Love and Marriage

 Remember the classic situation comedy 'Married....With Children?'  The opening titles play over the song 'Love and Marriage,' sung by ol' blue eyes himself, mob connected Frank Sinatra. The lyrics, as if you don't know, state 'love and marriage, love and marriage, they go together like a horse and carriage.  Let me tell you brother, you can't have one without the other.' 

I appreciate the sentiment, to be sure, and through that lens, I understand how we get to the view that we have about 1 Corinthians 13:1-13. Love and marriage, love and marriage, they go together like a horse and carriage... 1 Corinthians 13 is a passage that talks about love, to be sure, and it's a reading that we tend to associate with weddings. It's that way to the point that a movie that I really don't like, Wedding Crashers, has a side bet going that the reading will be First Corinthians 13. Like they're so sure about it that they're willing to put money on it. 

Love is patient, love is kind, and so on and so on. Such a wedding reading that you can feel confident about calling your shot that early. I've done the odd wedding in my day, but I don't think I've ever seen the Colossians 3:12 alternate reading proposed in the clip above. 1 John 4, sure, but not Colossians 3. You know what else I rarely see? Ephesians 5:22-33. That's funny, of course, because in Ephesians, the instructions are literally for married couples. I can't say the same about 1 Corinthians 13, or Colossians 3.

Quite the opposite, actually. Those readings, Colossians and 1 Corinthians, aren't (only) about marriage. To be fair, they apply to marriage as well, but only insofar as they apply to essentially all human relationships. And this is where we run up against the opening theme mentioned above. Love and marriage, love and marriage, go together like a horse and carriage, let me tell you, brother, you can have one without the other. We tend to do ourselves a great disservice when we have only one flavour of love - which leads to marriage, inevitably. 

But, for the Christian, love is not a romantic thing only. There is romantic love, to be sure, and it can be good, honorable and God-pleasing, but it's not the only type of love out there. And a big chunk of your life is spent around people with whom you are not in any kind of romantic relationship, nor do you wish to be. Yet you are still called upon to love those people. But if not romantically, then how?

First things first, you have to get past the idea that the epistle reading, from 1 Corinthians 13, is all about marriages only. It's telling you how to love other people, and that's hard to do. Love isn't an action or emotion that you reserve only for a romantic partner - the general principles of love apply to everyone. The opposite works as well, by the way. There are passages in the scriptures like Matthew 25 that tell you how you should treat the least of these - that applies to those who are directly around you all the time as well. This is a shocker to most of us - we assume that when Jesus is talking about the hungry, the naked, the sick, that these are all people whom we we will essentially never meet. They're the mythical poor, of whom we can absolve ourselves of any responsibility by having the right opinions, meanwhile there are people in our daily lives who will be very needy indeed, and we tend to walk on by. If we do provide for them, we do so resentfully, without realizing that this passage applies to everyone. In that way, you can't have the right opinion about a particular class of people all the while never seeing them, meanwhile doing nothing about the people whom you see in front of you all the time. 

One Corinthians says this too. It's not the narrow band that it keeps getting pictured as, just applying to marriages. There are a lot of people you are going to encounter on a daily basis, most of whom aren't your spouse. But they are your neighbors. Your spouse is your neighbor too, by the way. But all these people are people whom you've been called by God to love, and you, as a Christian, have to figure out how to put that love into practice. It's not supposed to be theoretical. Even we Christians don't think too often about loving our teachers, or students, or servers, or anything like that, but we're called to do it. And because our notion of love only exists in a very narrow band, we tend to get perplexed, and resort to politeness, or something like that, instead of love. But we're called to love them. 

Around such people, we are supposed to be patient, and kind. We are supposed to hope all things, believe all things, endure all things, etc. Those are instructions for life, not just for intimacy. Yes, you're supposed to love your spouse differently than you love your waitress (please, for goodness sake, don't get that wrong), but in application not in principle. The underlying principles of love don't change based on who they are applied to.  And that's part of the reason that church attendance, Bible reading, and all that are as important as they are - if you're only around a church when it's wedding season, like the Wedding Crashers, you would end up assuming that love is something confined to a marriage. But it's not. It's a matter of universal principles that are to be applied to your neighbor, waitress, spouse, children, parents, whoever. 

Understanding this is great. For when the Bible tells you to love your neighbor, it sort of just drops that on you and expects you to figure it out. Until you realize that there are specific, principled instructions that are right there, and there for you to follow. And these are the principles through which Jesus Christ our savior loves us. Not seeking his own way, bearing all things and believing in us. And like with everything else, we love because he first loved us.

Contempt

 Here's a truism: Familiarity breeds contempt. That should be obvious enough to all of us, especially those of us who are in the church. Back in the day when I was in university, everyone and his or her dog were Buddhists. Back in the late 90s, Buddhism was seen as cool, exotic and fascinating. Not like your tired, played out local Lutheran church, those Buddhist monks had a real, authentic spirituality, that was totally connected to the world, and to the spiritual realm in a way that the local Anglican church wasn't. 

None of this should be news, but there was a reason why all that happened at once - the good people of the University of Calgary had become cold to the idea of the Christian faith of their ancestors, and had begun to look for something new. And it was the novelty that drove things. I know I've quoted this before, but there was a bit from 'Family Guy,' where Peter mentioned that he could see into his neighbor Bonnie's room. Stewie responded by saying "Wait a minute, Lois is way hotter than Bonnie! Oh, I get it. It's worse, but it's different.' That kind of sums things up right there. The quest for novelty can lead to you destroying a marriage for something that isn't better, but is different. And if you'll do it for a marriage, you'll probably do it with God, too.

Our Old Testament reading comes to us from Nehemiah, and part of what goes into wrestling with the Bible comes from a realization that this is telling a long story over thousands of years. Each reading is fairly brief, and doesn't give you much context. And that's a shame, given how much context is required. There are things in the readings that suggest something that is happening essentially right out of frame, and it's only when you pry a little deeper that you work out why those things are happening.  In Nehemiah, they are rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem. 

It's catchy, and it's a nice concept, to rebuild the walls and to put Jerusalem back together. But that brings up a question: why do you have to rebuild the walls? What happened to them in the first place? Well, that drags us all the way back to the books of the kings, where the people of Israel did what we all do, you know. They sought after foreign gods, seeking variety over what what handed down to them. Pulling the Peter Griffin move that we can't seem to stop doing: It's worse, but it's different. 

The kings of Israel kept on following after other gods, kept on getting into trouble with it, and kept on doing, as the Bible says 'what was evil in the sight of God.' Their endless quest for variety ended up with them essentially throwing everything away. And away it all went. The walls came down ,the Temple was destroyed, and nothing remained of any of it. A king slain, a people carried away into captivity, all of it gone. The temple toppled and burned, all that was of any value gone and despoiled.  And that's the tale of why the walls had to be rebuilt.

So when Nehemiah has the walls rebuilt, Ezra goes up on a wooden podium, and reads the book of the law to the people who are gathered there. And they weep, likely out of joy, for the reality that the book of the law of God is being read again. The people of Israel, who had grown so bored of the god of their ancestors that they left him to serve other gods, those same children of Israel wept for joy upon hearing the words that they had spurned finally being read again. They have spent time in captivity, have gone all the way round, and found their way back home again. 

Likewise, the people of the New Testament. Familiarity breeding contempt as it does, they found themselves looking at Jesus, speaking the word of God to them, and saying 'don't we know this guy too well?' Yes, this was the one that they had seen grow up as part of their town. They weren't impressed with him anymore. He was now boring, because they were too familiar with him. Too close, as they say. They had seen him walk, talk, build furniture, operate his shop, all of that noise, and now, when he came to teach and preach among them, they shook their heads. Surely, we know him far too well.

Well, like the people of Israel in the Old Testament, or the people of our time now, we tend to be over familiar with God, but in the wrong way. That is, most people can tell you exactly what Jesus looks like, right? They can tell you what kind of beard he has, even down to what he was wearing. They can describe his haircut, eyes, all that even though most of it isn't in the Bible. They can tell you about his birth, his death, and some of his miracles in between. 

But they can't tell you what he says.

And that's so key. You can be over familiar with Jesus in the wrong way, just like they were in Nazareth. Isn't this the guy we're tired of? Isn't this the guy we're used to? We're not impressed by him anymore. Sure you're not. Because you're familiar with what he looks like. But Jesus is the Word of God made flesh, and as such, what he says is of such Titanic importance that it can't be overlooked. His words are what counts and what matters, and unlike his appearance, I have yet to meet anyone who can be over familiar with what he says. Familiarity with what he looks like can breed contempt, thus the Jesus on toast, or Jesus in water stains, or anything like that. But over-familiarity with his words? That seems to be almost impossible. I don't tend to find people that often who read through the Bible and get over familiar with the words of Christ - quite the opposite. They tend to say 'I had no idea that Jesus said these things. I had no idea those were the teachings of Jesus. I've heard these stories my whole life, and I'm still finding new things.'

Just like at the transfiguration, this the son of God, hear ye him. It's an important bit, because if we're listening to Christ, we're doing what we are supposed to do. Then our familiarity leads to seeing his same words in a new way, excitement, joy and meaningful teaching. And our desire for novelty finds its perfect rest in Christ who makes all things new.

The best pilsner

 I went to a wedding a long time ago now, long enough ago that the couple's children are teenagers.  And this wedding was for a couple, half of whom came from Medicine Hat. Medicine Hat, for those of you who don't know, is quite close to the Alberta / Saskatchewan border. And if you're anywhere close to Saskatchewan, you're close to what we affectionately refer to as 'Pil Country.'

Now weddings have changed since the time of Christ, but not by much. In fact, certain features still remain, one of which is that God has given us, according to Psalm 104

How Many Are Your Works, O LORD!
…14He makes the grass grow for the livestock and provides crops for man to cultivate, bringing forth food from the earth: 15wine that gladdens the heart of man, oil that makes his face to shine, and bread that sustains his heart. 16The trees of the LORD have their fill, the cedars of Lebanon that He planted,…

God gives these things to us as blessings, and it seems to be pretty clear, according to the scriptures, that wine, does in fact, gladden the heart. And at the wedding at Cana, just like the wedding at Calgary that I went to, wine, or pilsner, was gladdening hearts.  The best moment came when the MC for the wedding, a good friend of mine as well, came out and announced 'before we say grace, I feel like I should announce that we have already run out of Pilsner.'  

Before grace.  Before the meal, before the speeches, before the dance, before anything, the pilsner was gone.  Wow.  We achieve.  This is how I got to thinking about the wedding at Cana, because I've seen that exact same thing happen. Pilsner instead of wine, but you get the idea. Now, I've heard people try to talk about Cana in a very convoluted way.  If you don't believe that God actually does give you wine to gladden your heart, and in fact you view consumption of alcohol as sinful by nature, then you've got soem work to do vis a vis the wedding at Cana, and Psalm 104. What do you do with these passages? Well, if you're a Lutheran Christian, and you believe that the earth was created in 6 24-hour days, that there was a flood that covered the whole world and killed everyone except Noah who was 600 years old and a drunk, if you believe in talking snakes and that there is a man named Jesus Christ who elected to no longer be dead anymore, then believing that God sent wine to gladden your heart isn't too much of a stretch. 

But this isn't all about the ethical consumption of alcohol, it's about what the account says.  This account from John 2 mirrors the last Supper, because, according to John's Gospel, Jesus essentially goes from the wedding at Cana to the clearing of the Temple, and that breaks the line between Jesus as average carpenter, and Jesus as the Rabbi, the Messiah, and no longer a private citizen. This is his last gasp as a relative unknown, yet to perform his first miracle, yet to cleanse the temple, yet to take up the cross.  By the next moment, he will belong to the world, and this, the first of his signs, marks the transitional barrier.  But it's not just about the booze. It's about sending a message. 

Okay, fine, so let's say you're with me so far, it's about the message. Well then, tough guy, what's the message that it's about? I know this reading gets put into a lot of weddings, mainly because it has Jesus at a wedding in it, but it's not just for weddings. It's for right now as well. What do I mean by right now? I mean right now. Because right now, the exhaustion, the fatigue is setting in, and setting in hard. We have been rewarded for all our efforts over two years of bad news with more bad news.  The fatigue is real, the exhaustion is real.  Most people are getting to the point where they are truly and simply over it, and the news never seems to get any better. Cases are up, hospitals are at their breaking point, and it seems for everyone, no matter their position or station in life, they're all facing down the notion that their best days might very well be behind them.

That's a function of who we are, you know? I know, it seems like things have been this way for so long, that we can't remember anything else, and we sure as sure can't imagine a time when things might be back to normal. It seems like a dream, a fantasy, you know? The idea that one day things might be better, might improve? Well, think for a second about the happy first century couple, getting wine to gladden the hearts of their guests.  Everyone is happy, having a party, and enjoying life. They run out of wine, and the assumption is that the party is now going to end, or at the very least become less fun. Not only that, but the party is going to continue to be less fun now until it ends. Now imagine that not as a wedding, but as everything, and you're close to how people feel about the current situation. Nothing gets better, everything gets worse, forever.

Jesus takes water and turns it into wine. Nice trick. But it's not about the water and the wine only, and it's not about the party and it's not about COVID. Or, I suppose, not just about those things. It's about something more than that. It's about the core and essence of the Christian faith, the reality that says to you as a child of God that the best wine, the best Pilsner can and will be saved until now. You think it's all done and over, you think that there's no possible way that things could possibly improve, and you think that the ditch that you're in you can't ever get out of? You're saying these things in the face and the presence of someone who decided not to be dead anymore. And that same someone make a promise to you and to me, that if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall surely be united with him in a resurrection like his. That means that there is always a tomorrow, and a day after that. That means that there isn't any such thing as over, no matter what. You're looking at a promise of a future and a hope, and that's something very much worth considering, especially in these hopeless times.

When you're tempted to fall into despair, to thinking that there's no way out of the situation that you're in, then think very carefully about the wedding at Cana, and the words of the steward:\

Everyone serves the best wine first, then the cheap stuff after everyone has had enough to drink. But you have saved the best wine until now. 

That can still be true you know. Always time for better wine. Or better Pil.