TEXT: Exodus 20:14

There are many directions that a sermon on adultery could go. I could take on the role of judge, shake my finger and say, "No! No! Bad!" I could relate my own pain as my husband of ten years left me for someone else.

Or, I could also come at the commandment as a woman and point out that in Moses' day, and even in Jesus' day, the commandment about adultery was a commandment about property, tied in very closely with the next commandment on stealing. Wives and children back then were--and in some cultures still are today--property. The commandment had a double standard because men could have multiple wives, but a woman could only have one husband. Married men who wanted a bit of variety could have it. Just marry a second wife--or a third--or in the case of of King Solomon a 300th wife. The only woman a married man could not have was one that already belonged to somebody else--you could have as many as you could support.

For women, however, it was different. When somebody married you--something you had no say in at all--that was it. No matter if you never saw your husband after the first night, you could have nobody else. Women were only allowed one husband--anything else was adultery, while men could freely take any and all women they chose, just so long as the women weren't already somebody else's property. When Moses first told people of God's commandment not to commit adultery, nobody thought of it as something to save anybody from the pain of betrayal. It was heard as a way to protect men from taking the property of other men, or as a way for father's to protect the investment of their virgin daughters.

But that sort of double standard was not God's intent. God's intent in this commandment was to mandate faithfulness in marriage. And that is the direction that I would like this sermon to go. I want to address why fidelity and faithfulness in marriage matter, why divorce should never be taken lightly, and what there is in marriage that is sacred.

Now I am well aware that if you decided you wanted a sermon on marriage, I would not be the likely choice of a preacher. The person who should be preaching on fidelity and the sanctity of marriage ideally should be someone who has managed to pull it off somewhere along the line. I know that I can't stand up here with real credibility and tell anybody how to have a good marriage any more than I can give you a good lecture on how to parent your children when I have raised none. Practical advice is much better given by someone who has been successful at the endeavor.

But this sermon isn't meant as a "how to" sermon on marriage. Plenty of psychologists can do that much better. What I want to get across is that faithfulness in an earthly relationship is the way that we learn to be faithful to God and is the way that we proclaim that the God we serve is faithful to us. The relationship that most closely resembles our relationship to God is marriage, although there are other ways for those of us who are single to come at the same thing. But as we go into this, remember that this is the main point. Faithfulness to people is important because it teaches us to be faithful to God and witnesses to the faithfulness of God to us. So...here we go.

I don't want to get into the technicalities of adultery...mostly because if you're getting into technicalities, you are already rationalizing. I debated long and hard about which Gospel lesson to use this morning, the one that we read from John or the one from Matthew five where Jesus expands the adultery commandment to include lust and indulged fantasy. The Matthew passage makes an important point. It's not about what you technically have or haven't done. It's about what is in your heart. All the commandments, and I would say all of Scripture come down to that--God looks on the heart.

These days, as probably in all days, there are many people who have actually committed physical adultery. But there are millions more who have been married to one person and given their heart and soul to someone else. We tend to think that latter group is being faithful, since they have not physically crossed the line. We often even romanticize the tortured soul who is married to one person while truly devoted to someone else. Books and movies, drama and poetry often lift them up as heroic and noble. Not so, says Jesus. Faithfulness is ultimately a matter of the heart. If the heart strays, so do you. It is still adultery.

The passage from Matthew has a lot to think about. But I decided on the passage from John, because I also want us to remember that, as with all sin, adultery can be forgiven. When we recognize the nature of our sin and truly repent before God, God will not hold it against us. Others may see us as a monster, and there may be any number of human beings who will not offer us forgiveness; but God will see us as He sees everyone--as a sinner saved by grace. In this culture all of us would do well to remember that God forgives sexual sin as readily as any other when we repent.

But talking about adultery in that way is only scratching the surface of the commandment. While I'm not in a position to tell you how to have a marriage that will last 50 years, I am in a position to tell you that I believe God has a purpose in marriage that reaches beyond the purposes of earth. Some have said that marriage was established by God for procreation--to provide stable relationships where children could be born and raised. Others don't rule out having children as a purpose of marriage, but want to expand the purpose to include companionship and intimacy. All of that is well and good, but I think there is more. I think that marriage is sacred, by which I mean that I think we are doing divine as well as human work in our marriages. I believe that acting out fidelity in marriage is a way that we practice fidelity to God.

The Bible is packed with words about adultery and prostitution and images of brides and grooms, harlots and whores. But in the vast majority of cases, the Biblical passages with these images are not talking about human relationships. Most of the time, God uses these images to talk about God's relationship with His people. God takes His people as a bride, and throughout Scripture God uses sexual images to describe when His people go after other gods. In Scripture idolatry and adultery are the divine and human sides of the same coin. Adultery is taking the devotion due to your spouse and giving it to someone else. Idolatry is taking the complete devotion due to God and giving it to someone or something else. The two are closely related.

Remember the first and greatest commandment--You shall love the Lord thy God with all your heart with all your soul with all your might. God first, God above all else. When we put something else before God and devote our hearts and souls to something else, we are being unfaithful--we are committing adultery. The problem is, it's not easy to be faithful to God. Not only because there are lots of other demands and desires, but also because God is spirit. It is much harder to learn to relate to an invisible God than to a flesh and blood human being. God doesn't generally talk in a way that our ears can hear or touch us in ways that we feel with our skin, and it is easy to forget or ignore the things that aren't readily available to our senses.

I think God knows how hard it is for human beings to relate to a God who is spirit. That's one of the reasons that Jesus came as a flesh and blood human being. It is also, I believe, the reason that God gave us marriage. In relating to each other in marriage, we learn to relate to and love God. It's a sort of training ground. Fidelity is hard and God needs a way to train us in it. It is not easy to devote ourselves completely to one person, especially when that person is so different from us--they do things we don't really understand and even after 50 years of marriage they can still manage surprises. And yet, if we can't learn to navigate that with another human being, we will never be able to do it with God. That's not to say it will be possible with every human being, but it is a call to find at least one who can afford us the practice.

Remember 1 John says "Those who say, "I love God," and hate their brothers or sisters are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen." That's the kind of thing I'm talking about. We learn to be faithful, first by being faithful in our human relationships. Then, when we have matured, it will only be natural for us to be faithful to God.

All of the commandments are interconnected, and this one pulls us back to the second commandment about idols. When the Jews write them on two tablets, the second commandment about idols and this one about adultery appear parallel. We might not carve statues that we bow down and worship, but we often give our heart and soul to things other than God. Idolatry is adultery against God.

Now please be careful here. I am not trying to say that those of us who have divorced or who have been unfaithful have rejected God or that we have committed the unpardonable sin or that we can never be faithful to God. Marriage is practice for our relationship with God, but it is not the real thing. I believe that while God intends that when we get married, we stay that way, there is forgiveness and compassion when something, including ourselves, goes wrong. But I do want to say that there is a valid reason for attaching a lot of importance to marriage and fidelity in marriage, and good reasons for considering divorce only as a last ditch option when all attempts to save the marriage as a loving, mutual union have failed. If we treat our human relationships lightly, we will treat our relationship with God more lightly still.

When we treat our marriages seriously as important and even divine work, then it becomes easier to sort through the questions of divorce. The question we should be asking is, "Will it ever be possible in this relationship to model for the world at least some degree of the love and fidelity of God with this person?" That also helps with the questions of who we should marry and even whether or not we should marry in the first place. Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon in their book The Truth About God say, "The only good Christian reason to get married is the conviction that you can live out your baptismal vocation better within marriage than without." I think that's right on target.

God wants all of us--body, mind, and soul--and while we are on earth, we are given the opportunity to practice that devotion in marriage. We might not do it all at once, we probably won't. It may take 50 years of marriage to master true faithfulness to a spouse, and it will probably take a lifetime to manage faithfulness to God. But whatever our circumstance and whatever our past, we can all begin to practice faithfulness toward God by being faithful to one another--starting now if we haven't started before. A good marriage is the most obvious and effective way to do this, but those of us who are not married can practice faithfulness in other human relationships as well.

I think those of us who are single need to remember that the call to faithfulness is a call to all human beings, not just to those who are married. Somehow, every one of us needs to find covenant relationships where we can practice and live out that faithfulness. I don't think it is an accident that monastic orders consider themselves married to Christ and begin their service by taking lifetime vows. They make a commitment and practice love and fidelity to the church. That covenant also can be lived out in a lifetime relationship with a child, either through adoption or one born of your own flesh. Some find it in caring for a parent or in tending a lifelong friendship. Some find the experience in lifelong commitment to a cause or to an animal. Our very first experiences with faithfulness are often learning to feed the cat or walk the dog.

The question I want you to take home and consider is, "Do I have a way to practice lifelong faithfulness? What are the things for which I am willing to sacrifice comfort and leisure...maybe even my life? And for those who are married, "Have I really learned what it means to love and to cherish this person for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health?" Somewhere, somehow, we need to learn how to be faithful. Do you have a place to practice?

OK, so we should be faithful to each other because that teaches us to be faithful to God. But that's still not the whole story. Remember the foundation of all of the Ten Commandments. Living according to these rules are our form of witness. Living this way shows the world the nature of the God that we serve. We have the option of rejecting the commandments and saying to God that we don't want to be in that relationship. But if we say we want the covenant relationship that God offers, these are the vows we are asked to take.

The Jewish community viewed the giving of the law on Sinai as their marriage ceremony to God and the Ten Commandments were the marriage vows that they took. They agreed to take those vows because of their conviction that God had made those same promises and taken those same vows toward them. In our faithfulness to each other we proclaim a God who is faithful to us, "For better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health." Our fidelity is a statement about the depth of our love to another person, but in a religious context it is primarily a statement about the faithfulness of our God to us.

When we take on the name of Christ and call ourselves Christians, we associate the name of Christ automatically with all that we do. God is faithful to us; how wrong it is to take that name--the name of Christian--and associate it with infidelity...that breaks the third commandment about taking God's name in vain.

Make an effort to be faithful...to your spouse, to your children, to your friends, to your church, and ultimately to your God. It does take effort...a lot of effort. But being faithful will train us to be fit for the day when Jesus Christ comes for His bride, the Church. And it will truly proclaim the nature of the God who made us and knows us better than any husband or wife ever will. Be faithful, for God's sake.

Amen.

(c) 1999, Anne Robertson