Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Breaking Up is Hard to Do

The billionaire breaks up with his live-in girlfriend and won't grant his bastard children normal inheritance rights to his vast wealth. She takes it to court and finds out the truth…she wasn't his wife. Another moneyed couple breaks up and fights over who gets the L. A. Dodgers. She said he defrauded her into signing away rights to them, but now she wants him to ante up. No wonder the church didn't want to have anything to do with marriage until about the 8th century! We thought it was about sex, but we were wrong. It's about money—inheritance money, who gets what.

The church calls it a sacrament, a means of grace. Where's the means of grace here? Certainly neither of the parties is being graceful! The ones who celebrate the sacrament of marriage are not the clergy, but the couple. Each promises to love the other until death parts them. It is intended (as per Ephesians 5) to be a model to the world about how God's love works. It seems to me that if these two couples had come to it from a Christian understanding the first woman would have had a ring on her finger and the second wouldn't care who owned the Dodgers. On the other hand, they probably wouldn't be breaking up in the first place!

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