Popping the Question

1 Corinthians 13 (NRSV)
If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end.

For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

If you’re coming in mid-stream, you will need to know that we are in the middle of the “love sermons series.” I started this series because I know just how confounding love can be. It is the source of our greatest joys and the place of our greatest pains. Many of you can point to relationships with others that have brought you great strength. And most of us can point to relationships that have led to woundedness and brokenness. I know we’ve got a lot of different kinds of relationships represented here today: single, married, divorced, widowed, dating, waiting…we have the terrain represented here. But I want to talk a little bit today about marriage in particular and I hope that you’ll indulge me. It is very possible to live a single life and be a whole person. Despite the claims of The DaVinci Code you can ask Jesus about that. But many of us end up in marriage at some point in our lives and the church has something to say about that style of life, too. Marriage is a “special calling from God,” as Adam Hamilton puts it, and I want to spend a little time today talking about why that is. Even those of us who never marry or who are not currently married would be well-served to consider what it is that we believe about this strange and difficult institution.

Make no mistake about it. Marriage is a strange and difficult institution. As anybody who has been in one can tell you, a good marriage takes hard work. There are some folks who make it look easy, but the ease is bought at the cost of many long nights of conversation, many shared joys and trials, and many unexpected bumps in the road.

And the strange part? Well, that comes from the very idea of marriage itself. I have come to the conclusion that two people, on their own, cannot do this marriage thing. They need help. They need a community of people who care for them and can support them and they need God.

I often tell people who come to weddings that it is good that they show up because the couple that is getting married has no idea what they’re doing. Oh, I mean they’ve usually given it some thought. They’re not just doing a Britney Spears and running into a Las Vegas wedding chapel if I’m doing the wedding. I meet with the couple. We talk about the service. We do some pre-marital counseling. It’s not that they haven’t done anything to get ready. It’s just that they have no idea what they’re saying!

When a couple takes the vows that form the heart of the wedding service they say ridiculous things to each other. For richer for poorer? In sickness and in health? Who has any idea what these promises will mean later in life? Change is an inevitable part of any human life. Accidents happen. Illnesses come. Children come. When two people get married they have no idea what it’s going to ask of them. And there is no way that I or anyone can tell them what they will be asked to do by taking these vows. Except that they give themselves to the unknown and ask God to be present in their relationship. So when we ask for the blessing to be given by the families and the gathered witnesses at a wedding, it is no small thing that we do. We enlist the support of everyone gathered there, not only to help make a great party, but to help make a great marriage and to remind this couple that they are not alone. Because they’re going to need help to live up to these ridiculous vows they’ve made to each other!

We think of weddings as joyful times and they are. There is no doubt that some of the best occasions I have had in my ministry have come at weddings, especially those that take place between people I have known through my ministry, whether it was at my old church, or more recently through the campus ministry I had at UVA. But there is an element of sacrifice and struggle in marriages that we don’t pay enough attention to. Inevitably, when we come to share a life together as married people, we bump up against a little thing called reality, which we can often be out of touch with when we are on the road leading up to marriage.

The day comes when we realize that the whistling in the shower that we found so charming in the early days of marriage is probably not going to go away. I should hasten to say, Suzanne doesn’t whistle in the shower. Neither do I for that matter, but I’m not here to air dirty laundry. I’m just speaking hypothetically. We learn that we react to stress differently, that we expect different things from conversations, that our comfort with physical affection is different, and that we can spend a lifetime exploring the intricate differences that make us unique.

Suzanne and I were talking last night about the sense we had in the early days that we could read each others’ minds. We couldn’t really. We just spent so much time together that we could anticipate what the other was thinking. But then she changed…oh, all right, we both changed as people do and it wasn’t so easy. It no longer seemed like reading each others’ minds. It was obviously going to take some different kinds of communication.

John Gottman, a researcher on marriage and relationships at the University of Washington, has been studying married couples for thirty years and he says that it’s not the big arguments that indicate how successful a couple will be, but the way that they interact when they’re not fighting. He says that some attention to the little things that help maintain relationships builds the intimacy and trust between partners that allows them to weather the storms. If you want to hear the whole list, you’ll have to come join our Wednesday night study on love, marriage and sex from a biblical perspective (6:10 PM in the Seekers’ Classroom), but the basics are simple. Edit yourself. Saying every critical thought may feel like honesty, but couples who use a little judicious self-editing when talking about difficult issues tend to be happier. Accept influence. This is particularly important for men. Gottman says that a marriage succeeds “to the extent that the husband can accept influence from his wife.”[i] Research shows women are pretty well-practiced at accepting influence from men, but partnership happens when a man can do that as well. And have high standards for each other’s behavior in the relationship. Don’t accept hurtful behavior because it quickly becomes the norm.

Well, that’s only a beginning and this is really not a “how-to” sermon. But I like Gottman’s illustration for the importance of this. He says he once had a couple in counseling and the husband was upset because he said his wife never checked the oil in her car. So he thought she was being careless or lazy, but it turned out that she didn’t know there was a problem because she never knew that a car engine needed oil.” That, Gottman says, is a good metaphor for what happens in a lot of relationships.[ii] We don’t attend to the needs of the marriage because we don’t even know that it needs basic maintenance.

Well, that’s a researcher’s perspective, but what we really want to know, when we are in this place, is ‘What is God’s perspective on marriage?’ Some of what Gottman and his researchers found out is very similar to the words we heard in our reading from 1 Corinthians this morning. The 13th chapter of that letter from Paul to a new group of Christians is very familiar to us because we often hear it at weddings and it sounds to us like Paul is talking about how people in love should treat each other. Now Paul wasn’t talking to couples getting married at all. He was talking to a community that was having a very hard time getting along with each other. He has just spent several chapters trying to sort out their differences and to get them to live peaceably, when he gets to this section which outlines what Christian love is supposed to look like.

But even though it wasn’t written for couples, the language of the “love chapter” gives us some models that surely carry over to the way that we relate to one another. “Love is patient. Love is kind. Love is not envious, boastful or arrogant. Love does not insist on its own way. Love does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth.” That’s good language for any two people trying to ground a relationship in something larger than their own selfish needs. Love looks out for the interests of the other. It is giving of the self, not insisting that ‘I’ get everything that ‘I’ want out of a relationship. It doesn’t score points and it doesn’t hold things over the other’s head. This sort of love is grounded in God who knows us fully and knows how hard it is for us to love this way. But when are able to give ourselves to another in this way it echoes God’s love for us.

This really is the heart of it all. Marriage ultimately matters, not because society needs it for stability or individuals need it for their own betterment. Marriage matters because it offers us a glimmer of the way God loves us. Oh, I know how many problems there are with marriages. I know and you know how much brokenness there is in them, the pain we feel at a break-up and the sad jokes we make about the way men and women don’t understand each other in them. Marriage, as it is, seems a very imperfect lens through which to see God’s love. Now we see in a mirror darkly, to coin a phrase.

But there, at the very beginning of the scriptures, is the hope and promise that marriage could be something more. We talked last week about how Genesis, which starts with the greatest questions of the universe--why we are here and the purpose of our existence—thinks the question of men and women and marriage is so important that it couldn’t be left for later. We talked about the creation of man and woman and about what the man said upon seeing the woman for the first time. Do you remember those words? “At last,” Adam says, “this is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. This is Woman because she came from the same stuff as Man.” Then the text continues with a “therefore.” Therefore, a man shall leave his mother and father and cling to his wife and the two shall become one flesh.

Reading Karl Barth this week helped draw my attention to the hint of sacrifice in that last sentence. The man shall leave his mother and father. Of course, the woman does this as well. But this is why there are tears at weddings. There is a separation that takes place so that a new union can take place. Now we don’t give up our families when we are married, but there is a ‘leaving’ that takes place. It is not a leaving to freedom from our families but a leaving to the purpose God intends. As my buddy Karl puts it, “if it takes place that a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, to become one flesh with her, this is not something arbitrary or accidental but conformable to what begins in creation.”[iii]

This is the most mind-blowing thing about marriage. What Barth is saying is that when we get married, we are re-enacting what God does in creation. What God does is something strange and difficult, too. There is a separation that takes place. God, who would not seem to need anything to be complete…God, who exists from all eternity and who really has no need of us to be God…this God chooses to create and love something outside of God’s own self. And God does not stop creating and loving, even though we are unfaithful. For God the possibility and promise that we see in the two becoming one flesh in Genesis and the lovers desiring one another in Song of Songs is always possibility and promise, despite the ways we fail. When we understand marriage for what it really is, we see it as the human way of reenacting God’s love for humanity.

That’s why the Old Testament talks about the relationship between God and the people of Israel as that of a bridegroom and a lover. That’s why the New Testament talks about the relationship of Christ and the Church in the same way. As Barth puts it, “The authors of Genesis 2 and the Song of Songs speak of man and woman as they do because they know that the broken covenant is still for God the unbroken covenant, intact and fulfilled on both sides; that as such it was already the inner basis of creation, and that as such it will again be revealed at the end.”[iv]

Isn’t that amazing? We start to talk about marriage and we get tongue-tied because we know that it is fraught with problems and difficulties. The whole concept of two people giving themselves to one another to share a lifetime of fidelity in body and spirit it is so impossible that every marriage, even those that don’t end in divorce, knows this covenant as broken in some significant ways. And yet…and yet…there it is at the beginning of the scriptures, offered up as a model for how we are to understand God’s love for us. We can’t live up to that promise that God has for marriage, but it doesn’t stop us from popping the question and taking the plunge. Because when we experience grace in our most intimate relationships, when we know acceptance and healing and forgiveness and love, we do get glimpses of heaven. And that’s what God intends for us and for our marriages. God intends that a little heaven will come into this broken world by the medium of human love.

Love is patient. Love is kind. Love is of God. Love was there at the beginning of all things. And love will be there at the end. Thanks be to God.

[i] “Gottman’s Marriage Tips 101,” The Gottman Institute, www.gottman.com/marriage/self_help/index.php?pageoption=print
[ii] “’The Relationship Cure’ is manual for emotional connection’, University of Washington press release, May 7, 2001
[iii] Church Dogmatics III.1 The Doctrine of Creation, p. 305.
[iv] Ibid., pp. 314-15.