Marriage Matters … Why? A sermon by the Rev. Brian D. Ellison

The text for this sermon was 1 Corinthians 7, which was read in worship from the Common English Bible. It was preached at the 2013 Covenant Conference, the national event of the Covenant Network of Presbyterians, held at Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago, November 2, 2013.

Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul… You hopeless romantic.

Here, at the culmination of a conference on marriage, we lift up this beautiful gift of God, this essential institution of humanity that has inspired poetry and music, transformed lives and given stability to the world, this framework for faithfulness, this metaphor for relationship between God and humanity, Christ and the Church—here, we celebrate it with words for the ages, slogans inspired by the apostle:

“Marriage—Better Than Being on Fire”

“Marriage—Not So Bad (Since the World Will End Soon)

Yes, get your bumper stickers printed up now…

“Marriage—Like a Course of Antibiotics, You Should Finish If You’ve Already Started”

“Marriage—If You Must”

**

Frank Yamada introduced his scripture lesson Thursday night by saying that we as preachers had agreed to preach on traditional texts about marriage, texts that we ministers might be asked to preach on at weddings. Well, obviously, I changed my text.

One can’t really deny that this text is about marriage. It says so, right there in the bold print above the paragraph in our study Bibles: “On Marriage.” But in some ways this is the anti-wedding text. It talks about all the things we don’t talk about in church, addresses the indelicacies and, no surprise here, it reflects a different time and place and church and society pretty disconnected from what’s happening when two young or not-so-young people today put on a tux and a gown, or two tuxes, or two gowns, and walk down the aisle.

So we’ve mostly paid little attention. We’ve marginalized this text and understandably so. We’ve caricatured this text, which is easy to do.

It would be easy to miss some things that are tantalizingly clear in it. It would be easy to dismiss the ancient words because of the patriarchal history that is embedded in so much of Paul’s worldview, but then fail to notice how surprisingly egalitarian this text is, repeatedly asking the same things of women as from men.

And it might also be easy to let our views on same-sex marriage overpower our honest reading of this text and the context it addressed: Opponents citing these gender-specific words as though Paul were writing a position paper for a 21^st-century debate, have missed the mark. But so, too, have supporters who in laughing off the apostle as hopelessly out of touch with reality might forget that the faith community of Corinth—like another faith community we know—was one where sexual ethics and family arrangements were but one battleground in a rapidly evolving new world, where the church had no choice but to make up its answers on the fly because the questions were changing so fast.

Sound familiar?

So now it seems right that we would take one last chance to ask the question seemingly behind all these questions—the questions that Paul, and the Corinthians, and the Presbyterians and the Americans all have been called to answer in their time: Marriage matters … why?

**

Pete (that’s what I’ll call him)[1] came to see me shortly after I began my first call as a pastor, and it was very shortly after—It was my second week on the job. I thought I knew Pete pretty well: A widower, Pete had been married to Sarah for more than 30 years—I heard a lot about Sarah, even before I started. She had been a pillar of the church and the life of every party, the undisputed leader of the children’s Sunday School and a busy beaver in the church kitchen at every potluck. When she had died a couple of years before—too young—the church grieved deeply and also worried rather explicitly about Pete, because he was not much one for self-care or emotional engagement—those things had been his wife’s job.

But Pete was coming to meet with me now because he had been talking with a lady friend, also widowed, whom I had met only briefly, and they had decided they wanted to spend the rest of their lives together. But there was a problem, and most of you here who have served as pastors already know what it was: Were they to marry, she would lose her survivor benefits from her deceased husband’s pension, a significant financial blow. Would I marry them, he asked, in God’s eyes, in their friends’ eyes, in the community’s eyes, but not the eyes of the state? Could we have a wedding at the church to which everyone would come and which would look to all the world like a wedding, but just not send in the license? No one needed to know but them. And me.

Now this is a great topic for a workshop at a conference like this, not a sermon, and I don’t mean to dissect it here. But suffice it to say, in my 26 wise years of life, my three years of totally comprehensive seminary training, and my two excellent weeks of pastoral experience, in my careful reading of the fine print on the back of the marriage license and consultation with colleagues whose advice was as thoughtful as it was contradictory, it became clear to me that what I needed to do was say to Pete, No. It would be inappropriate, and perhaps illegal, for me to perform a marriage that is not reported to the state. We could do some kind of blessing or prayer. But not a full-on wedding, even a small one. Pete said he was disappointed. But he said he understood. In time, his lady friend—Barb—moved in. They lived life together. She came occasionally to church with him, though not so often. Actually, I saw less of Pete, too, over time. Mostly, I just saw him on Sundays. Our conversation about marriage had been the start of our pastoral relationship. It wasn’t until much later that I would come to see it had also been the end.

**

Perhaps you saw it in The New York Times, this week’s Sunday Styles section. “Choosing to Say ‘I Don’t’”[2] was the headline on a story about same-sex couples who, though they support marriage equality, are choosing for themselves not to be married. They give many reasons—they don’t think it’s necessary, it wouldn’t change anything, they’d have to pay higher taxes. I admit that my partner Troy and I have thought some of those same things, though in truth none of the couples in the article gave the reason that we would have given if The New York Times had asked us: “We’re waiting for the church—the church we love and the church I serve—to fully stand with us.”

It’s okay not to be married, of course, but I have to say I found myself oddly depressed by the tone of comments in the article—the answers the couples were unwittingly giving to the questions we have been asking: What is marriage?

One said:  “It’s this oppressive Christian model that says ‘Pick a person that’s going to be everything to you, they have to be perfect, then get a house, and have kids, and then you’ll be happy and whole.’”

One said he thinks marriage is “a risky venture, emotionally and financially,” so risky that marriages should instead be like cellphone contracts, “renewable every two years with an option to upgrade.”

Another couple told the reporter: “We love each other and have lived together for 30 years; why do we need to get married?”

Why indeed. Marriage matters … why? What is marriage really for?

These are questions that in one way or another every speaker, every preacher, most every workshop leader and panelist has addressed. Perhaps the takeaway is that, like that most convenient way of describing relationships on Facebook says, “It’s complicated.”

But might I suggest that Paul has a response that is rather simple. Disarmingly simple. And actually it’s not really an answer to the question so much as a critique of it.

It’s not that the text suggests something simple in the sense of something sentimental, that “all you need is love.” No mention of love here in this chapter about marriage at all, in fact, not even from the man behind 1 Corinthians 13.

No, the simple summary of Paul’s response to the swirling questions about marriage here, about celibacy and abstinence, about mutuality and submission, about complementarity and about sex, we might actually say, is: “All you need … is God.”

Perhaps we are asking the wrong questions.

Wherever the question is asked about how to be right and pure, to protect one’s dignity or God’s honor, the retort is to clarify that the right approach is not to limit, but to increase. Not to prevent, but to empower. “ I’m saying this for your own advantage. It’s not to restrict you but rather to promote effective and consistent service to the Lord …”

So just stop it, church! Paul says. Stop trying to get me to lay out for you something about marriage you can use to restrict or restrain; stop trying to get me to turn sexuality into something dirty or for that matter exceptionally sacred; stop trying to get me to tell you if you should or shouldn’t marry – how would I know? – Marriage matters because you matter. You matter to God. And if God matters to you, well then you already have the thing that matters most.

If 1 Corinthians 7 is to be our chapter “On Marriage,” then it seems the thing we would most easily do wrong with this marriage business would be to start wielding the spiritual tools, the list of dos and don’ts, the cudgel of sin and shaming, to hurt God’s people. Paul’s unspoken conclusion might just be, “Are we still talking about this?” Go, you single person, you married couple, you unmarried couple, you man and woman, you two women, you two men: Stop being preoccupied with the world’s concerns. Do what you need to do to best serve God, without distraction. The question isn’t “Why does marriage matter?”. The question is: “How is God calling us, through our marriage or our singleness, to live out our faith?”

**

On a Sunday morning, 11 years after Pete had first come to see me, he swore at me in the handshake line at church. I really can’t remember what brought it on, but there was a flash of anger about something minor that led me to know something was wrong. I called him on Monday. And this time when Pete came in to talk with me, it became clear what that had really been about, what everything had been about for a long time. It was our conversation a decade before, in which he and Barb heard me tell him that the church would not honor his relationship—of sacrifice and mutual commitment, of devotion and shared discipleship, of the full expression of love between two people and all that entails … that his faith community, which had sustained him and loved him, could not be a place where he could stand honestly before God and make promises … that his pastor, his new young pastor, would instead follow the rules, read the fine print, and protect his position and standing. Ever since, church meant something different to him, my spiritual leadership and credibility were less to him, and his relationship with Barb—otherwise a model of faithfulness and mutual care and affection–had carried an asterisk, a taint. That rather minor explosion that day in the narthex was only the first time he had let show through to me what had been a simmering, painful, festering wound that I had inflicted long ago, a wound that had never healed.

Here is what is true: I may or may not have been right in my ecclesiastical and secular legal interpretation, my professional and ethical decision, but I know for certain that as a Christian, I was just plain wrong.

Sisters and brothers, Why does marriage matter? What is marriage for? There can be but one answer: To glorify God.[3]

The reason we marry is to glorify God. And that may also be the reason we don’t.

The reason we open the doors of marriage to all to enjoy its blessings is to glorify God, not daring to keep any away from what God might do—will do.

The reason we, in our faith and practice of marriage embody abundance and not asceticism, faithful embrace and not fearful resistance, is that in this “earthly ordinance”[4] and in every other whether we are married or not,  we all fulfill our vocation, and so live into the life that is ours in Jesus Christ.

So let us tear off the bumper stickers and strip away the restrictions that diminish or demean God’s calling to all. And let us in humility pray that all our living as individuals and as the Church would glorify God. Amen.

 

[1] I’ve purposely changed the names and a couple details of this story.

[2] Cara Buckley, “Choosing to Say ‘I Don’t’,” The New York Times, October 27, 2013, Page ST1. Available online at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/27/style/gay-couples-choosing-to-say-i-dont.html?smid=pl-share

[3] As the Westminster Shorter Catechism begins, “What is the chief end of [humankind]? To glorify God and enjoy God forever.”

[4] Calvin calls marriage “an earthly ordinance,” a phrase used during the conference in the keynote address of Amy Plantinga Pauw.