A Sermon: A Christian Vision of Marriage

Marriage is in trouble in our culture! Big trouble! And I’m not referring to the high incidence of divorce, nor the number of people who stay married though they are radically unhappy. Nor do I mean the increasing number of people cohabiting outside of marriage or the prevalence of pre- and extra-marital sex. These are merely symptoms of a deeper problem, one that I dare say troubles every marriage, former or present, represented in this sanctuary today.

None of us should feel too good about our marriages! No matter how solid they seem and may in fact be. No, none of us should feel too good about our marriages, even the best of them. And it’s the church’s fault! And by “church” I mean the kind of Christianity most of us have experienced most of our lives, regardless of the particular denominational label.

It’s the church’s fault! I mean that quite literally. Though I do not intend to relieve any of us from our rightful responsibilities to spouse and family, I do mean that few if any of us ever had a chance to have a genuinely Christian marriage! And that, friends, is indeed the church’s fault. And it impacts more than just the married folk among us. It touches everyone—single, widowed, separated, divorced, remarried, or married. Most of what goes on in marriage is simply an intensified form of the relationship we are all called to as brothers and sisters in the church. Our failures in understanding marriage then, will be mirrored in our teaching about other relationships as well.

The answer to why the church is at fault in this matter is simple but not straightforward. Let me begin with an episode from a TV series a few years ago, “Midnight Caller.” Gary Cole starred as Jack Killian, a cutting edge late night radio talk show host. A man convicted of murder is about to be executed and Jack Killian gets permission to spend the day of his execution with him. Over his years in prison this convict has come to terms with what he did, with his life, and with his fate. He is not anxious or distressed as the hours roll on and midnight draws nigh. He bids his lawyers cease their eleventh-hour efforts to gain him a stay of execution.

Killian, however, is thoroughly nonplussed by all this. His consternation and distress in the face of this convict’s calm is palpable. He sweats profusely, paces endlessly, and never stops trying to penetrate what he believes is just a facade of peacefulness. It is beyond his capacity to imagine that someone could go to their death with such resolution and composure.

Finally, as they walk together down the hall to the room with the electric chair, Killian blurts out “How can you do it? How can you go without a fight?” The convict turns, looks Jack in the eye, and says, “You’ve gotta know who you are, Jack. You’ve gotta know who you are.”

“You’ve gotta know who you are.” That’s the simple answer to why marriage is in such big trouble in our time. We, as Christians, no longer know who we are; hence, we no longer know what marriage is or the skills necessary for a faithful marriage. That simple answer, however, is not a straightforward one. We no longer know who we are but we don’t know that we no longer know who we are! We have bought into a variety of cultural myths about marriage and have blessed them as Christian in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. We’ve married people into these myths for generations, and now, when marriages built on them fall like dominos, we are as perplexed and discombobulated as any one. All we can do is confess our fault and seek to learn anew who we really are as the community of faith gathered around one crucified and risen Jew, Jesus of Nazareth. That’s what we’ll try to do this morning as preparation for considering today’s texts.

A little boy, on his first day of Sunday School, was quite taken with the biblical story of the creation of woman. The idea that God had taken out one of Adam’s ribs and made it into Eve, his wife, fascinated the lad. That afternoon the little guy was out running races with his friends. He came puffing into the kitchen and collapsed into a chair. He grabbed his side and exclaimed, “Mommy, I’ve got a big pain. I think I’m going to have a wife!” In all candor, that’s not terribly far from the level of sophistication of our culture’s view of love and marriage.

For generations the church has bought into our culture’s myths about marriage thus forfeiting its own identity as the people of God. Four myths in particular stand out.

Myth one: love’s all you need. Our culture banks everything on love, doesn’t it? Our wedding ceremony is supposed to be a service of worship to God, yet it seldom rises above the level of a celebration of two people’s love for each other. So marriage is made to rest on our love. And when that love falters or fails, as it all too regularly does in our time, the marriage folds up and disappears. And that’s the way it will be as long as we base marriage on love.

The truth, however, is that love is not enough. German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in a letter on the occasion of his niece’s wedding, tells why:

God has sealed your “I will” with his own. He has crowned your assent with his own. In other words, God creates out of your love something that did not exist before—the holy estate of marriage.

Your love is your own private possession; marriage is more than a private affair; it is an estate, an office. As the crown makes the king, and not just his determination to rule, so marriage and not just your love for each other makes you husband and wife…. As God is infinitely higher than humans, so the sanctity, the privilege and the promise of marriage are higher than the sanctity, the privilege and the promise of love. It is not your love which sustains the marriage, but from now on marriage sustains your love.

Unless and until our weddings are celebrations of God’s holy presence in the midst of our love, they remain simply celebrations of human love but not that of marriage, Christianly understood, and thus we do those we marry a grave disservice.

Myth two: there’s that special person out there for me and I must find him or her. This is romantic nonsense, friends. That are lots of people we can love, share life, raise children with, and with whom we can grow old and gray together. The search for “that special person” is doomed and fraught with danger.

The truth, from a Christian perspective, is almost the opposite. Stanley Hauerwas, who teaches at Duke Divinity School has what he calls “Hauerwas’ Law,” which is: you always marry the wrong person! I’ll use his “Law” even though I use it a little differently then he does. It cuts in two directions. First, it means that whoever we marry, we always marry our ideal mate in them. No matter how well or long we know them before marriage, in the act of committing ourselves to another person “till death do us part,” we can’t help but commit to our image of the ideal mate. To make such a commitment to the real person across the aisle from us would be too daunting and scary!

The second thrust of this “Law” moves in the other direction. The person we know and marry today is not the person we will be married to in five months, five years, or five decades. We can’t know how and how much they will change from what they are on our wedding day. What we see is not what we’re going to get. So…we always marry the wrong person!

It’s only God’s grace embodied in our commitment to the disciplines and accountability of growth within the Body of Christ, which keeps together people who thus “marry the wrong person.” What binds brothers and sisters together in that body is the same grace that alone binds together husband and wife. Bonhoeffer helpfully explains,

Live together in forgiveness, for without it no human fellowship, least of all a marriage, can survive. Don’t insist on your rights, don’t blame each other, don’t judge or condemn each other, don’t find fault with each other, but take one another as you are, and forgive each other every day from the bottom of your hearts.

Myth three: marriage will cure our loneliness. As single folks we get lonely, especially in the impersonal, fast-paced, highly-stressed world of the late twentieth century. Our culture, and the church right along with it, encourages marriage as the balm for this inner ache. In a family established by marriage, we are told, we will discover companionship, understanding, creativity, and care.

Now it is surely right and important for us to seek and find companionship, understanding, creativity, and care. The problem is pointing everyone to marriage as the place where such things can be found. That would seem to make marriage necessary for human fulfillment and create an impetus to marry that can (and does) push many into ill-advised marriages.

The pathetic irony here lies in the church’s adopting such a viewpoint. The church is the family of God. Life in the church is where we most readily and regularly share companionship, understanding, creativity, and care with one another. In fact, such “family” experience would seem to be a necessary prerequisite for any meaningful determination about whether and whom to marry. If we seek to marry to get what we haven’t gotten (even in the church), we are in a terribly vulnerable position. Marriage by itself will not cure our loneliness. Our demand and expectation that it do so, puts a cruel and unendurable strain on it. That so many in the church feel they have to marry to find intimacy and family is but another index of how we have failed one another.

Myth four: marriage is a cocoon of happiness. We know that’s often not true, but we persist in believing it ought to be. Pastors and church leaders tirelessly tell us it can be. Madison Avenue tells us it will be—if we just buy their products.

Lewis Smedes wisely points us to sanity here:

Romantic lotus-eaters may tell you marriage was designed to be a pleasure-dome for erotic spirits to frolic in self-fulfilling relations. But they play you false. Your marriage vow was a promise to suffer. Yes, to suffer; I will not take it back. You promised to suffer, only to suffer with, however. You get your share of suffering from, willy-nilly, thrown at you. You promised to suffer with. It made sense, because the person you married was likely to get hurt along the route, sooner or later, more or less, but hurt he or she was bound to get. And you promised to hurt with your spouse. A marriage is a life of shared pain.

(Smedes clearly differentiates suffering with our mate from suffering from our mate and highlights the former, not the latter, as the kind of suffering we sign-on for in marriage.)

I want to go a step further even than Smedes and suggest a biblical counter-image to our cultural image of a cocoon of happiness. And it is this; marriage is an outpost of mission. Clearly, married folk stand just as much under the mandate of the so-called Great Commission (which you heard read earlier), as do non-married Christians. God’s dream to reclaim, renew, and restore the creation is just as much a priority for the former as the latter. All of the risks and responsibilities of discipleship fall on married couples and their children too. There are no exemptions from the call to take up our cross, no waivers from the call to be missionaries in neo-pagan North America. We cannot plead tending to spouse or family as justification for evading God’s call to serve and even to suffer!

Well, if I have not irritated you up till now, I suspect I just did. For nowhere is the church’s failure in this regard more egregious than its tendency to see marriage and family as ends in themselves—something which everything else, even the service and worship of God, is subordinate to. In biblical language, anything to which the service and worship of God is subordinated to is an…you guessed it, an idol! And I fear that much of the current rhetoric about “family values” steers very close to such idolatry. There are no “family values” other than those laid out in the Beatitudes we spent a couple months exploring earlier this year. Remember them: poverty of spirit, mourning, meekness, a passion for righteousness, being merciful, pure in heart, peacemakers, and reviled and persecuted?

Are those the “family values” married couples here intentionally focus on? I doubt it. And we have no reason to! Our churches have not inculcated in us over the years an awareness that such should be our “family values.” Instead, we’ve been fed on illegitimately baptized attitudes like success, pride, happiness, positivity, being liked and avoiding conflict. And we raise our families that way. The measure of your surprise or irritation at what I have just suggested is, perhaps, the most profound measure of the church’s failure toward its couples and families.

What then is “a Christian vision for marriage?” Drawing on the four myths of marriage considered today, along with the counter proposals I put against them, we can sketch the following outline:

1. Marriage is triangular. It involves you, your mate and the Triune God. It is the ministry and mission of this God that establishes and nurtures the love that binds you to your mate. Without a focal, intentional awareness of God’s holy presence in the midst of our marriages, we will fail whether we stay together or not.

2. There is no one special person for you waiting to be found. You and your mate (whoever that may be) are special people to God though, chosen people, in fact. God will lavish on you the grace of forgiveness, which each of you will provide the other ample opportunity to practice.

Through such experience you will be bound together into a fuller and richer (though not necessarily easier!) experience of your triangular marriage.

3. The indispensable training ground or preparation for marriage is the church. Only here, in the family of God, will we find the satisfaction of those urgent needs for companionship, understanding, creativity, and care such that those needs will cease to be forces driving us to marry simply for the sake of meeting them.

4. Our marriages serve as mission outposts for the kingdom of God. As couples and families we strive to nurture ourselves on God’s “family values” (the Beatitudes) and have our lives shaped by that “mission” prayer Jesus taught his people to pray, which we prayed together earlier in the service—the Lord’s Prayer.

5. An important corollary to all this is the answer as Christians we give to the question, “Who should I marry?” The answer we must give is this: beyond physical attraction, beyond shared interests and horizons, beyond all the basic compatibilities we look for, the only necessary and sufficient reason to marry someone is that you can be a better disciple living with them than without them!

This is a vision, to be sure. As I have detailed, it is far from the reality any of us here have known. Yet for the sake of our health as God’s family, for the sake of those we know and love who will marry here, and above all, for the love of our Triune God, let us make this vision our own. Let us wrestle with it as Jacob did the angel at Peniel, refusing to let go unless it blesses us (Genesis 32) and helps us to know again who we are and the difference that makes.

Thanks be to God for this Word to us today. Amen.

This sermon first appeared in Theology Matters, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Mar/Apr 2005).