Jesus Loves You

A sermon for the 20th Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 22
October 6, 2024, at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Hot Springs, AR

Readings: Mark 10:2-16

I remember the house. I remember it as blue with woods behind it where my first dog Snoopy ran away. Who knows if that’s true. The TV would play Barney or my favorite show, Lamb Chop. My parents enjoyed watching Cops. I memorized the theme song early on. My room had a small strip of dinosaur wallpaper around the top. And I remember the trailer, where Mom, my brother, and I moved out to. It was near a farm, and there was a pig. I threw a rock at a wasp nest and got stung several times. Maybe I was three or four. I remember the women’s shelter, the tree lined drive to a protected house, the small bedroom for my mother, brother, and me. There was a playground. That was where we moved next. I didn’t know why we moved there. I learned much later that my biological father, whose long pattern of abuse had finally driven my mother to that trailer–I learned he had been calling the trailer, recounting with menacing detail where we had been that day, threatening to kidnap my brother and me. That’s why we moved to the shelter. That’s why we moved from South Carolina to Missouri, where no one would find us. 

Not every divorce story sounds like that. It doesn’t have to. But in every divorce story I’ve heard, there is brokenness, and pain, and heartache, and uncertainty, and a back-up-against-the-wall feeling, and the hope for healing and a new start and something more, maybe even to love again. 

Jesus is talking about divorce today, and let us acknowledge that it makes us feel uncomfortable. Perhaps, as the gospel was read, you wondered about the divorce of someone you know, or your own divorce, or that time you wanted a divorce, and you wondered what Jesus would say. Perhaps Jesus’s words didn’t bother you at all; perhaps they made you turn red and want to crawl under your pew. If that was you today, this sermon is for you.  

We read that the Pharisees came to Jesus to test him. They want to trap him and shame him. So they ask him a hard question. According to the law of Moses, is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife? Let us be clear: the Pharisees are only interested in this question insofar as they can trap Jesus. They are not genuine interlocutors. They do not have in mind the brokenness and impossible circumstances we have discussed already today. “What does the law say?” Jesus asks. He knows the answer, and so do they. The Law of Moses says in Deuteronomy 24 that a man can issue a certificate of divorce to his wife. Any reason is fine–he simply must find something “objectionable.” One Jewish translation of the Scriptures by a council of rabbis says, if a wife fails to please her husband because he finds something obnoxious about her, he can divorce and dismiss her. That is all that is required. Being obnoxious. In effect, a man can issue a certificate of divorce for any reason. But according to Jewish law, at least the interpretation of Jewish law at the time and place of Jesus, a woman cannot, even if her husband is obnoxious (and what man among us is not?), or worse. A woman could not do much at all in Jesus’s society. If a woman were issued a certificate of divorce, she was often sentenced to poverty. She could not work or make money for herself. 

Jesus’s answer makes the standard harder. He says Moses was wrong. Moses’s law, he sees, has in effect allowed for the abuse and mistreatment of women. Jesus sees the results. Think about the woman at the well in Samaria–I wonder if her circumstances were like this? And Jesus, as he always does, stands up for those who are forgotten or abused or neglected or afraid. Jesus stands up for the most vulnerable. And he says, enough. Jesus will not stand by while God’s children are abused, especially if religion is used to justify that abuse. 

I have another memory, but I am nearly certain I made it up. It must have been one of those things I put together in my child brain to make sense of the world and the brokenness and confusion and fear around me. In my memory, I am being dropped off for a weekend visit with my biological father. I didn’t want to go. As I am transferring cars, I look toward the street, and there’s a parade. And just then, a group of women from the shelter, like suffragettes, come marching by, holding lit candles and singing Amazing Grace. I know I must have made it up because at this point I was protected from seeing my father and women in shelters don’t march in parades. But my brain put those things together for a reason. In the confusion of my four year old brain, I saw the shelter as a light in the darkness, a place of safety and hope, a source of God’s amazing grace for even me in a grief-stricken and fearful situation. 

I hope we are not like those Pharisees coming to test Jesus. I hope we don’t hold our self-righteousness up and parade it around, seeking to look better than those around us. Instead, I hope we are like those women in my memory. Themselves broken, they carry a light into the darkness of the world, proclaiming an amazing grace that can heal and save, that leads us forward when we don’t know where to turn, that holds us when all we can do is cry. I hope we are a place where all the broken, no matter who they are or where they come from, can approach the Good Shepherd like those children in the gospel today, knowing that he will bless them and be good to them and love them unconditionally. 

My friends, hear me now: If you are divorced, Jesus loves you. If you are married, Jesus loves you. If you are single, Jesus loves you. If you are widowed, Jesus loves you. No matter who you are, Jesus loves you. The love and grace and forgiveness of God are for you. The blood shed and the body broken are for you. And whether we are single, or married, or divorced, or widowed, or whatever, we are all sinners, and we all need Jesus. The good news is: Jesus is here, waiting for each of us, calling us his child, loving us no matter what.

The truth is, the love of Jesus for us all will never stop. It can never stop. Through trials, through difficulties, through divorce, the love of Jesus is reaching out to us. And there is no where you can go where you can escape that love, not even into a courtroom in a divorce proceeding, not even down a tree-lined drive to an undisclosed address. God’s love is following you in, and Jesus is loving you through it.  

Jesus loves me, this I know
For the Bible tells me so; 
Little ones, 
Hurting ones, 
Broken ones, 
Suffering ones, 
Divorced ones and married ones and single ones and widowed ones, 
Ones like me, and ones like you, 
To Jesus belong;
We are all weak, 
But Jesus is strong. 

Yes, Jesus loves us. Yes, Jesus loves us. Yes, Jesus loves us–you and me and the whole world. The Bible tells us so.