Orjan Borgen & Courtney Jiskoot marriage blessing St Mary, Balcombe 3.9.22

This is a remarkable coming together set within a weekend of celebration for Courtney and Orjan. We come to rural Sussex from rural Norway and many other places, some less beautiful than this, to see Orjan and Courtney ‘present their bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God’, to Him and to one another.

It is my privilege to celebrate their love before God and bless their aspirations in the presence of their families and friends joined by their marriage.

They met as they worked together at Schlumberger oil field near Orjan’s home in the little Norwegian town of Os near Bergen. In working together to harvest gifts from below the earth they paved the way for reaping a harvest from heaven, where Christians believe marriage is prepared. Today they welcome the anointing of the Holy Spirit from heaven. Previously as Christians they have each welcomed the anointing of the same Holy Spirit in baptism, confirmation and Holy Communion. Today they seek that anointing to bless their forward journey in life together.

Courtney grew up near here in Tunbridge Wells where she was involved in St John’s. Church, spent time volunteering and was part of the youth group. After studying Geology at the University of Bristol she spent a year studying abroad in California which broadened her vision and led her on to work in oil in Malaysia and then Norway, where she met Orjan who worked at the same company. To quote Courtney on Orjan: ‘Kind and charitable…when we did start dating, I don’t think it took me very long to realise this was the man I wanted to marry. There’s never been anything left unsaid between us to fester, we address issues quickly, partially out of fear that this might take away from our sense of intimacy... Marriage isn’t something either of us wanted to enter into lightly, but see it as the next challenge and commitment to each other’.

Orjan describes himself as being a sports and nutrition fanatic throughout his youth. He joined the military for a year (Norwegian National Service). After that, 13 years ago, he started working for Schlumberger and met Courtney around 6 years ago. I quote Orjan: ‘I’m looking forward to marriage, it’s the love of my life who I want to be with forever. I want our marriage to be our commitment to each other throughout the darkness and light, using communication and honesty’.

Both Courtney and Orjan are inspired by and deeply grateful for the example of their parents’ marriages: Mark and Jodie for 35 years and Nina and Leifgunner for 36 years. As in the first reading they chose, they seek their young love to develop in beauty into that sort of old love, held ‘in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death do us part’.

The couple’s aspirations are also expressed in the scripture they chose from the letter of Saint Paul to the Romans Chapter 12 especially verses 9-13: ‘Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honour. Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers’. 

As Orjan and Courtney join their lives before God today, they seek a special anointing from the Spirit to build more of his outgoing love within their lives. 

A Christian marriage is designed to be a beacon of unity in a divided and disarrayed world, a place where God's universal purpose is revealed in the joining of two people of his making. 

Christian marriage as a sacrament is a sign of something very beautiful and far reaching - God's purposeful drawing into unity of all things.

Thank the Lord however that Christian sacraments are not just signs but effective signs. Today God promises Orjan and Courtney help to effect the harmony marriage is called to become. 

No way in human terms can husband and wife achieve that total love and unity the Bible speaks of. They need - and on their wedding day receive - an open line to the Lord himself, a special account of grace that can be drawn upon when the going gets rough. This is the grace that is given in the sacrament of marriage, something Courtney and Orjan have lacked up to this day and something that will develop in significance according to their faith.

Like many couples before them they will discover that prayers are answered, like "I can't bear with this, Lord, anymore, but please, since you can, you bear with this through me. I can't forgive - you forgive through me. I can't be patient, you be patient in me by the gift of your Spirit."

In this way couples draw on the account opened for them today with the Lord, so to speak. It is always sad to see a husband and wife giving up at a human level when they have the supernatural resources of the sacrament of marriage at hand - if only they had faith, as a sort of cheque book, to draw on this account. St. James is right when he says in Chapter 4v2 of his letter "you do not have because you do not ask".

May Orjan and Courtney not go without God's richest blessings. May their marriage be a truly effective sign of unity in a divided world ‘extending hospitality to strangers’ becoming a shelter to many from the storms of life. May they live to see their children's children and a world growing more into the unity which is God's purpose.

Let’s reflect for a minute or so on God’s word to us before we proceed.

St Mary, Balcombe Trinity Sunday 12th June 2022

 

Today we celebrate the revelation of God as an eternal fellowship of love, three persons equal in majesty, undivided in splendour, yet one God.

The doctrine of the most holy and undivided Trinity is challenging, relevant, intriguing and essential – four headings to steer our delving this morning into foundational truth and life.

Firstly it’s a challenge. Reason takes you so far in Christianity. We could never have invented God in three persons, its revealed truth. Then you have the question of weighing other revelations – Islam and Hinduism besides the Judaism from which the Trinitarian revelation came. 

Preachers go on leave this Sunday for fear of a seemingly cold, calculated, mathematical doctrine. Three in one and one in three. Why three? Why not one, says Islam, why not more says Hinduism, why not none says the atheist mocking our feeble attempts to get our mind round God three in one.

There’s the challenge set before us in Trinitarian faith but that challenge is based on historical events. These clearly reveal the nature of God in the coming of Jesus, whose death and resurrection we’ve been following up to Ascension Day, and the coming of the Spirit on Pentecost Day. It’s a challenge that might lead you to the library or the internet so you can better answer for your faith to those who believe in one God, no God or many gods as opposed to one God in three persons.

Secondly the doctrine of the Trinity is utterly relevant. I’ve been busy preparing couples for marriage recently and how good that’s been, yes, how countercultural even given the falling away in this commitment. Marriage as a union of life-giving love points us to the Trinity, because human beings are in the image of God who is himself a union of life-giving love. Keeping true to ourselves as human beings, and true to the life-giving nature of marriage is keeping true to God as he has revealed himself to us.  God as love within himself. How could God be so without the distinction of persons within him? 

Challenging, relevant – thirdly the doctrine of God should be intriguing. The eternal fellowship of love that is God draws us into himself. What after all is the Church for other than to serve God’s purpose to bring as many souls on earth as possible into fellowship with him? 

The doctrine of the Trinity is revealed first of all in Our Lord’s coming into a human family with Mary and Joseph, into village life in Nazareth, then into the missionary partnership of the disciples. That divine society continues after his resurrection and the gift of the Spirit as one, holy catholic and apostolic church which is God’s never-ending family!

How intriguing God is, and we are. If you want evidence for God look in the mirror and read Psalm 8 You have made (us) little lower than the angels and crown (us) with glory and honour. More than that, a human being in isolation isn’t a true human for, in John Donne’s words, no man is an island. What’s intriguing about God as divine society mirrors what we find intriguing about ourselves, namely our desire for society and friendship. This desire will be fully satisfied only in the communion of saints who can be thought of as standing near God as a corona or crown around the sun.

Challenging, relevant, intriguing – lastly the Trinitarian doctrine of God is essential.

It is essential because Christianity is a religion of salvation and that salvation stands or falls on the divinity of Jesus Christ. We read Jesus words in today’s Gospel all that the Father has is mine…the Spirit will take what is mine and declare it to you (John 16:15). 

Does my eternal destiny depend on my own good works, lacking as they are, or on a relationship freely offered me by God in his Son? 

In Jesus do we really meet with God himself? 

These, as they say, are the twenty four thousand dollar questions hidden behind keeping a feast day for the Blessed Trinity. 

The doctrine might sound cold and mathematical but it follows a logic of love, love beyond all measure, extravagant, unconditional love for God so loved the world that he gave his only Son Jesus Christ so that all who believe in him should not perish but have everlasting life. (John 3:16)

To believe this is to believe God isn’t One but One God in three persons. 

It’s challenging to so believe – God is God and has revealed himself in this way and not another way.

It’s relevant - the way we see God affects the way we see ourselves and steers us from unworthy pursuits.

It’s intriguing because the loving fellowship of God in three persons chimes in with our sociable nature and draws it to joyful completion in the communion of saints

It’s essential doctrine because without it the divinity of Christ falls, the word of God is emptied of power and the sacraments become empty ritual as God’s coming to us in Jesus and the Spirit is denied.

May all I have shared enrich the eucharist we now offer through, with and in Jesus Christ, to whom, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, be all might, majesty, dominion and power now and for evermore. Amen.

Trinity 19 (27th of Year) Marriage - Ascension Haywards Heath 7th Oct 2018

Joe and Lydia phoned about getting married. Lydia had been married before. We spent two hours together looking at how a service of prayer and dedication after a civil marriage might fit the bill and they agreed to that as a principled way forward.

I visited Harry and Joan whose son Kevin had just come out to them as gay and wanted to get married in Church. We discussed how the love of Jesus is for us all, heterosexual or homosexual, though when it comes to institutions marriage in his and our book isn’t same-sex.

Bella and Luke are cohabiting without marriage but came to me to seek baptism for little David. They want the best for him. I explained the best for Christians involves marriage so, after a few meetings, they fix a date for David’s baptism whilst committing to marriage the next year.

Ingrid is a Christian student alarmed by the expectation at College that full sexual relations follow just brief acquaintance. In conversation with her I encourage her to hold fast to belief that sexual intercourse is a union of life-giving love and not just physical gratification and to pray for God to lead her to the right man to be her husband.

Roger shares with me his addiction to internet pornography which has severed his understanding of sex from loving commitment. I help him find God’s forgiveness and turn the page on this so he is made free to socialise and find himself a life partner of God’s choice.

I thought I’d share some pastoral encounters I’ve had over my 41 years as a priest, changing names, as a way of bringing sense out of  today’s scripture with its focus on the sacrament of marriage.

We read in the holy Gospel from Mark 10.7-10 that from the beginning of creation, “God made them male and female.” “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.’

Our Lord draws his teaching from our first reading, Genesis 1.21-24 which ends with the injunction Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.

In Mark Chapter 10 Our Lord challenges this maltreatment of women and the culture of easy divorce weighted towards men. He goes out of his way to uphold marriage as first conceived in Genesis over against the easy divorce of his day as we read in the Gospel v11-12 He said to them, ‘Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.’

Marriage according to Christ is the union of man and woman for life and what a high bar it can be in a society where 2014 statistics show 34% of marriages are expected to end in divorce by the 20th wedding anniversary, an unprecedented phenomenon bringing pain to many in our close acquaintance.

My talk with Joe and Lydia involved a culture clash. They came to me expecting to repeat vows in Church as it can happen in law, and I had a task I frequently have of explaining that the law gives us the right to do many things that aren’t right. In Christian marriage we seek irrevocable love, which means the sort of love Jesus showed on the cross which can never be called back. We fall short of that love, yes, so repeating wedding vows in the lifetime of a previous spouse has to have a difference about it which, in Church, looks to a merciful Redeemer to give a new start based on being honest before God.

With Kevin I have to explain how the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act may have rewritten marriage on the UK statute books to make husband and wife gender neutral but the Church of Jesus Christ is exempted. In Christianity marriage remains a life-long faithful  commitment between a man and a woman, ordained by nature, and by God for the creation of the family and future generations. Kevin’s love for Andrew may be from God, as is all friendship, and that sort of love the Church can bless, but not a physical union that neither nature nor God in his Word or his Church in her teaching can sanction. The recent change in the law is a privatising of marriage so its content is now whatever the couple wish to construct.

Scripture says – and Mark 10:7-8 is the clearest text of all - a man shall… be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.

In same sex marriage things don’t fit together in the plain sense of marriage. Hearts do fit together though, as for Kevin and Andrew, so that my pastoral encounter, or anyone of our encounters with gay couples, is a struggle from the point of view of balancing Christian hospitality and teaching. I remember meeting a lesbian couple who were having twins. Whilst wishing them the best at a human level I left profoundly troubled in heart at this form of parenthood that severs the unitive and procreative aspects of marriage.  

Bella and Luke cohabiting without marriage were in one sense no different to Kevin and Andrew but this pastoral encounter, related to the request for David’s baptism, was more a matter of talking through how marriage in Christianity is far more than an expensive ceremony. You can get married for less than £10,000 and it was great to see them as parents publicly celebrating the love that brought David into the world as the family headed for commitment to Our Lord at his baptism.

For Ingrid, the Christian student alarmed by promiscuity at College and her own shortcomings, and Roger struggling with viewing pornography, my main task as a priest was to remind them of the high standards Our Lord expects alongside his mercy, which covers sexual sins as much as any other, complicated through a strange shame. I quote C.S.Lewis on God’s mercy. No amount of falls will really undo us if we keep picking our- selves up each time. We shall of course be very muddy and tattered children by the time we reach home. But the bathrooms are all ready, the towels put out, and the clean clothes are in the airing cupboard. The only fatal thing is to lose one’s temper and give it up. It is when we notice the dirt that God is most present in us; it is the very sign of His presence.

It’s my earnest prayer that what I share from God’s Word this morning far from defeating us helps our empowerment as witnesses of humanity put into their right mind by Jesus Christ. Over the last half century contraception has given new controls to parents who in past ages saw the procreative side of marriage damaging the unitive or love side. Now we’ve turned the circle with such emphasis on the unitive side that those procreated, the children we have, fewer and more blessed materially, are for one in three families casualties of divorce.

There’s little we can do save knowing and handing on Christian teaching on the ideals of marriage and celibacy as appropriate, as well as the ways we have been helped in our own walk by the grace and the forgiving mercy of God.  

Sex outside marriage is a sin, as Christ makes clear in today’s Gospel, but context and blameworthiness is a separate issue. In today’s culture I would say having sex outside marriage is less blameworthy since folk no longer know or understand or follow the way of Christ, which is partly our fault, hence my not ducking a troublesome issue even at 8.30am on a Sunday morning. As a Church, we’ll get nowhere unless we hold ourselves to Jesus’ teaching so our words and deed fit together. In walking the talk it’s desperately important not to make the best the enemy of the good. Our Lord sets forth the best but is forgiving to those who fall short. We should applaud openly Christian gays, bisexuals and transgender folk and look to them for guidance on how best you live close to Jesus within a sexual minority.

Many of us will know second marriages where God is evidently at work and first marriages where he needs to get in more, so to speak, or same-sex unions that seem more godly than heterosexual unions. This is the human reality but it would become so much more inhuman without the wise standard Jesus sets us. The sayings of Jesus are unlike the sayings of say the Buddha. Jesus not only gave his teaching, he gave us his life to seal it by his release of the Holy Spirit able to empower us not just to hear what he says but to do what he says and to do it cheerfully.  There is no word of God without power. Let’s believe it – however much it might cost!

Trinity 6 Marriage renewal 7th July 2013

Later on this morning we’ll be having a presentation from Laurence and Rebeka Hardy, married 60 years ago in St Giles, as part of a focus on marriage renewal which explains my changing the Gospel reading.

Their presentation is based on Gary Chapman’s book The language of love with a reminder love isn't love unless expressed and acted out.

This church was built because of love expressed and acted out. Its spire points to Love unbounded and the sacraments celebrated under its roof for almost 1000 years have invoked that love.

This morning at the eucharist we’re seeking a special anointing in that love, the love that made us, and all that is, and loved us so much as to give himself up for us all.

The love within married couples is meant to reflect that love – love that can’t be taken back. As God gave himself up to death in Jesus we give ourselves to one another for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death do us part.

The Christian religion holds us to a high standard as we heard in the Gospel reading which has words used in a Christian marriage: what God has joined together, let no one separate.

Marriage can’t be dissolved in the Christian ideal because God’s love can’t be dissolved. Human love can dissolve, but if Christ is in our lives there’s a higher indissoluble power at work.

My song is love unknown Samuel Crossman wrote speaking of my Saviour’s love to me, love to the loveless shown that they might lovely be.

What beautiful words!  Love to the loveless shown that they might lovely be. God in love treats us loveless beings beyond our wildest dreams so as to lift us up into his possibilities and teach us to do the same. For this is the practical truth of Christianity: husbands and wives and children do better when treated better than they deserve! This is what God shows us in the unmerited love he gives to every believer.

The sacrament of marriage is the language of such love. Words of affirmation, acts of service, quality time together, giving presents, touch (Gary Chapman) – all of these mirror how God acts towards us once we enter relationship with him.

I have loved you from the foundation of the world he says in scripture. See my Cross, see and share the bread and wine which is my body and blood, offered for you – accept my love: love to the loveless shown that they might lovely be.

Marriage isn’t easy - but when God asks something of us he gives us the wherewithal to complete the task. Christian marriage is a particular anointing in the Holy Spirit and that anointing continues throughout life. Such anointing helps husbands and wives and all of us, whatever our state of life, to rise above worldly standards into those of Jesus Christ.

The Christian religion holds us to a high standard in the divorce friendly culture we inhabit: what God has joined together, let no one separate.

There is no word of God without power! What God has joined together, let no one separate. When we recognise the promise of God and hold to it we see things changing all around us mainly because we see things changing within us through the destruction of negative attitudes.

There is no word of God without power! May that power be with us by his Spirit as we keep fellowship with the Lord and with one another seeking him in prayer and sacrament, through the Bible and Christian fellowship.

Above all may it be ours in the eucharist we celebrate and receive.

Trinity 18 27th of Year Marriage 7th October 2012

Today’s readings centre on the sacrament of marriage.

How many sacraments are there?

The Church of England has seven sacraments of which two baptism and eucharist are given special status with the other five – marriage, ordination, confession, confirmation and anointing – named as lesser sacraments.

A sacrament is an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. The outward sign of water is a sign of baptism’s grace of cleansing and renewal. The outward sign of bread and wine is the sign of Christ’s body and blood. The oil of anointing is the outward sign of God’s healing. The bishop’s or priest’s hands and voice are the outward sign in confession, confirmation and ordination.

What about marriage? What is the outward sign?

The ring? No. The sign of marriage is the vows by which husband and wife give themselves to one another before God.

What is the inward grace of marriage?

Life-long union. Someone reads Mark 10.7-10 But from the beginning of creation, “God made them male and female.” “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.’

Our Lord draws his teaching from our first reading, Genesis 1.21-24: So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, ‘This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one shall be called Woman, for out of Man this one was taken.’ Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.

The rib story is just that, a story, one that teaches truth, though - the truth that men and women share a common humanity and are designed to complement one another. Vive la difference!

That passage has been abused to argue for the subordination of women so that in Our Lord’s day the all male Rabbi’s would build arguments for divorce to please their fellow men which included ‘she can’t cook as I want’. In Mark Chapter 10 Our Lord challenges this maltreatment of women and the culture of easy divorce weighted towards men. He goes out of his way to uphold marriage as first conceived in Genesis over against the easy divorce of his day as we read in the Gospel v11-12 He said to them, ‘Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.’

Marriage according to Christ is indissoluble – it can’t be dissolved.

It’s a high bar we struggle to reach up to. Like the high bar set in last week’s Gospel when he says if your eye offends you pluck it out.

If the food’s no good the answer isn’t divorce. ‘Pluck your eye out rather than do so’ is the sense of Our Lord’s teaching against breaking a marriage. That teaching has been a source of encouragement to married couples for 20 centuries.

Or should I say discouragement? At times when people are lured by the flesh to look elsewhere they’ve been discouraged from following those lusts by obedience to the wisdom of Jesus.

We need the wisdom of Jesus as much today as ever. Figures published by the Office for National Statistics show divorce rates in England and Wales increased by 5% between 2009 and 2010, from 114,000 to 120,000.

High Court Judge Sir Paul Coleridge made headlines in May for describing marriage breakdown as one of the "most destructive scourges" in Britain. Sir Paul felt compelled to speak out because of the "unprecedented scale of the problem". He’s launched the Marriage Foundation charity to improve public understanding of the "nature, benefits and importance of marriage and how healthy married relationships provide the most stable environment in which to raise children". Interesting that today’s Gospel ends with just that concern, about the welfare of children, having made clear the importance of the faithfulness in marriage that’s so helpful to this.

How does the Church, how do we, today, make sense of Christ’s teaching against divorce?

Each denomination has a pastoral policy on second marriage that allows for what Jesus called hardness of heart in v5. Some marriage failures come, as some of you know, even where there is much soft hearted generosity.  Our Lord taught and showed us soft hearted, irrevocable love.   On Calvary he gave himself as God does, without thought of taking back his gift.

That’s God! Softhearted! Never takes himself back from anyone - only from sin.

We humans love but our love can be hard hearted. When we say ‘I love you’ it can mean ‘I love me and want you’! For all of that it’s the noblest act of a human being to say, as many of us in Church have said to someone, ‘I take you...to love and to cherish. Till death us do part...all that I am I give to you, and all that I have I share with you, within the love of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.’

The nature of the marriage vow, the outward sign of a sacrament, makes repeating it to someone else, within the life time of your spouse, difficult.  For most Churches it is impossible to do so. That’s the position at St Giles. In Christianity, in Christ, a vow of love is a vow of love.  It goes against the grain of Christianity, of Christ, to take love back again.

So what of those who've got no option but to do so?

Roman Catholics have to seek the annulment of their first marriage. If you’re Free Church you fall back on a less sacramental and more human view of marriage and start folk over again. As Anglicans we offer a compromise. Our Service of Prayer and Dedication after Civil Marriage has quite a take up, for the honest service it is, in publicly admitting past failure and seeking God’s blessing on a new start.

If remarriage after divorce seems the unforgiveable sin, which it isn’t, it’s because the Church, being held to Jesus’ teaching, has to protect the integrity of word and deed as best she can. In doing so we try not to make the best the enemy of the good. Our Lord set high standards but was forgiving to those who fell short of them.

Many of us will know second marriages where God is evidently at work and first marriages where he needs to get in more, so to speak. This is the human reality but it would become so much more inhuman without the wise standard Jesus sets us .

If the outward and visible sign of marriage is the making of life-long vows to each other the inward and spiritual grace is life-long union. When you marry in Church you receive a special anointing from God to help you keep your vows that’ll always be there for you if you seek it.

It is an excellent practice for married couples to seek that grace together from time to time which is why on Sunday 7^th July we’re inviting couples to renew their marriage vows together at this service.

The sayings of Jesus are unlike the sayings of say the Buddha. Jesus not only gave his teaching, he gave us his life to seal it. By his life, death and resurrection Jesus Christ is able to empower us not just to hear what he says but to do what he says and to do it cheerfully.

What God has joined together, let no one separate – this is the word of Jesus. There is no word of God without power.

Let’s believe it – however much is might cost!