Message 11-12-06
Series: Hardwired to Connect
Scripture: Philippians 2:12-18
Title: God Loves Divorced People
My wife, Beckie, called me in the middle of the week. That’s when I’m usually studying for my messages. It was the middle of the afternoon and I was pretty focused, but when I heard her voice I said, “Oh hi. I’ve been thinking about you.” And you could hear the spark in her voice as she said, “Really? Why?” And without really thinking I said, “Well, I’ve been studying about divorce all day.” She wasn’t real happy.
Divorce is a drag isn’t it? It’s also pretty scary. I remember when our daughter Kate was just a little thing and she came home from school one day and asked, “When are you going to get divorced?” She wasn’t asking if we might. She wanted to know when that happens because she was hearing about it from so many kids at her school.
This isn’t the way it is supposed to be is it?
The Bible teaches that humanity was created to be in relationship with God and with each other. Interestingly Science has recently come to the same conclusion. Well, part of the same conclusion. In a well-known study Scientists, along with sociologists have said there is clear evidence that we are hardwired to connect. That was the name of the study, Hardwired to Connect. People are created in such a way that they need each other.
Christians claim that this is what Jesus came and taught us. We need each other and we need God. I like to repeat my favorite paraphrase of Jesus’ two top commandments – Love God. Love People. Nothing else matters. We were built to be in relationships. And when he describes his followers he says that the highest level of relationship is friendship. The highest expression of that is laying down one’s life for ones friends. We could argue that, from Jesus’ words, the next level down from that might be service. And I would suggest that it is in marriage that we can find one of the greatest opportunities to build a friendship of intimacy where service can be expressed deeply. I believe marriage in the best of circumstances to be a friendship that includes physical intimacy and commitment. At its heart marriage should be a friendship.
So what happens when the friendship breaks down?
All the study I’ve been doing on relationship, and particularly about friendships breaking down, has put me in mind of when I lost my best friend. Where I used to live I came to love a guy named Harry who was like the brother I never had. We liked the same movies. We cracked each other up. We got together for a meal during most weeks. We just hung out doing whatever. He spent time at my house and I spent time at his. Our families did stuff together.
Harry also worked with me in my youth group at my church for a while and the way the kids talked about us was like we were tied together in their minds. We were best friends.
One day, as things go, I just realized that I hadn’t seen him for a while. I had made a bunch of overtures – going to see a movie or grabbing lunch or something and nothing was ever working. Business was booming for him at that time so I sort of chalked it off, but I missed him. Then we began to hear that things weren’t going so well with him and his wife. I saw her a couple of times and when I heard how things were really going I made it a point to get together with him. We got lunch a couple of times. We even went to a movie, but things weren’t the same.
Have you ever been with a salesman whose been told he needs to build “relationships” with his clients? Have you ever had the feeling like he’s got a 3x5 card in his head with all your information on it and he’s just clicking through it without real emotion. That’s the way Harry was talking to me. He’d say, “Now your son is in soccer now, right? How’s that going for him?” It was just weird.
Finally, after some real serious conversation about his relationship with his wife over lunch one day, Harry drove me back to my church. As we pulled into the parking lot I was thinking over all the stuff that I’d learned and felt and I said, “Listen, I have just one more question. Who are you having an affair with?” Harry flipped out. He started yelling about how I was supposed to be his best friend. How could I accuse him of that? I said, “Harry, I’m not accusing you of having an affair. I’m asking you who you’re having the affair with.” He just about threw me out of the car. He was still yelling as he peeled out of the parking lot.
A week later it all came out. The whole time I was feeling the breakdown in our friendship; his wife was watching their marriage deteriorate. He was building a relationship with this other woman. His marriage fell apart. He stopped talking with me completely. Kids from my youth group came to our home and just sat at our kitchen table for hours not really talking, just in tears. This guy they loved wasn’t the man they knew. Destruction was everywhere.
Just like love starts long before marriage, abandonment starts long before divorce.
God hates divorce. That’s what we read in our first Scripture right? God hates divorce and you know what? So do you.
Even in the best of circumstances, even when we part as friends or we’re congenial about the breakup, divorce is destructive. It is like a person clothing themselves in violence the way they put on their clothes. We all know that. We are hardwired to connect and the breakdown of connection is destructive.
Friendship is no longer the pattern or the point of the relationship. “Being right” and “winning” replaces understanding. Love is replaced by apathy. God hates divorce because it is not about signing papers and separating property. It’s about violence being done to a deep friendship.
The Bible tells us that God knows all about this. We told in the Bible and specifically in the prophets of the Old Testament that God lived in a loveless marriage. The Bible tells us that God lived in a relationship of separation from his spouse that tore his heart apart. That’s the way the Bible talks about God and humanity. The prophets and specifically Jeremiah tells us that God got divorced. What this says to me is that these are the best words God has to describe what’s going on, to describe his heart to us. This also tells me that at the center of the universe there is a heart that knows the suffering of losing a deep friendship and love.
And, amazingly, what God calls his followers to is reconciliation. He doesn’t deny the breakdown or the pain or the destruction and he says it comes through our hard-heartedness. Jesus told a group of men that if they divorced their wives because she was just not “meeting their needs” and then went off and married someone else that was the same as adultery. And He says to these men that it is in abandonment of the relationship – in sexual unfaithfulness of any sort really – that we find the grounds for divorce. And people stop there saying, “Ah, it’s only with adultery that we find a legitimate divorce.” But I don’t believe that’s where Jesus stops. Remember Jesus told us that we just have to look lustfully at a person to commit adultery. I believe that Jesus is talking about the heart and the heart of adultery is abandonment. The Apostle Paul brings this abandonment into even clearer focus in his letter to the Corinthians. And I believe in the fullness of the statements of the whole Bible on divorce, that it is abandonment – the active destruction of a relationship – that God is against and that he hates. Abandonment is unfaithfulness. That’s what I find in the Bible. And unfaithfulness can look like adultery and it can look like abuse – emotional, physical, mental abuse – and it can look like apathy. Abandonment, simply walking away from the relationship, is unfaithfulness.
So when this abandonment happens in a marriage God calls us to reconciliation and to be ready with forgiveness. Jesus tells us when we have a breakdown in a friendship, especially if we are hurt by the other person, we should go and share the hurt we feel and seek reconciliation. If the person repents – if they see what they’re doing or have done and turn back, change – we should be ready to forgive them. But if they don’t or won’t we are not supposed to deny the hurt or pretend there is a relationship there when there isn’t.
God hates divorce but he doesn’t deny its reality. It was given to us because there are people who won’t work toward reconciliation. When that happens the future is killed. In most cases the deepest and most important friendship in our lives is destroyed. And it is in this that we can discover God’s love for divorced people.
You may have heard of the grieving process as it is described by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. It is important to remember that Dr. Kubler-Ross did not design or devise the grieving process. She discovered it. It was always there. She just mapped it out for us.
God has hardwired us for relationships and when those relationships breakdown, it is so important to realize, he also hardwired us to heal. God built into our make up a way to come back to wholeness and to move on.
And so “therefore, my dear friends . . . continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling.” Give your hearts over to reconciliation. Do your darnedest to make this thing work. Be ready with forgiveness – work hard not to see winning as the goal and give up destructive comments or critiques. Don’t return evil for evil but seek to overcome evil with good. Listen to the prompt in your spirit to attempt repair even when you’re arguing. Say the things that will give an out to the anger and move past it. But if all your efforts turn against you, then know that you are not alone. God has walked this road before you and God is walking right alongside you.
We live in a crooked and depraved generation that sees marriage as a convenience and will make partial vows at weddings, saying, “as long as love remains” instead of “until death do us part.” They will tell us to give up, to think about ourselves, to dump the other person and to get all we can. But we are not called to that. We are called to be ready with forgiveness.
When it comes to the sin against us we are called to forgiveness. We are not called to pretend we don’t hurt. We are not called to pretend there is a relationship when there is none. We are called to forgive and forgiveness is just deciding not to punish a true offense. We can do that. We can decide not to punish someone else. We can do it a little at a time even.
In the words of one man who in talking about his ex-wife said, “I forgave her in small sums… I paid those sums whenever I spoke to her and kept myself from rehashing the past. I paid them whenever I saw her with another man and refused self-pity and rehearsal inside for what she’d done to me. I paid them whenever I praised her to others when I really wanted to slice away her reputation. Those were the payments – but she never knew about them. However, I never knew her payments, but I know she made them. I can tell.”
We can choose not to punish. And when we do that, when we act without complaining or arguing we become as children of God who not only gain the word of life that we so desperately need but we can then offer it to others.
