In the current political climate women’s and children’s issues are spotlighted by an age-old paradox. On the one hand, the anti-choice political-religious agenda – with renewed energy seeks to impose a Kafkaesque level of government overreach into women’s reproductive lives threatening disastrous consequences for the integrity of medical professionals dedicated to women’s health. It’s ironic that this movement is championed by that part of our political and religious culture that has traditionally coined the slogan – keep the government out of our lives.

Yet, the paradox becomes more glaring when we note that the political and religious championing of the rights of the unborn is matched by a reluctance to legislate for the welfare and protection of the already born. Recent Republican refusal in the US Senate to extend the child credit is a sorry truth that for an electorate that practices a high degree of selective cognizance cannot be highlighted enough. Child-family credit is the single most effective instrument in dramatically reducing child poverty.

The political terrain of women’s and children’s welfare remains an area of fraught intersectionality. Anxieties about women’s reproductive rights meet head-on with accompanying white anxieties about race and class. The origin of American abortion prohibition has its roots in the murky history of white protestant racial anxieties in the face of late 19th-century immigration from southern and eastern Europe – anxieties that today find a voice in conspiracies of racial replacement.

It’s ironic that the strident claims of the religious right’s assertion that God and the Christian tradition abhors abortion find no support or evidence in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures which remain completely silent on the issue of abortion. In contrast, the diverse voices heard in the Scriptures are resoundingly loud and clear on issues of women’s and children’s welfare. They are similarly loud and clear about the obligation to welcome and protect the stranger. But the latter point is worthy of its own sermon.

As a case on point – Jesus’ teaching in Mark 10 should make us all wriggle with discomfort. How can we continue to claim to know the mind of God on contemporary reproductive issues about which Scripture remains consistently silent while ignoring the clearly articulated mind of God on the nature of the human relationship within marriage?

If Scripture is silent on contemporary issues of reproductive rights – justifying male control of female bodies – a general attitude nevertheless can be discerned hidden within Jesus’ debate with the Pharisees and his teaching to his disciples on divorce in Mark 10.

It’s not surprising that the debate about divorce centers on female adultery. Female adultery represents an attack on male control over female reproduction – because a wife’s adultery muddies the waters of legitimacy. A man needs to know that the children his wife bears are his and not someone else’s. Anxiety about legitimacy is code for the legal protection of intergenerational transmission of property rights – a cornerstone of patriarchal order.

Confronting this very male anxiety, Jesus messages in Mark 10 that adultery cuts both ways. It’s not just the wife’s adultery that counts for divorce, but the husband’s does as well. This is shocking news for both his Pharisee interlocutors and his faithful disciples. This is not what they want to hear.

Of interest to us is Jesus’ thoughts on the Mosaic writ of divorce as an accommodation for the hardness of the human heart. What does he mean by this? One reading of the writ is to see it as a recognition that men have a right to do what men want to do concerning their wives and children. But I think a better reading of what Jesus is getting at here is to recognize the Mosaic writ less as a permission for male bad behavior but as a protection for a woman by requiring her husband to publicly demonstrate the grounds for divorcing her. The writ protects what little rights a Hebrew wife might claim in the face of an unscrupulous husband’s attempt to cast her aside.

Mark is always in a hurry – he thinks nothing of abrupt and unexpected jumps in the narrative. One moment Jesus is addressing the question of divorce and then suddenly he’s talking about the welcome and protection of children. Although we note a rather abrupt and unskillful transition – Mark is showing his readers that the point to which Jesus is driving his argument firstly with the Pharisees and then with his disciples – is towards the recognition in a society where women and children had few rights and were easily the subjects of male abuse – that the protection and care for women and children is one of God’s primary concerns.

In his teaching on divorce, Jesus asserts the relationship between husband and wife is one of equals. Reflecting God’s covenant with humanity, Jesus asserts that marriage as a relationship of equals was God’s original intention for men and women in creation. When Jesus says: what God has joined together let no one separate, he is saying that God’s intention and the practice of divorce conflict. The Pharisees go away muttering to themselves, the disciples are rendered speechless, and Christians have squirmed on the hook of this teaching for nearly 2000 years.

Jesus understands the difference between divine intention and human experience. He is fully aware that God’s original intention for creation is continually frustrated by human failure. In this light, he sees the Mosaic writ of divorce as a pastoral and compassionate response to the reality of human failure. What he is not prepared to accept is the ossification of the Mosaic writ into a cruel legalism that favored husbands over wives – and was indeed an expression of hardness of heart. Jesus moves the conversation away from the legalistic debate among men concerning the justifiable grounds for divorcing their wives, into a different conversation – one that recognizes the tension between human fallibility and God’s intention for marriage as a partnership of equals – a reflection of God’s love for us in creation which as in all other areas of human response is found wanting.

So today, in the Episcopal Church, where do we find our theology of marriage and divorce? After a long debate in the 20^th century, Anglican theology groped towards a position that seeks to hold in tension the original divine intention for marriage and the reality of human failure. In our tradition, the solution we arrived at after much soul searching is to reserve a right to remarriage in church after civil divorce to the bishop’s prerogative. In nearly all cases the decision of the bishop depends on the advice of the priest preparing the couple for remarriage.

In marriage preparation, Linda+ and I invite the divorced person (s) seeking remarriage to share their perception of the failure of a previous marriage. In their story, we listen for the echoes of sorrow. We hope to hear in their story a sense of loss – a loss of innocence – to hear the echo of the pain and disillusionment at finding failure where they had hoped for fulfillment and joy. It seems to me that no one who has been through a divorce emerges unscathed by the loss of their once innocent belief that when you make sacred promises everything should work out, and people should live happily thereafter.

Our question to the divorced person or persons is – in this process how has this experience of loss of innocence deepened your self-awareness to better equip you to have a more mature expectation of yourself to sustain your hopes for this new marriage relationship? This is a pastoral inquiry and on the strength of the response we request episcopal permission to remarry the couple into a new beginning. When the religious tradition prohibits divorce denying it as a potentially life-giving opportunity for new beginnings -the Church continues a legalistic-pharisaic hardness of heart that perpetuates trauma in family life – with historically speaking, women and children – the primary causalities.

As Anglican Christians in the Episcopal Church, we live in the tension where a fixed interpretation of Scripture and Tradition meets the changing reality of the lives we are actually living. This place of tension is where we expect to encounter God, meeting us not only in our successes but particularly in our failures. Into this tension – God comes looking for us.