Words, Words, Everywhere Words & No Relief In Sight

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We did the consult thing today, with the specialist, well one of the specialists.  Dora was so starved for some kinda news that I thought she was going to fall down and kiss sunny jim’s feet.  

He talked more than my preacher does. No offense, chaplain! You know how preachers can be. They think they can solve anything by throwing words at it.

Anyway, every time I asked a question he got that, ‘Children should be seen and not heard' look in his eyes.

Aw, heck,there wasn't anything wrong with him.  Other than the fact that he talked for most of a solid hour, and didn't say a doggone thing. 

‘Maybe this, maybe that, maybe this other thing.”

Made me weary to the bone.  Why do they waste your dang time if they don’t have anything to say?

I know he thought he was doing a bang-up job because Dora was just about to cry from gratitude.

He didn't say one thing that had any certainty to it. If he had only said what he knew for a fact, we woulda been out in seven minutes. 

Heck, he could’ve taken an extra ten minutes to show us how much he learned in school and I still woulda felt all right. Instead we get a truck load of pig manure.  And I can tell you right now that pig manure is not what we need more of at this point.  It may have its place in this life, but we got an overabundance of it in our corner of the world.

And by the end of the day Dora is depressed as all get-out.  We were eating supper, having a great time joking back and forth, like we used to do, and all of a sudden she looks at me and says, ‘We didn’t find out anything today, did we? We still don’t know what they can do because they don’t know either.’ 

There isn't much that gets that woman down. If I told you everything she’s been through in her life, it would make you cry, and I know you've heard some rough things.  ‘She eats pressure for breakfast,’ is what I have always said about her.

Now she is all jumpy. Her knees have started hurting all over again, from out of nowhere, and she gets these headaches. 

She’s never had headaches before.

When she tells them they just stare back and say, “That ain't related to this,’ like that is a goll-dang answer.  It don’t concern them, like that kinda pain ain't any of their business because it ain't related to what they are studying on.  

I can tell you for sure that it concerns the heck out of me.

Aw, there is nothing wrong with that guy.  I know he’s doing his best, if for no other reason than he’s too proud to do a bad job. You can tell that about him.

In a way we are both alike because right now, I get a lot of pleasure out of making Dora smile.  And I am of less use to her than that bloomin' doctor is. 

It is so easy to please her these days. It feels so good to do some little thing for her.  And you would think I just worked some kind of a genuine New Testament miracle.

But I feel like crap for feeling so happy while she is suffering.  Some days I feel positively happy because she needs me so much right now. 

Dora has always loved me but there has never been a day in our marriage when I thought she actually needed me.  Now she needs me and the way it makes me feel is kind of scary.

OK, well it is time for me to shut up. I'm talking more than that dang doctor.

Will you pray with me? Right now it feels like that is the only kind of talking that is gonna help anything.

Photo C redit: www.crosscards.com

An Unexpected Invitation to Grace

Today's guest post appears  thanks to my wife Linda Wilkerson.  Linda is director of pastoral care & pastoral education for the Parkland Health and Hospital System, where she has served for 12 years.  She has also served for 6 years as my co senior pastor at Iglesia Bill Harrod. Last Sunday she preached on the subject of divorce, basing her sermon on Mark 10:2-16

We often have the pleasure of celebrating with couples in this church who have been married for many, many years.  Just recently we celebrated with Mary and Tony Diaz and with Rachel and Daniel Alonzo.  We also see it in marriages like those of Debbie and Daniel Solis, Mike and Andie Garcia and many other couples in our congregation.  

Their stories remind us of what is possible when two people stick together to raise a family and to contribute to the health and stability of their churches, their neighborhoods and their cities.

We have also had the painful privilege of weeping with and supporting those who are looking for healing from the death of their marriages.  Divorce is common in our day, as it seems it was in Jesus’ day. We get married making a lot of promises to one another and sometimes we fail to carry out those promises.  And those failures have real consequences.  Everyone suffers—husband, wife, children, in-laws.

Many of you know that I am divorced.  And remarried, thankfully, to Mark.  I know from first-hand experience how painful divorce is, no matter the reason.

I am convinced the vast number of couples who go to the trouble to make wedding vows do so with every intent to stay together.  There are many reasons that people do not stay together.  Some of them are tragically flawed, but some of them are also painfully obvious.

TAKING A STAKE THROUGH THE HEART?

For centuries the Christian religious establishment, while offering grace on other fronts, has commanded women and some men to stay in marriages in which they and their children were grossly mistreated and made to suffer on a daily basis.

So today’s passage, where the Apostle Mark records Jesus as clearly saying that divorce should be prohibited and that men and women who divorce and then remarry are committing adultery, could be for me and many of you, like taking a stake through the heart.

Jesus’s words seem to leave no room for a balm of any kind on the soul of the wounded divorced or divorcing man or woman.  And the church, I think, over many years has been guilty of using Jesus’ words as just that—a sword or battering ram—using them to beat up on the suffering while some of those who have not been divorced feel a self-righteous pride.

One woman wrote that when she reads this piece of scripture or hears it preached, she feels as though a load of garbage has been dumped on her, making it impossible to get rid of the stink of divorce.

And, I want to say clearly—I think that when we take this approach to Jesus’ words, we have badly misunderstood what Jesus was about and what he was attempting to do in his teaching on this subject.

PLACING OURSELVES IN JESUS' TIME

First, though I imagine that the emotional pain of divorce is the same no matter what the time period, in our days or Jesus,’ divorce in Jesus day was a far different matter than it is today, in this respect: wives were considered property.  According to Hebrew law, a man could write a bill of divorce for any reason. 

One Jewish interpreter of the law made the famous, or infamous, statement that a bill of divorce was allowed if the wife burned the toast.  A woman’s life was never secure. If she lived with a tyrant she was always one step away from a life of poverty because without being in a relationship with a man she was an outcast in the community, with no way to earn a living a survive. 

Jesus knew that.  When he was asked whether Moses allowed divorce, he went right to the heart of the matter, calling out the hard-heartedness of men who would divorce their wives and leave them destitute. He took a step further when he said that no matter what Moses allowed, this despicable behavior that allowed one person to ruin another was never what God intended.

Pictures of the Happy Couple
Photo Credit: Mark Grace

That’s good news for everyone in a relationship who has been abused, demeaned or made to feel worthless.  God created every one of us in God’s image.  Divorce cannot cancel out that essential fact. As the Psalmist said in the reading from Psalm 8 which Mark just spoke on, we have been created just a little lower than the angels.  We are each a priceless, beloved creation of God. 

No one can ever take that away.

Also, for most of history marriage was not about romance or fulfillment; it was viewed primarily as a legal contract, the lawful exchange of property.

So Jesus, quotes Genesis saying, ‘God made them male and female.’ ⁷‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, ⁸and the two shall become one flesh.’ I think that by linking marriage to creation Jesus intended to retrieve and to elevate, marriage as something more than just a legal obligation. He may have wanted to assure men and women that, in fact, God blesses our marriages and wills for them to flourish, and that any time a marriage ends in ruin it grieves the heart of God, not because some legal standard has been broken but because of the damage done to Gods' beloved children.

Come back tomorrow to read the conclusion of Linda's sermon taken from Mark 10:2-16

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