Sermon preparation can be problematic, not least when presented with Gospel teaching such as we have heard today.  Scanning my bookshelves for help, one commentator writes:

“The preacher may groan on discovering that the Gospel lesson for this Sunday includes the strict teaching of Jesus regarding divorce and remarriage in Mark 10.2-16”. 

So little help there!  But here goes.

When I was growing up, the majority of my age group had parents who were married to each other and remained that way.   In polite circles, however appallingly wrong a marriage had gone; the couple were expected to put a brave face on it, at least in public.  Those who chose not to pretend that all was well were ostracised, particularly the women: so experienced the mother of one of my friends, who two days before her Silver Wedding Anniversary walked out because she couldn’t go through the façade of a big family celebration.

Some may say the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction.  Nowadays, broken marriages are commonplace.  As a Church which offers forgiveness and understanding and which seeks to be inclusive, the question is: do we collude with the society around us or do we have something distinctive to say about it all?

In today’s reading from St Mark’s Gospel, it sounds as though Jesus was known to take rather a tough line about divorce and remarriage.  The Pharisees who come to ask him about it are not looking for information.  They are trying to trap him.  They want to open up a gap between the Law of Moses and Jesus’ teaching, because they are trying to discredit him.

As always, their plan backfires.  In his response, Jesus does not condemn Moses’ ruling on divorce and remarriage, but he does paint a bigger picture:  he puts it into a bigger context which the Pharisees can’t discount, because it, too, is Torah, that is, Jewish Law. 

Jesus doesn’t counter-attack by disputing his contemporaries’ interpretation of Moses allowing a man to divorce his wife (note:  not the other way round, of course!)  Instead, Jesus says that the particular question about divorce and remarriage is too small.  The question can never be simply in the context of one man and one woman.  Its proper context is the whole of creation.  The union of husband and wife should always remind us of the Garden of Eden, not in a nostalgic, romantic way, but in a way that rekindles our longing for closeness, to each other and to God.  In the Garden, man and woman work together, in unity of purpose, caring for God’s world without disagreement or competition.  And they walk and talk with God, naturally and without separation.

This is the communion for which we were made, with each other and with God, and marriage is the nearest surviving symbol of that in our broken world.  Every broken relationship does a little more damage to that vision of a world united in love.  When we acknowledge our love of God and seek to serve Him, we recognise with sadness that we are not yet capable of living always to mirror God’s unity and love.  We are faced with the reality of discord and fractured communion in the world we now inhabit. 

But the good news is: the encouragement that Jesus tries to give his original listeners is intended for us too.  He wants us to share his vision of communion as the goal of God’s creation.

In our ‘hardness of heart’, we can so easily think only of what we want and need immediately, rather than of what our part in God’s great work with the world might be.  We can think of ourselves and each other as just a means to an end, rather than as co-creators, with God, of God’s kingdom.

This means that, in practice, we are always bound to try to see our relationships in the bigger context of God’s whole dealings with the world.  That will not always mean that marriages can be saved, or that people should be forced to stay together, however destructive their relationship is. 

But if as a Christian community we can see the bigger picture, it will mean that we are not tempted to under-rate how much damage is being done, every time we find our love is finite, or every time we are tempted to think that our decisions are purely personal, involving only ourselves.  On the contrary, each broken relationship is a crack in the mirror that we were designed to be, the mirror of God’s love for the world. 

This is not to lay a huge burden of guilt on those experiencing difficulties in their relationships, but to plead for the whole of our Christian community to play its part in supporting marriage and families, because what they symbolise is so essential to our being. 

In our wider Christian community, we need to take responsibility for helping to uphold married couples and families, not condemning them when they break up, but offering all the support we can.    Upholding family life has, of course, always been the remit of the Mothers’ Union, but it need not be exclusive! 

What makes a Christian community distinctive is that we are all called to play our part in upholding family values in this, our church family.  Loving one another as Christ loves us, forgiving one another, seeking to be reconciled with one another when we need to, living in peace and harmony with one another, and building one another up with words and acts of encouragement and mutual respect, all to the glory of God.  This vision of harmony and reconciliation is a major part of the healing ministry which the Church is called to exercise.  It is a vision of the wholeness which God in Christ seeks for us all.  It is included in our outreach to the community through our Healing Services. 

I love crystal.  It is beautiful to look at.  The only problem is when you drop it, it shatters into a thousand pieces and no matter how hard you try to glue the broken pieces back together it never looks as beautiful as it was before. 

As human beings made in God’s image, we can think of ourselves like leaded Crystal.  We are lovely until we make a mistake - and we all make them.  Then life shatters into a thousand pieces and can never be put back together exactly the way God meant us to be.

But if we compare ourselves to PlayDough instead of Crystal, as PlayDough we can be pulled apart, rolled into little balls, flung against the wall, or smashed flat.  Then like PlayDough, we can always be scraped back together again, forgiven, reworked, re-moulded, and reshaped into someone that is even more beautiful than before. 

God believes in us.  God believes that we are not beyond help.  God loves us.  He forgives us, scrapes us back together again and moulds us into something even better than we were before we were broken. 

It is this coming together that we celebrate today - and every time we break bread together.  God has made us his family, a family that stretches around the world, a family that is called to love as we are loved, to forgive as we are forgiven, and to give as we receive.

As we are gathered here today, we give thanks to God that we are not alone, that we are all invited to share in the wedding banquet anticipated in each and every act of Holy Communion.

This is the picture conjured up in the last part of today’s Gospel reading, where Jesus rebukes his disciples for attempting to exclude little children from his blessing.  “Let the little children come to me”, he says.  “Do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs.  Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.  And he took them up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them.”

Whether our marriage experiences are successful or unsuccessful, whether we think we have managed to achieve the profound union God intends or have wound up in a divorce court, the receiving of the kingdom like a little child applies. 

If we have failed in some of our relationships, we are not disqualified.  This incredible picture of otherwise rejected children being welcomed and given a blessing sustains those of us who are happily married and those of us who are painfully separated. 

Let this be a lasting message of hope for us all.

Amen.