There is something miraculous about long marriages. Someone was asking Luther the secret to his long marriage – 55 years to the same woman. “Well, it’s simple,” he said. “We take time twice a week for a quiet dinner at a candlelit restaurant, soft music, and a long walk home.”
“That’s what it takes?” the interviewer asked.
“Yep. She goes on Tuesday and I go on Friday.”
Whatever it takes, I suppose. There are jokes like that that have been told from time immemorial and it is because marriage is not an easy thing. It is loaded down with all sorts of expectations and cultural baggage. There are no qualifying exams so anybody can do it and it is left up to two people who have no idea what they’re getting into when they promise to be with each other “for better or for worse.” And we’ve seen it go wrong in so many different ways. It’s no wonder Socrates is credited with saying, “By all means marry. If you get a good wife, you’ll be happy. If you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.”
Marriage is in a state of flux in our time. It is still held up as a cultural ideal, but it is not what it was in the 1950s. The 50s were a kind of anomaly. During that period you almost had to be married. There was a survey done in 1957 in which four out of five American responding said that preferring to remain single was sick, neurotic or immoral.[i]
Things have changed today. We accept singleness as a perfectly acceptable way of living out a whole life and that’s a good change. Because of the problems young people have seen in marriages, they are more cautious about getting married. People are marrying later. Couples are choosing to live together outside of marriage, testing out the relationship before marrying or never marrying at all. And the traditional and biblical standard of sex as something only clearly affirmed within the bonds of marriage has slipped away. Sex has become a substitute for transcendence in relationships, or at least a pale reflection of it.
You know all of this. I don’t list all of these changes to beat us over the head with how far we’ve fallen. We know all of these things because we see them in our own families and in our own lives. We’ve all changed. But what I believe we suspect is that marriage has become broken in our culture. It is not what God wants it to be or what we want it to be. We want to hear a new word.
Of course, one other reason that we are debating what we think about marriage in these days because of our struggle as a nation over the application of the word ‘marriage’ to same-sex couples. Many states have now extended the civil rights offered to heterosexual couples to same-sex couples and some have even granted marriage licenses. Most churches, including the United Methodist Church, have clearly opposed the idea of same-sex marriage while maintaining the need for guarding the rights and dignity of all people.
My own sense is that this is because we have no precedence in scripture or tradition for such marriages. What marriage means to us is a union between a man and a woman. In the blessing prayer of the service of Christian marriage in The United Methodist Hymnal the covenant between the man and woman is said to represent “the covenant between Christ and his church.”[ii] The couple, in their bodies, offers a glimpse of a spiritual truth beyond themselves; they represent a relationship between God and humanity that is figuratively rendered as a male Christ taking the female church as his bride.
Again, though, I know that we don’t merely see this question in theoretical or abstract terms. In my family and perhaps in yours…in my circle of friends, and perhaps in yours…there are people I love who believe that they are diminished in their humanity because the church does not recognize their most significant relationship. It makes it all the more important, then, that we honestly struggle with what we believe about marriage because the truth is that heterosexual couples have not been too great about upholding the ideal that we think is threatened by these new understandings.
So what is our understanding of marriage? To be honest, it’s not all that clear. The Bible presents us with many different models of marriages, many of which we would find disturbing today. Abraham and Sarah, the ancestors of all Israelites, were married to each other but when they were not able to have a child, Sarah’s servant, Hagar, was given to Abraham to become a surrogate mother. It was not a happy experiment. Sarah and Hagar ended up in a bitter dispute and the servant and her child were sent off into the wilderness. But the arrangement was not all that unusual in a society that put a premium on producing male heirs and the ancient Israelites were such a society.
Polygamy is also found in the Bible. Jacob married Leah and Rachel. Solomon famously had 700 wives and 300 porcupines…er…concubines [1 Kings 11:3]. Those were not particularly great arrangements either. Leah was always the neglected wife. Solomon was led astray by all of his foreign wives.
There was also the practice of levirate marriage. According to this tradition, if a man died without leaving a son, one of his brothers was to marry his widow in order to produce a child [Leviticus 25:5-10]. We see this in practice in the story of Judah and Tamar in Genesis chapter 38. It’s an R-rated story and again it’s not a very happy story. Jesus is asked this practice in the gospels when the Sadducees ask him whose wife a woman would be at the resurrection if she had been married to seven brothers because of this kind of marriage [Matthew 22:23-32]. (His answer, by the way, was that she would be wife to none of them because in the resurrection there was no marriage.) Again, this seems a strange and disturbing practice from our perspective, but for a society intent on producing male heirs, tidy marriage arrangements took a back seat.
Then through Christian history we don’t see a whole lot of references to the church taking a particular interest in marriage. Jesus attended a wedding in Cana as one of his first public acts of ministry [John 2:1-1]. Later in the letters of the New Testament we see references to the roles that men and women are supposed to take on in marriage and it’s clear that the standard is one man and one woman. Bishops, for instance, were supposed to be the husband of only wife. [1 Timothy 3:2]. Our bishop in Virginia is now a woman, Charlene Kammerer, so we would say that she should only have one husband. And she does.
But marriages themselves took a long time to come into the church. In the passage from 1 Corinthians that we have for today, Paul addresses marriage only to say that it is useful for keeping us out of trouble. Sexual immorality was leading some of the Corinthian Christians astray. Some of them were interpreting the freedom they knew in Christ to say that all of the old rules were thrown out. To them Paul said, “No, you are too tempted to wrong behavior if you pursue sex outside of marriage. There is still a role for marriage in the Christian community.”
On the other hand there were some Corinthian Christians who were saying, “It is good not to even touch a person of the opposite sex.” Since they were expecting Jesus’ return, perhaps they should give up sexuality altogether. Paul had some sympathy for this belief. He was single himself and he had dedicated himself to preparing for Christ’s return. “I wish everyone could be like I am,” he told the Corinthians.
He also knew that this was unrealistic. He affirmed the place of sex in marriage and in fact, he encouraged regular relations between married couples. “The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does; likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. Do not deprive one another except perhaps by agreement for a set time, to devote yourselves to prayer, and then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.” That’s 1 Corinthians 7:3-5. Some of you are going to want to make note of that passage.
He also told people who were unmarried that, even though he saw the best form of life for himself as singleness and dedication to God, there was no sin in marriage. He just warned that “those who marry will experience distress in this life, and I would spare you that” [1 Co. 7:28]. Oh, yes, but Paul, it can be such a rich distress! (There are a few times, very few, when I think I can speak with more authority than Paul.)
As it became clear that the church was going to be in the world for awhile, obviously marriage became more common. Children were born and raised in Christian marriages and they in turn married others. But their weddings were often not in the church and very often they were not marriages built on romantic love. If you were in the upper classes, very often your mate would be chosen because of arrangements between families. If you were a serf many times you had no choice either. In 1344 a lord of a Black Forest manor decreed that all of his unmarried tenants had to marry spouses that he chose. In other places, if you were a peasant and wanted to pick your partner you had to pay a fee.[iii]
It was only slowly that weddings came to the church and then it was only to the front porch of the church where the priest would do the ceremony and then only because the priest was often the only person in a village who could read. Marriages in England only came inside the church building just before the Reformation in the 16th century.[iv]
The truth is that the church had never really developed a good theology of marriage. Because celibate priests and monks led the church for so many centuries, not a lot of thought was put into marriage. As James White, the great liturgy scholar says, “Medieval theologians had trouble saying much positive about [marriage] except that it was a remedy against lust.”[v] White goes on to say that “the predominant history of this rite has been that of a legal contract in the West, a contract which the couple performed and the Church witnessed and blessed”[vi] but did not try to explain.
It was also the case, for all of these reasons, that love had little to do with marriage. If it was about child-bearing or status or money or security or necessity then love could rank pretty far down the list. In fact, displays of love between married couples were often looked down on. You’ve heard that Virginia is for lovers? Well, in the 1690s a colonist here described a woman he knew as “more fond of her husband that the politeness of the day allows.” Ministers would often warn spouses against loving each other too much – against the clear teaching of scripture as we have seen.[vii]
So this preacher wants to say something about marriage today, knowing that it has a sometimes sad and strange history among us…knowing that there are some of us who have not been married and wonder what all the fuss is about…knowing that there are some of us who have been married and have known great pain in that relationship and who have had marriages end with a great deal of heartbreak…knowing that there are some of us who are currently in marriages that are full of light and shadow and that demand and invite our time and energy and our best selves…knowing that there are some of us who are quite happy in their singleness and not thinking about marriage…and knowing that there are some of us who lived many years with a spouse now departed who feel a tremendous sense of gratitude and loss for what that marriage meant. Yesterday we celebrated the life of Jennie Benton Turner at a graveside service. She was married to her husband Burleigh for 61 years before he died in 1999 and by all accounts it was a rich and loving relationship that reminds us of the promise of marriage.
That is what I want to say about marriage today – that there is still promise in the institution of marriage and there are blessings to be found in it. It may have changed in form many times through the centuries. It may be stretched and frayed by the challenges it faces today. It may often be broken, but for all of that it is not beyond redemption. In fact it can offer us glimpses of what the life in God’s reign in meant to be like.
Paul may have said some interesting things about marriage in 1 Corinthians but he is also credited with some other words about marriage in the letter to the Ephesians. After talking about the mutual love that ought to exist between husbands and wives, the writer remembers the first thing ever said about the relationship between men and women in the Bible. “For this reason,” Genesis says and Ephesians quotes, “a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh." Then it goes on to say, “This is a great mystery.” [Ephesians 5:31-32]. The word in Greek is mysterion and in Latin it got translated as sacramentum and this is the reason why, when the church got around to thinking about marriage it called it a sacrament, something that Protestants didn’t adopt. But it is what Jim White calls a “natural sacrament,” a way in which, through human flesh, the mystery and grace of God can be known.
Ephesians makes the connection greater. It’s clear that what’s important is not only the relationship between a married couple, but a greater relationship that the couple represents – the relationship of Christ and the church. Every time a couple joins together in marriage it’s not just about them, no matter how many bridezillas and vanity weddings we may see. A Christian marriage is also about the love becoming human and being lived out through human relationships.
I do a lot of weddings. I did more last year than I’ve ever done in my pastoral ministry. And I am still dumbfounded by the willingness of couples to take on these vows knowing what a shaky institution marriage is. But I am also filled with joy and hope. Because with marriages there is also the potential for deep happiness and deep sharing. There is a commitment to stand before another person in all of your vulnerability and to be known by them. And there is the possibility of space to be opened up for children who are our greatest promise and sign of trust in the future.
Paul is surely right that anything that distracts us from following Christ and expecting his return ought to be discarded. Marriage is not one of those things, though. Marriage is a crazy, human thing that is often entered into without rational thought. In our culture, it’s often inspired by an explosive spark that kindles something overpowering between two people. Marriage claims against all odds that the impermanent attraction that brings two people together can somehow be made permanent and enduring because God is asked to be at the center of that relationship.
For all that, marriage is of God. If you are in a marriage right now, get working on it because it is work and it needs to be done well – for your sake and for the sake of any children who are part of it and for the sake of the world. If it is troubled, seek help. Pray to God for your spouse and reach out to others who can help you pray and discern what’s happening and what can be done. If you are not married, God loves you just the way you are. Despite the cliché in our culture, you don’t need someone else to complete you. But if you do go into marriage, go in knowing that you can’t do it alone – even the two of you together. There is blessing and life in marriage, but it finds its ground in the love of God.
Thanks be to God for all the human ways God’s love becomes incarnate. Thanks be to God.
“That’s what it takes?” the interviewer asked.
“Yep. She goes on Tuesday and I go on Friday.”
Whatever it takes, I suppose. There are jokes like that that have been told from time immemorial and it is because marriage is not an easy thing. It is loaded down with all sorts of expectations and cultural baggage. There are no qualifying exams so anybody can do it and it is left up to two people who have no idea what they’re getting into when they promise to be with each other “for better or for worse.” And we’ve seen it go wrong in so many different ways. It’s no wonder Socrates is credited with saying, “By all means marry. If you get a good wife, you’ll be happy. If you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.”
Marriage is in a state of flux in our time. It is still held up as a cultural ideal, but it is not what it was in the 1950s. The 50s were a kind of anomaly. During that period you almost had to be married. There was a survey done in 1957 in which four out of five American responding said that preferring to remain single was sick, neurotic or immoral.[i]
Things have changed today. We accept singleness as a perfectly acceptable way of living out a whole life and that’s a good change. Because of the problems young people have seen in marriages, they are more cautious about getting married. People are marrying later. Couples are choosing to live together outside of marriage, testing out the relationship before marrying or never marrying at all. And the traditional and biblical standard of sex as something only clearly affirmed within the bonds of marriage has slipped away. Sex has become a substitute for transcendence in relationships, or at least a pale reflection of it.
You know all of this. I don’t list all of these changes to beat us over the head with how far we’ve fallen. We know all of these things because we see them in our own families and in our own lives. We’ve all changed. But what I believe we suspect is that marriage has become broken in our culture. It is not what God wants it to be or what we want it to be. We want to hear a new word.
Of course, one other reason that we are debating what we think about marriage in these days because of our struggle as a nation over the application of the word ‘marriage’ to same-sex couples. Many states have now extended the civil rights offered to heterosexual couples to same-sex couples and some have even granted marriage licenses. Most churches, including the United Methodist Church, have clearly opposed the idea of same-sex marriage while maintaining the need for guarding the rights and dignity of all people.
My own sense is that this is because we have no precedence in scripture or tradition for such marriages. What marriage means to us is a union between a man and a woman. In the blessing prayer of the service of Christian marriage in The United Methodist Hymnal the covenant between the man and woman is said to represent “the covenant between Christ and his church.”[ii] The couple, in their bodies, offers a glimpse of a spiritual truth beyond themselves; they represent a relationship between God and humanity that is figuratively rendered as a male Christ taking the female church as his bride.
Again, though, I know that we don’t merely see this question in theoretical or abstract terms. In my family and perhaps in yours…in my circle of friends, and perhaps in yours…there are people I love who believe that they are diminished in their humanity because the church does not recognize their most significant relationship. It makes it all the more important, then, that we honestly struggle with what we believe about marriage because the truth is that heterosexual couples have not been too great about upholding the ideal that we think is threatened by these new understandings.
So what is our understanding of marriage? To be honest, it’s not all that clear. The Bible presents us with many different models of marriages, many of which we would find disturbing today. Abraham and Sarah, the ancestors of all Israelites, were married to each other but when they were not able to have a child, Sarah’s servant, Hagar, was given to Abraham to become a surrogate mother. It was not a happy experiment. Sarah and Hagar ended up in a bitter dispute and the servant and her child were sent off into the wilderness. But the arrangement was not all that unusual in a society that put a premium on producing male heirs and the ancient Israelites were such a society.
Polygamy is also found in the Bible. Jacob married Leah and Rachel. Solomon famously had 700 wives and 300 porcupines…er…concubines [1 Kings 11:3]. Those were not particularly great arrangements either. Leah was always the neglected wife. Solomon was led astray by all of his foreign wives.
There was also the practice of levirate marriage. According to this tradition, if a man died without leaving a son, one of his brothers was to marry his widow in order to produce a child [Leviticus 25:5-10]. We see this in practice in the story of Judah and Tamar in Genesis chapter 38. It’s an R-rated story and again it’s not a very happy story. Jesus is asked this practice in the gospels when the Sadducees ask him whose wife a woman would be at the resurrection if she had been married to seven brothers because of this kind of marriage [Matthew 22:23-32]. (His answer, by the way, was that she would be wife to none of them because in the resurrection there was no marriage.) Again, this seems a strange and disturbing practice from our perspective, but for a society intent on producing male heirs, tidy marriage arrangements took a back seat.
Then through Christian history we don’t see a whole lot of references to the church taking a particular interest in marriage. Jesus attended a wedding in Cana as one of his first public acts of ministry [John 2:1-1]. Later in the letters of the New Testament we see references to the roles that men and women are supposed to take on in marriage and it’s clear that the standard is one man and one woman. Bishops, for instance, were supposed to be the husband of only wife. [1 Timothy 3:2]. Our bishop in Virginia is now a woman, Charlene Kammerer, so we would say that she should only have one husband. And she does.
But marriages themselves took a long time to come into the church. In the passage from 1 Corinthians that we have for today, Paul addresses marriage only to say that it is useful for keeping us out of trouble. Sexual immorality was leading some of the Corinthian Christians astray. Some of them were interpreting the freedom they knew in Christ to say that all of the old rules were thrown out. To them Paul said, “No, you are too tempted to wrong behavior if you pursue sex outside of marriage. There is still a role for marriage in the Christian community.”
On the other hand there were some Corinthian Christians who were saying, “It is good not to even touch a person of the opposite sex.” Since they were expecting Jesus’ return, perhaps they should give up sexuality altogether. Paul had some sympathy for this belief. He was single himself and he had dedicated himself to preparing for Christ’s return. “I wish everyone could be like I am,” he told the Corinthians.
He also knew that this was unrealistic. He affirmed the place of sex in marriage and in fact, he encouraged regular relations between married couples. “The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does; likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. Do not deprive one another except perhaps by agreement for a set time, to devote yourselves to prayer, and then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.” That’s 1 Corinthians 7:3-5. Some of you are going to want to make note of that passage.
He also told people who were unmarried that, even though he saw the best form of life for himself as singleness and dedication to God, there was no sin in marriage. He just warned that “those who marry will experience distress in this life, and I would spare you that” [1 Co. 7:28]. Oh, yes, but Paul, it can be such a rich distress! (There are a few times, very few, when I think I can speak with more authority than Paul.)
As it became clear that the church was going to be in the world for awhile, obviously marriage became more common. Children were born and raised in Christian marriages and they in turn married others. But their weddings were often not in the church and very often they were not marriages built on romantic love. If you were in the upper classes, very often your mate would be chosen because of arrangements between families. If you were a serf many times you had no choice either. In 1344 a lord of a Black Forest manor decreed that all of his unmarried tenants had to marry spouses that he chose. In other places, if you were a peasant and wanted to pick your partner you had to pay a fee.[iii]
It was only slowly that weddings came to the church and then it was only to the front porch of the church where the priest would do the ceremony and then only because the priest was often the only person in a village who could read. Marriages in England only came inside the church building just before the Reformation in the 16th century.[iv]
The truth is that the church had never really developed a good theology of marriage. Because celibate priests and monks led the church for so many centuries, not a lot of thought was put into marriage. As James White, the great liturgy scholar says, “Medieval theologians had trouble saying much positive about [marriage] except that it was a remedy against lust.”[v] White goes on to say that “the predominant history of this rite has been that of a legal contract in the West, a contract which the couple performed and the Church witnessed and blessed”[vi] but did not try to explain.
It was also the case, for all of these reasons, that love had little to do with marriage. If it was about child-bearing or status or money or security or necessity then love could rank pretty far down the list. In fact, displays of love between married couples were often looked down on. You’ve heard that Virginia is for lovers? Well, in the 1690s a colonist here described a woman he knew as “more fond of her husband that the politeness of the day allows.” Ministers would often warn spouses against loving each other too much – against the clear teaching of scripture as we have seen.[vii]
So this preacher wants to say something about marriage today, knowing that it has a sometimes sad and strange history among us…knowing that there are some of us who have not been married and wonder what all the fuss is about…knowing that there are some of us who have been married and have known great pain in that relationship and who have had marriages end with a great deal of heartbreak…knowing that there are some of us who are currently in marriages that are full of light and shadow and that demand and invite our time and energy and our best selves…knowing that there are some of us who are quite happy in their singleness and not thinking about marriage…and knowing that there are some of us who lived many years with a spouse now departed who feel a tremendous sense of gratitude and loss for what that marriage meant. Yesterday we celebrated the life of Jennie Benton Turner at a graveside service. She was married to her husband Burleigh for 61 years before he died in 1999 and by all accounts it was a rich and loving relationship that reminds us of the promise of marriage.
That is what I want to say about marriage today – that there is still promise in the institution of marriage and there are blessings to be found in it. It may have changed in form many times through the centuries. It may be stretched and frayed by the challenges it faces today. It may often be broken, but for all of that it is not beyond redemption. In fact it can offer us glimpses of what the life in God’s reign in meant to be like.
Paul may have said some interesting things about marriage in 1 Corinthians but he is also credited with some other words about marriage in the letter to the Ephesians. After talking about the mutual love that ought to exist between husbands and wives, the writer remembers the first thing ever said about the relationship between men and women in the Bible. “For this reason,” Genesis says and Ephesians quotes, “a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh." Then it goes on to say, “This is a great mystery.” [Ephesians 5:31-32]. The word in Greek is mysterion and in Latin it got translated as sacramentum and this is the reason why, when the church got around to thinking about marriage it called it a sacrament, something that Protestants didn’t adopt. But it is what Jim White calls a “natural sacrament,” a way in which, through human flesh, the mystery and grace of God can be known.
Ephesians makes the connection greater. It’s clear that what’s important is not only the relationship between a married couple, but a greater relationship that the couple represents – the relationship of Christ and the church. Every time a couple joins together in marriage it’s not just about them, no matter how many bridezillas and vanity weddings we may see. A Christian marriage is also about the love becoming human and being lived out through human relationships.
I do a lot of weddings. I did more last year than I’ve ever done in my pastoral ministry. And I am still dumbfounded by the willingness of couples to take on these vows knowing what a shaky institution marriage is. But I am also filled with joy and hope. Because with marriages there is also the potential for deep happiness and deep sharing. There is a commitment to stand before another person in all of your vulnerability and to be known by them. And there is the possibility of space to be opened up for children who are our greatest promise and sign of trust in the future.
Paul is surely right that anything that distracts us from following Christ and expecting his return ought to be discarded. Marriage is not one of those things, though. Marriage is a crazy, human thing that is often entered into without rational thought. In our culture, it’s often inspired by an explosive spark that kindles something overpowering between two people. Marriage claims against all odds that the impermanent attraction that brings two people together can somehow be made permanent and enduring because God is asked to be at the center of that relationship.
For all that, marriage is of God. If you are in a marriage right now, get working on it because it is work and it needs to be done well – for your sake and for the sake of any children who are part of it and for the sake of the world. If it is troubled, seek help. Pray to God for your spouse and reach out to others who can help you pray and discern what’s happening and what can be done. If you are not married, God loves you just the way you are. Despite the cliché in our culture, you don’t need someone else to complete you. But if you do go into marriage, go in knowing that you can’t do it alone – even the two of you together. There is blessing and life in marriage, but it finds its ground in the love of God.
Thanks be to God for all the human ways God’s love becomes incarnate. Thanks be to God.
1 Corinthians 7:29-31
I mean, brothers and sisters, the appointed time has grown short; from now on, let even those who have wives be as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no possessions, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the present form of this world is passing away.
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1 comment:
ALEX: Your sermon on marriage is fantastic. Very enlightening. Dad
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