When It's Broken

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1 Thessalonians 4:3-8; Matthew 5:27-32

May 18, 2014 (Confirmation Sunday) • Portage First UMC

VIDEO INTRO

Last Sunday, if you remember, was a fairly beautiful day when we left worship. I went home and finished mowing the yard after lunch, and enjoyed some time reading on the deck. Then, after Cathy and Rachel got home, we decided to take Linus, our exchange student from Germany, out to the Lakefront Park, one of our favorite places. By the time we got there, and walked the length of the pier, the sky over Chicago and over the lake started to get really dark. Then there was lightning in the distance, and me, being one who can always clearly state the obvious, said that maybe we should get inside. I know, brilliant, right? So we got back in our car and headed over to McDonald’s at Ameriplex, where we rode out most of the storm.

Wherever you were during last Sunday’s storm, we all discovered the next morning and maybe even that night that there was clean-up to do. There were broken things littering our streets and yards. Broken trees, damaged roofs, and so on. Crossroads had a tree down as well as damage to one of the barn roofs. And some of us, including the church, were left with broken power lines to deal with in the form of no power to our homes. Within a few days, the worst of the damage was cleaned up, the power lines were replaced, and life went on as usual.

And I couldn't help but think—if only life were that easy to repair! Because there are times in life, we all know, when things seem to be perfectly normal. It's a sunshiny day, as far as we can tell, and then, just on the relational horizon, a few clouds appear. Then, the clouds turn dark (maybe suddenly). And then it’s obvious a storm is coming in your life. And the storm may have any number of different origins, but nevertheless, no matter what the origin is, it becomes clear that life, as it has been, is about to be disrupted, even broken. Life, in fact, may never be the same after the storm.

This morning, we’re continuing our series of messages on covenant and relationships, and today we're going to focus on those times when storms come, when a relationship seems to be broken beyond repair. And while much of our focus this morning will be on marriages, there are principles here that apply to all sorts of relationships, and I’ll do my best to draw those out as we go along. But, as I’ve said for the last several weeks, statistics indicate that 50% or better of marriages today end in divorce, and those who are part of the church do not have any better numbers than those outside of the church. We tend to divorce at the same rate as everyone else, despite our belief that divorce is not God’s best plan for us, and we’ll talk about that a bit more near the end this morning. Three weeks ago, when we began this series, I asked for a show of hands as to who had been touched in some way by divorce, and there were a whole lot of you who indicated you had. So what is it that leads to those kinds of storms?

A couple of weeks ago, on our church’s Facebook page, I asked folks who would be willing for me to use their stories to share what had led to their experience of divorce, and several of you graciously responded, for which I thank you. If nothing else, the stories that were shared with me remind us that broken relationships and especially broken marriages are not easy to categorize. We may want to blame this one or that one, but there are always at least two sides to the story. One person shared with me that their divorce grew out of a lot of different factors, including differing values and goals. That led to different ways to managing money, not ever feeling like a team and neither person being willing to see things from the other person’s point of view. Another story shared how lack of communication led to the break, that they married young and never fully committed to making their union work. Not knowing each other very well led to living different lives. Still another person shared about an in-law who went through a very difficult divorce in which the relationship broke apart because one of them had never learned how to show love or affection. There was a coldness between the two of them, and like the storm clouds suddenly arriving on the horizon, she was completely surprised when her husband asked for a divorce. She had assumed you didn’t have to work at marriage, that it was forever automatically. And while those stories made me sad, they’re also a good reminder that every broken relationship is made up of complicated and complex reasons and events that led to the difficult decision, to a dark place of brokenness.

Having said that, though, for the sake of time there are three primary threats to relational harmony that I want to focus on this morning. The first of these is emotional or physical abuse. Every fifteen seconds in our country, a woman is battered by her husband or boyfriend. That means that just during this worship service, 240 women will be beaten somewhere. Four of those women will die today (Hamilton, Love to Stay, pg. 81). And yes, there are instances of women battering their husbands or boyfriends, but that is still a small number today comparatively speaking. However, not all abuse is physical. Much more often, there is emotional or spiritual abuse taking place. When it’s physical abuse, we can sometimes see the wounds or the bruises; we might even think that it’s easier to intervene in those cases. With emotional or spiritual abuse, the wounds are invisible. One woman described it this way to me: it’s like “being treated like nothing more than the scum on your shoe…when someone ignores you, dismisses your feelings, calls you names, ignores your kids, would rather sleep than be intimate, you start to feel like you are worthless and unloved.” When we're talking about emotional abuse, we’re focusing on a persistent pattern of demeaning, speaking with contempt toward the other, undercutting them in various ways. It’s not a way we should treat anyone, especially when we remember that Jesus said to treat others the way we want to be treated (Luke 6:31). When we treat another person that way, when we undercut them, demean them, speak poorly of them, we must want to be treated that way as well. True? And if not, then why do we treat someone else that way, especially one we have promised to “love and to cherish” until death?

Now, all of us say things from time to time that we later regret. Maybe we regret them as soon as they come out of our mouths! That’s normal; not good, but normal. I’m talking about a pattern, often established early on in a relationship or a marriage. Some believe that any sort of fighting or argument is evidence of abuse, but that’s simply not the case. When you bring two different people together, there are going to be disagreements and even arguments. It’s not whether couples fight or not, or even how often they fight. It’s how they disagree, how they fight. John Gottman, a professor of psychology, says he can predict with 91% accuracy whether a couple will divorce or not, all within the first five minutes of meeting the couple. He sets up a question he knows will cause conflict and then watches how the two react. If they go on the attack, demean or abuse the other, he says, it's a sign of an impending shipwreck (Hamilton 82). So how do you fight with your spouse? How do you argue with your friends? Does your response lead to abuse, to greater brokenness, to demeaning the other person, or does it lead to wholeness and healing? Abuse is one sign of an impending storm.

The second threat to relational harmony is addiction. One woman described the events leading to her divorce this way: “[My husband] was a womanizer and alcoholic, and after we were married [he] became a cocaine addict…I knew I was clinically depressed and went to counseling. He told me I had to choose counseling or him. I chose counseling to save my life.” Addiction begins with the promise of pleasure, and it often starts as just something on the side, a hobby, but the problem is it has diminishing returns. By that I mean that what once gave you a thrill or a “high,” over time doesn’t anymore. You need more to get the same high. And then more. And then more. And before you know it, you’ve been sucked into an all-consuming lifestyle. It doesn’t really matter if it’s alcohol, drugs, pornography, gambling or any other addiction, the goal is always the pursuit of pleasure. And that pursuit, then, gets in the way of everything else, including having healthy relationships.

You see, in Genesis, as we’ve talked about several times now in this series, God created his children, us, to be relational beings. He created male and female “for each other,” and he meant for us to find “pleasure” or contentment in each other. When Genesis says that, after naming all the animals, Adam found “no suitable helper” for himself (Genesis 2:20), and when God looks over all creation and says, “It is not good for the man to be alone” (Genesis 2:18), we’re meant to remember that we were made for relationships, for community. We’re meant to find contentment in each other. And especially husbands and wives are meant to fulfill their relational longings in each other; that’s yet another side to Genesis saying we’re to “become one flesh” (2:24). When we seek other things to bring us pleasure or contentment, when we seek other substances to fulfill us, we’re falling far short of where God intends us to be. When there is addiction involved, there is something standing between the two of you—whether that’s drugs, the bottle of alcohol, the computer that beckons, or anything else—and that something is inhibiting and even bit by bit destroying the relationship you were meant to have. And here’s one more thing: usually those who are closest to us can see the addiction better than we can. If your spouse tells you you have a drinking problem or a gambling problem or an issue with pornography, you probably do (Hamilton 86). Listen to them and consider if the addiction is worth destroying those relationships that are most important to you because addiction is a sign of an impending storm.

The third threat, then, is the one we usually think of first when we think about relational storms, and that is adultery. Many think that this is the main cause of divorce, when in actuality arguments about money have, in recent years, topped that list. Still, adultery is a huge cause of brokenness. Two of the folks who responded to my Facebook post mentioned adultery as the final breaking point. One person wrote this: “I was the worst husband on the planet. I drove her away when she needed me, made up reasons to justify my actions, found fault in everything she did, convinced myself that all that I did was for her and the kids, and finally cheated on her and walked out. She hates me now and I don't blame her. [I] wish I could get a ‘do over’ as the kids say.” Another person described well how it often happens: “My ex started a casual emotional relationship with an ex-[girlfriend] he saw during his work days. This led to two marriages and families destroyed as they left us and married one another.” According to the National Marriage Project, 22 percent of men and 14 percent of women who are married have had an affair (Hamilton 94-95), and today it often begins through social media. Facebook and the like allow you to meet people all over the world, even old flames, and since we post our best pictures and best moments online for others to see, it’s easy to begin to imagine that the other person, the one who doesn’t see you when you're at your worst and whom you don’t see at their worst, might just be the one you missed out on.

You know, as a pastor I hear people say, “I don’t know what God’s will is for me.” And there is a lot of life where God’s will is ambiguous. But in the letter Paul wrote to the Thessalonians, it’s as clear as it can be. Paul says, “It is God’s will that you should be sanctified.” And then he goes on to define what that means: “that you should avoid sexual immorality” (4:3). Can he be any clearer than that? The city of Thessalonica, much like Corinth that we’ve looked at a couple of times recently, could find unbridled sexual temptation anywhere they looked. The temples doubled as brothels, and every sort of practice was tolerated or even actively encouraged (Wright, Paul for Everyone: Galatians and Thessalonians, pg. 118). So, to the young Christian congregation, Paul wants to be especially clear: avoid all of those things that you used to take as “normal.” Instead, he says, “each of you should learn to control your own body in a way that is holy and honorable, not in passionate lust like the pagans, who do not know God” (3:4-5). Basically, Paul tells the Thessalonians that if they do not reject that old lifestyle, they are in turn rejecting not Paul, not their pastor, but God himself (Thomas, “1 Thessalonians,” Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Vol. 11, pg. 272).

The word there is porneia, from which we get our word “pornography,” and it’s the same word Jesus uses in Matthew 5, in our Gospel lesson this morning. There has been a considerable amount of ink spilled on exactly what this word means. In the ancient word, it could mean “incest, fornication, or adultery” (Boring, “The Gospel of Matthew,” New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. VIII, pg.  192). In Paul’s day it certainly at least referred to the sacred prostitution that took place at the pagan temples, but much more generally it seems to have referred to any sort of physically intimate activity outside of marriage (Wright, Paul, pg. 119). Jesus uses the word when he describes the only exception he gives for lifelong marriage: “I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality [porneia], makes her the victim of adultery” (5:32). Jesus certainly seems to be referring specifically to adultery, and we’ll come back to that in a moment, but in larger passage, Jesus is suggesting there are roots to this act we need to deal with much earlier. In the verses leading up to this often-quoted section, Jesus is dealing with something we don’t talk about as much: lust. In fact, his direction is that we deal aggressively with the first signs of lust and we’ll never have to get to the porneia stage. In fact, he uses exaggerated speech to make his point; if your eye causes you to lust, gouge it out. If you hand causes you to stumble, cut it off. Of course, if we took Jesus literally there, we would have a whole world full of half-blind and one-handed people. He’s not telling us literally to do that. Rather, he’s pointing out that if we deal decisively with lust, we won’t have to worry about adultery. Jesus says, in essence, that that adultery is an act of the imagination, that it begins with the intention of the heart, much earlier than an actual act might happen (Card, Matthew: The Gospel of Identity, pg. 57-58; cf. Boring 191).

So is adultery the only grounds for divorce? In the ancient world, there were two schools of thought, both basing their thinking on Moses’ guidance in Deuteronomy 24. In that passage, Moses says a man can divorce a woman “who becomes displeasing to him because he finds something indecent about her” (24:1). And so the rabbis debated. What did Moses mean by “displeasing”? What did he mean by finding something “indecent” about a wife? The strict, conservative school of Rabbi Shammai said divorce could only happen if there were sexual sins or “gross impropriety.” The liberal school of Rabbi Hillel said it could be anything that displeased the husband. For instance, if she burned dinner, he could divorce her. You see, divorce was not prohibited in the writings of Moses, the earliest Jewish law. Rather, it was regulated. It was easy to obtain and frequent in occurrence. Then along comes Jesus, who is reminding his followers that marriage and family are good gifts from God to humanity. They are not something designed for human regulation or mere legal arrangement. And while he seems to come down pretty much in the camp of Shammai, Jesus’ larger point is this: these relationships were meant to last. This is something God takes seriously. Malachi, the Old Testament prophet, even used divorce as a metaphor for the way Israel, the nation, had behaved toward God. They had been unfaithful, and had rejected the one who loved them. They had “divorced” God, but God was calling them back to faithfulness (Malachi 2:10-16). God takes this stuff seriously. But Jesus does allow, at the least, an exception for adultery, porneia. Does that require divorce? No, and some in our day have broadened that definition to include any sort of breaking of the vows of faithfulness. For instance, in the event of physical abuse, does God really want someone to stay in the marriage even if the spouse has never cheated on them? I don’t believe so, because that’s not the life God designed for us. At that point, the vows to honor and love and cherish have been broken. You may come down differently on that, and that's fine. Jesus does allow an exception, but he also takes these vows very seriously, and when the vows are broken, we’re not to rush into breaking the marriage. This calls for much prayer and discernment.

Paul says, in fact, that the success of any relationship depends on three things:“the commands of the Lord, the presence of God, and the power of the Spirit” (Wright, Paul, 117). The Lord Jesus, God the Father and the Holy Spirit. We cannot hope to heal the brokenness, let alone move ahead, if we do not have the presence of God in our lives. In every wedding I do, in some way or another, I remind the couple that marriage takes three—not just the bride and groom, but they will also need the presence of God on good days and on bad days. I love the image of a triangle, with the bride and groom making the base and God at the top. As they each draw closer to God, they will inevitably draw closer to each other as well. Worshipping together, praying together, reading and discussing books together, walking together to talk over the events of the day—doing what is needed for the two of you to continue to communicate and allow God to be an integral part of your relationship.

But then, there are these things that come at us, these threats. How do we respond? Well, if we find ourselves with a threat in our face, then, as Tom Wright says, “Saying ‘no’ to desire when it strikes inappropriately—in other words, outside the context of marriage—is part of the most basic Christian discipline” (Wright, Matthew, 49). Learning to use the word “no” and knowing when to use it are very basic skills we all need to learn. But there is also the reality that, in this highly digital age, temptations can sneak up on us in form of friend requests on Facebook or tweets that are sent our way. Or it might be that ad, or a banner when we have “googled” something. It’s estimated that nine out of ten teenagers have viewed some form of pornography on the internet, whether on purpose or by accident. We need guardrails on our lives, and that begins with installing parental controls on our computers and smartphones and tablets. Some may say, “Just don’t allow the technology into your life,” but unless you’re living on an Amish farm, that’s an unlikely thing to happen. The technology is real, it's here and it's pervasive. So install filters. Turn on the “safe search” mode on Google. Do everything you can to protect what comes in via the technology. And make sure someone else can hold you accountable. Cathy has all my passwords to the computer, to my Facebook, and since I pretty much use just two or three passwords, to everything else. She can check my e-mail or my Facebook at any time. I don’t know if she does or not. I know her passwords, and I could do the same. Even if you’re not married, this is a good discipline to get into, to have someone you trust who can and will hold you accountable. As I said a week or so ago, the patterns we establish early in life are those we will carry throughout life and into any relationship we become a part of.

Now, maybe some of you are sitting here this morning and your life feels broken. Maybe you’re on the verge of a divorce. Maybe there have been things in your life that you haven’t told anyone—addictions, adultery, abuse, or something else. As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, we are planning a covenant renewal service for husbands and wives on June 1, over at Crossroads, and today at the Connection Center, you can pick up an invitation to give to your spouse, to invite them to come with you. It’s not meant to be a judgment, because we invite you to come if things are going great or if storms are brewing. What this is meant to be is a new start, a chance to walk together from wherever you are right now. Especially if you’re in a broken place, think what an invitation from you to the one you still want to love might mean, what possibilities it might hold for your relationship. And what a great thing if you both pick up an invitation and find surprising ways to share it with the other; that would mean you’re on the same page and ready to move ahead together! We would love to see all husbands and wives there with us that evening.

The storms will come, of that we can be sure. And that’s why we need one more “habit of life,” one we come to celebrate on this Confirmation Sunday. The most important habit of life, for marrieds and for singles, is to cultivate is a relationship with Jesus Christ. This morning, eight of our teenagers are going to come in front of the congregation and before God to say, “This day, I am declaring my faith in Jesus and that I intend to live my faith out every day. This day, in this place, I vow to follow Jesus through this church, to give my prayers, presence, gifts, service and witness to him.” It’s a bold thing to do, in this world, to stand up for a life that is often so contrary to what the world offers and says is “right and good.” But when we make that stand, that vow, as they will this morning, we will find that Jesus walks faithfully with us through the storms of life. We also find we gain a family, a church family, that will suffer when we suffer and rejoice when we rejoice (cf. 1 Corinthians 12:26). This relationship with Jesus, the one that these Confirmands are declaring today, is bedrock for navigating the storms that come our way, for facing whatever threats come our way, so let’s celebrate his presence in our lives today and in the lives of our Confirmands.