How long is the leash?

Genesis 2:18-24
Mark 10:2-16

How we imagine God’s relationship to us has a lot to do with how we relate to one another. We have a puppy at our house, a nine-month old mongrel rescue dog named Shakti. And when I take Shakti for a walk, particularly if she has been inside all day, she pulls at the leash constantly, straining against it in her excitement and desire to run. Sometimes it seems that people imagine God is like someone walking a dog, and the dog is us. We run around, straining at the leash, and God is that firm hand at the other end that keeps us in check.

That’s the way that the Gospel depicts the Pharisees, and they relate to other people like dogs who need to be trained to walk on the leash. They are always asking themselves “How much slack does God give us?” which leads naturally to the question “How much should we give others?” and that is why they have such a problem with Jesus. They can’t figure him out because sometimes it seems like he wants a leash so short that the dog can’t even walk, and sometimes it seems like he’s letting everybody off leash, to run around and play. What they don’t understand is that for Jesus the whole leash thing is beside the point entirely.

For instance, in the story we hear this morning; they come to Jesus to test his legal opinion, to find out how long his leash is on the question of divorce. Characteristically, he answers with another question—“What did Moses command you?” So they proceed to describe the leash. What Jesus says next shows that as far as he is concerned, the question of “How much slack does God give us?” misreads who God actually is, and what human life is about.

The church has tended until recent times to take Jesus’ sayings on divorce as simply tightening the leash of the Pharisees. My mother tells of how, when she was a child, her father would, every once in a long while, take her with him on a Sunday morning (For some reason it was always her and never one of her brothers). Instead of going to the Methodist Church where they usually went to as a family, my mom and my grandpa would slip quietly into the back row of the Roman Catholic church in the little town in the Sierras where she grew up. She would sit there with her father in a state of bewilderment as he watched and listened to the priest say the Latin mass. And then they would get up and furtively depart when it was time for the people to come forward to a communion from which Grandpa, an Irish boy from St. Louis, was barred for having divorced his first wife.

While I think we have to be careful not to explain away the vehemence of Jesus’ statements in this passage, I don’t think that what my grandfather went through is what he had in mind. It is significant that he never directly contradicts the authority of Moses’ commandment; he does not propose a new law forbidding divorce. That is because the length of the leash is not what is stake when we are talking about the breaking up of a marriage. What is at stake is the basic wholeness for which we human beings were created by God—a wholeness that is realized in relationship.

Jesus’ reply to the Pharisees invokes the blessing that crowns all the gifts that God gave us at the very beginning. Having given us life, and a garden to dwell in full of trees bearing food, having bestowed on us the company of all the living creatures, bringing them to us to be named with the names we choose, God gave us an other—one so like us as to be like fashioned from the same substance, and at the same time not us. It is this gift from the God of blessing and creating that Jesus wants us to remember when we tire of one another or despair of loving each other. For if this is our God, and the whole life of Jesus is the demonstration that it is, then we have some hope of relating to one another in the same way.

The gift of the other is offered to us most intimately in our family lives, and we are to cherish it there, but the scope of God’s work of creating and blessing relationship does not end at the second chapter of Genesis. Neither are we to draw a line around our marriages or our immediate families and say, “Here and no further will my hope for belonging extend.” We should read today’s Gospel story in relation to that other one where Jesus’ mother and brothers come asking for him and he looks around at the motley crew of hangers on sitting with him and says, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother, and sister, and mother.”

Today we begin our Fall Pledge Campaign at All Saints, and our theme for the campaign is “Joyful, joyful we adore thee,” after hymn 376, which we will be singing from time to time over the next few months. The text of the hymn describes the love that binds all created beings to their source, and the words and music together express the joy that inspires them to return that gift with adoration and praise. The hymn concludes with a prayer that we might share in what systematic Christian theology calls the divine economy, that circulation of giving and receiving love between God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit that makes them one, and which we participate in by loving one another.

I invite you to consider making a pledge to support Christ’s church, wherever you find yourself in relation to its ministry, whether here or somewhere else, whether you are a long and faithful member or just finding your way back with a full load of doubts and questions. How much or how little you commit--ours is not a community with membership dues or a price of admission. Rather, what we extend to one another in this way is joyous participation in the faithfulness of a God who blesses relatedness, an investment in that economy of gifts that is God’s intended purpose for us in our original Creation.

Implied in our freedom to choose, to give what and where our hearts incline us, is that we also have the capacity to withhold our gifts, to be hard-hearted, closed-minded, and closed-fisted. Elsewhere in the bible this choosing is given a moral character—we have the power to bless or to curse, the responsibility for choosing life or choosing death. In any event, something we can never side-step is the element of risk that comes with the other. We do not make our worlds alone, we do not choose in a vacuum. There is always the possibility that we will give love that is not reciprocated, that our faithfulness will be met with others’ betrayal, that our blessing will run afoul of another’s curse.

But will I be the one to withhold? Am going to gauge the length of the leash before I start walking? Or will I wager what gifts I have with the trusting heart of a child? Maybe this is a good place as any for God to find me, if I take the risk of serving him here. Maybe this brother to my left and this sister to my right and that mother behind me hold the key to God’s will for me to do. Maybe my open heart for them is his joy in me, creating and blessing a world of unity and peace.