I have to confess that I find this a very difficult Gospel to preach about. It is a Gospel about marriage--and marriage is one of the hottest of all the hot-button issues in today's culture wars. All you have to do is bring up marriage and you find yourself immediately embroiled in a controversy. And I tend not to like controversy. Controversy tends to make my stomach hurt. Especially when the controversy strikes kind of close to home.

And there are plenty of controversies about marriage in our culture today. There is the whole question of divorce and remarriage, which is the particular presenting issue in the Gospel lesson. Many of us welcome the liberalization of divorce laws that's taken place over the last few decades as a good thing, something that has made it possible for people to end bad marriages rather than be trapped in continual cycles of pain or anger or violence or abuse. On the other hand, many voices raised today say the divorce rate is too high, it is unhealthy, it hurts children, it creates hidden costs that burden all of society. It's a controversy.

There are controversies around heterosexual marriage and same-sex unions, domestic partnerships, what some people derisively call "gay marriage" and some people proudly call "gay marriage." Controversies about blessing same-sex unions, and about consecrating bishops who are living in relationships that are not traditional marriages, are at the heart of the tensions we're experiencing in our worldwide Anglican Communion, and tensions in many other denominations as well. It's a controversy.

There are controversies around the relationship between church and state with regard to marriage. Most religions say that marriage is a spiritual relationship, a relationship of blessing. But marriages today are also legal contracts licensed and regulated by the state, and today many states, and our federal government, are talking about creating laws and constitutional amendments that will set boundary definitions for marriage quite apart from any spiritual or religious concern. Every time I officiate at a wedding and sign the marriage license, I am acting as a deputy of the state; and in a system that offers some protections to people like us through a separation between church and state, that overlap in marriage makes me stop and question. It's a controversy.

Any way you look at it, there are controversies about marriage all over our society today. And those controversies are made even more difficult because marriage is something we care passionately about. Anyone who's married, anyone who's been married, anyone who's looking forward to being married, feels these issues strike close to home. Anyone who's struggled to hold on to a marriage, anyone who's gone through the pain of the breakup of a marriage, anyone who's discovered the whole new lease on life that comes with the rediscovery of love and the joy of new marriage, feels these issues strike close to home. Anyone who wants to be married but cannot be, because they're gay or lesbian or because pensions or insurance plans would penalize them heavily for being married, feels these issues strike close to home. And when there is so much feeling around the questions, the questions get harder to face, they get harder to talk together about, they get harder to be in dialogue about without falling into controversy. And that's when my stomach starts to hurt.

But stomachache or no, these are things we have to talk about. They're important. And from a Christian perspective, whenever we get into these controversial cultural questions about marriage, sooner or later we come up against the question of a theology of marriage. As Episcopalians, we view marriage not only as a human relationship, but as a divine gift, a sacrament, a place where human action and divine action act together to embody God's love in the world. What we think about marriage and divorce, or church and state in marriage, or same-sex marriage, will have a lot to do with what we think are the spiritual and theological dimensions of marriage.

And a good place to start with a theology of marriage is right here in this difficult Gospel lesson. The Pharisees attempt to test Jesus with a question about divorce; but Jesus turns the test back on them with an answer about faithfulness. The Law allows for divorce, Jesus says, but the Law allows it because of hardness of heart. What God really wants for us, Jesus says, is relationships that are full of heart, relationships that are open-hearted and tender-hearted and generous-hearted and courageous-hearted. What God wants for marriages are relationships that are so intimate in communion that it is as if two persons were sharing one single life. In the Genesis creation story from which Jesus quotes, relationship is the mainspring that drives the entire story. "It is not good for the human being to be alone," God says, and so God creates lots of relationships for the human being to be part of: relationships with all the plants to be tended in the Garden of Eden, relationships with all the animals to be named and cared for, and, crowning them all, relationship with another human being, with whom to be loving and compassionate and faithful and joyful as interdependent equals.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that this Genesis story suggests that God creates the entire universe so there can be relationships. God the Holy Trinity is relationship, three divine Persons sharing one divine life, eternally giving themselves to each other and receiving themselves from each other in communion of love. The relationship of the three Persons creates the condition of the possibility of relationship for all creatures, so that all creation lives within the love of the Trinity. And God the Trinity continually seeks to draw all creation deeper into that communion of love. All our relationships have the potential to draw us deeper into communion with the Trinity. All our relationships create opportunities for us to grow more open-hearted, more tender-hearted, more generous-hearted, more courageous-hearted--opportunities for us to grow more loving as God is loving. For Christians, marriage is one particular call to grow in love, a call to a covenant relationship with a high degree of harmony and beauty and fidelity--a relationship where two people can come to model the love of the Trinity in a particularly intense way. I believe that about marriage. I believe that is what Jesus teaches is the ideal for all marriages.

But the fact is we don't always live up to that ideal. God longs for us to grow more and more open-hearted with each other; but sometimes our hearts become hard, sometimes we are not able to love the way God wants us to love, sometimes we are not able to love the way we want to love. And because of that hardness of heart, Jesus says, the Law God gave to Moses allows for divorce. The role of divorce in the Law is to be a kind of safety valve, an escape hatch, so that hearts that have become hard can move past that hardness and begin to grow soft and alive again. God gave you the law about divorce as a last out for your hardness of heart, Jesus says, but what God really wants is that you open your hearts to sharing a life of faithful, compassionate, enduring love. That ideal of God for us, not just the law but the ideal, must be the core of any theology of marriage we might develop.

And I think the theology of marriage in our Prayer Book is an excellent statement of this core ideal. Pick up a Prayer Book and look at page 423. Look at the last paragraph on the page, where it lists the reasons why God gives us marriage. The marriage of two people "is intended by God," it says, "for their mutual joy, for the help and comfort given one another in prosperity and adversity, and, when it is God's will, for the procreation of children and their nurture in the knowledge and love of the Lord." That's a profound statement. It says that the first, foremost, most important reason for marriage is mutual joy: people get married because they enjoy each other, so they open their hearts to each other more and more, and so they grow closer to God. The second reason for marriage is help and comfort in prosperity and adversity: people get married because it is not good for human beings to be alone, and when we share our strengths and our weaknesses, in good times and in bad times, we grow in compassionate communion, and we grow closer to God. And the third reason for marriage is to make families: people get married so they can grow in their love by adding more people to their love: children, adopted children, in-law children, grandchildren, as well as all the layers of extended family in which love grows outward to hold more people in its embrace, just as the love of God holds all the universe in its embrace. The three reasons for marriage--joy, help, family--are three ways in which we as human beings can grow in love like God's love.

And growing in love like God's love is a truth about marriage that goes deeper than any controversy. Growing in love like God's love is something we can hold on to in all the shifting cultural opinions about divorce and remarriage, or church and state in marriage, or same-sex marriage. Growing in love like God's love is something we as a church congregation can all support, something we can all be part of, married, unmarried, post-married, almost-married, young, old, straight, gay, lesbian, parent, grandparent, great-grandparent, lover, beloved--growing in love like God's love, growing ever more open-hearted and tender-hearted and generous-hearted and courageous-hearted is what Jesus says God wants for all our relationships, marriage in particular, but all our relationships.

That's the part of today's Gospel that really hits close to home. And that's good news in which we all can grow.