Dead, certainly, but surely raised: a sermon

A sermon by Jamie Howison on Mark 10:2-16

This evening I really need to speak to this reading from the Gospel according to Mark, so let me just set aside the reading from Job for this week, with a promise that I will pick up the Job story—in all of its complexities—next Sunday.

It was a good number of years ago that someone talked to me after being in our liturgy on the Sunday in which these verses appeared, and who remarked that for her this was always a really raw week. She wasn’t inclined to look at the passages in advance, and so inevitably found herself both surprised and vulnerable when this Sunday arrived and we again read, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.” And yes, she was someone who had lived through a divorce and made her peace with it, but this reading always caught her off guard.

And yes, I am divorced. It wasn’t something that I wanted or planned, and as many of you will remember, the breakdown of my marriage five years ago is something that left me more than a little broken. In the little book I brought into print this past winter, I wrote of how I reacted to it all:

In the days immediately following my realization that my marriage was in deep trouble—that at the very least I was facing a separation, and quite probably a permanent dissolution—my emotions swung wildly between anxious fear and desperate hope. I shook constantly, found myself unable to sleep, lost my appetite, and had trouble keeping down whatever little food I could swallow. I found coffee almost entirely unpalatable, and even the thought of favorite foods like seafood or olives made my stomach lurch. I couldn’t focus enough to read or watch a movie, and so late evenings would find me pacing the streets around my home, getting more and more tied up with anxiety, and quite probably compounding my sleeplessness. In my imagination I would conjure up little glimmers of hope, thinking that if I did this or said that or found the right marriage counselor, maybe we could have one more try at things. Faint hope, to be sure—and each time it would fade as quickly as it had come. (Howison, A Kind of Solitude, Resource Publications, 2021)

I had written “in the days immediately following my realization that my marriage was in deep trouble,” but now looking back I realize that it was in fact months, not days, that saw me in that space. Had Kalyn and Rachel not come forward with a proposal to come on board as part-time staff, I’m not sure how I would have coped. Right from the beginning of that July into the opening weeks of September, I was that raw. I had to have someone over on any night that I would otherwise be alone at my house. And people came. They came and sat and listened and tried to help settle me down. They came to see if maybe there was something I could be eating, or if there was something that could distract me or give me hope or something—anything—other than this space of broken remorse. There are some of you here who did that, and I need to thank you for your steadfastness through those hard, sorrowful weeks. You helped me walk through those first few months, and then through the following four months prior to my boarding a plane to go to Halifax where I spent five weeks in a kind of retreat, facing down all that I was, all that I had lost, and all that was yet promised.

Some Pharisees came to Jesus, Mark tells us, and they came with a question by which they meant to test him. Or, as the Good News Bible translates this, they came “and tried to trap him.” “Is it lawful,” they ask, “for a man to divorce his wife?”

That wasn’t my question; not at all. I knew they were trying to trap him, and I wasn’t interested in seeing Jesus trapped. I wanted—I needed—him to see me and know me and pick me up and place me back on my feet. I had glimmers of that over those first couple of months, sometimes when I was alone and sometimes thanks to the people who came and sat with me out on my back porch and encouraged me to not lose hope. Yet I wasn’t entirely sure if I could do that.

I also knew the answer he gave to those Pharisees and the teaching he offered later to his disciples once they were alone, and I had to contend with those. In replying to the Pharisees, Jesus is canny.

‘What did Moses command you?’ They said, ‘Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her.’ But Jesus said to them, ‘Because of your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you.’

At this point you can sense the pause before he begins to set out his deeper and more demanding point.

But from the beginning of creation, “God made them male and female.” “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.’

Jesus is appealing here to Genesis, as a deeper source than the allowances contained in the book of Deuteronomy, which he characterizes as being only allowed due to the hardness of the human heart. By appealing to the texts from Genesis, Jesus is essentially saying, “this is how things have always been intended to be.” Draw your own conclusions, my Pharisaic friends…

It is when he gets back to the house and the disciples ask him again about divorce that Jesus gives his even more demanding teaching: “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.” The Pharisees had only spoken about a man’s ability to divorce his wife, and here Jesus ramps it up to speak about how it implicates both partners. He sounds utterly uncompromising, doesn’t he? Oh sure, you can conjure up some idealized picture in which one partner is completely innocent and the other is utterly at fault, but frankly that is nothing more than idealization. Nobody—nobody at all—is that completely innocent.

And so over those months I would look back and see all of the places where I had failed, and I would berate myself for all that I had missed or gotten wrong or simply ignored in a blind hope that it would all just work out. If only I had just… but that’s not what was happening, and I knew it.

It was six months after I was confronted with the failure of my marriage that I boarded a plane to go to Halifax to spend five weeks in an intensive retreat with the Chapel community of the University of King’s College. I’ve written about those weeks in my short book, A Kind of Solitude, which comes with the rather long subtitle, How Pacing the Cage with an Icon and The Book of Common Prayer Restored My Soul. I won’t go into all of that here, other than to say that what my spiritual director, Fr. Gary Thorne, constructed for me was a whole lot of time without just a whole lot to do. Some might imagine that such a time would be welcome and lovely in its own way, but as Fr Thorne set things up I wasn’t to spend much time reading or writing or preparing sermons or doing any of the kinds of things that I normally love to do on my own. I was to write an Eastern Orthodox icon, which was about as far out of my comfort zone as you can imagine. I was to attend three and sometimes four chapel services each weekday, all using the traditional Book of Common Prayer. And I was to pace the cage, whether that was found in the streets of Halifax, in my room in an empty residence building, or in my head. Fr. Thorne was quite sure, he had written to me, that, “It will be difficult to find the boredom and inner chaos that can lead to a divine restlessness. Spending unproductive time in your cell is important.” Frankly, I didn’t have a clue as to what he meant, or at least I didn’t until I was so deeply bored and restless that all I could imagine was getting on a plane to head back home where I’d sit by my wood stove and read anything I damn well felt like reading.

It was funny, then, the morning I looked in the bathroom mirror and saw light in my eyes. I looked again, switched off the light and opened the blind. I stood to one side and looked again, and then turned on the light again. That’s light. That’s really light! And it was.

There were yet a number of ups and downs to go after catching that glimmer of light in my eyes, yet there had been a shift. The person who had arrived in Halifax both fearful and oh-so-optimistic had died, and someone new was emerging, there in that little room on that cold wintery morning.

I once asked Robert Farrar Capon about his own experiences of having a marriage break down, and specifically where his courage had come from to remarry the person with whom he would spend the rest of his life. “It is quite simple,” he’d answered. “You just have to die.”

You just have to die to the old fears, limitations, mistakes, misjudgements, and failings, and trust that God has given you a new heart with which to get on with what remains of your life. Such a simple thing if it weren’t so impossibly difficult. Then again, that is so often the shape of grace.

“Let the little children come to me,” Jesus had said to those who would sooner have chased those children away. “Do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs.” And by these he means those who have no rights, who are easily dismissed as inconsequential, and who might even be easily exploited. Let them come to me, Jesus says. “Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.”

I know what it is to be reduced to that place of being but a child; vulnerable, hurting, broken, and lost. And I know what it is to be lifted up, wrapped in his arms, and blessed. My divorce was marked by so much loss and pain, but in him it has not had the final word. He has had the final word. No, He is the final Word, and slowly he lifted me up, dusted me off, and set me on the road again. Dead, certainly, but surely raised.