Things get loose

 

 A Sermon preached at St. Paul's Episcopal Church

Georgetown, DE 

and live broadcast simultaneously at

Sirach 26:10 on Facebook

Pentecost XIX - Proper 22 - B

October 3, 2021

When I was a kid, Saturday mornings had their rituals. There was furniture to polish and laundry to be done and floors to wash and polish. That was what we kids did while my parents did the grocery shopping. Oh, and after our chores, (or, sometimes, during) we watched Saturday morning cartoons.

 

There was an order to the morning busyness that was prescriptive. The afternoon, on the other hand, was free for bike rides or a pick up game of softball or basketball or Jacks, or hanging out at a friend’s house, listening to the latest song on 45-rpm records.

 

My father, however, could always be found on Saturday afternoon, in the garage. Working on his Oldsmobile – which, I recently discovered, they don’t make any longer. I would ask him what he was doing and he would say, “Working on the carburetor.”

 

As I remember what my father taught me, the carburetor was a large, bulky contraption which sat on top of the engine which provided the necessary fuel to the engine and spark plugs to get the engine going. But nowadays they don’t use such a system.

 

I clearly remember the day I read in the newspaper that new cars used a 'fuel injector system'. It was the 80s and my dad had long ago traded in his Oldsmobile for a newer model. And yet, as I pulled up to my parent’s house one Saturday afternoon, there was my dad, in the garage. The hood of the car was up and my father was bent over the engine, wrench in hand.

 

Smart Alec that I was, I greeted my father who continued to work with his wrench, moving it here and there. “So, dad,” I said, “I understand that these new cars don’t have a carburetor. I think I read that they have something called ‘fuel injection’.”

 

My father kept working as he nodded his head in agreement. “So,” I said, not really asking a question about carburetors or fuel injection but rather to gently tease and test him, “if you’re not working on the carburetor anymore, what are you doing?”

 

My father was not a man of many words. He was taken out of school after the 6^th grade to work the farm and whatever he knew, he taught himself. Daddy continued to move his wrench here and there on the engine and said, “Well, things get loose from time to time. You gotta tighten ‘em.”

 

Things get loose. You gotta tighten ‘em.

 

I think of my dad’s “Garage wisdom” whenever I read today’s collect, which begins, “Almighty and everlasting God, you are always more ready to hear than we to pray, and to give more than we either desire or deserve.”

 

I imagine God out in the heavenly garage, tightening things up on a Saturday afternoon so they don’t get loose. And, when they do, well, God’s got the wrench out and ready, before we even know something is loose.

 

Or before we, like Job, are even able to get out the potsherd, a fragment of pottery, to scrape away the ravages of sin, God is ready to forgive, ready to help us save  ourselves from the temptations of The Evil One for yet another day.

 

Over in the Gospel lesson, Jesus has his scriptural wrench out and ready, tightening up the understanding the Pharisees have had about divorce. Well, they didn’t really have a question about their understanding concerning divorce. Smart Alecs. They just wanted to test Jesus.

 

They asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” Jesus answered them, “What did Moses command you?” They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her.”

Understand, please, that women of antiquity - much like their sisters in many of those same countries in the Middle East - had no social standing whatsoever without a father or a husband. A divorced woman, much like a widow, was the poorest of the poor. Women - and children - were consider property. So, if a man wanted another woman, he could simply write a letter of dismissal for his present wife and move on, without any regard for the status of his wife.

Right, says, Jesus, that’s because things had gotten too loose. The people had been in bondage in Egypt for 400 years and needed a way to make them a great nation. Moses made things real tight. Jesus says "Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, permitted you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’" 

 

Jesus is saying that divorce is the direct result of the hardness of the human heart, but from the beginning, divorce was never part of God's plan.

 

Jesus reminds them that "in the beginning, God made them male and female". In the beginning God made them equal. You can imagine how those words fell on the ears of the Pharisees, right? No, God doesn’t want divorce - God wants us to keep the covenants we make - but God doesn’t want inequality, either.

 

Mark doesn’t report how the Pharisees responded to that, but I’m pretty sure they went back to the Temple very unhappy campers. 

 

To underscore the point, Jesus even allows little children to be brought to him. He was “indignant” with his disciples when they tried to keep them away from him.

 

Children, like women, were considered chattel – or property.  They had no status, no rights. The disciples were men of their culture and time. I can just imagine how their heads began to explode as Jesus began, one by one, to tighten up their understanding of what God wants for the people of God.

 

Here’s the thing: God’s love is a love that liberates. If Jesus sought to protect women and children, then this passage isn’t really about divorce as much as it is about recognizing the imago Dei – the image of God – in everyone, particularly the people society tends to disempower. 

 

What God brings together, nothing can separate. This is descriptive, not prescriptive. We cannot simply discard that to which the Holy Spirit binds us. Divorce must be considered as carefully as marriage is entered into - with deliberation and careful consideration - even when there are irreconcilable differences, or hurt or pain or abuse.

 

Now, I worry about people all the time. It’s both genetic and a learned behavior. I come from a long line of women who worry. Slowly, over the years, I have come to understand that worry is one way to pray – for me, it’s a form of prayer. I ask God to be with those in our society who are as vulnerable as those ancient women and their children who were viewed as property.

 

And, you know, I’ve done this for so many years that I stopped listening for an answer. I just want God to do something for people whose humanity is unseen, let alone the divine image within them.

 

More and more lately, I feel as if the answer that I had stopped listening for is that God has already done something for the most vulnerable among us. Didn’t Jesus show us how to love one another? Jesus didn’t reinterpret the law to be contrary or to challenge those with power for fun. Jesus set an example for us to follow and embody.

 

My father’s Garage Wisdom did come from a book. I think it was divinely inspired.

 

Things get loose. Ya gotta tighten them.  We stray from the knowledge that God’s love liberates. That what God brings together, nothing can separate. That we are bound together by the Holy Spirit.

 

There's an ancient teaching of Rabbis that, before every human being - man, woman or child - before every human being there are 100,000 angels, sing, "Make way! Make way! Make way for the image of God."

 

I think we forget that, sometimes. We neglect to see the dignity in every human being. 

 

Things get loose. Ya gotta tighten 'em.

Whether we know it or not, God is already in the garage, wrench in hand. Because God sees godself in each and every one of us, no matter our age or gender, our sexual orientation or physical status, our race or religious beliefs. God recognizes the divine spark in each of us.

 

Our response is to see God in each other - as our baptismal vows say, "to seek and serve the Christ in each other" - and then behave accordingly.

 

We don’t always, of course. We often miss the mark. But we can be sure that when things get loose, God tightens them.

 

Amen.