Do you think Arnold Swarzenegger is having second thoughts about running for governor of California?  Surely he had to know that if there were any suspicions about his sexually abusive forays on movie sets they’d become public when he painted a political bulls eye on himself?  Now, people rightfully want to know if Swarzenegger’s attitude toward women has genuinely changed or if his political correctness is just a cover for Stone Age chauvinism.  Didn’t he know where the line was?  Then, there’s Limbaugh, who just couldn’t rush fast enough to put a bigoted foot in his mouth.  Doesn’t he know where the line is?  How is it that we can know where the moral line is and step across it anyway?  Is it true that if we just had someone draw the line a little clearer on matters of morality we’d never step across it?  If we knew better, we’d do better, right?

Let’s ask the Pharisees.  No one was better at drawing moral lines and making certain no one stepped across them.  One day some of them decided to see just how good Jesus was at moral geometry and asked him where he drew the line on a subject more relevant today than it was then.  “‘Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?’”  The way Mark records Jesus’ response to the Pharisees makes it appear as though Jesus deals with two totally unrelated topics. 

First, the Pharisees questioned Jesus about divorce.  It was something of a setup but Jesus handled himself well and turned the situation into an opportunity to give the Pharisees more information than they probably wanted.  Then, suddenly, Jesus changes the subject to children, in particular, their value to God and their place in God’s kingdom.  When reading Mark’s gospel, it does sometimes appear that he simply strings together a bunch of Jesus’ sayings that don’t have any particular relationship to each other.  Maybe so, even at first glance here.  Let’s look closer.

The Pharisees wanted to know the rule about divorce, like they didn’t know it already.  So, Jesus reminded them of what they already knew by recalling Moses’ law to them (Deuteronomy 24:1-4).  Even though Moses’ law represented social progress in its time, it looks to us like its fresh out of the social Stone Age.  In Moses’ day, a man’s wife was just another piece of property.  If a man didn’t like his wife anymore, he could toss her out with no explanation.  Of course, that often put a woman in a totally helpless position.  Since women were not educated or trained in the professions, it was not uncommon for women who’d been abandoned to have to turn to prostitution in order to survive.  Moses law said that a man had to at least justify his reason for divorcing his wife by giving written explanation.  It wasn’t much and, though it may sound strange to us, this actually elevated the role of women in society even in Moses’ day.  A man was not allowed to just toss his wife out without cause.  She was more than a donkey or a duck.  However, in case you didn’t catch it, even Moses made no provision whatsoever for women to divorce men, no matter what.  Even Moses had some growing to do. 

Along comes Jesus to teach Moses’ great-great-great-grandchildren better by taking them back to God’s plan for marriage from before Moses’ day.  “‘From the beginning of creation, 'God made them male and female.'  'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.' So they are no longer two, but one flesh.  Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.’”  Jesus affirmed that divorce was never a part of God’s original plan for marriage but that Moses legally instituted it only to accommodate man’s stubbornness and heard-heartedness.  (Does grace accommodate anything in us today that no law can dictate?)

Jesus defined marriage this way.  Marriage was God’s idea, not mans’.  God gets to make the rules about how it begins and ends.  Jesus said that God’s ideal for marriage was a lifetime union between a man and a woman.  We can end a marriage, but only by hijacking the right.  Matthew does record another saying of Jesus that Mark does not in which Jesus allows for divorce when one spouse is unfaithful to the other by committing adultery (Matthew 5:31-32).  Because Jesus wasn’t gender-specific in his comments he was elevating the role of women even further.  Any chance Jesus was getting into our 2003 stuff 2000 years ago?  Isn’t he defining marriage strictly and only as a man-woman union, for life?  No one who runs for president in this next election will be able to run from that question.  Not many churches that want to continue ministering in this world will be able to either.  There is very little left we will be able to assume or take for granted. 

Jesus is also talking about adultery.  And, because Jesus also defined adultery as an attitude of the heart as much as an act in bed (Matthew 5:27-28) he’s opening all kinds of cans of moral worms here.

Some years ago I was sitting at a coffee table with a group of men when the conversation, of all things, turned to sex.  They knew I was a preacher and most of them had some connection to a church in very religiously conservative northwest Arkansas.  That didn’t stop one of the men from asking this question, appropriately sanitized for pulpit use.  He asked, “An affair is one thing but what’s wrong with a little recreational sex?”  I’ve always wondered how his wife would have responded.  Like the Pharisees, our questions always reveal more about us than they ask from others.  But, since he asked, well, Jesus, how about it?  Is the line that rigid?

Please allow me to take a gender-specific step aside for just a moment and talk about adultery.  Men, if you’re viewing Internet pornography and you think that, when, not if, but when your wife finds out that it won’t feel to her just exactly like you’ve been sleeping with those nameless women you’re E-lusting after and have the same net effect in destroying the trust in your marriage as if you had been sleeping with them then you’ve been smoking the same thing Arnold and Rush have.  There are lines.  Jesus defined them.  And, we step across them only at great peril to our marriages and our souls.  Nothing, and I mean nothing, will devastate a marriage more than adultery, no matter what form it takes, long term cheating or short term recreational.  Nothing.  Very few marriages survive it.  That’s why Jesus expanded Moses’ law further and allowed for divorce under those circumstances.  Even though it is God’s ideal that one woman and one man stay married for life, if adultery creeps into the marriage bed, Jesus knew that a human heart can only take so much.  Over and over again, Jesus’ grace accommodates in us what the law of Moses could never legislate into being.  But, we know the rules, don’t we?  And, we know what it costs to break them, don’t we?  Don’t we?

Then, how is it that Christians keep committing adultery and divorcing at higher rates than the general population?  How is that?  Is it because we don’t know the rules?  If we knew better, we’d do better, right?  Is it because we take false security, like the Pharisees, in thinking that right believing insures right living and insulates us from moral failure?

This past week Stedman Graham was the guest on Larry King Live.  Stedman Graham and Oprah Winfrey have been living together for some seventeen years.  Oprah calls Stedman her lifetime partner.  Here’s a little bit of trivia.  You probably won’t ask for my autograph.  But, Stedman Graham and I went to Hardin-Simmons University together.  I didn’t know him.  Of course, he didn’t know me, either.  He did have to go to chapel every week just like I did.  It was a requirement for graduation.  Chapel at a West Texas Baptist university.  Chapel, where God’s ideals were held high as the model for living.  Arguably, no one plays a greater role in shaping American culture at this point than Oprah Winfrey.  Yet, she’s just living with a man, not married to him.  A man who had to know the rules, where the line was drawn on marriage and, for whatever reason, stepped across it.  So, is it true that, if we just knew the rules, we’d live more like what they prescribe?  Stedman has the right to ask me, by the way.  I went to chapel, too. 

Suddenly, after Jesus explains the rules, we find him moving in doors where the conversation about marriage and divorce continues; “in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter.”  Jesus draws the line even more clearly.  “‘Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.’”  In other words, there is what is legally right, Jesus said, and morally right.  A legal divorce still has moral consequences.  In this fallen world, the distance between what is legal and moral will always be greater than it should.  This is what I understand Jesus to be saying.  Regardless of the circumstances or reasons, if we decide to end our marriages, we have more business to settle with God than we do with the courts.  Could Jesus have said it more plainly? 

In the middle of all this, people start bringing their children to Jesus for him to bless.  His disciples’ rebuked them for bothering Jesus with children in the middle of this very adult conversation.  But, aren’t children going to eventually be a part of the conversation adults start about divorce and adultery? 

Reminds me of the stories my grandparents told me of when they were growing up.  At Sunday lunch, after church, the children ate after the adults.  It was almost always fried chicken.  The grandfather always got the white meat, the breast.  The kids got the leftovers, the wings or backs, maybe a drumstick.  Children knew their place in my grandparents’ world.  The disciples were only reminding the children of their place in Jesus’ world when Jesus turned the tables and said, “Nope, boys, you’ve got it backwards.  Only children get into my world.”  “‘Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.’”  Do you see the play on words?  We think of the kingdom of God as a spiritual goal to be achieved, an award to be won for keeping the rules.  Jesus said we get in only by letting it in.  We enter by receiving. 

Just about the time I’m finally figuring out how to behave like an adult, Jesus comes along and calls me back to my childhood.  Can I ever learn to trust like I did when I was four or five?  David Spade stars in a new movie that I haven’t seen, Dickie Roberts, Former Child Star.  I do have some theatric taste.  But, the plot is about an adult actor who is a former child star.  He’s auditioning for a role as a normal person.  But, because he missed his childhood playing the roles of others, he doesn’t know what normal is.  Now that he’s all grown up, he wants to learn how to live with a normal life and goes to live a family so they can teach him what normal is, from childhood up.  It’s a strange thing, but true.  The way to spiritual maturity starts in the heart of a child.  Isn’t that what Jesus said? 

As adults, we grow skeptical, cynical, even unbelieving.  We tend not to trust people because we’ve been burned so many times by hidden agendas and ulterior motives.  But, Jesus says, if you are going to be a part of what I’m eternally about, your going to have to find that childlike part of you that knows how to trust and accept and receive.  How far would you have to dig to get to that part of yourself again?

And, what in the world do these two seemingly unrelated events have to do with each other, Jesus’ teachings on divorce and his blessing of the children?  Is it this?  We know the rules.  By the time we’re adults, especially if we’re raised in the chapel, we know the rules.  But, if a person’s heart is not right, there will never be enough rules to keep them married or to keep them from crossing any line.  The only people who stayed lovingly married are those who know the rules, but also know that love rules. 

To be a part of God’s kingdom means to go to a place in ourselves where rules cannot go, where only love rules, and, like a child, receive God there.  Whether we’re single, married, divorced on in the middle of a raging affair, being a part of God’s kingdom and living like it means being transformed from the inside out by receiving what we can never earn or achieve, the gift of God’s life within.  Without that life, all of the rules in the world, even God’s rules, will never be anything more than a moral straightjacket.  Eventually, Houdini-like, we’ll find a way to get out.

Perhaps you heard the story of the woman in Jacksonville, Florida who was thrown in jail and failed to tell the authorities about her two-year-old daughter at home alone.  When the little girl was found, two weeks later, she’d been surviving on mustard and ketchup and dry pasta, for two weeks.  Did her mother not know any better?  There are laws against a parent abandoning a child, and this mother will soon discover the wrath of those laws.  Most of us cannot conceive of abandoning our children.  We know there are laws.  But, it isn’t the law that makes us love our children.  Wouldn’t most us say that, if we were going to take a visitor into that place inside of us where we love our children, we’d have to take them to a place where rules cannot go and where only love rules?  To that place where we have received our children as sacred gifts of God, to be loved and nurtured and cared for until we die?  Isn’t that where we love our children, in a place where rules cannot go?  That is where God wants us to love him.  “‘Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child . . ..’”

If you want to do marriage the right way, you’re going to have to live from the inside out, from that place inside of you where rules cannot go.  If you want to be a part of God’s eternal kingdom, you’re going to have to go to a place in yourself where rules cannot go and there, in childlike faith, receive the God who loves you as his own child.  Do you know where that place is inside of yourself, where rules cannot go and where love rules?