Author: J. Barrett Lee

Anglicanism and the Benedict Option

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Reblogged from Anglican Pastor

The Anglican spiritual theologian Martin Thornton once remarked that “the genius of St Benedict cannot be confined within the walls of Monte Cassino or any other monastery.” In continuing a discussion of the so-called Benedict Option, and what it means for Anglicans, my suspicion, and what is becoming my conviction, is that we Anglicans hold to a tradition which is not only well-suited to the Benedict Option, but which is the very thing itself. To be sure, there are Anglicans who would never in a million years consider themselves as such, but one can hardly deny the Benedictine character of Anglicanism, in her Prayer Book, in her mission, or in even the unique spiritual tradition of the English people. In the Middle Ages, England was often referred to as the “land of the Benedictines,” dotted as it was with monasteries, typically tied to the cathedral cloisters, following the Rule.

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What Do You Say to the Person who has Lost Everything?

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Sermon2 Comments

This week’s sermon.

The text is Job 38:1-7, 34-41.

Last week, we asked the question: “What do you get for the person who has everything?” And the answer we came up with, following the gospel story of Jesus and the rich man, is “Nothing.”

This week, we’re going to flip that question around 180 degrees and ask, “What do you say to the person who has lost everything?”

That’s the question that hits us as we read the story of Job, as we have been doing in our readings from the Hebrew Scriptures these past few weeks. The book of Job contains the most well-known story of suffering in all of human history. This story has been read the world over by people in different countries, languages, and religious traditions.

The story follows this guy Job, a decent person who stands by helplessly as everything he loves is suddenly taken away from him. In the end, he is left sitting by himself on a garbage heap, wondering what the heck just happened. Eventually, his friends come along and try to comfort him with sage advice and religious platitudes like, “Don’t worry, God has a plan” and “Everything happens for a reason.” But these bumper-sticker slogans do nothing to comfort Job in the midst of his pain. In fact, Job’s friends end up making the situation worse as they proceed to blame the victim for his own suffering. Following the line of conventional wisdom that one finds in the book of Proverbs, they theorize that God must be punishing Job for some secret sin, and if Job would simply search his heart and confess whatever he had done wrong, the affliction would leave him and all would be well again.

But Job isn’t buying what these so-called “defenders of the faith” are selling. Their sloganeering has less to do with comforting the suffering person and more to do with comforting themselves. They think that if they can identify some specific reason why all this suffering was visited upon Job, then they can prevent something similar from happening to them. So they recite these pointless platitudes that seem reasonable to them, but do nothing to alleviate Job’s pain.

Sadly, I’ve noticed this same tendency in a lot of religious people over the years. When unthinkable tragedy strikes, people of faith are often the first to offer some kind of explanation or solution, no matter how badly conceived, whether it was asked for or not. They say things like, “God has a plan… Everything happens for a reason… God took your baby because he needed another angel in heaven… There’s a lesson in this for you, if you would just learn it… You just need to have more faith… God never gives you more than you can handle…” Just like Job’s friends, I think those who say these things are more interested in comforting themselves than comforting the one who is suffering. People who are going through incredible pain don’t need bumper stickers or Bible verses, they need friends who will stay with them through the pain, listen to their struggles, and not try to “fix” them.

Like Job, most people who suffer know instinctively how unhelpful these pat answers are. They might listen politely, but on the inside they usually walk away feeling more alone and hopeless than ever. Job, however, was not so polite in his response to his friends. He was brutal in his honesty. He defended his own integrity, shook his fist at the sky, and straight-up accused God of being unfair.

At the beginning of his story, Job’s remarks still sound conventionally religious: “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there; the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” (1:21) A little while later, Job’s anger begins to show as he curses the day he was born (3:1). He is harsh toward his friends and their unhelpful advice, calling them “miserable comforters” and wondering why they keep talking at all.

Eventually, Job lets loose his anger toward God directly. He says that God has wronged him (19:6), denied him justice (27:1), and demands a response from God (31:35). There is nothing in Job’s tirade that sounds like traditional piety or stoic resilience in the face of suffering. He says that God owes him an answer; he dares God to come down from heaven and face him like a man, and that’s exactly what happens.

Today’s reading from the book of Job outlines the beginning of God’s response to Job’s demand. Job finally gets the face-to-face encounter he’s been shouting for, but it doesn’t exactly turn out like Job had expected.

To begin with, God doesn’t offer Job any answers, only questions: sixty of them, to be exact. The first question sets the stage for the rest: “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?” And it only gets more intense from there: “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? …On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy? …Who has put wisdom in the inward parts, or given understanding to the mind?” This is just a small sample of the questions God asks Job in response to Job’s demand for an answer.

Job finally gets his face-to-face encounter with God, but none of the answers he was looking for. The voice from the whirlwind overwhelms Job with a barrage of questions about the mystery and the grandeur of the universe. Job is left standing in awe. His only response, at the end of the interrogation, is a stunned silence. In chapters 40 and 42, he calls himself “small” and says, “I lay my hand on my mouth… I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.”

Job’s experience of God’s presence is hardly sweet, comforting, or peaceful, but it was exactly what he needed. The attempt of Job’s friends to present a tame, orderly, and comprehensible God left Job feeling empty and dissatisfied, but the blunt force of awestruck mystery was enough to shake him out of his pain-induced stupor. Job never got his answer, but he got what he needed: a direct experience of God’s presence. Job says, “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you”. Somehow, that was enough for Job, even when there were no answers or solutions to be found.

So, this leads us back to our initial question.

Last week, we asked, “What do you get for the person who has everything?” And the answer we came up with was, “Nothing.”

This week, we are asking, “What do you say to the person who has lost everything?” And the answer is the same: “Nothing.”

This is an important lesson for us to learn in today’s Church, where too many Christians are prone to lean back on empty platitudes instead of trying to be really present with those who suffer. It’s not our job to offer easy answers to tough questions or come up with quick fixes to big problems. Our job is to be with each other when we suffer, to listen, to empathize, to ask questions. Somehow, this means more to people than all the answers and solutions in the world. Our friends in pain may never remember what we say, but they will remember that we were there with them when times were tough. This is the Church at its best.

What’s even cooler is that, in the midst of our care for each other, we begin to sense another, mysterious presence in our midst. Our love for each other points the way to a bigger love, the Biggest Love, that holds the universe together in arms that will not let us go.

I think about this mystery each Sunday as we celebrate the Eucharist. As a pastor, people often come to me with problems we don’t know how to solve and painful questions I don’t know how to answer. It gets overwhelming sometimes. I am keenly aware that many of you may be going through something horrible this morning, and there is nothing I can say from this pulpit that will make you feel any better. Clergy are neither psychologists, nor social workers, nor business managers, nor politicians. I don’t actually know how to fix the problems in your life, the church, or the world, but what I can do is invite you down to the front of this church each Sunday, hand you a piece of bread, and say, “The Body of Christ, given for you.”

What I can offer you is Christ, sacramentally present with us in bread and wine. As we share the Body of Christ, we become the Body of Christ (you are what you eat). We become part of each other through Christ, and Christ’s presence becomes apparent among us through each other. This presence, more than anything else, is the most healing thing we can offer to each other in moments of pain.

Let us be present with each other then, no matter what we are going through, in order that we may be attentive also to the healing, sacramental presence of Christ in our midst.

I Am a Mainline Protestant Under the Age of 35. Yes, We Exist.

On By J. Barrett LeeIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

By Olivia Whitener

Reblogged from Sojourners.

I am a Mainline Protestant under the age of 35. Yes, we exist.

I spend (most of) my Sunday mornings sitting in a pew at an Evangelical Lutheran Church in America congregation, singing old hymns, and reciting the Lord’s Prayer which I have had memorized since before I went to school.

At age 22, I make an effort to get my dose of word and sacrament before heading to brunch on Sunday mornings. Though I love the beach, I found greater joy in singing songs and leading Bible studies at a mainline church camp during my recent summers.

I love the sound of an organ.

Unlike 35 percent of my age-group peers, I hold much of my identity in my Christian tradition. But while many are losing hope in the church as a community and institution, I experience a place where I can struggle alongside others and find support. There are many ways the church has failed us; religion is often used to justify gross injustices, leaving many feeling abandoned by the place where I have found a home. And sometimes being a Christian and being a member of a worshipping community is hard, because it is another responsibility on our shoulders and it requires us to give back.

It isn’t always convenient, but here’s why I stay…

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Living In Between: Adventures of a Presbyterian pastor on a Jesuit campus

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Reblogged from Presbyterians Today

By the Rev. Abby King-Kaiser

Protestants prioritize the Word, Scripture. We take it very seriously. So seriously. Worship thus centers on the Word. Even the formal ways we talk about worship usually relates back to the Word. Catholic Mass, on the other hands, centers on the sacrament. The altar is the centerpiece, and much of the rest of worship, prayer, and even a faithful life, flows from the sacrament. It even changes the way we talk about encounters with God.

This doesn’t mean that Communion isn’t essential for Presbyterians (though the infrequency of its celebration in some of our congregations may raise questions to that effect) or that Catholics are unconcerned about Scripture. It’s just a question of where our emphasis lies.

Perhaps we can learn from each other.

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Why the Filioque Sucks: An Explainer

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Uncategorized1 Comment

The Filioque was added to the Nicene Creed unnecessarily and without due ecclesiastical process. Also, it messes with the orthodox expression of the mystery of the Trinity and rearranges it into a hierarchical ladder. Is it any wonder then, that pneumatology has become such a widely neglected discipline in western theology?

There is an aesthetically pleasant balance that emerges sans Filioque, with the Son “eternally begotten” and the Spirit “eternally proceeding” from the Father.

Another orthodox source I was reading recently pointed out that God the Father is always described in the Scriptures as the the source of the Godhead. Christ is called “the Son of God” and the Holy Spirit is “the Spirit of God”, but the Father is never called “the Father of God”, but simply “the Father”.

Anglicans have called for the removal of the Filioque from all future Prayer Book revisions since the 1978 Lambeth Conference. In the Presbyterian Church (USA)’s Book of Confessions, the Nicene Creed is included with the Filioque, but a note is made regarding the controversy. The decision to keep it in appears to be based on the historical fact that Presbyterianism draws its theological heritage from the western (i.e. Roman) stream of Christianity, which is where the Filioque originated.

Nevertheless, the 1989 Presbyterian Hymnal places parentheses around the relevant words, like so:

I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life, who proceeds from the Father (and the Son).

This is how I print the Creed in my church bulletin. It marks the controversy and gives those who know their history the option of not reciting the Filioque. I print the words, even though I personally disagree with their inclusion, because that is how the Creed appears in our Book of Confessions.

I’m with the Dean on this one. You can read his thoughts and decide for yourself.

Reglogged from the Crusty Old Dean.

We, in the West, many of whom have been coddled by establishment and cultural hegemony, can shrug more easily at whether words matter or not.  As the Egyptian Coptic Bishop Bishoy put in in the news release that prompted this whole blog post, “As a church that has been persecuted for most of its existence, our faith and faith issues are exceptionally important.”

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What Do You Get For Someone Who Has Everything?

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Sermon1 Comment

This week’s sermon.

The text is Mark 10:17-31.

What kind of gift do you get for the person who has everything?

I did some Google research on that very question this week, and here are a few of the ideas I came across:

  • A wine rack made out of snow skis.
  • A corkscrew that looks like a fish.
  • Cufflinks that look like glasses.
  • A beer holder for your bike.
  • A snowball slingshot.
  • A pillow that functions as a working remote control.
  • A robotic exoskeleton.
  • A hovercraft.
  • Contact lenses that project TV directly onto your eyeballs.
  • A belly button brush (I don’t want to know).
  • Anonymous business cards you can leave on people’s windshields to complain about their parking.

You and I live in a highly consumeristic society. We want everything to be “Bigger! Better! Faster! More!” We are constantly inundated with messages trying to sell us stuff. One study declared that the average American is exposed to 247 advertisements a day. We are told that our spouses will love us more if we buy them diamonds; we will become better basketball players with the right kind of shoes; we will appear sophisticated if we drive the right kind of car; and (my personal favorite) we will become “the most interesting man in the world” if we drink the right kind of beer. We are locked into the ridiculous habit of “spending money we don’t have to buy things we don’t need to impress people we don’t like.”

It’s a ridiculous cycle that all of us are caught up in. We need to be reminded of its ridiculousness from time to time, for the sole reason that no one has ever seen a hearse pulling a U-Haul. You can’t take it with you. There has to be more to the meaning of life than the acquisition of “stuff.”

Unfortunately, we’ve been so shaped by our consumer society that we’ve forgotten how to think outside the box of “getting more stuff.” We’ve even applied the principle to our religious life.

We’ve been trained to think that spirituality, salvation, or enlightenment are all about gaining something for ourselves: knowledge, wisdom, inner peace, mystical experiences, etc. And we think we can earn the rights to this consumer product through religious observance, correct theology, or moral fortitude.

We have been trained to interact with God in the same way that we might interact with a clerk at 7-11: approach the counter, exchange payment, receive desired product. The problem with this is that the kind of relationship that God wants to have with us goes far deeper than the kind of momentary interaction we have with clerks at the store, where neither party is likely to remember the other person’s name by the end of the day. God wants more than that (from us and for us). But in order to get us into that kind of relationship, God has to shake us out of our consumer-capitalist mindset.

That is exactly what Jesus is trying to do with the rich man in today’s gospel.

The story begins with the rich man approaching Jesus with a question: “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

And that’s our first indicator, right there: the little word do. He assumes that there is an exchange that needs to take place. He intends to do something for God, and then receive something else (i.e. eternal life) from God in return for his payment of doing. We soon learn that this particular person is already quite wealthy (he is “the man who has everything”), and as such has learned to interpret his entire life in terms of economic exchange (even his relationship with God). He is approaching God with a proposal for a business transaction and nothing more.

But Jesus responds, not by imparting some new knowledge to this man, but by appealing to what he already knows: “You know the commandments,” he says, and then proceeds to recite several of the Big Ten from the book of Exodus.

The rich man is clearly unimpressed. “Yeah, yeah,” he says, “I know all that stuff already. I’ve been doing it since I was a kid. But else needs to happen? I feel like there’s something more to life, something I’m missing, so I want to make a deal with you, Jesus, and obtain whatever it is that I am lacking.”

So there it is. Jesus is now faced with the question: What do you get for the man who has everything?

And this is Jesus’ answer: Nothing. Jesus gives him Nothing.

It’s not that Jesus doesn’t give him anything; it’s that Jesus gives this man the gift of Nothing.

Jesus says to the man, “You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.”

In other words, he says, “Take all your possessions and the mindset that comes with them, take all your merit badges and accomplishments, take your experiences, take your trophies and diplomas down from the wall, take your preconceived notions about God, take your politics, your religion, your economics, take it all, and let it all go.” And he says that same thing to us today.

The best those things can do is feed our ego, which is a false conception of who we are. Our true self, the deepest part of us that is made “in the image and likeness of God” lies far deeper than those things. And we can only discover that true self by letting go of these other things in our lives that tempt us to identify with them.

Many of us, including the rich man in this story, are too frightened to embark on this journey of discovery. We are afraid that, if we let go of all these other identifiers, we might discover that there is no true self underneath the piles of “stuff” we have accumulated over the course of a lifetime. We think those “things” are us. We say, “I am the person who does this; I am the person who owns that; I am the person who is this.” We hold onto these false idols and identify with them because we are scared that, deep down, there is no Great “I Am” holding it all together. So we think it’s up to us. And too many of us go to our graves, kicking and screaming, and defending our little patch of earth until our hearts stop beating.

But here’s the thing: We’re wrong about all that. In spite of our deepest fears, there is a Great I Am who is deeper still (“Closer to us than our own hearts,” as St. Augustine says).

The rich man in today’s gospel, for whatever reason, was unable to let go and join Jesus on this journey of discovery. He wasn’t able to accept the gift of Nothing from Jesus. He walked away sad, still identifying himself with the “stuff” that he thought was his. But there have been others along the way who have accepted Jesus’ gift of Nothing.

Most notably, there is St. Paul the Apostle, who wrote much of the New Testament. He, like the rich man, had amassed a great treasury of accomplishments in the name of patriotism and religion. He lists them in his letter to the Philippians:

“If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.”

These are things that Paul used to identify himself and uphold his little false ego-self. But then something happened to him: he had a blinding encounter with the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus. And this was the result, after his conversion:

“Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him”

St. Paul received Jesus’ gift of Nothing and was transformed by it. He discovered the truth: that there is a Great I Am at the heart of all things. The true self that Paul discovered was not another ego like the one he had constructed, but the Spirit of Christ himself. He writes in his letter to the Galatians: “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.”

This is the goal of all Christian spirituality: not a list of religious accomplishments, but a letting go of all these things so that we can receive Jesus’ gift of Nothing and so discover our true identity in Christ.

One of my favorite authors, Fr. Richard Rohr, calls this “the Spirituality of Subtraction.” It’s not about gaining more experiences or accomplishments. It’s about letting go of those objects, experiences, and accomplishments we think we own.

What does this look like when we live it out? How do we measure Nothing? How do we chart our success in the art of letting go?

The only answer I can even begin to imagine for that question is this:

We achieve success by accepting failure. That’s the only way to make spiritual progress in the Christian life. We learn to accept ourselves (maybe even love ourselves) with all of our faults and limitations. When we fail or fall, we laugh at ourselves, rather than beat ourselves up.

The theologian Paul Tillich said it like this:

“You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted!”

This is what we call “grace.” This is what it means to receive Jesus’ gift of Nothing. And when we can do this (i.e. achieve success by accepting failure), a most amazing thing happens: our acceptance of ourselves and our failures starts to spill over toward acceptance of other people and their failures. Grace is contagious.

And here’s the really neat thing: in the end, it changes the way we understand God. As we open our hearts to grace, we gradually stop imagining God as the angry judge in the sky who makes impossible demands on us for the sake of religious observance, moral fortitude, or theological accuracy. We begin to see God as Jesus saw God: the Giver of Grace, the Giver of Nothing, the Great I Am beneath and beyond our false little ego.

And with that in mind, we can step back out into this world with full assurance of that which we affirm every Sunday:

That God loves us and there’s nothing we can do about it.

Early Warning Signs Of Adult Onset Calvinism

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Uncategorized1 Comment

Reblogged from the Blazing Center.

Don’t get too steamed up over this. It’s satire.

Approximately 1 out of every 4 Christians will encounter adult onset Calvinism (commonly known as AOC) during their life, either personally or in someone close to them. It can be a scary thing to encounter, especially if you’re not familiar with the symptoms. The person you once knew and loved is suddenly a completely different person.

Don’t panic.

It gets better.

To help you navigate the treacherous waters of AOC, I’ve listed the possible symptoms you may encounter.

Click here to read the full article.

My favorite:

  • Inevitably arriving at the conclusion that John Calvin was not that strong of a Calvinist. At least, not as strong as you are.

New Book by W. Bradford Littlejohn

On By J. Barrett LeeIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Source: My Book is Now Published!

W. Bradford Littlejohn, author of The Mercersburg Theology and the Quest for Reformed Catholicity, has published a new book on the classic Anglican theologian, Richard Hooker.

Based on Littlejohn’s areas of interest, I suspect that he and I could have some lively conversations atop Hadrian’s Wall, wandering in the borderland of Anglican and Reformed.

If you find yourself in similar territory, you are cordially invited to pull up a three-legged stool and join us for this book discussion!

Introducing The Sacramental Imagination

On By J. Barrett LeeIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Reblogged from The Anglican Pastor.

The Eucharist is Christianity’s first and ultimate church planting strategy. It’s not just a sentimental moment to recall our Lord’s sacrifice. The Holy Eucharist is the celebration and realization of God reconciling all things through Jesus Christ (2 Cor. 5:19, Col 1:20). If this is true, then our participation in the sacraments also enlists us as midwives, assisting the birth of a fresh movement of God’s work and presence in our lives and our neighborhood. 

Click here to read the full article…

It’s About Relationships…

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Uncategorized1 Comment

Today’s sermon from North Presbyterian Church.

The text is Mark 10:2-16.

We’ve got a doozy of a gospel reading this week. I call it one of our “damage control” passages because so many people have been hurt by it, a preacher has to unpack its meaning in order to get a decent sermon out of it.

If today’s gospel was a movie, and I had to give it a parental guidance rating, I think I would have to say it was rated R because of ‘thematic material’. This is a passage that is intended for ‘mature audiences only’. Taking Jesus’ teachings about divorce at face-value can be dangerous, especially if one doesn’t have a clear understanding of what Jesus does and doesn’t mean.

Unfortunately, “taking this passage at face-value” is exactly what Christians have been doing for centuries. This has led to a lot of people being hurt by the church during a time in their life when they needed that fellowship and support more than ever. So, with that in mind, I’m going to begin this morning by stating very clearly what you’re not going to hear from this pulpit on the subject of divorce.

First of all, I’m not going to tell you that, if you get a divorce, you’re going to hell. I don’t believe that. I think you know me well enough by now: that’s not how I roll. Second, I’m not going to tell you that, if you get a divorce, you should be banned from receiving communion or serving the church in an ordained capacity as an elder, deacon, or pastor. There was a time in Presbyterian history when that was the case. But since that time, we have developed an awareness that life and relationships are complicated and don’t always work out like we had hoped. An effective, Christ-like ministry is one that recognizes life’s complexities and leads with grace rather than judgment. Third, I’m not going to tell you that, if you get a divorce, you can never begin another relationship or get remarried and expect that relationship to be healthy and blessed by God. The God I believe in is the God of Plan B and second chances. If that wasn’t who I believed God to be, then I wouldn’t (I couldn’t) be standing in this pulpit today.

If you’ve been told any of those three things before, I want you to tell you today that you’ve been lied to. Getting divorced does not mean you are going to hell; it does not mean you are barred forever from Christian service; it does not mean that you can never again have a healthy, life-giving relationship that is blessed by God.

When Christians tell these lies, they often like to quote passages like the one we just read and sum it up by saying, “See? The Bible says very clearly that divorce is a sin! Therefore, any divorced person is a sinner, and no sinner could ever be called by God for service in this church.”

That’s what they say. And a lot of people get hurt when Christians talk like that.

One of the things I’ve notice about people who use the word sin in this way is that they talk about it in a way that emphasizes the so-called “sins” of other people, rather than their own. Whenever you ask about what’s wrong with the world, they can always answer: “It’s those people! It’s those sinners!”

I call this tendency “The Reality TV Phenomenon.” People watch Reality TV in order to feel better about themselves. No matter how dysfunctional one’s life currently is, chances are that it’s not nearly as messed up as the people on the Jerry Springer Show. It’s a convenient way to feel self-righteous and superior to other people.

Whenever Jesus encountered that kind of attitude, he called it hypocrisy. He would often butt heads with the Pharisees. These Pharisees, like so many fans of Realty TV, had a very precise definition of the word sin that they applied to people outside their religious in-group. They saw themselves as the guardians of morality and family values in their culture. They were upstanding citizens who attended worship regularly and knew the Bible inside and out. If anyone had a trustworthy definition of the word sin, it was them.

These Pharisees approached Jesus with a question on the topic of divorce. Rather than genuinely seeking advice from Jesus, they just wanted to put him on the spot so they could figure out whether his definition of the word sin was as accurate and comprehensive as theirs. But Jesus, as usual, is onto this little game of theirs and isn’t having any of it. He takes their question and raises it “to the next level”, so to speak.

The Pharisees come to Jesus with a question about the legality of divorce. Jesus reframes the question by placing it within the much larger context of relationships. He immediately starts talking about the story of Adam and Eve in the Torah. He talks about who God is and what God is doing. He takes this conversation about the technicalities of the law and turns it into a conversation about the meaning of relationships.

Jesus is arguing here that the Pharisees, with their very precise and thought-out conception of morality, have essentially missed the point. They thought they had this question of divorce already figured out. They thought they already had all the right answers, but Jesus shows them that they haven’t even begun to ask the right questions.

Their definition of the word sin left them feeling pretty self-righteous and superior. It allowed them to place the blame for all the world’s problems on the shoulders of “those other people” whose lives did not conform to socially acceptable norms. But then Jesus comes along and hits them right between the eyes with some hard truth. Even though all their legal ducks were in a row, he told them, they were still not free from the bondage of sin. Jesus was working with a far broader and deeper definition of the word sin than the Pharisees were.

The word sin, I think, has surprisingly little to do with legal requirements and moral laws. I think it has a whole lot to do with the quality of our relationships. Sin is a tendency that exists within all of us, regardless of our moral, legal, or religious status. We all have an inner drive toward selfishness. Therefore, none of us has any right to feel morally or spiritually superior to anyone else, no matter how socially unacceptable or dysfunctional others’ lives may appear to be.

When we try to identify the presence of sin in our relationships, it’s not enough to simply label some behaviors as “sins” while others are “okay”, because even the most apparently righteous actions can be tainted with sin and selfishness. Just look at the Pharisees and you’ll see what I mean. If you look at what they were doing from a legal standpoint, they came away looking squeaky clean all the time. But if you look at how and why they were doing what they did, their self-righteous and judgmental hypocrisy becomes clear. They came to Jesus with a loaded question about a legal contract but left with even bigger questions about the nature of relationships.

With this broader and deeper understanding of sin in mind, let’s revisit that initial question: “Is divorce a sin?”

Does a failed marriage necessarily exclude a person from the benefits of salvation, full-participation in the life and ministry of the church, or God’s blessing upon future relationships? No. Absolutely not.

But, on the other hand, if someone were to ask me whether I think divorce is a product of human sinfulness (i.e. our inner tendency toward selfishness), then I would have to say Yes: our marriages fall apart because of the brokenness and the selfishness that exists in all of us, not just a few.

This way of thinking about sin has significance for all of our relationships, not just marriage and divorce. To illustrate what I’m talking about, let’s look at the Ten Commandments and imagine them, not just as a list of “Thou shalt nots…” but as benchmarks by which we can assess the quality of our relationships (marital or otherwise):

  • You shall not murder:
    • Do we seek to give life to one another or do we suck it away?
  • You shall not commit adultery:
    • Are we faithful to one another or do our hearts belong to something/one else?
  • You shall not steal:
    • Do we willingly share our lives with one another, or do we simply take what we want from each other?
  • You shall not bear false witness:
    • Do we speak the truth about who we are to one another or do we maintain a façade for the sake of appearances?
  • You shall not covet:
    • Are we grateful to and for one another or are we constantly looking over our shoulder at how good everyone else has it?

As we honestly answer those questions, we start to get a general sense of how healthy our relationships are or are not. This can be applied to all relationships, not just the ones between spouses or partners. It works just as well for relationships between parents & children, bosses & employees, siblings, coworkers, friends, you name it.

You can even ask these questions about your relationship with yourself. Who else do we try to hide from more? I think there are a lot of people walking around this world right now in a state of being divorced from themselves. They feel alone and exposed, hiding their deepest fears and covering up their insecurities, even as they’re looking into their own bathroom mirror.

Far more important than particular legal question about divorce is the question of relationships. We selfish and broken people are all reaching out to connect with something or someone outside of ourselves, hoping that we will be able to discover through that connection the meaning of our existence.

As you go back out into the world this week, I want to encourage you to be mindful of how it is that you conduct your relationships with others. Don’t get caught up in these squabbling debates about legalities and technicalities. Instead, do like Jesus does: Raise your own level of awareness in order to ask the harder questions about all your relationships.

May you find on that difficult journey a sustaining sense of connection and meaning in your life that draws you ever closer to the sacred source of all life: the loving God in whom we live, move, and have our being.