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Marriage and how to live it
Sermon during Marriage Weekend 15 February 2004
(See pictures of the Marriage Weekend.)
Give way to one another in obedience to Christ. Wives should regard their husbands as they regard the Lord, since as Christ is head of the Church and saves the whole body, so is a husband the head of his wife; and as the Church submits to Christ, so should wives to their husbands, in everything. Husbands should love their wives just as Christ loved the Church and sacrificed himself for her to make her holy. He made her clean by washing her in water with a form of words, so that when he took her to himself she would be glorious, with no speck or wrinkle or anything like that, but holy and faultless. In the same way, husbands must love their wives as they love their own bodies; for a man to love his wife is for him to love himself. A man never hates his own body, but he feeds it and looks after it; and that is the way Christ treats the Church, because it is his body - and we are its living parts. For this reason, a man must leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one body. This mystery has many implications; but I am saying it applies to Christ and the Church. To sum up; you too, each one of you, must love his wife as he loves himself; and let every wife respect her husband. Ephesians 5.21-33
Marriage, it has been said, is like twirling a baton, turning handsprings, or eating with chopsticks: it looks easy till you try it.
There's plenty of advice available. Peter Ustinov, for instance, said "Marriage is like a 3 speed gearbox: affection, friendship, love. It is not advisable to crash your gears and go right through to love straight away. You need to ease your way through. The basis of love is respect, and that needs to be learnt from affection and friendship." Good advice. But what about God's advice?
The BBC once showed a programme that asked whether the Ten Commandments should be revised for the modern world. Those of us who have been brought up to respect the Ten Commandments as God's unchanging rules for all mankind - give or take a few oxen and asses - find the whole idea of revising them a sick joke. We feel that parliament might just as well try to pass a law to change the force of gravitation or the speed of light. God built the moral law into the fabric of the universe just as he built in the laws of physics.
But when it comes to God's laws on marriage and how to live it, we may not feel so sure. Perhaps in that case God was only concerned with a society long ago and far away. Maybe those rules should be revised - for the new millennium, as pundits like to say. After all, just think how society has changed in the last half century. Here's an extract supposedly from a 1950s home economics textbook entitled "The Good Wives' Guide", written by an unknown woman.
"Have dinner ready. Plan ahead, even the night before, to have a delicious meal ready on time for his return. This is a way of letting him know that you have been thinking about him and are concerned about his needs. Most men are hungry when they come home and the prospect of a good meal (especially his favourite dish) is part of the warm welcome needed.
"Prepare yourself: Take 15 minutes to rest so you'll be refreshed when he arrives. Touch up your make-up, put a ribbon in your hair and be fresh-looking. He has just been with a lot of work weary people. Be a little gay and a little more interesting for him. His boring day may need a lift and one of your duties is to provide it. Clear away the clutter. Make one last trip through the main part of the house just before your husband arrives. Gather up schoolbooks, toys, paper etc. and then run a dust cloth over the tables.
"Over the cooler months of the year you should prepare and light a fire for him to unwind by. Your husband will feel he has reached ahaven of rest and order, and it will give you a lift too. After all, catering for his comfort will provide you with immense personalsatisfaction."
"Remember, he is the master of the house and as such will alwaysexercise his will with fairness and truthfulness. You have no right toquestion him. A good wife always knows her place."
That appears in the section headed 'Jokes' in a web site devoted to weddings. Yesterday's serious advice is today's joke. Couldn't it be the same with the Bible's instructions on living the married life? Did I detect a stiffening of muscles as the Epistle to the Ephesians was being read this evening, betokening a determination to reject that particular part of the Bible? Shall we look at it rather carefully, and see whether it really is God's word for all time, or simply a set of prejudiced opinions by a first century Jewish bachelor? Remember that, as a Rabbi said, "Success in marriage is more than finding the right person: it is a matter of being the right person." Let's begin with these instructions:
"Husbands should love their wives just as Christ loved the Church and sacrificed himself for her to make her holy. He made her clean by washing her in water with a form of words, so that when he took her to himself she would be glorious, with no speck or wrinkle or anything like that, but holy and faultless. In the same way, husbands must love their wives as they love their own bodies."
We begin with husbands, then. And as soon as St Paul has said "Husbands should love their wives," (by the way, is that out of date, do you think?) he starts talking of Jesus, his favourite subject. As soon as he thinks of a loving husband, and the depth of that love, he thinks of the love that Jesus had for his friends. It's a love that has no limit, a love that led him to sacrifice himself for his friends. Of course Mother Teresa, as a celibate person, could know nothing about love (well, cynical journalists seem to think that only married people can know anything about it), but she did say this: "I have found the paradox that if I love until it hurts, then there is no hurt, but only more love." Jesus himself knew well what loving without limit meant: "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." And yet that love that led him to sacrifice himself did not make him a weakling. He won the loyalty and trust and obedience of his disciples, and he was not afraid to give them instructions, and to stand by them when they protested: remember how he told the fishermen to let down their nets, and after protesting that they had already been fishing all night and had caught nothing, they obeyed. And note the result: they had a magnificent haul of fish. So Jesus' authority was exercised for their benefit. I can't think of a single time when Jesus gave an order for the sake of his own comfort.
That's the role model that St Paul sets before husbands. It's to love their wives to the point of sacrifice, and if they take the lead it's for the benefit of their wives. We make jokes about men who can't or won't take a lead; like this one: 'It doesn't matter how often a married man changes his job, he still ends up with the same boss.' For St Paul, loving in a wholehearted, self-sacrificing way doesn't conflict with the duty of being the head of the household. It's to love their wives as they love their own bodies, no less. As St Paul points out, reasonably enough, "A man never hates his own body, but he feeds it and looks after it." In fact St Paul's conclusion is that "for a man to love his wife is for him to love himself." But of course that is all out of date, and anyway St Paul was a woman-hater. Or was he? So far it doesn't seem to me as if he was. Strangely enough, these instructions on being a husband come in the section of the letter headed by this: "Give way to one another in obedience to Christ." They are just one example of applying that general rule. And they set such sky-high standards for husbands that I cannot imagine any husband claiming to have lived up to them perfectly.
So we turn to wives. Everyone recognises that the role of men and women in marriage is different. "A perfect wife," says one wit, "is one who helps the husband with the dishes." I've been going round for the past few days telling people the following piece of wisdom from a woman: "To be happy with a man you must understand him a lot and love him a little. To be happy with a woman you must love her a lot and not try to understand her at all." (Helen Rowland) We should not be surprised if a woman's love shows itself in different ways. We should not be taken aback too much to read this, again under the heading: "Give way to one another in obedience to Christ": "As the Church submits to Christ, so should wives to their husbands, in everything."
This is where our 21st century reactions leap into top gear. We immediately picture a Victorian wife pounding the washtub with a pole, the way we watched it in 'The 1900 House' a few years back, while an idle husband sits smoking his pipe with a male friend in the parlour and occasionally orders his wife to bring a dish of tea or put more coals on the fire. And we say 'Never again! We shan't return to that domestic subservient hell.' And quite right, too. Not that there is much chance of it, after the coming of electrical appliances that do the washing for us, and are the equivalent of keeping two or three domestic servants in our homes. But is that domestic subservient hell what the Bible is advocating? Is the idle man in the parlour remotely like the Christlike self-sacrificing head of the home we have just been describing? And bearing in mind the Jewish idea of the ideal wife that St Paul must have learned as a child, the combination of successful businesswoman, manager, employer and Jewish Momma that the book of Proverbs describes, I can't see him sharing our horror-vision of the downtrodden skivvy.
So what is submission? It is the natural attitude of anyone to Jesus when we realise how great his love for us is, and how much he has done for us:
Perfect submission, all is at rest;
I in my Saviour am happy and blest.
It was the attitude of Jesus to his heavenly Father when he prayed in the garden just before being arrested and killed:
My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me:
nevertheless, not what I wish, but what you wish.
It is the natural attitude of a loving wife to the self-sacrificing Christlike love of her husband, and of the loving husband to his wife who is to him 'glorious, with no speck or wrinkle or anything like that, but holy and faultless,' to use the words of that "woman-hater" St Paul.
Contrast that with what a couple said to me some years ago when the question of who was to be head of the household came up. They said "Whichever of us earns more money." I can't get my head around that. It seems to leave love and duty right out of the thinking. It seems to reduce marriage to a business contract. President Ford and his wife got it more nearly right when they drew up a private contract before their marriage in 1948. Mrs Ford said "We decided that a successful marriage is never really a 50-50 proposition and settled for a 75-25 arrangement. Sometimes the 75 would emanate from my side.Sometimes it would have to be Jerry's gesture. We have carefully worked out the art of generous compromise." You can see what she means. But the writer Larry Christenson got it right, too, when he said: "Scripture knows nothing of a 50-50 'democratic' marriage. God's order is 100-100. The wife is 100% a wife, the husband 100% a husband." There is a great peace and joy in being able to give yourself 100% to one who loves you 100%. It also takes great effort. St Francis de Sales said "The state of marriage is one that requires more virtue and constancy than any other; it is a perpetual exercise of mortification." That's just another way of talking of the self-sacrifice that we've already discussed. It's not enough to have rosy dreams. Marriage is our last, best chance to grow up. (Joseph Barth)
There is so much more to be said. I have concentrated on just a few verses from the letter to the Ephesians, and I know how many more questions are crying out to be addressed. The Germans have a proverb: Marriage is heaven and hell. I've concentrated on the heaven that there can be in marriage. Despite the downside, most people find that it is worth it. Dr Johnson said: "Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures." I'm not sure that all the joyful monks and nuns, and others of us who seem called to live single would agree that celibacy has no pleasures. God can make the single state of life a blessed one, if we put him first in it. But for the majority the way is in couples, and despite the varied lifestyles that are now socially more or less acceptable, marriage is God's way for living in couples.
And then there is the whole question of what happens when one party in a marriage ceases to act in any way like the husband or wife St Paul pictures. Is there a point when it becomes literally impossible for the other party to fulfil their marriage vows? Is there a point when the marriage is dead and should be given a decent burial? What of the man who was accused of deserting his wife, and replied "I'm not a deserter - I'm a refugee!"? Was the mayor of San Franciso right to license same-sex marriages last week? The Church of England has been trying to deal with the question, and no doubt the dust will settle in time and we shall see an attitude which is at the same time true to God's word and alive to the multiplicity of human situations around.
But one sermon cannot tackle everything. I should like to leave you with the delight put before us in the Song of Songs, where the woman sings to her husband: "There is a fragrance about you; the sound of your name recalls it. No woman could help loving you." and he sings in return: "Your hair is beautiful upon your cheeks and falls along your neck like jewels." And if some cynic says that such passions soon fade and are replaced by dull habit, let me quote you what a woman in her seventies told me some years ago. She said: "When I see your father unexpectedly, my heart still gives a litle leap." Fortunately, the woman speaking thus about my father was my mother, speaking after very many years of living marriage the way the Bible sets it forth, and finding that in this, as in every other part of life, God honours our obedience and gives his lasting joy.
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Thursday 20th of November 2008
