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 38 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.
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 for 10am let alone
8am 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!
