Today’s Scripture Reading (September
25, 2014): Matthew 19
Divorce
rates continue to rise, at least in the Cultural West. The divorce rate in the
United States (when seen as a percentage of marriages over the same period of
time) reached 53% in 2011. Canadian statistics for 2008 show a similar rate of
48%. And as bad as that might seem, no one seems to hold a candle to Belgium
who topped the charts at a whopping 71% in 2010. The western idea of marriage
has been changing for the past few generations. No one seems to expect to marry
for life anymore. We no longer believe that strict monogamy is the pattern that
our lives will follow. Rather, we have fallen into a hope for serial monogamy. Our
cultural question is often this - if we can commit to one person at a time over
the length of our lives, is that not enough?
The problem
is that the Bible (which in this case we judge as archaic) seems to hold a very
different ideal for us. The Bible would seem to instruct us toward a lifelong
monogamy – the practice of taking one spouse for the entire length of our
lives. And we can argue that the Bible is speaking out of a different time and
different place, but to be honest our protestations often end up sounding
selfish and falling short. For instance, as we spend billions on trying to find
the cure to AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, the ability to
eradicate these illnesses from the planet are totally within our own control.
Lifelong monogamy by the human population of our planet over a single
generation would drastically change the landscape with regard to sexually
transmitted diseases. Lifelong monogamy over a series of generations could
eradicate the problem totally. We already know the cure. We just don’t want to
accept it.
But this
passage leads to another reason why the Bible supports the idea of strict or
lifelong monogamy. There is a process that begins when we unite sexually with
someone that knits us together. We cease being individuals and begin to see
life as a couple. We recognize that it is happening. We might call it something
different (like love) but we know the process. We begin to view our world
differently when we are romantically linked with someone else. The two have
quite literally already started to become one.
It is because
of this process of being knit together that, when that linking dissolves ending
in a breakup or divorce, there is no painless way to separate. What has
literally been sewn together now must be ripped apart, and the pain involved in
the ripping lasts a lifetime. The resultant scars from ripping the one back
into two becomes a pain that will literally shape the way we live the rest of
our lives.
Recently I
met with a couple who had experienced several marriages and divorces in their
lives. And the problems that had crept into their current marriage had a lot to
do with the previous ones. The tears from the divorces that went before still
had not healed. The raw edges and the pain was causing new problems, and the
only solution was to admit that it just wasn’t supposed to be this way. That God
had a different plan. And this pain was a result of our own unwillingness to
follow that plan – to let what God had joined to never be separated.
Divorce is
not the unforgivable sin, but the path to forgiveness begins when we begin to
recognize the permanence of what God has joined to together. And we can make
the most out of our current marriages if we will just realize this one fact - “what God has joined together,
let no one separate.”
Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Mark 10
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