Rocky Cape Christian Community

The Pleiades, blazing just above the gum trees on the north side of our yard this morning.

One stands in silence.

Surrounded by a circle of low community buildings in the Australian bush, no earthly light but stars -- millions and billions of stars, unspoken glory of starworlds beyond our highest comprehension, lights of the Southern Cross, Indus, Hydrus, Pavo, the Triangulum, great white stars right down to the near horizon, shining through the trees.

The sea is flat calm tonight. No sound but log trucks, usually in pairs, about every fifteen minutes, gradually becoming audible until they go rushing past, eighteen wheeler flat beds, lit up like Christmas trees, young drivers' life and pride, to quickly fade on the Bass Highway, going west.

Funny how neatly everything falls into place, early in the morning. The woodworking shop, silent. The dining hall, the playground, only a few scattered shoes and toys on the yard. All windows blank. All voices stilled. Only God.

What did the Aborigines know, here in the bush, under the stars, five thousand years ago, that modern Australia forgot?

He rules. He does not change. We may count on him.

It matters not what we want or think. What matters is to fall in line with him. With the elements of life itself.

Too bad we enlightened ones, we Christians, ever got to negotiating with God. To take what God said, juggle it around, tweak it a bit until it fits, then hand it back with a grin: "Here God, that should be good enough, don't you think?"
 
He doesn't answer.

* * * * *

Forty-eight years ago (in 1959) Australia finally passed a comprehensive divorce law. Up to the 1500s specially privileged Englishmen could avail themselves of the pope's marital annulment. With the Reformation that disappeared. King Henry VIII's parliament maintained the right to annul marriages, but it only happened in the rarest of cases involving monarchy or the fabulously wealthy.
 
No Australian colony had marital annulment privileges. But with so many convicts transported from Britain to this country, the gold rushes that followed, and the nature of this sparsely populated land, it was easy for men to abandon their wives and remarry somewhere else without getting caught. By the 1850s a Royal Commission set out to investigate the problem. Very cautious annulment and separation arrangements followed, but politicians and imperial officers debated the issue for decades following.
 
Only in 1959 did a new Matrimonial Causes Act finally describe fourteen possible offences and aberrations that might lead to divorce. Even then, one could only get a divorce if a minimum of two witnesses could prove the adultery of one's spouse. People needed to hire private detectives, rig up secret cameras, track down hotel receipts and be able to prove that one's spouse was a habitual offender before a divorce was granted. Social stigma, in most cases, kept people from pursuing that route until the late 1960s and 1970s when a new "Family Law Act" (1975) finally made divorces easy to obtain.
 
Nearly two generations later, what can we say?
 
By making divorce easy, by removing cultural and religious barriers against it, has the situation of Australian families improved?
 
Only an absolute foreigner could possibly answer, "Yes."
 
Most Australian children grow up in broken homes. Most Australians break up with their partners twice or oftener in their lifetimes. A minority only breaks up once. A very, very small minority actually stays with their first partners for good. There is virtually no difference between religious and non-religious people in Australia, regarding the percentage of marital unfaithfulness and divorce.
 
We, at Rocky Cape, are one of three miniscule Christian churches -- a mere handful of people in this vast country -- that still have anything to say against divorce and remarriage.
 
Virtually everyone we know here is divorced and remarried. Virtually all Christians we know are either divorced and remarried, or else have it in their families. Virtually all seekers, home-schoolers, etc., are either divorced and remarried or have children from pre-marital unions. Even the ones that don't, have had extra-marital relationships.
 
Believe it or not, of all the people I know in Australia, I am only aware of TWO exceptions to this "rule." And even one of those I am not quite sure.
 
The very idea that we do not accept divorce and remarriage throws well-meaning Christian people here for loops. As if we still insisted the earth was flat, or as if we believed tomatoes were poisonous.
 
"COME ON, we've all gotten past that! You CAN'T ask us to separate just because we were married before!"
 
Actually we can't, and we don't. All we say is that we have seen what came of the great divorce experiment and we don't want it. We choose not go along with it or make a place for it in our community. Is that fair enough?
 
"If you'd understand the Bible correctly (what it actually means in Hebrew and Greek)," a host of erudite Christians thunders all around us, "you'd realise the Bible still permits divorce and remarriage!"  
 
Even if it did, we wouldn't want it.
 
"You are crazy! You will never get anywhere with your church community. If you don't accept the divorced and remarried, who on earth do you think will join you?"
 
Doesn't look like much to worry about yet, does it? Our biggest concern is not who might join us but how to put up, to feed and clothe everyone that actually does.
 
"What will you say before God, about all the people you turned down just because they were divorced and remarried?"
 
Probably not much. He seems familiar enough with how things work.
 
"But what about all the children you would hurt, all the homes you would break up?"
 
Actually we are not the ones responsible for today's hurting children and broken homes. Our society is living proof of how we protect our children and keep our homes together. We do it by keeping the divorce option out of the picture.
 
"Yes but what if you came from a background like ours? We made all our wrong decisions before we met Christ. Why bring up the past and make us suffer for it now?"
 
To stop sharing a bedroom with someone else's husband or wife is not suffering. Real suffering comes from bringing divorce and remarriage into the church.
 
"But who knows what actually constitutes marriage now-a-days? We were young and inexperienced when we made our vows. We didn't know what it meant. Why should a scrap of paper stand against us now?"
 
We don't worry about legal "scraps of paper." My wife's parents still got married withouth "papers" in Mexico. We know and recognise many Christian couples married with no legal procedure. But we go by the promise. It is not right to promise unity before God and man, and break it.
 
"But what will all the divorced and remarried seekers do? Where shall they go?"
 
Doesn't look like much of a problem in Australia. Hundreds and thousands of churches allow divorce and remarriage. There are options unlimited. Only three don't. If you want to continue in divorce and remarriage why choose one of them?
 
"Yes, but. . . ."
 
* * * * *
 
But the stars are still shining.
 
He rules. He does not change. We may count on him.
 
It matters not what we want or think. What matters is to fall in line with him. With the elements of life itself. Not seeking loopholes or exceptions, like Moses' crowd, because our hearts our hard. Seeking, rather, what God has in mind.
 
"His wisdom is profound, his power is vast. Who has resisted him and come out unscathed? . . .  He alone stretches out the heavens and treads on the waves of the sea. He is the maker of the Bear and Orion, the Pleiades and the constellations of the south. . . . How then can I dispute with him?" (Job 9: 4-14).
 
Four thousands years ago Job stood under the orderly heavens I see this morning. Four thousand years from now -- four hundred thousand years, four billion years -- that heavenly order shall continue.
 
Will you be a part of it? Or will you pass it up to keep on cuddling a partner that isn't yours?
 
Eternity calls for wise choices.
 
Peter
 
Rocky Cape Christian Community
19509 Bass Highway
Detention River, Tasmania 7321
Australia
www.thecommonlife.com.au