Marriage & Modern America

A little while back Rachel and I took a field trip to Custis Tomb.  Have you ever stopped by there?  There’s a sign out on 13 just before you get to Stingray’s and if you follow it out to the end of the road you will wind up at the site of the old Arlington mansion.  Here’s your trivia for the day – did you know that Arlington, for a brief period during Bacon’s Rebellion in the 1670’s – was the capital of Virginia?  It’s true.  This is where the royal governor fled when Nathaniel Bacon and his men were burning down Jamestown.  Another fact to amaze your friends with.

But the family that owned Arlington was the Custises and sure enough there are two tombs there for two of the Custis men.  John Custis the 4th has the larger of the two tombs and on his tomb is inscribed this epitaph:

Liv’d but Seven years
which was the space of time
He Kept a Bachelor’s house
At Arlington.

Now here’s the thing: John Custis IV did not live 7 years, he lived about 70 years.  And he’s not saying that he only lived at Arlington on the Eastern Shore for 7 years and that he loved it so much that he only considers his time on the Eastern Shore as really living.  He lived on the Eastern Shore much longer than that.  But he only lived as a single man on the Eastern Shore for 7 years.

So what he’s saying, on his epitaph, is that his marriage was so bad that only considers his bachelor years to be really living.  It’s kind of like the guy who tells a stranger, “I’ve been married to my wife for 20 wonderful years.”

And she says, “Honey, we’ve been married for 30 years.”

And he says, “I know what I said.”

But let me tell you how bad John & Frances Custis’ marriage was.  As Kirk Mariner tells the story in his Off 13 book, things went south really quickly after the couple got married in 1706.  They soon weren’t talking to each other and their poor butler had to act as the go-between.  “Pompey, would you ask Mr. Custis if he would like tea or coffee.”  “Pompey, would you tell Mrs. Custis that I will take coffee with sugar.”  That kind of thing.  Poor Pompey.

One time, when they were in horse-drawn carriage driven by Mr. Custis, he rode her right into the creek.  Sadly, the marriage ended in a legal separation, Frances Custis went back to live in Williamsburg and died soon after.  John Custis went back to Williamsburg, too, and never remarried.  But they did have a son named Daniel Parke Custis and he married a woman named Martha.  And when he died Martha remarried a man by the name of George Washington.  And now you know…the rest of the story.

So why am I telling you this interesting tidbit of Eastern Shore history?  Because I want to make the point that marriage has never been an easy thing, not even on the Eastern Shore.  And why would I want to make that point?  Because we’re about to get a humdinger of a statement on marriage from Jesus.

Now when we read Mark chapter 10 we might ask why it should make us uncomfortable.  I mean, after all, Jesus does something in this passage that we are always hoping he will do – he makes a clear, direct, unmistakable statement about an issue that is very contemporary.  There is no parable, no cryptic, Zen-like question like when they asked him about paying taxes.  No, is this passage lays it all out in the open – “Marriage is intended to be permanent between two people, divorce is contrary to God’s intentions, and any relationships outside this understanding are adultery.”  That’s pretty clear, right?  No amount of fancy interpretation is going to change that, right?

So, if we’ve finally got Jesus on record saying something like this, why does it make us so uncomfortable?  Well, because we know that the world around us, people we know, we ourselves, stand indicted by Jesus’ words.  I’d venture to say that there isn’t a person in this room whose lives have not been impacted in some way by divorce or adultery.  If they haven’t touched our individual lives, they’ve touched the lives of someone close to us.  And we feel the pain that these broken relationships caused.  We’re feeling the pain.  Jesus says this and we want to say back, “But….but, Jesus, it’s complicated.”

For once Jesus lays it all out cut and dried and that’s when we get nervous.  Jesus doesn’t seem to take into account the pain behind the situations he so easily reels off and categorizes.  Broken marriages don’t happen in the abstract, they happen to real people who have real hurts.

We find ourselves questions.  Would Jesus really condemn those whose marriage is broken by abuse?  Isn’t there grace for people who find their marriage irrevocable wounded by mistrust or neglect.  Can we have a little more than 11 verses to help us out here, Jesus?

And you might say, well, we really do have more than 11 verses to help us out.  There are other stories where Jesus leads with compassion.  Do you remember the story of the woman caught in adultery who is about to be stoned.  She’s condemned by the men of the community, but specifically NOT by Jesus.  In that situation Jesus is far more compassionate than judgmental and he challenges the clear, direct statements of law with the counter-act of grace.

Here, however, he isn’t dealing with hurting people; he’s dealing with his favorite foils in the gospel of Mark – the Pharisees, those religious leaders who are always presented as scheming to catch Jesus in his own words.  They are the ones who try to trick him with the tax question.  And here they are again, trying to test him with a question on marriage.  That’s what it says in the first verse of the chapter.  They are trying to test him.

So the Pharisees ask him whether it is permissible for a man to divorce his wife.  (Notice that the Jewish law of the day was pretty one-sided – women could not divorce their husbands.)  Jesus knows this is not a pastoral question.  He knows they’re not asking this out of concern for the people.  They want to catch him and kill him.  John the Baptist, you might remember, lost his head because he ventured to challenge King Herod on this very issue of the permissibility of remarriage after divorce.

Jesus first turns them back on their authority.  “What did Moses say?”  Well, Moses permitted a man to sign a legal document to dissolve his relationship with his wife.  That’s what they tell Jesus.

That’s when Jesus begins his riff.  He challenges the old tradition…says that Moses had to give this command because they were such a recalcitrant people.  What Jesus says instead is, on the one hand more liberal, and on the other, much more strict.  He abolishes the double standard that would allow a man to end a marriage but not a woman.  But he also reaches back to Genesis and quotes it.  “A man leaves behind his father and mother and clings to his wife, and two become one flesh, so no longer are they two but one flesh.”  Then he adds the emphasis that it is God who does this joining together and “therefore, what God has joined together let no one put asunder.”  Sound familiar?

What Jesus does here is to take the legal framework that the Pharisees are operating out of and to place that in a theological framework.  They refer to Moses as the authority and to a document that is only a legal formality.  Jesus points to God as the one who makes the marriage and he makes the marriage into a relationship that is far from a legal contract that can be whisked away at the stroke of a pen and the turn of a whim.  Jesus points to a covenant that is not meant to be broken.

That’s the setting for this saying – not in a pastoral setting where Jesus is counseling real couples with real issues – but in a debate with political, life-threatening overtones.  That’s not to say that we can ignore what Jesus says when it comes to dealing with our own relationships.  But it does make a difference.

Now here’s the reality.  Marriage is in trouble in modern America.  I did some research this week and there is no shortage of studies dealing with the challenges.  For one thing, people are just not getting married like they used to.  Divorce rates are down from what they were in the 1970s, but cohabiting couples are up.  A new study by the University of Virginia’s National Marriage Project (yes, UVA does have a National Marriage Project) says that “children are now more likely to be exposed to a cohabiting union than to a parental divorce.”  24% of kids born to married parents will see their parents divorce or separate by the time they are 12.  42% of kids will experience their parents cohabiting without getting married.  That doesn’t mean these relationships are any more stable, though.  The breakup rate for children born to cohabiting couples is 170% higher than for married couples up to age 12.

So people are not getting married like they used to, but they still have some very romantic notions about marriage.  A recent survey by the Clark University Poll of Emerging Adults “found that 86 percent of people—single and married—aged 18 to 29 expect their marriages to last a lifetime.”  One of the research professors on the project, Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, says that 90% of emerging adults expect to find their soul mate as their marriage partner.  And these are people who have seen so many marriages end in divorce.  Arnett doesn’t feel that most people are very realistic about what marriage will involve.

On the other hand, many of the people in that same age group are saying that they think marriage is becoming obsolete.  A 2010 Pew Survey found that 44 percent of young adults said marriage was becoming an obsolete institution.  Maybe that’s part of the reason that almost half of the adults in our country are unmarried.

I found out other interesting things in my research.  For instance I found out about a new study that showed that women tend to drink more heavily when they get married.  Not sure what that’s all about.  But what I did get clear about is that, at the very time same sex couples are asking for marriage, many people are abandoning it.

So here’s the place where it would be easy for the preacher to go on a rant.  “Look what’s happening to marriage.  Like every other institution it’s suffering.  Government is suffering from confusion and lack of commitment to it.  Community groups are closing up shop.  Schools are struggling.  And so is marriage.”

But I don’t want to rant.  I want to say, with Jesus, that marriage is something we should hold up and support and treasure even if we are not married ourselves or even if the marriage that you are in is in trouble.  Jesus refused to think of marriage in merely legal terms.  For him it was a way of experiencing God.  Marriage, every marriage, has the potential to show us something of how God operates in the world.

We have some champion marriage partners in this congregation, people who have lived in marriage for many years and who still inspire us.  And I know it hasn’t been easy.  I know there are trials and I know you don’t feel like you’re on your honeymoon every day.  But I give thanks to God for these couples who show us through their lives what God can do.

And I know we have some deep pains from broken relationships in this congregation.  When marriages end, when there is divorce, it is a painful thing.  But whether you have had a marriage end or you have not been married, or you never intend to get married, you are not a stranger to God’s grace.

We also have some people in this congregation who have gone through that experience of divorce and found grace and hope on the other side and they have a story to tell as well - a story of how God gave them what they needed.  We have hope on the other side of broken marriages because there is the possibility of experiencing the reconciling, healing work of Jesus.  It doesn’t come easily and it certainly doesn’t come without consequences.  But it does happen.

So squirm a little when you hear these words from Mark because they are hard words, but they are not meant to condemn hurting people but to ground marriage in something more than a contract.  But as we squirm, recognize that Jesus’ hard sayings come with a promise – that in God’s love, all things will be made new – even broken people with broken hearts.

Thanks be to God.