Teach me to Fly

All right. Well, again, welcome to Hope Lowertown. Those of you who haven't had the pleasure to meet yet, My name is Brian, lead pastor here, and excited to continue in the Gospel of Mark. And we've said this every week now for 33 weeks, believe it or not. Starting off with this verse, the beginning of the good news. Good news is how we. When we say the word gospel. That's what this is. This is the Gospel of Jesus. This is Jesus good news. The good news about Jesus, the Messiah or the anointed one, the one that all of the world is waiting for, the Son of God. And we see that he has authority in his teaching. He has authority over nature. He has authority over demons. He has authority even to forgive sins. And here we're gonna see this shift. We saw it at the beginning of chapter nine, kind of the shift. He's no longer teaching in parables. He's speaking clearly. He's teaching his disciples and everyone following him. Hey, this is what's about to happen. And we've seen two times now where he goes to his followers and says, I'm on my way to Jerusalem. I'm going to be turned over. I'm going to be handed over to the Gentiles and they're going to kill me and I'm going to die and I'm going to be risen from the dead. And this happens. It's already happened twice. We're going to see it again in a couple of weeks where it happens. And every single time, the disciples are like, okay, Jesus, that's cool for you, but I'm kind of a big deal, right? It happens every time. And we're not gonna see that today. We'll see that in a couple weeks. But just wanna keep that on the forefront of our minds of kind of what's going on in the context a little bit. Does anyone in here have aviophobia? Fear of flying? The older I get, the more I have, and especially when my wife and I are on the same plane, I am like, man, this thing goes down. If I die, I don't really care. But if every. Like, it's like, I don't wanna die. This is bad. I just get. Does anyone else get a little more nervous with flying? No, just. Okay, few of you, thank you. Thank you. Not alone. Feels. I feel seen in that. But I'm giving a little trigger warning here. Okay? That's all. So I tried to be a little bit just of what's about to happen here. Let me explain this image here. This is a picture from January 15, 2009, when Cap and Captain Chesley. Not Chelsea Chesley. Unless Wikipedia got it wrong too. Chesley Sully Sullenberger safely landed US Airway Flight 1549 in the Hudson River. It was pretty, pretty well known thing that happened over a decade ago, or almost over a decade ago. Known as the miracle on the Hudson after both engines were disabled by a bird strike. Terrifying that that's that easy to happen. Shortly after takeoff from LaGuardia, Sully First Officer Jeffrey Sykes glided the Airbus A320 to a safe water landing, saving all 155 people on board. Hey, great, thank you, Captain Sully. And I know there was a movie Tom Hanks did. I still have never seen it. I don't like watching historical movies that I already know the ending to. You know what I mean? It kind of is like, ah, I guess everyone lives, so why watch it? That's just how I've been about it. Anyways, I bring that up because of this, right? I was asking that question, hey, would you ever want to learn how to fly? And I've never been to flight school, so maybe I'm wrong in this assessment. Maybe I'm completely wrong in this. But I can imagine if you went to a flight school and you said, hey, I want to learn how to fly, teach me how to fly. That the first thing they do wouldn't be to show a video of a water landing in case of an emergency. Hey, just in case. All right, step one, like 101, you want to learn how to fly? Let's watch a video on how you crash land. That doesn't make any sense. That's. Why would we start there? Shouldn't we learn like how planes fly? Like I don't even understand how we can have a multi million pound machine flying through the air. Doesn't make any sense. Can we start with that? Maybe. And that's exactly what we're going to see today. That we might say, hey, I wanna learn how to fly. But then they say, hey, let's crash land. We're gonna see that in the text today where people are gonna come with, hey, how do we end? How do we end this thing? And Jesus is gonna say, no, no, no, no, I don't wanna teach you how to crash. I wanna teach you how to fly. And that is a very different perspective. I do think, and I mentioned this before, but a lot of us, if not all in some way, shape or form, have marriages around us that have maybe ended in a crash landing. It might be your own Marriage. It might be parents like mine in some way. It might be a sibling like mine. It might be a friend like all of us. This is not a light topic. This isn't a joyful thing. Hey, let's just talk about divorce. It's not a. A fun thing. It's difficult. And yet today, I want us to see the grace. I really do. And I'm not just saying it because I don't want to talk about hard topics. I want to talk about the grace that Jesus shows his followers. Even in difficult situations, divorce is hard. Even one when we might say and might determine it's the right thing to do. I have friends that I know that would look at this and say, yeah, I really think this is. This is the best situation. It's still. To those people that have gone through that, it's still one of the hardest things they've ever had to go through. Even if they would say, no, I think this actually is the right thing to do. It doesn't make it any easier. And so I'm not trying to say that this is easy, or we can just skip over that. It's incredibly difficult. So let's look at this passage. Mark chapter 10, verses 1 through 12 that I've titled Teach Me to Fly. We're gonna be looking at just three things. Looking at the wrong hard hearts and intention over permission, starting in verse one of chapter ten says, and he left there and went to the region of Judea and beyond Jordan. And the crowds gathered to him again and again, as was his custom, he taught them. And the Pharisees came up in order to test him. Pharisees. I'm gonna talk a little bit more about them in a second. But the Pharisees are just religious leaders of a different Jewish sect of their belief. And the Pharisees came up in order to test him. Well, there's something else going on here. All right. This is a map of the region. And we all here at Lowerton love maps, right? We're just obsessed with them. And there's this region that we have here of Jerusalem. You've got the yellowish area up there is Herod Philip. So there was Herod the Great, and he has multiple sons, and he kills a few of his own sons. Sounds like he's a really nice guy. And he kill. Or. Sorry, Herod Philip is up in the north there. And you've got Herod Antipas in the green. And then you've got Archelaus in the red region. Archelaus is not a very good king. And so he is replaced with Pontius Pilate. We'll get into all of that in the End of Mark. But Jesus is in that perea. He's in the green area there under Herod Antipas rule. Oh, I thought everyone's like, whoa, that's amazing. The reason that that actually is amazing is because Herod Antipas just chopped the head off of Jesus cousin John the Baptist. Because John the Baptist was confronting Herod about his divorce and remarriage, right? So there's a test that's going on here, and the Pharisees are going, oh, let's get Jesus to talk about the exact same things that got his cousin executed. Right? This isn't just, hey, I'm just curious, Jesus. This is, how can we kill this guy? And how can we get Herod to do it again? He did it to John, maybe he'll do it to Jesus too. There's a lot going on, and his answer could end up costing him his life. Says when the Pharisees came up in order to test them and asked, is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife? Without getting into the nuance of this question, it's implying something more. And we know that based on a lot of other texts, several. I shouldn't say a lot. Several other texts, Biblical and extra biblical texts that talk about and try to answer this question. And the question that's being asked is never, is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife? The question is, is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife or over any reason? That's the question that everyone's been asking. We read about. It's worded that way in the equivalent a Gospel account of Matthew of the same exact situation that's happening. The Pharisees came up in order to test Jesus, and they ask, is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife over any reason? It's a phrase. We do this all the time. Think of if I were to walk up and say, hey, hey, did you watch the Final Four? Your response probably wouldn't be, well, the Final Four. What? You know, the Final Four. Like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I don't know where that came from. No, not the teenage. No, the Final Four. The NCAA tournament. Right. We know in context what we mean. I don't have to explain that every single time, unless you're not a basketball fan. And so this is just, is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife over any reason? This is what is being debated a lot at the time. And so let me just state, while I do Think biblically that there are valid reasons for divorce. I think that Jesus is trying to do something and trying to instruct them differently. He's trying to change their opinion, and he's trying to answer something entirely in this situation. Let me read this quote here from James Edwards. It says, you will not be successful in war if you train by the rules for beating a retreat. This is why I went to that example of, you don't learn how to fly by studying crashes. The same is true of marriage and divorce. The exceptional measures necessary when a marriage fails are of no help in discovering the meaning and intention of marriage. Our question shouldn't be, is this a sin or not? Am I permitted to do this thing or not? Or am I okay in God's eyes if I do this? The right question that I think Jesus is answering here in this text is, how do we have a marriage that flourishes? They ask, how do we crash? And Jesus says, let me teach you how to fly? That's a major difference here. The second point is hard hearts. The Pharisees came up in order to test him and asked, is it lawful for man to divorce his wife? And he answered him, what did Moses command you? We've talked about this a few times, but Jesus, who is part of this baptizer movement, he takes what his cousin John kind of started out in the wilderness and over the Jordan, and he says, hey, I'm gonna take that, and we're gonna do something far greater, and we're going to reestablish Israel under me. I'm going to be the new covenant. My blood is going to establish something greater. And then you had the Pharisees. There were other. There were the Sadducees and the Zealots. There were other sects within Judaism, and the Pharisees were another one. But the Pharisees believed the Torah, that's the first five books of the Bible, and what was called the traditional or the oral traditions of the elders, that they had these extra biblical teachings that they would say, there's the law of Moses and there's other teachings that we now have to help us understand the law of Moses. And that's Jesus's biggest contention with the Pharisees. That's why Jesus always says, well, what does it say? Right? You have heard what does it say? And he does the same thing. Here you're debating what you've heard and what you've been teaching and your Mishnah and your Talmud. I'm talking about, what did Moses say? Let's get back to the text. And so that's what's going on. He says, what did Moses command you? And they said, Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce to send her away. That's what the Pharisees say. And they have answered rightly. If we look at the passage, they're quoting the law of Moses in chapter 24 in Deuteronomy 24:1, Moses says this. This is like the guy. When a man takes a wife and marries her, if then she finds no favor in his eyes because she has found some indecency in her. And he writes her a certificate of divorce and puts in her hand and sends her out of his house. And it goes on basically even all the way back then in Deuteronomy is saying, hey, the wife, this woman needs to be taken care of, needs to be cared for. She's not allowed just to be dismissed as something. As a just. I just don't want her anymore. That's not how this works. And so the thing that's debated, it's just. It's the same thing within, like our Constitution, where there's this law. What did it mean when our founding fathers said that we can bear arms? Right. Well, what does that mean? Right. And they would. And we still. Right, we debate. What does that mean? What does that look like? What does that actually entail? And it's the same thing. Well, Moses, the law, the Constitution says, if then she finds no favor in his eyes because he has found some indecency in her. That's what the law says. But how do we interpret that law? And that's where we get a couple different understandings. In the Mishnah, there are three different views. There are two main schools within the Pharisaical tradition that would say that there's Shammai and Hillel. And these are the two main ones. This one has a third one, but the two mains are these. Let me read this. The school of Shammai says a man may not divorce his wife unless he has found. Found unchastity in her. For it is written quoting Deuteronomy 24, what he just read. Because he hath found in her indecency in anything. That word indecency is way more of an adult term. All right? There is something else going on here. Infidelity in anything. Okay? And the school of Hillel says, looking at the same law and interprets it very differently, he may divorce her even if she spoiled a dish for him. For it is written because he hath found in her indecency in anything. Okay? They're quoting the exact same Mosaic verse to arrive at very different conclusions. Akabas says, even if he found another fairer than she, for it is written, and it shall be if she find no favor in his eyes. Same text. We're just gonna apply it a little bit differently now. You can imagine then the reason behind it. These individuals that are coming, these men that are saying, hey, how can I get a way out? How can I crash land? I wanna make sure that I've got an escape plan in case of emergencies. If she doesn't end up being everything that I want her to be in my marriage, it's okay. But a letter of the law, I haven't done anything wrong. And Jesus says, you're looking at this all wrong. And Jesus says to them, because of your hardness of heart, he wrote you this commandment. His opponents ask what is permissible, and he points to what is commanded in Deuteronomy 24:1 3. And Jesus argues that this text in Deuteronomy is not a pretext for divorce, but an attempt to limit the worst consequences for women. Jesus is saying all the way back in Deuteronomy, this isn't like, hey, here's a letter of exemption when it comes to your marriages saying, no, that when this does happen, you want to make sure that women are taken care of. That's what Jesus is saying here. This is not a text of concession. Sorry, it is a text of concession. Excuse me. Not a text of intention. What do I mean by that? Moses didn't say this because divorce is good. He gave it because they were going to do it anyway, and he wanted to limit the damage, especially to women who could be discarded with no legal protection. Concession texts tell you what to do when things go wrong. The divine intention for marriage cannot be determined from a text about divorce. He's saying that if the worst happens, if you are about to crash, this is how you handle it. The diagnosis of is hardness of heart. That's the diagnosis. So. So, because I'm sure that there are people in here who are single who are like, oh, man, dodged a bullet today. This one's not about me. I'm good. No, this isn't about that. It is. Jesus is using that. But the point here is hardness of heart. Especially when looking at, are we just gonna obey the letter of the law and then think, okay, no, no, no, I did that. So I'm good. I'm good, right? I can kind of do what I want because I didn't break the law. This is for all of us, not just those of us who are married or pursuing marriage. So I wanna just take a moment and just reflect on that. Where do we look at our lives and say, well, did God really say that? What aspect? Right. We go all the way back to Genesis chapter three. So the serpent says to Adam and Eve, and specifically Eve. And she says, no, I can't eat of that tree. God said, we'll die. And he says, well, did God really say that? Right. And it's the same question we do. It's the same question that the devil asks Jesus when he's out in the wilderness. If you're the son of God, God didn't. Did he really say you were the son of God? Maybe we need to work on that a little bit. And it's the same voice that we hear in our head on a daily basis that we come to a decision that we need to make that we don't know, is it right or wrong or is it wise or unwise. And then we hear that little voice say, ah. Did God really say. Does he really care about this particular issue that's popped up? In what ways do we try to split the hairs of what God has said? Oh, I'm not really committing adultery. I've just checked out. I haven't done anything wrong. I'm just not present. I'm just tired, I'm just exhausted. I just can't do this anymore. But I haven't done anything wrong. Yeah. What does it really mean to honor my father and mother? I mean, they treated me like garbage. They weren't there for me. You know, the phone works both ways. You know, all the things that we can say. But yeah, honor. What does that mean exactly? I think the most honorable thing for me to do would be to cut them out of my life. Did God really say, yeah, I exaggerated that story? Yeah, I pushed it a little bit. Actually, it wasn't even my story. It happened to somebody else and I used it cause I thought it was funny and it, you know, it made everyone laugh. But I mean, come on, is it really a big deal? I'm just with my co workers. We're just talking. It's not gossip. It's not hurting anyone. They don't know. We're just talking. We do this all the time. This is what Jesus is talking about here. He's talking about our hardness of heart to say. What does it actually mean to be a fully devoted follower of Jesus? Well, I obey the law and break the law, so I'm good. What does Jesus Do. He says, from the beginning of creation, God made them male and female. Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. And so they're no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate. Jesus does hear what's called the analogia scriptura. Just a fancy word of saying, let scripture interpret scripture, or scripture rightly interprets scripture. So Jesus, when you have a New Testament author, or even an Old Testament author going back to another passage that they're quoting, they're saying, hey, this is how you apply it. That's how you apply that text. Well, I don't know, how do we go back to the creation story? How do we apply this text? Jesus answers that for us. He lets scripture rightly interpret scripture. And he says, God made them male and female. Again, the Pharisees are trying to figure out some deeper meaning of the text. They're trying to look at the law and say, well, what does it really mean to me? And specifically, one that will benefit them and one that will destroy the lives of the women that they have divorced. But Jesus declares the will of God as set forth in the creation mandate in the creation text over a legal text, that the creation surpasses the legal text. The creation comes first. And then the law of Moses. Again, they ask, how can I crash land? And Jesus says, well, how did God intend it? So the final point here, intention over permission. I want to look at First Corinthians, chapter 1023. I don't normally just grab a verse and take it out of context, but I think we understand what's going on here. He's quoting. They're asking the questions. They're doing the same thing that we're talking about right now that the church in Corinth is saying, yeah, yeah, but I'm under grace, therefore I can do whatever I want. All things are lawful. And Paul says, you're saying all things are lawful. You haven't broken the law, but not all things are helpful. You say, all things are lawful. You haven't broken the law, but not all things build up. Jesus is teaching a call to discipleship. And it's costly, it's countercultural. It's not just doing the right things and not doing the wrong things. It is an entire new way of life. Just because I'm not sinning doesn't mean I'm a fully devoted follower of Jesus. It just means that at best case scenario, I'm a legalist, just means I'm really good at following the rules. Case in point. Well, me, I do this a lot. Let me go back. Anyone know this? Good old Mavis Beacon? Anyone else learn how to type on Mavis Beacon? Yeah. Okay, a lot of us older millennials probably learned this. Mavis Beacon. Is she still around? Is this still a thing? People don't even learn how to type anymore. They're just born with typing skills, I think. But we used to have to take a class on how to type, and we would do this with Mavis Beacon. And it was a good program. I learned how to type on it. Here was the thing with Mavis Beacon, though. When we would take a test, you'd go into a program in this room. You'd go through the left door instead of the. The games doors were for fun. And you would take a test and you would have to type. You'd have your keyboard covered so you couldn't cheat, couldn't look at your keyboard. And you would type up. It would give you something to transcript, so you would type over it. And if you spelled something wrong, you'd get penalized if you made it wrong. But the way it did it is it would grade you on characters per minute or characters per second, however that worked out. And then it would tally the errors, and then it would give you your grade. Well, characters per second. I very quickly learned that I can go nice and slow, and when I get lost or confused, I can just hold the space bar down and it will tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, and count as a character. That I did not get wrong. That's true. And what happened? I was getting straight A's in typing class, and I was writing four words a minute, right? Because. But I wasn't breaking the rules. Nobody said, you can't hold the space bar down. Is it wrong to have spaces in my writing? No, it's not. Well, am I harming anyone? Well, no. I don't know. Maybe just your typing skills, Right? Did you see what I'm saying? That's not. Nobody would look at that situation at a middle schooler. It was called junior high because we were in Illinois. Nobody would look at a junior higher and say, you were wrong. You're wrong for that. And that's not what happened. My teacher came up and said, it's actually very clever of you. Don't do it again. All right? And then it became law, right? Then it was law. He gave me the passing grade the first time, and then that was that. This is the point. Do we have A hardness of heart of just saying, no, I'm actually doing okay, of any topic. And then Jesus says this. And in the house, the disciples asked him again about this matter. And he said to them, whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her, and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery. In other words, the answer to the question of is it okay to divorce for any reason, he says, no, this is not how we look at marriage. It's not the point of marriage. Marriage is a covenant with one another. It's not the intent of marriage. It's just to look. How can we find a way out? The intent of Jesus teaching here is not to shackle those who fail in marriage with debilitating guilt. The question is not whether God forgives those who fail in marriage. We already know the answer to that question. He explicitly says it in Mark, chapter 3, verse 28. All the sins and blasphemes of men will be forgiven. Why? Because that's who he is. He forgives. There is no unpardonable sin other than not believing in him. And if we say, I recognize that I'm a sinner, I recognize that I've failed, I recognize I've fallen short, Jesus says, yes, that's the posture that I need. Paul tells us that our guilt, our condemnation, was nailed to the cross. When Jesus was nailed to the cross, you don't need to feel guilt or shame. Whether you've gone through this, whether you're going through this, whether you know someone, they're not worse sinners. They're just human, and Jesus has set us free. I want to just end here with a couple quotes. This one from Edwards again says there is, after all, no instance in Scripture of an individual seeking forgiveness and being denied it by God. The question in our day of impermanent commitments and casual divorce is whether we Christians will hear the unique call of Christ, the discipleship in marriage. In marriage, as in other areas in which the call of Christ applies, will we seek relief in what is permitted, or commit ourselves to what is intended by God and commanded by Christ? Will we fall away in trouble and difficulty, or follow Jesus in the costly journey of discipleship? Even in marriage, will we surrender to the divine union of two becoming one flesh? Or will we honor and nurture marriage as a gift and creation of God? And if you're. You're here this morning, you're just. You're feeling shame, you're feeling guilt, you're feeling all the things that might come with a thing that's highlighted that you're like, that's me. I fall into this category. I want to end with this quote here from Dane Ortland. This was a book that we all read years ago. Now, gentle and lowly, he says this. We cannot present a reason for Christ to finally close off his heart to his own sheep. No such reason exists. Every human friend has a limit. We offend enough if a relationship gets damaged enough if we betray enough times, we are cast out. The walls go up with Christ. Our sins and weaknesses are the very resume items that qualify us to approach Him. Nothing but coming to him is required first at conversion and a thousand times thereafter until we are with him upon death. If in this moment, even if your divorce isn't even the thing on your mind right now, in this moment, if you feel beat up or you feel attacked, I think it just means you have a good resume. That's what the gospel says. Jesus says, yes, you're first candidate in the line for forgiveness. Only when we acknowledge our sins and weaknesses can we approach Christ who seated on his throne of grace. And so I just want to end it with this application. In what ways are you thinking about crash? About the crash rather than the flight? How can I be a fully devoted follower of Christ in my relationships and my friendships? Maybe it's my marriage for you, Maybe it's other relationships that might just. Yeah, I'm following the rules, doing my job. Is there something else going on? When we look at our community, in this community in particular, I attend worship. I go to church. I don't really let anyone in. I do what I'm supposed to do. I'm not breaking any rules, not breaking any laws. I'm doing what I'm supposed to do by the letter of the law. But I don't really let anyone in. I'm not really vulnerable. I don't like that word accountability kind of freaks me out a little bit. I don't let people know the real me. Do I really need to forgive these people? I don't know. Most of the areas that we struggle with are invisible from the outside. That's everybody. That's just a human condition. The things that we struggle with, usually most of us are invisible. People don't even know what you're going with. They don't even know what we're wrestling with. And that is why we need Jesus to give us that grace. And we also need one another. We need community. And that's what I love about the communion table. It's literally called communion, at least in our tradition. That's what we call it. We go around, we have this shared experience together where we take the wafer that represents the broken body of Christ, that we take the juice that represents his blood that was poured out for us, and we get to do that together. This table is a perfect example of exactly what Jesus is getting at in this text today. Grace and mercy and love that you need me and we need one another community. The sorry, Communion is a beautiful expression of both. We have communion every week here at Hope Lowertown. You don't need to be a member of this church, or any church for that matter. But if you're a follower of Jesus, if you say, yeah, that king, I wanna follow him, I don't do it perfectly. I often will fall into legalism and am I doing the right thing? Or I will then slip into licentiousness or just, yeah. I mean, Jesus said, I'm okay, so I guess I'm okay. I can keep living the way I wanna live and no one will know and I'll just have this secret thing and no one's gotta find out and I'm good to go. You say, no, I don't. I don't. I often fall into that, but I don't want that. I wanna follow Jesus. I would love for you to take these elements with us. And maybe you've never done it before, but if you say, no, I wanna follow that Jesus, I believe that gospel. That sounds like good news. It sounds almost too good to be true, but it's not. It's real, it's free. It's grace. If you say, yes, I want that, then I would love for you to take those elements with us this morning. Let me go ahead and pray. The worship team's gonna come back up and play a few songs. Feel free to grab those elements as you see led, and then we will sing together. Let me pray. Father, thank you again just for our time to look at this text. A difficult text, a hard text, one that might even cause anxiety. But I pray that, as we now have been on this side of it, that we would see the grace that you offer, that we would see the commitment that you have called us to costly discipleship, that. That being a follower of your son isn't just about doing what's right and not doing what's wrong. It is a heart change. It is a posture. I pray that you would just be honored and glorified. Now, as we confess our sins, as we just read, that is our resume, we now know we have the access to you because we're sinners and we acknowledge it. And we know that you have said that if we confess our sins to you, that you are faithful and you are just to forgive us of our sins. Only God can forgive us of our sins and be just in doing so. God, we love you. And it's the name of your son, Jesus Christ, that I pray. Amen.