Jesus on Marriage and Divorce

To Jump immediately into the scripture reading and commentary, go to the 2:47 mark in the sermon.

Well unless you cut yourself off from all forms of media and social interaction for the last month, you will have heard the uproar about Indiana’s passage of a “Religious Freedom Restoration Act” or RFRA. The act modeled on a federal act signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1993 was specifically designed to give religious people some legal protections against attempts by the state laws and civil lawsuits to force them to go against sincerely their sincerely held religious beliefs. The bill was spun in the media however, as an attempt to allow evangelical Christian businesses the legal right to discriminate against homosexuals. It didn’t, but what it might have allowed a Christian businesses to do, was to refuse to take part in a homosexual wedding ceremony. The media were outraged by this, and ABC57 in South Bend were determined to expose the bigotry this act was giving cover to. So that all right thinking people would demand that the act be repealed.

The problem was, finding an evangelical Christian business in a fairly liberal college city like South Bend wasn’t easy, and finding one that would be willing to go on record as support the RFRA was like trying to find the needle in the proverbial haystack. So they sent out their reporters 20 miles south to the sticks, and they hunted around until finally they found an explicitly Christian business that said they supported the RFRA. The fact that it was a Pizza Parlor that didn’t cater weddings didn’t matter. They fact that they said they’d never deny service to homosexuals who came in to eat, also didn’t matter.