You need to know that it’s been at least as difficult to get ready to preach this sermon as it was to climb aboard a 767 this past week and fly to Atlanta.  Both journeys, however, were and are more important than my fears of taking them.  But, in both cases, I spent a great deal of time this week in personal reflection trying to understand my anxieties.  Just like flying this week, this is a first-time-since experience.  I spent less than four hours flying to and from Atlanta.  I spent over twice that much time sitting in an airport staring at the gate wondering if I had the courage to walk through it the first time since September 11.  I’ll be in this pulpit less than twenty-five minutes.  I’ve spent several times that amount wondering if I had the courage to enter this text with you.  It’s the first time since a divorce hijacked my marriage seven years ago.   

My fear is and has been that someone would ever look at my life and say, “Because he’s been divorced it must be o.k.”  If you think that then you haven’t been looking very closely or listening very well.  This is what I have said about being divorced.  It is the single worst thing that has ever happened to me.  And, it keeps happening.  It never ends.  Never.  People compare divorce to a death.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  When someone dies there is a funeral, a grave, a headstone.  There is a finality of some sort.  A place to go and grieve.  When you divorce, there are living reminders of your failure all over you all the time.  It’s like walking into a spider web.  It gets all over you and you can’t get if off.  That’s what it’s like to be divorced.  Financial ruin.  Social shame.  Heartbreak upon heartbreak, especially with children.  Emotional and physical stress that ages you beyond your years.  People who judge you because they don’t know the whole story and you can’t tell them.  Should I go on?  People who are looking for excuses to get divorced will always find them.  But, if you’ve looked closely and listened well then you know that, if anything, my life is a witness to why you shouldn’t ever get divorced. 

Just in case you need more, Jesus has given us a rule about divorce.  It’s wrong.  That’s the rule.  Either in the way a marriage ends or in the way a person tries to start life over after divorce, there are spider webs of complicated moral issues all over the place.  Jesus said, “‘except for marital unfaithfulness’” a man couldn’t divorce his wife.  Most of the excuses we hear these days wouldn’t cut it with Jesus.  In fact, Jesus was trying to protect the most vulnerable people in his day, women.  Women could not divorce their husbands under any circumstances.  So, by giving this rule, Jesus was actually elevating the worth of women by telling men that to divorce them was to put them in harm’s way.  Uneducated and unskilled, women who were divorced often had to resort to prostitution to stay alive.  And, if they remarried, they were committing adultery.  The bigger burden was on the man.  Jesus was telling those with the most power, “don’t take advantage of vulnerable people.”  That’s the rule. 

That’s why Jesus was coming down so hard on adultery.  In one way or another, adultery always takes advantage of a vulnerable person.  If you are sleeping with someone who isn’t your spouse, one reason what you are doing is sin is because you’re taking advantage of someone else’s trust; you’re exploiting the vulnerable.  Nothing makes a person more vulnerable than trust.  Someone’s husband or wife is trusting their spouse to be faithful.  Someone’s children are expecting their mom or dad to be where they said they’d be.  In their trust, they are the most vulnerable.  If you are sleeping with someone who is married to someone else, you are taking advantage of someone somewhere who is vulnerable.  And, quite honestly, you and bin Laden have something in common.  You are both using stealth tactics to take advantage of vulnerable people in order to get what you want no matter what damage it does to anyone else.  And, if you think I’m overstating the case, then you just haven’t seen the stark terror in someone’s eyes when they’ve just discovered that their spouse is sleeping around.  Whatever social acceptance adultery may ever gain, in the eyes of God, adultery is marital terrorism because it exploits the vulnerable.  Enjoy! 

But, Jesus went further than that.  If we think we’re in the clear just because we’ve never slept with someone else’s wife or husband, listen to this.  Jesus said, “‘You have heard that it was said, ‘Do not commit adultery.’  But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.’”  Jesus was saying, “You may have believed up until now that you only committed adultery if you had sexual relations with someone to whom you weren’t married.  I’m here to tell you that just wishing you could qualifies as adultery.”  To God, what lies in our hearts is as significant as what bed we lie in.  That’s the rule.  I’m just kind of curious.  Anyone here still feeling comfortable about their moral purity before God?  Anyone here with a totally clean slate?  All of which brings us to the heart of this matter.  Jesus wasn’t so much giving us a moral standard by which we are to judge others.  He was giving us a moral mirror into which we are to take a good long look at ourselves and ask whether what we see is what God sees. 

A person who had once been very active in church once wrote me.  Names, details have been altered to protect the vulnerable, but, in their own words, “Just when I think I'm rounding the corner of the pain of this divorce or actually over some hill, I end up at church, and it is always the place where I take three steps back.  It is the only place where I've experienced judgment, hypocrisy and loss of friendship.  I'm always surprised at the anger I feel at church.”  You see, judging from a perspective that only God can have, others had concluded who was at greater fault than whom, passed judgment and shunned accordingly.  This is what I wrote to that person.  “It is true that there really is no way of knowing who pushed the first domino in causing any marriage to end.  Others judge us because they don't know the whole story looking at our marriage from the outside.  We also judge each other within the marriage because we don't know the whole story about each other.  We tend to see what we see through very distorted lenses of hurt and anger.  It finally comes down to being willing to accept responsibility for our own choices without finding a way of blaming anyone else for pushing us toward them.  Otherwise, the anger never ends.”That’s why Jesus said, later in this very same Sermon on the Mount, “‘Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you (Matthew 7:1).’” 

Jesus gave us the rule.  But, not as a standard by which to judge each other.  He gave us the rules to serve as the moral mirrors in which we might do the kind of self-examination that leads to accepting responsibility for our own moral failure.  Which is part of the frustration.  He gave us the rule.  And, even though he gave it 2,000 years ago, it seems kind of late.  We’ve already made a mess of things.  What do we do about that?

Well, one thing we don’t do is just toss the rules.  Several years ago I was riding around with a rancher as he was explaining to me the difficult art of keeping herds fenced in.  Fence repair was a full-time job because, like people, cows don’t like being fenced in.  Not knowing that the fences were there to protect them, some cows always seemed to find a way of exploiting the weakest place and breaking out to the grass-is-greener side.  Up by the road, where the big trucks roll.  A whole industry called “rendering” had grown up just to handle those cattle that weren’t satisfied with the care the rancher gave inside the fence.  In the ranching world, even carcasses have value.  Dog food, shoe leather.  So, the rendering truck would come along and clean up the mess that was always made when a cow, deciding to live outside the fence, met up with an eighteen-wheeler doing seventy.  The wage of sin is . . . rendering?!

It always gets messy when we forget that God’s rules weren’t made to fence us in as much as they were made to protect us.  Nowhere is that more true than in matters related to sexual purity and faithfulness.  So, some break out.  Others just keep standing at the fence looking over wishing they could.  Either way, life gets messy because both the act of sleeping with someone to whom you’re not married and just the thought of wanting to qualify as sin.  So, where’s the hope?  We know the rules.  Jesus gave us rules.  Did he give us any hope?

We take Jesus words, “‘except for marital unfaithfulness,’” wrongly if we use them as a standard by which to judge others.  We also too easily gloss over them.  Jesus was giving us a rule.  He was also giving us hope.  Even in those words he was acknowledging that God knows he’s not working with perfect people.  There’s great hope in that.  You can have a conversation with a God like that, even after your worst failure.  Why don’t we just cut to the chase?  We’re not here today because we’re good at what we do.  We’re not here because we’ve kept all the rules.  We’re here because we need a God who works with people who got outside the fence and got slaughtered for it.  We’re here because we need hope and the only God who can give it. 

Jesus is giving us rules.  But, Jesus is also who is giving us hope.  Jesus was acknowledging that there were some marriages that just weren’t going to work and only God knows why.  That doesn’t change the rules.  That doesn’t change the price we pay when we break the rules.  Neither does it change the fact that we are serving a God who works with people who make a mess of their lives. 

That’s one reason I need you to know my story no matter how painful it is for me to share it.  Henri Nouwen says that ministers must be willing “to confess their own brokenness and ask forgiveness from those to whom they minister.  Confession and forgiveness are the concrete forms in which we sinful people love one another.”  (Henri Nouwen, In the Name of Jesus, Crossroad, 1990, pp. 46-48)  So, I need you to know my brokenness and to forgive me for it.  I also need you to know I’ve found hope.  I can’t tell you about my hope if I can’t tell you about my brokenness.  They go hand in hand, together, or not at all.  If I only talk about sin as something that happened to someone else I cannot talk about hope as something that happened to me. 

We cannot love whom we do not know.  And, if we are going to know each other, we must be free to confess our sin, our brokenness.  Only then, can we can point each other toward hope.  If this is not true then why did Jesus let his disciples see him sweat blood as he struggled with his own humanity in the Garden of Gethsemane?  If this is not true then how is it that we have record of Jesus weeping.  If this is not true then how is it that we have the record of Jesus confessing not only his thirst but even his loneliness from the cross on which he faced his own very human death.  It may be Jesus divinity that redeemed us.  But, it is his divinity as revealed through his humanity that points us toward hope.

Ministers are sometimes the most emotionally and spiritually confused and unbalanced people specifically because they spend inordinate amounts of energy hiding their own spiritual inadequacies from others.  As a result, they cut themselves off from the kind of honesty that genuine relationships demand.  It is as if they fear that, if anyone finds out how human they are, they won’t be able to believe in God.  What arrogance!  Only Jesus can save lost souls.  It is through the confession of our sin that we can confess our hope.  Put simply, we should hold high the rules about marriage and adultery and all matters of justice and love.  But, we should also be willing to confess the places at which we’ve failed to keep the rules.  Only then will we have the moral authority to point others to the Jesus who gives us hope.  This world is full of very frightened people right now.  People need rules.  But, they also need someone who’ll point them to hope.  We will be those people? 

I flew into Atlanta very late Wednesday night.  I found myself riding a train across town to a place I’d never been before.  As late as it was, the train was packed.  You could tell the locals from the tourists.  The locals had this thousand-mile stare of boredom in their eyes.  I’ve got this deer-in-the-headlight look staring at maps and signs hoping not to spend the night riding loops around Atlanta.  But, even with maps and signs, I was still so very lost.  At one point, a woman sat down beside me.  Early thirties, Eastern descent.  Pakistani, Iranian, maybe.  Reading a technical paper, not that I was looking, she and I were observing the unwritten rule that you don’t talk to strangers in the city on the train.  But, I was lost.  So, leap-frogging the unwritten rule that men don’t ever ask directions, I asked her for help.  And, she gave it.  She told me where to get off the train.  And, when I got off, she stopped to point to the elevator that led from the loading platform to the street.  She’d seen my luggage and knew the stairs would be too much. 

I took the elevator.  It opened up to a very dark and spooky place.  Not the kind of place you want to be alone late at night looking so very much like a tourist.  But, to my surprise, standing about thirty yards away was my angel of the night.  She’d taken the stairs, gotten there first and waited on me.  When I came off the elevator she pointed me toward the street, where my ride was waiting.  Then she walked into the darkness and I never saw her again.  I never even knew her name.  She didn’t owe me that.  Why did she stop and help?  Had she been lost once and someone waited on her?  Someone who knew that signs and maps, rules of the road, can never substitute for a real human being who cares enough just to take a moment to show you the way.  That you need rules but you also need hope. 

I could have profiled her, I suppose.  Pakistani?  Iranian?  A crowded train in the city.  In my suspicions, I could have just written her off as not worth trusting.  But, as it turned out, the very one I was tempted to judge was the one who knew the way when I was lost and even cared enough to stop and give me hope.

There are lots of broken families and broken and lost hearts in this city just waiting for their angel of the night.  Someone with the courage to say, “I know how you feel.  I’ve been lost, too.  But, I’ve found new hope.  May I show you the way to Jesus?  May I show you the way to hope?”

There are lots of lost folks in this city.  Just waiting.