The Reverend Carolyn Estrada

We associate this admonition with marriage: indeed, those words from today’s Gospel are used in the liturgy for the celebration and blessing of a marriage.

Strong words!

And their pairing with Jesus’ teaching on divorce seems to underscore their significance to marriage and the marriage vows: "Divorce: don’t do it."

It’s also yet one more example of our need to contextualize both what we read in Scripture and how we interpret it in our lives today.

Are we to take Jesus’ teaching on divorce literally?

Certainly today’s divorce statistics demonstrate that we don’t…

What is Jesus saying?

From what we know about marriage at the time of Jesus, I’m not so sure it was God who was doing the joining together… Marriage at that time was a contract made between men: the groom, and the father of the bride. Essentially the father transferred to the groom the ownership of his daughter. The woman had no say in the matter. Further, Mosaic Law gave the husband the right to divorce his wife at will.

And a woman without a man was among the most vulnerable and marginalized in society: she had no protection, no means of support, and was reduced to begging – or prostitution – for her livelihood.

Jesus’ response to the Pharisees speaks to the hardness of heart of those whose self-interest would create an underclass, who would exploit the vulnerability of women and participate in their further marginalization.

His pronouncement on the particularity of divorce seen in that context is one more example of Jesus’ compassion and concern for the vulnerable, the marginalized, and it is in this light that I would like to consider these words: What God has joined together, let no one separate…

This morning’s Gospel lesson is paired with part of the Creation Story from Genesis, and I am reminded that, day after day, as God finished the work of creation, God pronounced what had been done as "Good."

All of it.

Not some better, some worse, or less good.

There were no "value-added" criteria.

God saw everything that God had made, and indeed it was very good: sun, moon, stars, water, land, plants, animals, birds of the air and fish of the sea, people – the entire web of creation, pulsing with life! God blessed them all.

We know God’s creation is abundant – and diverse. (Look at all of us here today!) And we are all intricately bound together in relationship because God loved us all into being!

But it is so easy for us as human beings to separate ourselves out from one aspect of creation or another, to let our special interests, whether personal or political, economic or environmental, result in a privileged and an underclass.

This is true even today, when the reality of our inter-dependency is ever more clear to us with signs of global warming, the impact of global financial crisis, threats of global war… It is no longer only those proverbial butterfly wings whose movement in the rain forests of the Amazon can be felt here in Santa Ana. Our newspapers daily remind us of our fate; how dependent we are on one another for our future well-being…

Yes, we may know more – but as a first world country whose standard of living, even in this depressed economy, is still better than most of the world, our experience of that reality is less. We may be bound together – but we live with a sense of entitlement. It’s hard to see ourselves as MEMBERS of creation rather than MASTERS of creation.

Jesus reminds us today to remember that we are all creatures of the God who loved us into being, and admonishes us to remember our responsibility toward the vulnerable and the marginalized: What God has joined together, let no one separate.

It’s easier in the abstract than up-close-and-personal.

I have a favorite example from Yevtushenko’s autobiography in which he recalls being a child in a huge crowd in Moscow when a procession of twenty thousand German prisoners of war were marched across Red Square. The crowd was mostly women and children, all of whom had suffered from the burden of the war, and most of whom had had a father or husband or brother or son killed by the Germans. People were clenching their fists and you could feel the hatred in the air. Suddenly, something happened to them. He describes the scene:

The women saw beyond the label – "enemy" – to their common humanity which bound them together as part of God’s creation.

Theology gives expression to this concept:

A mitzvah in the Jewish tradition is a good and kind act. But the good and kind act does not exist in isolation: in doing the mitzvah, the doer embodies God in a particular act.

As Christians we talk about being the hands and feet of God in the world today: the enfleshment or incarnation of God in who we are and how we live.

These concepts recognize our essential unity with God, that manifestation of God in the particularity of human experience, and that joining together which binds us to God and to one another as part of God’s creation.

Today Jesus challenges us to soften our hearts and to release those practices of our own which create an underclass, which exploit vulnerability and marginalization of God’s people..

Amen.