August 22, 2021
Message: “What’s So Good about Marriage? Grace”
Scripture: Mark 10:2-9
Prelude: Rosemary Nettrouer
Announcements
Thank you, Rosemary, for the music. Thanks for technical support by Michael Barrett, Joe Dawley, and Erin DeGroot, with music coordination by Dawn Blue.
- Thank you for wearing your mask to help protect the unvaccinated among us. – We are monitoring the current situation and believe the safety measures we have in place are good enough.
- Offering plates are near the front and the back of the meeting room. Thank you!
- We are worshiping in person and live streaming on Facebook and the church website (wichitaquakers.org).
- Please feel free to share our worship with your Facebook friends by posting a link.
- Please also feel free to comment on the Facebook page with prayer concerns, announcements, or words of ministry.
- And if you worship with us online only and would like to be more connected, please leave a message on the Facebook page or the church website.
- Church activities this week:
- Sunday, August 22, 11:00 am, Monthly Meeting
- Tuesday, August 24, 7:00 pm, Good Times Squares Dance
- Friday, August 27, Good Times Squares Dance
- Saturday, August 28, 1:00 pm, Ministry and Counsel, membership review brown bag
Welcome & Greeting
Music: “The Love of God,” Hymn #290
Call to Worship: 2 Corinthians 4:6ff (The Message)
… God said, “Light up the darkness!” and our lives filled up with light as we saw and understood God in the face of Christ, all bright and beautiful. If you only look at us, you might well miss the brightness. We carry this precious Message around in the unadorned clay pots of our ordinary lives. That’s to prevent anyone from confusing God’s incomparable power with us. As it is, there’s not much chance of that. You know for yourselves that we’re not much to look at. We’ve been surrounded and battered by troubles, but we’re not demoralized; we’re not sure what to do, but we know that God knows what to do; we’ve been spiritually terrorized, but God hasn’t left our side; we’ve been thrown down, but we haven’t broken.
Centering Meditation
Music: “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing” (Duet by Judy Blue and Rosemary)
Prayer Concerns
- Our church
- People affected by Covid
- Nikki Holland (Belize, FUM) reacting to a severe allergic response following a second Covid-19 AstraZeneca vaccination
- Debbie Busch (sister of Greg Newby and Vonda Schuster) has it, is improving
- Catherine’s cousin Luke, improving but still having breathing problems
- Dan Schuster has it, is going OK
- Brad Blue (firefighter, son of Judy Blue) has tested positive
- Adversity around the world, for example, Afghanistan, Haiti, the pandemic, and forest fires
- Students, teachers, administrators, staff, families (specially mentioned Tanner Mallonee, schools where Dawn Blue and Rhonda Newby work, and Catherine’s granddaughter Cora starting at CUNY)
Pastoral Prayer
Creator God,
you call us to love and serve you
with body, mind, and spirit
through loving your creation
and our sisters and brothers.
Open our hearts in compassion
on behalf of the needs of the church and the world.
Message: “What’s So Good about Marriage? Grace”
Scripture: Mark 10:2-9
At our June Monthly Meeting for worship with attention to business, we suggested that maybe it’s time to consider approving Great Plains Yearly Meeting’s “Statement of Inclusion.”
In light of that, I embarked on a series of messages about the theology of marriage and sexuality. I have looked at Genesis 1 as well as the passages of the Bible that people point to when they want to support condemning same-sex relationships. Those are Genesis 19 (the story of Sodom and Gomorrah), Leviticus 18 and 20 (the rules about holy living), and Romans 1 (Paul’s perspective) along with the lists in 1 Corinthians 6 and 1 Timothy 1.
In the end, those passages don’t provide as strong a foundation for the condemning point of view as might at first appear. At least in part that’s because the Bible doesn’t answer the questions we are asking, and it simply doesn’t consider the idea of a sexual orientation in which one might understand oneself as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transexual, or queer. Nor does the Bible consider the possibility of a loving, committed same-sex relationship or marriage (Griffith dissertation, 13).
So, now I’m looking at the Western Christian theology of marriage to see how it might apply to the questions that we’re trying to find answers to, beginning with the thoughts of Augustine, a bishop in northern Africa, who tackled the theology of marriage in the year 401.
Last week I talked about children as one of the things that’s good about marriage. I said, “One reason marriage is good is because it provides for the having and raising of children. And some people argue that because same-sex couples can’t have children the usual way, that’s one reason Christians ought to say no to same-sex relationships.”
I also said that, on the other hand, “the Christian tradition has, from its earliest days, said couples who can’t have children can participate in this good in a variety of ways. And the Christian tradition has, from its earliest days, recognized that having and raising children isn’t the only reason to get married. Loving each other has value in itself.”
Today I’m talking about marriage as a means of grace, marriage as one way we can receive God’s Light and power. Augustine talked about this grace in terms of the sacramental bond of marriage and marriage as a remedy for concupiscence. Stay with me. 😊
A sacrament, as Augustine wrote about it, is a religious ritual with two aspects. One aspect is something we do or says and the other aspect is the spiritual effect of what we do or say.
In marriage, Augustine thought, sex in the context of a pledge of mutual fidelity is the “something one does or says,” and the spiritual effect is an indissoluble bond (Griffith dissertation, 138).
Augustine got the idea of the indissoluble bond from Jesus’s teaching on marriage in Mark 10.
I am reading from Mark 10, beginning with verse 2, New Revised Standard Version:
2 Some Pharisees came, and to test [Jesus] they asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” 3 He answered them, “What did Moses command you?” 4 They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her.” 5 But Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you. 6 But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ 7 ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife,[b] 8 and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. 9 Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”
10 Then in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter. 11 He said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; 12 and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”
The only way that makes sense – that if someone remarries after divorce, they are committing adultery – is if the bond of marriage is something that endures despite a divorce, permanent, stronger than Gorilla Glue. 😊
Some sidebar notes:
- In Mark’s account, the Pharisees see divorce as something only men can do, while Jesus sees it as something women and men might do. Luke and Matthew don’t include that (Luke 16:18; Matthew 19:3ff).
- Jesus’s teaching that forbids divorce, in his day would have prevented men from setting aside a wife and leaving her without protection and without a way to support herself. It has also had some unfortunate consequences, such as keeping a wife tied to an abusive husband.
- Matthew’s account of Jesus’s teaching on divorce includes an exception: “whoever divorces his wife, except for unchastity, and marries another commits adultery” (Matthew 19:9). Most everyone agrees that Matthew added the exception because Jesus’s real teaching seemed too difficult.
The permanent bond of marriage, as Augustine thought about it, “… can serve in marriage as protection, blessing or judgment, depending on the participants. … In order for the … bond of marriage to be a blessing, Augustine advised that it ‘be guarded by husband and wife with concord and chastity.’ With effort, he believed, companionship based on respect and mutual service can grow between the two and continue into old age” (Griffith, 138). That’s the grace of the bond.
“Augustine also identified a remedy for concupiscence among the reasons marriage is good: it helps people cope with sexual lust and protects them from sin” (Griffith, 140).
1 Corinthians 7 provides biblical support for this idea, and here are the relevant verses, according to The Message:
- 2-3 It’s good for a man to have a wife, and for a woman to have a husband. Sexual drives are strong, but marriage is strong enough to contain them and provide for a balanced and fulfilling sexual life in a world of sexual disorder.
- 7-9 Sometimes I wish everyone were single like me—a simpler life in many ways! But celibacy is not for everyone any more than marriage is. God gives the gift of the single life to some, the gift of the married life to others. I do, though, tell the unmarried and widows that singleness might well be the best thing for them, as it has been for me. But if they can’t manage their desires and emotions, they should by all means go ahead and get married. The difficulties of marriage are preferable by far to a sexually tortured life as a single.
Certainly, that’s not a strong endorsement for marriage, and I would say that strong sexual desire is maybe not the best reason to get married, but there you go. 😊
These thoughts from scripture and from Augustine established within the Christian tradition the idea that a pledge of mutual fidelity forms an indissoluble bond and helps people deal with strong sexual desire.
What does that mean for same-sex relationships? Well … “Nothing on principle would prevent same-sex couples from … pledging mutual fidelity. Also, if marriage helps people deal with strong sexual desire, then anyone with such feelings could benefit from a committed relationship, and few would argue that gay or lesbian persons have need of this less than do heterosexual persons” (Griffith, 142).
In the twentieth-century, Western Christian thought on marriage began to focus on the couple’s personal relationship.
Several Anglican scholars wrote helpfully on the bond of marriage in terms of relationship.
Helen Oppenheimer “described how couples become one experientially:
What happens quite ordinarily in marriage is that a common mind is formed over the years and strengthened by joint experience, so that a husband and wife can no longer identify their separate contributions. This is evidently so in the case of their material possessions; but it is just as true that their opinions and their whole style and approach to life are not able to be disentangled as belonging to one or the other.
“Such unity requires commitment and fidelity, she said, and, in that context, ‘the physical act of sex can be comprehended, not as a be-all and end-all nor as an unworthy distraction, but as the proper physical expression of the complete commitment … which is marriage,” symbolizing and facilitating the whole relationship” (Griffith, 167). Grace.
Barbara and Morton Kelsey suggested that in intimate relations between committed partners, sex itself can be sacramental. It can lead to wholeness. “One’s beloved can become the symbol that opens the way to God.” (Griffith, 180). Grace.
Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, “saw grace as working through sexuality to teach persons ‘to be human with one another.’
Grace, for the Christian believer, is a transformation that depends in large part on knowing yourself to be seen in a certain way: as significant, as wanted.
“The body’s grace is that through loving and being loved by another human being, one can learn to love and be loved by God” (Griffith, 180).
Some people argue that only heterosexual, procreative sex can offer that grace. That is, only tab A in slot B can enhance the spiritual, relational union of a couple (Griffith, 186, 187). That seems to go against the lived experience of many.
Rowan Williams, again, “contended that, given the capacity for loving relationships to teach humans how to love and be loved by God, same-sex relationships not only share in that grace but illustrate to Christians that procreation is not the only criterion for legitimate sex. ‘Same-sex love,’ he wrote, ‘compels us to think through the processes of bodily desire and delight in their own right’” (Griffith, 193).
What’s so good about marriage? Grace — the grace that two people can become as one and that through loving and being loved by another human being, one can learn to love and be loved by God.
Open Worship:
Enjoy the quiet as a respite from life’s busyness.
Connect with God and with one another in prayer.
Open yourself to the healing Light of God’s Spirit.
Find grounding in love and gratitude.
Share vocal ministry as God leads.
Benediction
Postlude: Rosemary Nettrouer
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