I heard a sermon in the last few weeks on marriage, something like “Three Reasons Marriages Fail and Four Steps To a Sound Marriage.” The specific church isn’t important, because I’m fairly sure the same sermon would have been delivered almost all of the churches we have recently visited. I heard everything I expected to but not everything I hoped to, so I write the following not to gripe (I hope.) but to think baldly.

Here’s what was covered:

• God’s hope and heart are for marriages to be lasting commitments, even if they don’t always work out that way.
• Christian religion has in the past pushed divorcees to the sidelines, rendering them second-class citizens.
• God offers grace and forgiveness for the wrongs and failures committed in marriage.
• God wants people to do right in their present circumstances regardless of the past. Furthermore, God wants divorcees to do right by their previous spouses even if they have remarried.

All this was expected. The second point, regarding Christianity’s tendency to exclude, had the potential to surpass my expectation, but it failed. It came across very them vs. us: they, other Christians exclude; but we are different.

Here is what I had hoped to hear:

I wanted to hear someone say there are times when divorce might just be the best available option, and not just in obvious circumstances involving physical abuse or serial adultery. Is divorce bad? Yes. Does it damage individuals? Yes, everyone connected to a divorce, from spouses and children to friends and even acquaintances, is damaged without exception. But there are times when the continuation of a marriage would cause even greater damage. Could these cancerous marriages have been prevented? Perhaps, but they weren’t; so we must live and we must wrestle with God’s hope and heart in the midst of the reality we find ourselves in.

I wanted to hear someone acknowledge that real life is always gray. Hopefully, it is an ever lightening canvas as God’s White Kingdom is ushered in, but between this day and the day when the Kingdom comes in fullness life is gray. I wanted someone to say that in the gray of today there are no easy steps to anything, much less anything good and godly, because the lives that God interrupts are messed up and because God must be pursued by people who are messed up in a world that is messed up.

I can imagine two likely reasons these things weren’t said. First, I suspect most don’t buy it. Not really. Their espoused beliefs in the Here-But-Not-Yet Kingdom and of process sanctification are betrayed subtly and, I think, in some cases unknowingly by a religion that only perceives a binary world, a world where the life of faith must be a pure white pixel in the blackness of humanity. In this religion there is no room for process and progress, for - dare I use the term? - the evolution of one’s soul. Those few who might believe otherwise, must be under extreme pressure not to say such things. It is a boat not easily rocked.

“It’s a license to divorce!” the critics will cry.

“No,” I say, “it’s a realistic assessment of the world, of marriage, and of life.”

This is what I wanted to hear.