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Mark A. Lewis,
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MLewis@secaucus.org
Dorothy Fowlkes
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The Great
Divorce
Reflections on the
lessons for the 17th Sunday after Pentecost
By The Rev. Mark A. Lewis, Vicar
Genesis 2:18-24 / Psalm 128
Hebrews 2:9-18 / Mark
10:2-9
James Pike, was a famous liberal Bishop of California in the 1960s. He was famous -- some would say infamous -- for many things. He was very vocal on the subject of ESP. He had many theological ideas that set the stage for our own Bishop Spong. But not least of all he stood out from the crowd because he was divorced and remarried, twice, when that was still a novel thing among the clergy. He used to say that the reason Islam was such a fierce competitor for Christianity was that it preached One God and three wives, whereas Christianity preached one wife and three gods.
Monotheism is easier than monogamy. Polygamy -- having several wives -- is a custom deeply ingrained in many societies. While most Muslims might aspire to two or three wives, some Arab potentates have dozens, even a hundred wives. Right wing groups in the church, very eager to defend the "nuclear family" seem to forget that in the Bible, many of the greats practiced polygamy.
Anglicans have had a dicey time with marriage issues from the very beginning, since our anecdotal -- though not actual -- foundation on the serial marriages of Henry VIII. That's a storybook version of the English Reformation. But a real issue facing the church today has to do with figuring out what is God's plan for marriage, for intense human unions.
Christianity is booming Africa. So, what are Christians, Anglicans like us, to do about polygamy? African bishops at various times have taken or given permission for Christians to be polygamists. In many places, polygamy is a solution to the problems posed by birth and survival rates that leave many more women coming to maturity than men. In time the gender ratio may even out.
But just now, to force all the wives but one to leave the husband would be to consign them to poverty and disgrace. Who will support them? Who will feed their children? Where would they go? Beyond that, it consigns the husband himself to disgrace and disesteem in a society where many wives are a sign of wealth and dignity.
So when a polygamous family in Africa hears and receives the gospel message, can they all become Christians? Or not? Some bishops have said that whole families may be baptized, provided that after marriage no new wives may be added to the harem, and that ultimately in this way the institution of polygamy may be eased out.
But marital snarls in this country come from our widely accepted practice of serial monogamy, not polygamy. One thing we are doing is learning from the Eastern Orthodox doctrine that marriages themselves can "die" and so leave partners free to remarry. Gradually, we're learning why God put erasers on pencils.
Divorce, like abortion, is never going to be embraced and celebrated in the practice of our religion. Both are sad often even tragic, whatever the circumstances may be that make them necessary, and even positively therapeutic. Still, they are not part of the Constitution of human life; they are amendments made necessary by human failure.
We should remember the whole context of polygamy when we hear the readings today about the divorce discussion with the scholarly Pharisees. We should remember that they were steeped in the myth of the origin of human sexuality -- the deep sleep, the rib-ectomy, the creation of Eve from the rib of Adam, and the pronouncement of marriage as union into one flesh.
We should notice that our story is from the second chapter of Genesis -- it is the older of the two versions of human beginnings that are given there. In the first chapter, God makes humanity all at once -- in two models -- at the same time.
But here in chapter two, the ADAM (in Hebrew the word means "man" in the sense of "all mankind") comes first. That is, the GENERIC HUMAN being, undifferentiated into gender. And God is in the process of looking for good company for the ADAM, not a candidate for going forth and multiplying, but a companion, a helper, someone to dispel the loneliness. And only after bringing around all the animals for the ADAM to have a look at does God put the ADAM under a general anesthesia and come up with something entirely new.
Now this story is much misinterpreted by people as putting women in second place since Eve is taken "out of the ADAM." This misses the point. The Bible is not about biological science. The point of the Adam and Eve story is that human beings have one origin, and that the gender specificity, maleness or femaleness, is not to be thought of as definitive, but that across all humanity we are "bone of each other's bone, flesh of each other's flesh."
Myths are, as the great psychologists like Carl Jung knew, public dreams. It's in sleep that Adam's rib is taken and the dream of Eve brings about new possibilities -- the one divides so that there may be two becoming one again.
There are other ancient myths that we should know about, that explain this basic human quality in different symbols. The Upanishads of India, about 1000 BC, tell of the universe before time, being the Self, in the form of a human. The Self shouts, "It is I" and finds itself alone, and "lacked delight and wished there were another."
This sounds like our Genesis: "for the human there was not found a helper fit for him", doesn't it? Well then, in the Sanskrit myth, the Self swells up and splits in two and becomes male and female. It was BOTH before that. The male embraces the female and the human race arises. Therefore, every thing -- right down to the ants in the anthill, the story goes -- is at one with the original creation. It's a myth about the unity of creation and the origin of human need for companionship and relationship. But note, in the Sanskrit myth it is GOD that differentiates into sexes, in order to then unite. So in this understanding, God and the creation are not separate, as they are in our western myth.
Protestant Christianity in general has seen "salvation" as an individual's deliverance from damnation, and has little room for community in the process. So, it follows naturally that to us marriage and divorce tend to be individual matters. But the more ancient and profound Christian tradition says we can't be saved all alone, we can't even get married all alone -- "it takes a village" as Hillary says, or "it takes the church," as a classical Christianity would say.
Unfortunately, the traditional Roman Catholic way of handling failure in marriage is to claim it didn't happen at all -- that there was no marriage. What they claim to do is annul the rites that proclaimed it. The fee for this is higher of course than the fee for a marriage license. Anglicanism has better sense than that -- good sense gained only lately, though, and after more experience with divorce and denunciation than we're proud of. The Eastern Orthodox, perhaps from their climate and culture, learned more quickly.
In the Western creation myth, God does not split into two, but remains apart, overseeing the split of the Adam -- not God, but something made by God -- into two. Our religion then challenges us forever to relationship with others, with other human beings, and only through them to find our relationship with the Creator. No Hindu thinks that way -- that religion challenges the faithful to identify instead with the Universe, the Being that people split from, the divinity everyone is a part of.
In the Greek version of the creation myth, from Plato's Symposium, we have a story of three distinct creatures at the beginning. There is one race, all male, who live in the sun. Another, all female, here on earth. And a race called intersex living in the moon.
The gods on Mount Olympus were afraid of all three races because they were huge. Each was a double creature, back to back, each with four hands, four feet, and so forth. The male race was two males joined back to back; the female race, two females; the both-sex race, a male and female joined back to back. The gods -- Zeus and Apollo -- were afraid that these creatures were so cooperative and so powerful that they might take over control from the gods. The Olympians plotted a war and cut the double creatures all in two, down the middle, and scattered them throughout the universe.
In this myth, the divided creatures continue to long for their other half. And spend all their time searching and searching for their other half, the only thing that can make them feel whole again. Sometimes they succeeded; sometimes they failed. But they never stopped searching to be reunited, leaving no human being enough time or energy to challenge the gods.
This myth explained for the Greeks the phenomenon not only of male-female love, but also of all kinds of friendship and connection. It's an interesting take on what the human compulsion for connection is all about. Clearly it's not just about reproduction. It's about relationship. It's God's provision for companionship, for love. Unitive relationships are in our nature, hard-wired.
Now let's look at the good news that Jesus has for the Pharisees in today's gospel. They aren't quizzing Jesus to learn about human relationships or the wonder of sexuality, of the great enabling grace in their faith legends. They want to argue a legal point. Not: "Is it legal to get a divorce?" They ask "Is it legal for a man to divorce his wife?" Well, Jesus knew the law books, maybe as well as they, and so he said, "What do the law books say?" They answered, "It's legal - fill out the forms, and you've got it." And Jesus said, "Well, there is, in fact, that provision for human failing, but you've missed the point of it all."
God made you for rapture and you want to talk rupture. God made you for love and you want to talk law. God made you for union and you want to talk division. God wanted one mind, one heart, one flesh -- and you want to talk two bank accounts, two apartments, two tax returns. God wanted you to have union, not separation.
Of course Moses' Law allows for failure. Of course the church can see that some relationships come apart. But that's not God's dream for us.
In Jesus' time, as in many parts of Africa today, to send a woman away from her husband was to consign her to death. Why might a man divorce his wife in Jesus' time? Adultery? If SHE had committed adultery, then her husband could divorce her and she could be stoned to death, as part of the divorce. Was she not as much fun as she used to be? Too bad for her -- send her packing. Was it that her father was not rich after all? Set her on fire with a quart of kerosene, as is done to unlucky brides in India even today. That's one quick way to a final decree. And the husband doesn't even have to return the dowry.
It is this that Jesus is addressing when he denies divorce to the all-powerful Jewish male of the first century. There is no discussion of a woman divorcing her husband here. And Jesus is coming to the defense of the defenseless women, just as the bishops in Africa do in their defense of polygamy. They are not laying down rules for everywhere and for all time. They are, like Jesus, saying that insistence upon talking about rights and permissions misses God's point. Human relationships are about duty and opportunity. They are about rapture and love and the possibility that every human being can find an end to his or her aloneness in union with another.
"For this reason a person leaves the nuclear family and joins with another" ... so that new life, new arrangements, new possibilities may come to pass, so that aloneness may come to an end, and there will no longer be the division that individuality creates but the union that sexuality makes possible. When God brings human beings together, therefore, in this venture of union -- at whatever age and after whatever missteps -- let no human institution, let no legal tradition, be used to create division again. What God joins together let no one put asunder.
And therefore the letter to the Hebrews says, "we don't see human beings quite having succeeded at all this, though we are only a little lower than angels." The creation story says that everything is supposed to fit together neatly. But in real life, we don't see it happening that way. But what we do see is JESUS. And here is the one we look to. It's strange isn't it, the one we look to is someone who -- by tradition -- never married, but who became the Bridegroom of us all. Jesus lived and died as one of us to show us something about how we can bridge the gaps in our nature while we wait here on earth for things to be perfected. How to overcome life's tendency to defeats, divorces, death, separation, bondage.
In the marriage service, the couple is always reminded that their relationship is a mystery, a sacrament, of the love Christ the bridegroom has for each of us, for his church. And, for those who listen, a reminder to everyone that every human relationship of love and every time people find fulfillment in one another the world gets a little glimpse of the endless marriage that all human beings celebrate with our God.
With enormous debt to the work of Grant M. Gallup
-- Mark Lewis
Your comments or questions are welcome MLewis@secaucus.org.
Links to additional "Reflections on Lessons" may be found at the bottom of the Sunday web page.
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