Our own Mark Grace is the Director of Pastoral Care and Counseling with the Baylor Health Care System.  His wife, Linda, holds the same position with Parkland.  Mark told me recently of a beautiful black lab he had while living in rural Pennsylvania.  Pepper was not just a pet, he was a good friend.  One night, Pepper got out.  The next morning a neighbor stopped by to tell Mark that the dog had been found lying in a nearby ditch where he had died after being hit by a car.  Mark says that people stopped by all day long to offer their condolences, as though a member of the family had passed away, which, in fact, it had. 

One farmer with a backhoe came by and offered to help bury Pepper.  So, they went out back and dug a proper hole.  They laid the dog in the grave and, as the farmer began shoveling the dirt back in, Mark stood nearby, speechless, with tears streaming down his face.  After he finished, the farmer got off the backhoe and came and stood beside Mark.  Then, this tough old country farmer did something only those who’ve been on the inside of that kind of loss could possibly appreciate.  He put his arm around Mark’s shoulder and simply said, “I understand.”  Of course, Mark and Linda do that every day.  They stand by as one tragedy after another shovels dirt in on top of people’s dreams.  Diabetes, cancer, heart attacks, just plain old age.  And, sometimes, all they can do is put their arm around a sobbing shoulder and say, “I understand.”

You find yourself doing that a great deal when you are a minister.  But, sometimes, like Mark wishes Pepper had not gotten loose to get run over in the first place, you wish there was something you could do to avert tragedy before it happens.  Of course, there are the unpreventable things.  Car wrecks, illness, financial setbacks, loss of a job, that kind of thing.  But, nothing breaks my heart more than to sit and listen to people telling me the story of their dying marriage.  Most often, by the time they get to me, all I can do is stand by while the last shovels of dirt cover their broken dreams, put my arm around their shoulder and say, “I understand.”  It’s one of the few times I can legitimately say to another person that I know how they feel.  But, so often, I wish I could do more to avert the tragedy before it happens. 

This morning I had originally intended to preach from a text that teaches about being sure of your eternal salvation.  But, mid-week, something stopped me cold.  It’s not that preaching about eternal salvation is unimportant.  We’ll get back to that shortly.  It just that I’ve spent a lot of time lately watching broken dreams get buried.  I was just wondering if there was more I could do.  So, I turned my scriptural eye to this intriguing text in Matthew.

In ancient Jewish custom, if a man died without having children, his unmarried brother was responsible for marrying his widow in order to keep the family bloodline flowing.  In the case presented to Jesus, one man died without children but with six brothers, each who proceeded to marry the childless widow his predeceased older brothers kept passing down until each of the seven had been married to her.  Jesus was asked to clarify whose wife she’d be in heaven.  Certainly, these were not smart brothers.  By at least the fourth or fifth, should not one of them have stopped and asked, “What is it about being married to my brother’s widow that is so very unhealthy?”  Of course, this was all a setup.  They were trying to get Jesus to answer a tricky legal question because they had a hidden agenda that had nothing to do with heaven or the God of it.

This whole discussion actually reminds me of the way some of my Texas friends would taunt me when I lived in Arkansas.  They would ask, as though I knew, if two people are married in Arkansas and they die and go to heaven will they still be first cousins?  What my Texas friends didn’t know was that, in Arkansas, they tell the same joke on their Oklahoma neighbors.  And, I hear tell that in Oklahoma, they tell it on Texans.  My guess is that two people, born in Texas, moved to Oklahoma and got married before moving to Arkansas where they later died.  And, of course, inquiring Texas minds want to know, if you die in Arkansas, can you go straight to heaven or must you first pass through Texas?  Who knows?  It’s all nonsense, right?

Which is almost the way Jesus answers this somewhat goofy question about which of the seven brothers could lay claim to a repeatedly widowed woman in a place where marriage won’t mean anything anymore.  I think Jesus wanted to turn their attention to the place where their marriages still meant something.  “‘You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God,’” he told them.  Despite their meticulously literalistic interpretation of God’s law, they misunderstood the effect it was meant to have in transforming their lives.  Even if we know how to extract the most exact meaning of each of God’s words so that we can split every spiritual hair what good is it if we miss the power those words were meant to give us while we still have hair, or don’t?  What difference does it makes if you can solve heaven’s puzzle but can’t work one useful spiritual equation for the life you have now?

Which is why I found myself switching from the subject of eternal salvation to the question of how we put heaven’s power to work in our lives now, in particular, in our marriages and other significant relationships.  In the place we talk about heaven so much isn’t it true that you need to find help with putting heaven’s power to work in the home you hope to live in until you die and go there?  Especially if you’re beginning to wonder if it is true that marriages are made in heaven because of the hell on earth you live with every day.  It was to that subject Jesus turned his attention when tossed the next religious hot potato.

“‘Which is the greatest commandment in the law?’” he was asked.  Attempting to get Jesus to prioritize God’s laws, these self-appointed judges of others’ inability to live right hoped to get him to inadvertently minimize the rest.  To a legalist, a law is a law is a law.  Jesus didn’t step in their bear trap.  He just said that all the law, summed up, meant this.  And, if you are one who needs moral absolutes with no variance, here they are, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind (and) your neighbor as yourself.’”  Life should be about relationships governed by God’s love and justice.  Love for an eternal God and a love of God that transforms and empowers us to live in just and loving ways toward each other now as we journey toward our meeting with our eternal God in heaven.

A dear friend from years back called this week to say that she and her husband had rented a cottage, in Arkansas, on the occasion of their 30^th wedding anniversary.  But, Arkansas wouldn’t be heaven.  It would be hell.  Just a few weeks ago, she discovered that, not only had he become involved with another woman who was a close friend of them both, but that this woman, a widow with five children, was now pregnant with his child.  They were going to what was meant to be a place of celebration to find a way of ending three decades of marriage.  Looking from the outside in, you would have never guessed it.  This couple was as active in church as any two people I’ve ever known.  Deeply spiritual people.  Church leaders.  How does that happen?

Cutting to the chase, if your marriage is not meeting the needs that marriage was intended to meet, then your marriage is in trouble.  You, and you alone, know the truth about that in your marriage.  Most marriages get into the kind of trouble that will destroy them before the trouble becomes visible to anyone who could have helped from the outside.  Only you and your mate know whether you are in trouble or not.  And, if you are, what are you going to do?

More bizarre.  Recent research indicates that Christians, in specific, Baptists, are more likely to get divorced than their non-Christian neighbors and co-workers.  Twenty-four percent of all adults who lay no claim to faith in God have been divorced at least once.  But, among “born-again” believers, those folks who believe themselves to have heaven’s puzzle solved, twenty-seven percent have been divorced (“Baptist divorce rate higher than average,” The Baptist Standard, January 12, 2000).  Why this big discrepancy between our knowledge of how to get to heaven and how to make heaven work where we live now? 

We have a clue in the scripture we have read this morning.  These Sadducees and Pharisees knew the law.  Jesus said they didn’t know the power of God.  They were committed to biblical ideals but had didn’t have a clue as to the spirit of them or how to be empowered by them in their daily lives.  It’s frightening what can happen when you mistake religious idealism for the power and love of God.  When you assume that knowledge of how to get to heaven will keep you from living in hellish ways now.  Paul wrote that, “There will be terrible times in the last days.  People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God – having a form of godliness but denying its power (2 Timothy 3:1-5).”  By the way, these were church people he was describing.  Did he miss any of us?  These same scripture-quoting folks about whom we’ve read ended up nailing the Jesus of scripture to a cross.  What are some of the unheavenly things you’ve done while quoting scripture? 

Right after we got married, Nancy and I took the boys to Burger’s Lake in west Ft. Worth.  A spring fed swimming hole, Burger’s Lake has swings and slides and all that kind of thing.  I decided that, being newly married, I should impress my new bride with my athletic prowess.  So, I tried out the trapeze that swings out over the water.  You grab the bar, run hard, swing out and let go, hopefully, over the deep end.  What I had not accounted for was the fact that it had been years since I’d done anything like pull-ups.  To say the least, my upper body strength had not kept up with my lower body development.  I took hold of the bar, ran hard, swung out over the water and all was well, until the weight of what I was attempting took hold of me.  I can’t remember what hurt more, my shoulders dislodging from their proper alignment or coming to rest in waste deep silt as I fell.  You see, I was fully committed to holding on to the high bar.  It was the greater weight of what was happening beneath my commitment that ended my bride-impressing swing before its time. 

In church life, I’ve never known one person who divorced because she or he did not believe in the sanctity of marriage.  I’ve never known one person who did not at least start their marriage fully intending to see it through to the end.  Part of the grief of divorce is watching high ideals, dislodged from their proper moral alignment, come crashing down hard in the waste deep silt of marital failure.  High ideals, a non-negotiable belief in the evils of divorce, long-tenured church membership and a scripture-quoting assurance that you are heaven bound will not prevent you from divorcing.  One woman I knew threw her abusive husband out just days shy of their 50^th anniversary.  Finally, she couldn’t take it anymore.

If your marriage is not meeting the needs marriage was intended to meet for emotional safety, intimate companionship, sexual joy and fulfillment, spiritual growth and so on, your marriage is in trouble and in headed for premature death regardless how high the spiritual values to which you hold.  If either you or your spouse is ignoring the basic needs of your mate in your marriage, for whatever reason, you are being more than naïve if you believe your commitment to the high ideal of marriage will protect you from the consequences of indifference to each other’s needs.  The greater weight of marriage’s unmet needs will eventually rip you loose from the highest ideals.  It may have been different three decades back.  These days, whether you eventually get divorced or not will have less than ever to do with whether you believed it was right or wrong. 

This is a two-part sermon.  I’ll finish it next week.  This is where I wanted to start.  Only you know what’s going on in your marriage.  Only you have a view from the inside out.  When you look from that perspective, what do you see?

A few weeks ago I started having a very slight, but strange twinge in my chest.  Not the same kind a fifteen-year-old boy has upon meeting a new girl, either.  Nothing serious, I was sure.  I mean, about my twinge.  But, I made the mistake of mentioning it to my nurse-wife.  Shortly thereafter, I found myself taking a stress test followed by a sonogram of my heart.  The doctor said that only if he could get a view of my heart from the inside could he tell what was going on in my chest.  The report came back even more positive than I could have believed.  But, he said I was wise to be careful.  Too often, he said, the first sign that you’re heart is in trouble is when it just stops beating. 

I’ll do it.  I’ll stand with you.  I’ll put my arm around your shoulders while tears run down your face and while we both watch a judge pour the last shovels of legal dirt over what was once your marriage.  But, I’d much rather ask you to take a look from the inside out now and be very honest about what you see. 

The next warning you get that the heart of your marriage was silently breaking all these years may be when it just stops beating.