331 What We Offer

   (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “What We Offer” originally shared on October 2, 2024. It was the 331^st video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   We’re going to see two sides of what the Church offers the world this Sunday, and both of them are offensive. Or not. Today, we’re going to find out.

   If I paid closer attention, I’d probably know the answer but since I haven’t, I’ve wondered if the Assignment Editors who send reporters out to cover news stories consider the psychological toll it takes on them. If a reporter gets a gruesome murder one day, do they get sent to a flower festival the next?

   That came to mind when reading this week’s Gospel text, Mark 10:2-16, the one that will be read in the vast majority of churches all over the world this coming Sunday.

    Here you get Jesus’ hard teaching on divorce. Hard because it didn’t approve the loopholes that many religious leaders of the time taught were there. Instead, building on God’s intention rather than the religious Law, He heightened their awareness of the need for a Savior.

   And then we get a teaching that seems softer, more like a flower festival, and more like what many people imagine Jesus to be. Unconditionally accepting.

   Yet, both stories would have challenged the way most people thought about God at the time. They both would have been difficult. And, in many ways, they still are.

   They are both about the meaning of “Sin”.

   We don’t hear too much human behavior being called out as “Sin” in our culture or in our churches today. Unless it’s as the sin of some political or social injustice being worse than all other sins, or some culturally disapproved behavior, or about something not to be called sin at all because that would make it easy to forgive but not to change.

   But these all teach a very non-Biblical understanding of Sin.

   Today, “Sin” sounds melodramatic, or at least outdated, or maybe even provocative. Too judgmental. Too “Scarlet Letter”.

   In Mark 10:2-12 (there are parallels in Matthew and Luke), Jesus speaks about divorce in what seems like a very judgey kind of way. Isn’t this the same Jesus who said in Matthew 7:1,

“Do not judge, so that you may not be judged.” ?

   And yet, here are Jesus’ strict words on divorce. Can we reconcile all these verses by simply saying that we are not to judge what is reserved for God to judge and, after all, Jesus is fully God (as well as fully a human being) so it’s OK if he does it? Or is it something else?

   The Pharisees who pop up at the very beginning of this Sunday’s text are testing Jesus by provoking Jesus to make a judgement.

   We see it in Mark 10, starting at the 2^nd verse:

2 Some Pharisees came, and to test him they asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” 3 He answered them, “What did Moses command you?” 4 They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her.”

   The Pharisees were the most righteous people among the Jews. Every young man wanted to grow up to be a Pharisee. They got respect.

   They were not clergy. Pharisees were lay men (this was a time of patriarchy) who had come to a point in their lives where they could afford to retire, turn the business, or the trade, or the skills, over to the kids, and do nothing but study the religious law and live it. There were so many laws, over 1,000, to keep track of, that it was a full-time job.

   And here the Pharisees were trying to stir things up. Do you know anybody like that? 😊

   Jesus didn’t have a hard time with the Pharisees because they were righteous, but because they were self-righteous. They loved the respect they got, and they let everyone know that they were righteous.

   They loved the letter of the law, but they didn’t care about the spirit of it. It was like a parent who tells their children, “Don’t eat cake before dinner. It will spoil your appetite.” The children say “OK”, but when the parent walks into the kitchen, they find them stuffing themselves with cookies. “What’s going on?” the parent says. “You said, “Don’t eat cake before dinner. But you didn’t say we couldn’t eat the cookies.”

   The children kept the letter of the law, but they ignored the spirit of it.

   Likewise, the Pharisees had only become concerned with regulations and appearances. They were not concerned with what the law pointed to, or why the law was given: the transformational living relationship with the one true living God for which human beings were created.

   And when they argued, they were masters of the “gotcha” questions.

   That’s where we find them in this reading from Mark 10, continuing with verse 5:

5 But Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you. 6 But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ 7 ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife 8 and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. 9 Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”

   Did I mention that, in Jesus’ day, it was patriarchy? Women had no rights. There were some religious scholars who said that the words, ‘Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her.’, which was not a law but a commentary on current practices with reference to Deuteronomy 24:1-4, meant that, first, only a man could end the relationship and, second, that he could end it for any reason: burnt toast, bad posture, mother didn’t like her, anything.

   So, Jesus’ words, while harsh to our ears, actually had the effect of protecting women.

   And the provision for divorce was given to limit the human effects of human sinfulness, not to condone it.

   But it was a question for which there was no religious or cultural agreement. Jesus had taken a side, but he had based his “side” not on the law, or on a loophole in the law, but upon the nature of relationships in God’s creation.

   As usual, we get some of the details clarified in reading Jesus’ explanation to his disciples, privately, continuing here with verse 10:

10 Then in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter. 11 He said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; 12 and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”

   Jesus said, “No divorce”.

   Jesus went with God’s intention. Human beings were created in God’s image and, whatever else that means, it means that we were created for a living relationship with the one true living God. Marriage is a reflection of that relationship. Breaking that relationship is a reflection of our rebellion against God. Marriage, Jesus said, existed under God’s authority, not human beings’.

   So, while the Pharisees were looking for loopholes, Jesus cranked the law down even harder.  

   He seems to be making the religious Law concerning divorce more strict. Why? Because Jesus, who was fully God and fully human being, saw the real problem.

   The problem was Sin. Sin entered, and continues to enter, the world through a one-way door: our rebellion against God.

   That rebellion is Sin, with a capital “S”. It separates us from God. Sins, with a small “s” are what we do in this state of separation, to reject God. And we, who are all sinners, continue to separate ourselves from God. Sin, as it has from the fall of human beings from the perfect relationship with God that God had given them, means death. How can sinners deal with Sin? We deserve only death.

   But Jesus, in describing his purpose vs. all the forces that seek to defy God, said, in John 10:10,

¹⁰ The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.

   God’s answer to Sin, with a capital S, is not “You have to be better.”

   God’s answer is not, “Quit your job and learn all the laws so that you can keep them.”

   God’s answer is not, “You need to do better.”

   God’s answer is not, “Let’s look for loopholes in the Law”, or “Let’s now call Sin, “Not Sin”.

   All of that would be bad news.

   God’s answer is, “You need a savior, and I am the Savior, in Jesus Christ, through the cross.”

   Most Christians know John 3:16, here it is, but also pay attention to John 3:17,

¹⁶ “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.

¹⁷ “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.

   The Christian life is a response to something we didn’t earn or deserve and didn’t have to because of Jesus Christ. Our Savior. On the cross. That is the gospel, the good news.

   God’s answer is to restore us, to give us new life, to make us a new creation, to give us a new birth, to be made God’s people, a people set apart, blessed to be a blessing.  

   Is this what we are offering the world. I don’t think so.

   The Christian Church in the Western world has been in decline for some time. I think that one of the major reasons is that we behave as if we have nothing to offer.

   People can form many kinds of community and families on their own. They can find meaning in their work, in social service work, or their role in their tribe. And, though that meaning eventually fails, they can find distractions in their hobbies, or drugs, or popular entertainment, or sexual exploitation of others, or violence, or self-righteousness, or revenge, or life-drama, or sports, or any number of self-destructive behaviors that human beings devise to live lives that ultimately are “curved in upon themselves”, what 16^th century Church reformer Martin Luther called “Sin”.

   Worship services that are not focused on God but are economically aspirational, performative, produced as an enterprise, popular only if they reflect the congregation’s political and social views, do not challenge any lack of compassion, set a standard of this world in the way we think the world works best for us, confirms only local biases, are led by popular personalities, built upon entertainment values, made to meet the budget, tell you in big ways and small that God is all about you, that you don’t need to change anything, to just be good by local human standards, and which operate on the fear that if people don’t like it they’ll just go someplace else, can grow. They offer what the world wants. But do they offer what the world needs?

   What we don’t offer is what the world knows that it needs but can’t name, and when it names it on its own it mocks and fears it.

   Because the gospel, “the good news” can only come from outside of human beings.

   This is why Jesus began his public ministry in all four gospels with the same simple message as in Mark 1:14-15,

¹⁴ Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, ¹⁵ and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”

   We are by nature sinful and unclean. This doesn’t have any intrinsically moral meaning. It simply means that we are born separated from God. Jesus calls us to turn around, to repent.

   How can we do that? We are naturally sinners, separated from God.

   Our gospel reading for this Sunday concludes with the answer, in Mark 10:13-16,

¹³ People were bringing little children to him in order that he might touch them; and the disciples spoke sternly to them. ¹⁴ But when Jesus saw this, he was indignant and said to them, “Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. ¹⁵ Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” ¹⁶ And he took them up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them.

   Children were at the bottom of the social order in Jesus’ day, so for him to seemingly put them at the top in the kingdom of God was shocking. So, why make children the spiritual template for blessedness? They didn’t represent what people valued when they thought of maturity: independence.

   This is shocking also to us. What does Jesus mean when he says, “Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.”?

   Do you have to be baptized as an infant? Go to Sunday School? Be an angel in the Christmas play? No.

   We are like children. Dependent.

   We cannot come to Jesus, but Jesus comes to us. We have nothing to offer, but Jesus offers us everything and that is what we have to offer the world. Jesus.

   This is the good news we share; it is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Jesus.

   How do we proclaim what the world knows that it needs but it can’t name? By being God’s ambassadors.

   I suggest no program. Programs don’t work. People work. Spirit inspired people “work”. Programs, by themselves, are what institutions do in order to say they are not to blame. To say, “We tried that.”

    Renewal doesn’t come through a program. It comes through a relationship with God that is filtered through our relationships with friends and family. It comes by telling our stories, “Why I am a Christian” or “Why I remain a Christian”. Or, “Why I came to believe that Jesus rose from the dead”.

   Christian churches are genuine communities of people who love Jesus, not “friendly” people or warm families. You can find those where you live.

   We listen to the Holy Spirit over community organizers, we seek faith over facilities, and we model spiritual formation over saccharin friendliness.

   Jesus condemned divorce not to make life harder, but to teach us to not live self-righteously.  He taught us to receive His reign over us in the Kingdom of God like children, so that we may live with confidence, as a child trusts a loving parent.

   Open your heart to God. Confess your sin and repent of it. Live with joy, trusting in the mercy and grace of God. Place your trust in Jesus, our Savior, to make you righteous: Jesus, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.