Broken People Welcome Here

The First United Presbyterian Church

“Broken People Welcome Here”

Rev. Amy Morgan

February 16, 2020

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Deut. 30:15-20

15 See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity.

 16 If you obey the commandments of the LORD your God that I am commanding you today, by loving the LORD your God, walking in his ways, and observing his commandments, decrees, and ordinances, then you shall live and become numerous, and the LORD your God will bless you in the land that you are entering to possess.

 17 But if your heart turns away and you do not hear, but are led astray to bow down to other gods and serve them,

 18 I declare to you today that you shall perish; you shall not live long in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess.

 19 I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live,

 20 loving the LORD your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him; for that means life to you and length of days, so that you may live in the land that the LORD swore to give to your ancestors, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.

Matthew 5:21-37

21 "You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, 'You shall not murder'; and 'whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.' 22 But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, 'You fool,' you will be liable to the hell of fire. 23 So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, 24 leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift.

   25 Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are on the way to court with him, or your accuser may hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you will be thrown into prison. 26 Truly I tell you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny.

 27 "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall not commit adultery.' 28 But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

 29 If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. 30 And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to go into hell.

31 "It was also said, 'Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.' 32 But I say to you that anyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of unchastity, causes her to commit adultery; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.

 33 "Again, you have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, 'You shall not swear falsely, but carry out the vows you have made to the Lord.' 34 But I say to you, Do not swear at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, 35 or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. 36 And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black. 37 Let your word be 'Yes, Yes' or 'No, No'; anything more than this comes from the evil one.

We always knew when a marriage was breaking up. In my church in Michigan, when a family suddenly stopped attending, disappeared from our community without comment or protest, we inevitably would learn, months, or sometimes years, later, that there was a divorce. Sometimes, part of the family would return, after all was said and done. But almost never did the breakup unfold within the community.

Because the anger, the name-calling, the court battles, the lies, the infidelity, and ultimately the divorce, were forbidden in the church. There was certainly no explicit judgment. Plenty of our church leaders had been divorced and remarried, some of them several times. On the other side of it, they could say it was for the best. They were better off. They had moved on. But they couldn’t show the church the ugly part.

And I always wondered why. I thought it was tragic that the church community was shut out at a time when a family needed our support the most. Church was supposed to be the place you came when everything unraveled so the love and grace of God in Jesus Christ could hold you and comfort you through the storm. Why would someone hide from that in such a difficult time?

I understand now that part of the reason was our community’s need to project an image of self-sufficiency and success. But I also understand now that the church is especially ill-suited to offer comfort and love to someone going through a divorce. Because the person we follow condemned it so strongly.

In the segment of the Sermon on the Mount we read today, Jesus teaches with passion about anger, lust, divorce, and truthfulness. He employs hyperbole to emphasize the extreme importance of his augmentation of the Torah around these topics.

Anger and name-calling lead to judgment and punishment. Reconciliation needs to be immediate. Even our thoughts are judged and can put us in hell. The only allowable reason for divorce is unchastity, and remarriage is out of the question. Making an oath or a vow is evil.

So when we find ourselves in the horror of a relationship filled with rage and hurt,  betrayal and broken promises, what can the church community possibly offer us except judgment and damnation? These words of Jesus have wounded and alienated people in one of the most challenging experiences we can go through.

Which is why I really struggled to preach on them this week. These words have hurt people. Maybe not because a pastor has ever used them in counsel or expounded on them from the pulpit. But maybe because no one said anything about them at all. We just know those words are there. Judging us.

And so, I knew I couldn’t ignore these words this week. To say nothing about them is to allow them to shame us. And that is never what the gospel is about.  

If all we hear in these words is judgment and shame, then they have no place in the gospel. I am a firm believer that if the gospel is good news for anyone, it is good news for everyone. For everyone who is angry, for everyone who is divorced, for everyone who needs to be trusted. So if these words are in the gospel, there has to be good news in them somewhere.

But to find that good news, we have to remember some other words of Jesus. In John’s gospel, he says he came into the world not to judge it but to save it. So that is what we’re looking for in this text: salvation. And so, we have to ask: How are these words saving my life?

The church likes to focus on saving souls. And that’s good stuff. But this segment of Jesus’ teaching concerns temporal, human relationships. Jesus isn’t preaching about what offends God, what will incite divine wrath, what will destroy our souls eternally. He is observing how the brokenness of human relationships creates a living hell here and now.

There’s a scene in the Netflix film “Marriage Story” when a couple going through a divorce is attempting to work out the details of child custody without their lawyers getting involved. The discussion devolves into a venting of all the pent-up anger they’ve been feeling through the disintegration of their relationship and ends with the husband shouting, “Every day I wake up and I hope you’re dead! I hope you get an illness and then get hit by a car and die!” It begins with anger, then leads to insults and name-calling. Wishing someone was dead. How far from there to murder? The couple is clearly in hell. We don’t need to fear some fiery afterlife to understand that Jesus’ encouragement to reconcile instead of resenting one another can save our life.

Christianity has had a difficult time understanding lust. Celibate priests and Puritan parsons have largely shaped lust into a fear that women will be attractive to men. Purity movements in the evangelical church have attempted to restrain the hormonal impulses of youth. This has led to a culture that often blames women for the lustful thoughts, and even actions, of men. Which entirely misses the point of lust.

Human attraction is natural and good and wonderful. It can lead to loving, consenting, mutual relationships.

By contrast, lust, as Jesus is identifying it here, objectifies and dehumanizes. It categorizes a person as a thing that exists to satisfy your desires.

If we understood this, if we took this seriously, we could save hundreds of thousands of people from being trafficked for sexual exploitation. We could save people from being sexually harassed at work.  We could save people from addiction to pornography. We could save students from sexual violence on college campuses.

Jesus never freaks out about people having sex. But he recommends stabbing your eye out if you convince yourself that another person’s body is your possession. And cutting off your hand if that might lead you to act on that impulse. Understanding lust not as sexual attraction but as dehumanization will save us. It will save a lot of us.

And then there’s this teaching about divorce. I’ve never known one person who has described this process as anything but hellish. Many of them have found life-giving relationships on the other side. But divorce is never an easy out. And that’s what the Torah, at the time, provided: to men. A man could cast off his wife for any reason. All he had to do was claim he was displeased with her. You can only imagine the power dynamic this created within marriages. The threat of divorce looming over the head of each wife.

Jesus restricts divorce to protect the vulnerable party in this relationship. He is looking out for the powerless.

All this talk about adultery and divorce is not about judgment and shame. It names a reality of those who endure this difficult experience. Adultery, as Jesus clearly outlined in the previous teaching, is not all about sex. It is about dehumanizing.   

And the unchastity clause is thrown in to acknowledge that when a marriage disintegrates to the point where a woman would risk her very life by sleeping with another man, the marriage is indeed over.

So what Jesus is saying about divorce is not that it is bad and evil and should never happen. He’s saying that it shouldn’t be used as a threat, and that it is permissible when it can no longer be recognized as a marriage. This is life-saving teaching.

The prohibition against remarriage is not an edict that labels divorced women as damaged goods. Interpreters have attempted to determine if Matthew’s exemption clause in the previous verse leaves some loophole that would allow for a woman to remarry if she wasn’t the unchaste party in her previous marriage. Jewish law at the time certainly allowed for the non-offending party to remarry. But Jesus doesn’t seem to be leaving open any caveats.

This was extremely troubling to me. Why in heaven would God not desire the life-giving relationships many people experience in a new marriage following a divorce? Why would Jesus label as adulterers two people who have entered into a loving, life-affirming covenant, a relationship of healing and wholeness? For this is what many people have experienced after a divorce. Why would Jesus deny them this goodness?

The truth, of course, is that he wouldn’t, and he didn’t. In this teaching, Jesus didn’t create new commandments or apply harsher restrictions to the law. He’s saving our lives. 

Sometimes, what saves our lives after a divorce is a good and healthy marriage to somebody else. Jesus wouldn’t call that adultery. But sometimes we can get caught in a cycle of serial monogamy, easily casting aside a dissatisfying relationship for something better, younger, hotter.

All the teachings in this passage are inter-related. This teaching on divorce is not accidentally sandwiched between the teachings on lust and vow-breaking. In that context, Jesus isn’t labeling all divorced and remarried couples as adulterers. He’s taking the dehumanizing power of lust and the pain of broken promises seriously. And he’s telling us not to make a habit of it. He’s telling us to love people and not use people.

And so he finishes this segment of instruction with the plain and simple, “Let your ‘yes’ be ‘yes’ and your ‘no’ be ‘no’.” If there is one thing Republicans and Democrats can agree about right now (and there may only be one thing) it is that we don’t trust politicians. They make promises and break them. They say one thing and do another. They aren’t upholding their oaths of office. They are lying through their teeth. We can all, no matter our political persuasion, understand the life-saving value of simply telling the truth, all the time, and keeping our promises, all the time.

And politicians are easy targets to judge on this one. But this really only becomes a life-saving truth if we apply it to our own lives. Because it is the lies we tell ourselves, the promises we break with those we love, that are evil. Those lies and betrayals are what give life to anger, lust, and adultery. They are the root of all that Jesus addresses beforehand. Simply telling the truth and keeping our promises will save our lives.

That sounds easy. But, of course, it isn’t. Humans are genius at justifying our misbehavior. We are brilliant liars and masters of creating loopholes in our promises. Truth and integrity are counter-cultural values. They are not productive or conducive to success. Some would say, “not anymore,” but I would contend that they never have been. History is long, and instructive. Those who tell the truth and keep promises are not rewarded in this world. Those values belong to those of us who are in this world but not of it. Those values belong to the citizens of the commonwealth of heaven.

Jesus isn’t judging us. He is saving us. But, as Barbara Brown Taylor writes, “it is sometimes hard to tell whether you are being killed or saved by the hands that turn your life upside down.” This work doesn’t always feel good. And we sometimes fight against it. And we very often fail to live into it.

All the same, I implore you not to hide from it. Don’t take yourself away from the community that is here to work and fight and fail alongside you. Do the messy work of salvation here, together.

The church was never meant to be in the business of making us better people. We aren’t called to this community so that we can show how far we’ve come on the journey of good behavior or pure thinking or righteous suffering.

We’ll know we’re on the right track in following Jesus, not if we can show we are free from anger or lust or failure to live up to our word. We will know we are on track with following Jesus if we can be angry here, and seek reconciliation. If we can admit our faults and failings, and seek forgiveness and healing. If we can own up to our ugliness and lies, and have the courage to accept love and grace. If we can share the pain and admit the betrayal and grieve the broken promises.

Broken people are welcome here. Always. Because Jesus welcomed broken people. Not so he could judge them. Not so he could turn their lives around. Not so he could make bad people into good people. He welcomed broken people so he could love them, heal them, make them whole, give them abundant life. He welcomed broken people, like you and me, so he could save us. That is good news.

Thanks be to God, Amen.