am. But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion.

Second, suppose a single mother with a ten-year-old and a seven-year-old wishes to remarry. Should she be able to? If we say no, we are asking her to face the next decade a half without a male role model in the house and perhaps with serious financial concerns that might affect her and her children negatively. She will drop her elementary children off at day care at 7:00 a.m. and pick them up at 6:00 p.m. She is mom and breadwinner and more. Are we prepared to do that?

If you are divorced, you might be better off never to marry again; but you cannot do that alone. You have to have people around you, like you, committed to single life; and even then you may find yourselves dishonoring God by your sexual behavior, or you find yourself in a domestic situation that places enormous pressures on you as a parent and on your children. That is where my pastoral concerns find themselves somewhat at odds with the practices of other evangelical pastors.

I know that some pastors will say to people, "I cannot for conscience' sake marry you, but go get married somewhere else, and it will be great to have you back in this church." That has always seemed terribly inconsistent. If the remarriage is so bad that I will not be party to it, then, shouldn't the church discipline a couple that remarried against what the pastor said was the will of God, if they come back to the church? And isn't a pastor who says that saying in effect, "I will keep my hands clean, while yours get dirty?"

Even though I seldom take part in remarriages, I now believe that hardness of heart is grounds for remarriage. I wish it never happened, but it does. It seems inescapable, if we are to minister to people, who turn to Christ and His Church for help and hope in our morally empty culture.

I know I must go forward to face whatever comes my way. The gospel of salvation is not for people who do not need rescue. I just know that I want BVBC to be a place of refuge that welcomes in people whom sin has damaged, not an impenetrable fortress that keeps them out – all the while never ceasing to aspire to realize together our Father's original intentions for marriage and family.