Twenty-Seventh Sunday Oct 8^th, 2006

Genesis: 2: 7-8,18-24 Psalm: 128 Hebrew 2: 9-11 Mark 10 : 2-16

Theme: What God has joined let no one separate

1. Thanksgiving and Divorce. These are hardly two items that go together. However, as we celebrate Canadian Thanksgiving, it is usually within A FAMILY - whether still holding together or whether we are split up. At Thanksgiving we give thanks precisely for the vows our parents made at their wedding day. We give Thanks for the good times and the bad, for sickness and health, for riches and for poverty, because in each of these situations, we have experienced God’s continual love. In each of these situations, if we have experienced the love of our family, it has either doubled the joy, or helped us in time of difficulty.

2. Our reading from The book of Genesis gives us the origin of marriage - it is not good for man to be alone and so God creates for a man a companion. In our Gospel, we are given the picture of the indissolubility of marriage.

And then we face reality: good men and women enter into relationships which they want to last for life. With all good intentions, and all the good will, but the reality is that there is Divorce even among good families. This leads to broken relationships, broken families, broken homes. So Thanksgiving can be very painful times. We come to church with the hope of find strength in difficult times, comfort in hardship and a meaning for the pain. For some it can be a time of soul searching for yet another time. They ask themselves where did they go wrong, why did it go wrong, what was the turning point and could it have been saved.

3. Everyone realises that Marriage (even when it breaks up) is something holy. If you ask any couple what they wish of marriage. They come up with the three things that are integral to a catholic marriage.

The first is they want it to last for life. No one gets into marriage for a period of five years, renewable after that time.

The second is they want fidelity as an integral part of marriage. No matter how many boyfriends or girlfriends there have been in the past, now there is an exclusivity that is of the very essence of marriage.

Finally, they want the fruit of every marriage, they want children. At times this is not possible due to impotency or infertility. But even the most self centred of our “rich and famous” film stars say they want children. These come from the very relationship of the couple who want to get married.

4. However, these elements of marriage may be the result of the way we have been brought up and within a Christian milieu. I was talking to a young man who has just immigrated to Canada. He came from a Communist regime country, where every idea of God was absent from the time he was born. When I brought up the subject of marriage, he looked at me as if I was discussing something from nuclear physics. “No”, he said, “I want a woman for companionship and sex. If it does not work out, we split up and try with someone else. However, if there is a child I will take the responsibilities of feeding, clothing and educating the child”. “What about your own parents?.” I asked. “They are divorced, and it is a good thing, they did not get on at all.” There was no bitterness, anger or rancour in this man. He seemed well balanced, honest and he had a healthy sense of the law. He was a little extreme when it came to criminals. There should be no prison for murder, rape, or drugs. Execute them.

5. So what makes the Christian marriage different? Many, even within the Catholic church, claim that the Church should catch up with times and allow Divorcees to marry as they do in other Christian Denominations. As Catholics, we must treat everyone - and especially those vulnerable and hurting with extra barrels of compassion, care and understanding. However, we know that the Catholic Church is not a Buffet Table, “take the things you like and reject those you do not like.”

Neither is the Media and Television the guideline for what the Catholic Church should do and should not do. In fact the Media and Television are there for themselves and for news. They are amoral, they are not interested in what is good or bad. Furthermore the Media and Television claim the Catholic Church is both fallible and outdated, but they want all of us to accord the “infallibility” because it is based on popular opinion. In a word, they want us to grant them, what they deny in the Catholic Church.

6. The essence of the Catholic Marriage is that it is a Sacrament. It is a sign of God’s love for us. If we tamper with that sign, we are tampering with the very understanding of God as revealed to us. It is an image of God who is all loving, who never goes back on love whether we are evil like Hitler or good like Mandela. God’s love is a constant; God loves me whether I sin or whether I live a good life in keeping with all the Commandments of God - and decent human behaviour. God loves me whether I am Catholic or Protestant, Shiite or Sunni, Israeli or Palestine, happily married or divorced. It is for this reason that the Catholic Marriage,- if it is to be a sacrament, if it is to be a sign of God’s love for us - must be permanent. God’s love of its very nature is permanent, faithful and fruitful. Now it is true that even in good catholic marriages some of these are absent, and some of these marriages break up. But that is a different issue altogether.

7. And so on this Thanksgiving Weekend, we thank God for the good times and bad, for sickness and health, for riches and poverty. We thank God for marriages that have lasted, we thank God for couples that struggle to keep their marriages together, we thank God for Divorcees within our midst, who have kept faithful to their God even if their spouses have not kept faithful to them.

May this Thanksgiving be a time of blessings, peace and joy. God bless you all.