Sermons

What Makes A Marriage?

Scott D. Anderson                           Third Presbyterian Church
October 23, 2005               Genesis 1:26-31, Galatians 3:25-29

We gathered at Grace Episcopal Church across the street from Wisconsin’s State Capitol on a chilly February morning before making our way over to the Capitol rotunda. About 200 pastors and lay leaders—Lutheran, Presbyterian, United Methodist, American Baptist, United Church of Christ—met to protest a proposed constitutional amendment to the Wisconsin State Constitution. The amendment would define marriage to be between a man and a woman, and also outlaw state-supported domestic partnerships and civil unions for same gender couples.

The debate in the State legislature, from the perspective of religious community participation, had been pretty one-sided. Christian evangelicals teamed up with the Roman Catholic Bishops in support of the proposal, while mainline Protestants, up until this February morning, had sat it out on the sidelines.

Our biggest surprise that wintry day was a raucous counter-demonstration confronting us as walked from the church to the Capitol. Representing a group of fundamentalist churches in the Madison area, the demonstrators hurled insults at us along with charges of heresy.

For a brief moment the two sets of demonstrators met at the Capitol entrance, each group carrying signs and banners. An Associated Press photographer waited for just the right moment to snap a picture that would appear in newspapers across the state the next morning. The right moment came just as the two groups passed. A pastor from the counter demonstration held up his sign and shouted: “The Bible says its Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!” A member of our group close by then raised her sign and shouted back: “Love makes a family!” Two sound bytes, two worldviews that answer one of the most contentious questions of our age: “What makes a marriage?”

The traditional view is that God has created us male and female, and only through the complementary character of our respective genders can a marriage be made. This view, rooted in our observations of the natural world, finds credence in the creation stories of the Bible and centuries of theological reflection. It is, for most Christians, settled church teaching. The Bible says its Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. What makes a marriage is primarily the form of the union, the union of male and female.

What is surprising about the Adam and Eve approach is that it makes lots of assumptions about marriage that no longer ring true. It assumes men and women, when they marry, will marry for life, in spite of the fact that over half of the marriages in America now end in divorce, many for morally defensible reasons. It assumes the central purpose of the union is to have and raise children, in spite of the fact that more and more marriages in America are intentionally childless. It assumes that men and women each have distinct roles to play in the marriage, rooted in their gender difference, in spite of the fact that almost all the roles that men and women now play in a marital relationship are virtually interchangeable.

Let’s not miss the irony: the 70% of American heterosexuals who assume that marriage is a natural, static, timeless institution have themselves turned the traditional definition of marriage on its ear.
Marriage historian Stephanie Coontz, writing in the July 5th issue of the New York Times, draws the logical conclusion: “Gays and lesbians looked at the [marriage] revolution heterosexuals had wrought and noticed that with its new norms, marriage could work for them, too.”

Even with these many recent changes within the institution of marriage, the heart and soul of the traditionalist approach remains. God has created us male and female. It’s this form of the relationship—the natural and complementary form of male and female, that makes it a marriage.

We Protestants have always been suspicious about discerning God’s intentions through the natural world. Because we know the gospel to be the story of a God who begins the work of a new creation in Jesus Christ, we see a God in Scripture who acts consistently in unnatural ways.

The new creation who becomes enfleshed in a virgin, an unnatural birth. The new creation, whose brutal and unjust crucifixion, an unnatural death, reconciles us with God. A new creation, whose empty tomb, God’s quintessential act opposed to the natural order, serves as eternal confirmation that this new creation embodies the very being of God.

God’s new creation doesn’t stop at Easter. You and I are here today at Third Presbyterian Church because God has acted “against nature” to include us in the fellowship of the church.

In Paul’s day the “natural” view—the “God created it this way for all time” view-- was that the church of Jesus Christ would be an exclusive fellowship of Jewish Christians. But Paul reminds Jewish converts to the faith in Rome that in the new creation inaugurated by Jesus Christ, the Gentiles—all the non-Jewish peoples—would be engrafted into the church by God’s gracious yet unnatural act. Listen carefully to Paul’s agricultural metaphor in Romans: “…you [Gentiles] have been cut off from what is by nature a wild olive tree and grafted, contrary to nature, into a cultivated olive tree…” (Romans 11:24a). God has acted against God’s own creation by grafting you and me—the wild olive branches-- into the fellowship of the church—the cultivated olive tree!

And so when Paul, in writing to the Galatians, describes for Jew and Gentile alike what life is like as part of the new creation in Jesus Christ, what is presumed to be “natural” in the old creation is challenged at every turn:

“…for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. As many of you were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.’ (Gal 3: 27b-28).

Our baptism is the entry point into this new creation. In baptism we die to the old created order and are clothed with a new identity that renders all of the identities and distinctions of the old order as secondary. When we are baptized we are neither Jew nor Greek (our ethnic identity), we are neither slave or free (our class identity), nor are we male and female (our gender identity) for we all find our identity primarily and equally as one in Jesus Christ.

Notice that the third pair is different than the first two. It’s not male or female, but male and female, a direct quote from the Genesis creation story. Could it be that Paul is suggesting that it is not just our identity as male or female but the partnership itself, of male and female that loses its privileged status when we clothe ourselves with Christ in baptism? Could it be that the old creation in Genesis included Adam and Eve, but the new creation, which is alive among baptized Christians, could include Adam and Eve as well as Adam and Steve?

If the traditionalists have it wrong, I am not sure the proponents of marriage equality have it quite right. “Love makes a family.” The reality of contemporary family life in America is that our primary relationships come in many forms: divorced parents, single family households, blended families, gay and lesbian couples. Children come to us through childbearing, through adoption, even through artificial insemination. What makes a marriage, so this argument goes, is not the form of the relationship, but its content.

Some years ago when I was serving as pastor of a Presbyterian congregation, a couple came to see me who wanted to be married in our church. After we talked a bit about their relationship, they asked if in the wedding ceremony they could change the last line of the traditional wedding vows, from “as long as we both shall live” to “as long as our love lasts.” I told them no, I couldn’t do that. The promises of marriage, “to have to and told from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish” are not the contingent promises of a mere social contract. They are solemn, public promises that assume a far greater responsibility and a deeper measure of faith. They are entered into with the expectation that these promises are made and kept, “as long as we both shall live.” The couple decided to postpone the wedding; there was too much uncertainty, too little commitment.

Is human love—as long as it lasts---enough to make a marriage? Is human love enough to launch our relationship into an unknown future, it is enough weather the inevitable storms that life brings our way, is it enough to raise our children, is it enough to help us renegotiate our relationship in every season of life? Does love make a marriage?

John Calvin’s answer during the Reformation was “no.” He saw marriage as not as a two-way contract between consenting adults, but as a three way-covenantal agreement. A covenant between each spouse and God, with each party making promises to the other two, promises that are lived out not in an isolated nuclear family, but within a network of relationships in the larger community of faith.

There is a connection between the promises we make at baptism and the promises we make in marriage. Our baptismal service as Presbyterians welcomes new members in a symphony of promises. There are promises to renounce the devil, to embrace God, to teach a new Christian the faith. There are no spectators at a Presbyterian baptism. Everyone participates. Promises bind the community and God, the baptized to God, the baptized to the community, and members of the congregation to themselves. Promises create and sustain this community.

Similarly, Presbyterian wedding ceremonies feature a network of promises: between two people, between the couple and God, between the couple and a community, between a community and God. There are no spectators at a true Presbyterian wedding. Everyone participates. Promises create and sustain this community, too.

In Christian marriage we are not left with our human love to fulfill the promises we make on our wedding day. Because of our baptism, our primary identity places us “in Christ Jesus.” To root our marriages “in Christ Jesus” means that there is always a third party present, the One whose gracious, forgiving, demanding, and ever-present love for us is the real content of our marriages.

Because our baptism places all of us as “one in Christ Jesus” our marriages are lived out within a community that holds us accountable, forgives us unconditionally, and can sustain us through the irreconcilable differences that any couple can face.

Baptism makes marriage something more than a personal entitlement or a private decision, something more than the quality of the relationship between two spouses. Our Baptism brings a third party into the covenantal agreement, making God’s love the substance of our marriage, and making marriage the gift and responsibility of the community.

And so the burning question for both church and state in these opening decades of the 21st century is this: will the community offer this gift, marriage, to couples of the same gender?

Andrew Sullivan, a gay man, political conservative and former editor of The New Republic magazine, imagines what the community would be like with same gender marriage. He writes:

“[Marriage] would provide role models for young gay people, who, after the exhilaration of coming out, can easily lapse into short-term relationships and insecurity with no tangible goal in sight. My own guess is that most homosexuals would embrace such a goal with as much if not more commitment as heterosexuals. Even in our society as it is, many lesbian and gay male relationships are virtual textbooks of monogamy. Gay marriage could also help bridge the gulf often found among gay children and their parents. It could bring the essence of gay life, a gay couple—into the heart of the family in a way the family can most understand and the gay offspring can most easily acknowledge.

“Most important, perhaps, as gay marriage sank into the subtle background consciousness of the culture, its influence would be felt quietly but deeply among gay children. For them, at last, there would be some kind of future; some older faces to apply to their unfolding lives, some language in which their identity could be property discussed, some rubric by which it could be explained, not in terms of sex, or sexual practices, or bars or subterranean activity, but in terms of their future life stories, their potential loves, their eventual chance at happiness. They would be able to feel that their emotional orientation was not merely about pleasure, or sin, or shame, or otherness, but about the ability to love and be loved as complete, imperfect human beings.

Any heterosexual man who takes a moment to consider what his life would be like if he were never allowed the formal institution of marriage to cement his relationships will see the truth of Sullivan’s vision. Imagine life without a recognized family; imagine dating without even the possibility of marriage. Any heterosexual woman who can imagine being told at a young age that her attraction to men was wrong, that her loves and crushes were illicit, that her destiny was singleness, will also appreciate this vision.

Marriage for same gender couples is not a radical step, Sullivan concludes. It is a profoundly humanizing, traditionalizing step.

As one who values Christian marriage, I dream of the day, probably not in my lifetime, when the community of faith here at Third Presbyterian Church will gather for a wedding of two baptized members of this congregation. It might be the marriage of Adam and Eve; it might be the marriage of Emma and Eve. It will be a marriage blessed by the Presbyterian Church and protected by the state of New York. It will be a wedding where promises are made, life long commitment and fidelity are solemnized, a marriage infused with God’s love, a marriage that will be the gift and the responsibility of this community of faith. That’s my dream. Amen.