What God has joined together...

The gospel reading for yesterday was Mark 10:2-16. The priest focused part of her sermon on verses 2 through 12, which read:

And Pharisees came up and in order to test him asked, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?" 3 He answered them, "What did Moses command you?" 4 They said, "Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce, and to put her away." 5 But Jesus said to them, "For your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment. 6 But from the beginning of creation, 'God made them male and female.' 7 'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, 8 and the two shall become one flesh.' So they are no longer two but one flesh. 9 What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder." 10 And in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter. 11 And he said to them, "Whoever divorces his wife and marries another, commits adultery against her; 12 and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery." 

Two things struck me about the passage, in relation to Marriage Revolution.

The first comes in verse 9, and in particular, the phrase about what God has joined together. 

In the past, I'd thought this referred to anyone who was married; if you ended up marrying, surely it was God's will, because marriage is a God-thing and a church thing.

But I realized that this thinking isn't quite right. Sure, He permits us to marry whoever we want. We have free will, and free choice. When you marry, it definitely falls within his permissive will. But then again, so does sin. He permits many things. Not all marriages fall under his ordained will however. Not all matches are made (literally) in heaven. Many, many marriages come as a result of us not listening to the voice of reason, whether it be spoken directly by the Spirit, or indirectly through friends, families, and our own logic.

So that's the first part of my realization; that just because you are married doesn't mean God directed it to happen.

The second part is a bit more nuanced. I'm a lover of the sacramental, and hold the sacraments in high esteem, so the idea of undoing a sacrament is difficult for me. I thought that all Christian traditions considered marriage a sacrament. Turns out that in Protestant denominations (including Anglicanism) it is not. 

Strike two against my fundamental thinking.

Even within the Catholic and Eastern traditions, which hold marriage as sacrament, there is an issue which shakes my thinking. Unlike the other sacraments, which have an ordained clergy member officiating, the spouses themselves are the ministers of the sacrament of marriage. They officiate. And this seems to pull it even further out of the realm of what I'd viewed it to be.

Is it any surprise that half of our marriages end in divorce? We are not uniting as couples that God chose from His heavenly throne, we are most often not married sacramentally, and even in a sacramental union we are being our own ministers rather than joining with a priest in persona Christi to knit a chord of three.

My notions about the sacramental quality of marriage have fallen by the wayside. 

That doesn't mean that I don't believe what He says in verse 9: "Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate." 

Woe be it to any who would do so. 

What has shifted is in my understanding of what God's joining together means. I think there are very, very few couples for which this description fits.

And that's the crux of the problem.