Bonhoeffer's sermon on marriage is a particularly beautiful selection that requires folks to think theologically about Christian marriage. This morning -- as I head into two marriages in as many weeks (and one of them, my own!) -- I begin reflecting on what it means to talk about Christian marriage.
Of course, it's easy to respond with trite, romantic concepts that reflect the culture more than they do my faith. That's the one thing I want to avoid. Instead, I want to offer a fresh reading of the NT that refocuses marriage away from the "order of creation" theme that Bonhoeffer used in his Ethics and toward the biblical notion of grace. In other words, I want to ground marriage in Jesus, not in nature. Covenant, not in procreation.
And I want to begin in an odd place: We Christians need to recover our identity as Gentiles.
This is important for a few different reasons. First, this recovery highlights the fact that we are not "by nature" children of God. We've been chosen and adopted. In the language of Paul, we've been "grafted into" the tree of Israel. Second, this action of God -- grafting in the Gentiles -- highlights how the grace and election of God determines the people of God. We are not God's children because of nature. We are God's children because of election. This places election at the center of Christian notions of marriage (and celibacy) rather than a Darwinian focus on procreation. Marriage is grace, not biology.
Secondly, I want to ask an odd question: Why does sex matter so much when talking about marriage? The standard answer, of course, is a condemnation of sex outside marriage, but lots of folks don't understand why. Is marriage just permission to have sex?
Sex matters because it is where our personhood is most exposed and vulnerable. This makes sex both tragic and comic.
The reason sex can be so painful and tragic is that we expose ourselves to the perceptions of another. And this exposure carries great risk, psychically and spiritually. Consequently, we may choose to remove our sexuality from the communal sphere where there is so much risk, vulnerability, and exposure. Sex, then, becomes solitary and non-relational. Thing is, this retreat into isolation -- removing sex from the perceptions of others -- may be the best theological definition of sexual perversion.
That's why one of my mentors, Stan Hauerwas, says: Christians have the best sex in public. Sexual "perversion" is sexual activity without risk, without the dangerous acknowledgement that my joy depends on someone else's, as theirs does on mine. Distorted sexuality is the effort to bring my happiness back under my control and to refuse to let my body be recreated by anther person's perception. And this is, in effect, to withdraw my body from the enterprise of human beings making sense in collaboration, in community, withholding my body from language, culture, and politics.
In short, healthy sexuality is allowing my personhood to be shaped by the perceptions of others. Sex is to enter into a communal space where there's giving and receiving -- a mutuality -- a sharing of selves and perceptions. That's why sex matters. It's a location where we discover our humanity through our being with others.
That discovery takes time. Kendra and I aren't supposed to be passive instruments to one another. It takes conversation and cooperation. Thing is, the more time you take, the greater the risk. There's more to expose, and a sustaining of the will to let oneself be formed by the perceptions of another. Properly understood, sexual faithfulness is not an avoidance of risk, but the creation of a context in which grace can abound because there's commitment not to run away from the perceptions of another.
What I'm suggesting is that sex -- and marriage -- is a spiritual discipline. It's actually a kind of monasticism. Living in close community, exposing our bodies and personhood to the perceptions of others and allowing those perceptions to affect and shape us. In both monasticism and marriage, there's a "mutual kenosis", a shared self-emptying.
Marriage, like monasticism, allows eros and the body to mean more. Marriage shares with celibacy the end of sanctifying the whole person through the body, of permitting the body something more to be about, something further to mean, something better to desire, until finally it gets taken up into the life in which God loves God. In this process of desiring ever more, one incidentally or intentionally gives up -- lets go of, gets rid of -- the petty things that one used to want, and in that way the life of ever-greater desire is one of asceticism, and asceticism in which self-control serves self-abandonment. The goal of marriage and monasticism is the same.
This probably sounds odd. That marriage and monasticism are flip sides of the same coin. That eros can be ascetic. But married folks get it. If you've ever had to "work out" life in the sexual sphere with a partner, you get it.
Marriage and monasticism require time to work out transformation. Both the married and the monastic need somebody who loves them to call them on their faults from whom they cannot easily escape. The transformation is not only, or even primarily, the experience of falling in love (eros), but that is the intensity and the clue to the importance of something else: The experience of living with someone, the neighbor, who won't leave one alone (agape).
This echoes what Paul says in 1 Corinthians:
The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband. The wife's body does not belong to her alone but also to her husband. In the same way, the husband's body does not belong to him alone but also to his wife.Our bodies are not our own. They are "community property". We share our body with spouses. And it doesn't end there. My body belongs to the community of faith. I don't wholly control my own time, money, efforts, or talent. The community has a claim on me. Ultimately, because these loves -- for Kendra and for the world -- are simply reflections of my love for God. As Paul writes:
You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body.Monks are "not their own". And neither are the married. Monks learn this lesson directly: By giving up eros for the love of God (agape). The married discover this more indirectly: Eros demands that I make my body available to the other (agape). But the lesson is the same: You are not your own.
Thing is, all this talk about monasticism and marriage sounds dreary. But this is where the language of grace comes in. Marriage doesn't make any sense without it. Without the talk of being "grafted in". Love, sex, marriage, friendship. These only mean what they mean because of God's grace. So what is grace?
Grace is the transformation our hearts know because we're wanted, beautifully loved. We're significant to God.
The whole story of creation, incarnation, and our incorporation into the fellowship of Christ's body tells us that God desires us, as if we were God, as if we were that unconditional response to God's giving that God's self makes in the life of the Trinity. We're created so that we may be caught up in this, so that we may grow into the wholehearted love of God by learning that God loves us as God loves God.
The Christian community exists for one reason: To teach us that we're an object of divine joy. We are desired.
Anytime we're greeted with joy, that's grace. The whole message of the Incarnation boils down to this: God desires you. You're an occasion of joy.
As physical creatures, we tend to experience this grace in the presence of others. And that is what I was talking about. These human experiences -- love, laughter, sex, friendship -- only make sense in light of God's grace. God's grace animates these experiences, we know ourselves to be loved by God through these experiences.
The body's graces. Can my physical body be experienced as "an occasion of joy" by another? And for myself? Again, recall how risky sex can be. Can grace be experienced here, in the physical sphere, where I am maximally exposed -- physically, emotionally, spiritually?
Yup. But really only when we participate in the very divine life. When we're trinitarian. There has to be mutuality and communion. This is where our culture's experiences of sex fall so short.
When mutual kenosis is present, we find the body's graces. My body becomes an experience of joy. Not just pleasure. But a genuine experience of grace.
For my body to be the cause of joy, the end of homecoming, for me, it must be there for someone else, must be perceived, accepted, nurtured. And that means being given over to the creation of joy in that other, because only as directed to the enjoyment, the happiness, of the other does it become unreservedly lovable. To desire my joy is to desire the joy of the one I desire: My search for enjoyment through the bodily presence of another is a longing to be enjoyed in my body.
Sex is spirituality, but not in the way DH Lawrence anticipated. Eros (desire) can only be experienced by agape (self-sacrifice). True love is only experienced when my joy is achieved by surrendering to your joy. In this, the sexual union models the life of the Trinity. The love of the Son is given to the Father and the Father gives it back to the Son through the Spirit. Each empties into the other, an eternal flow of self-emptying love -- back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. The tides of kenosis and love. Gifts given and received -- back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Father, Son and Spirit finding each other to be occasions of joy. That's the very heart of perichoresis.
Christian views of sex and marriage are always trinitarian. Sex and marriage matter because God matters.
Marriage is an experience of grace, of being found to be an occasion of joy. And as with sex, this marital grace can only make sense if a pre-existing language of grace precedes it. God's marriage to his people is what makes sense of human marriage.
So I argue that it's better to use the language of election when talking about marriage, than the language of nature.
In short, what makes marriage a reflection of God's trinitarian nature is that it models God's election in Jesus Christ. I choose you. And again, this is where my own biography wells up. Kendra and I have a little exchange we share when we are experiencing grace in our life together. I say, "Thanks for saying 'yes'". And she responds, "Thanks for asking". We experience grace because it is an occasion of joy to be chosen. To be selected. And this grace is not just for the married. We experience the grace of God's election whenever we are chosen to be an occasion for joy, by friends and family. It's grace because we feel desired and wanted.
Marriage, then, reflects the trinitarian nature of God in that it participates in (incarnates) God's election and marriage to Israel. This is the grace of marriage: I choose you.
If I'm right -- and I think I am -- this is why procreation isn't what makes marriage a marriage, theologically speaking. No doubt reproduction is a part of human sex. But marriage? Marriage is about God's election of Israel.
This is why it's so odd to me that we develop our Christian understanding of marriage based on Adamand Eve. And do so along "natural" lines. Do we really want marriage modeled after those two? Ummmm. No. Have you read that story? Doesn't make for a good story of grace between them.
So Adam and Eve aren't the model for marriage. No, God and Israel are the model for Christian marriage. And that marriage is one of election and covenant faithfulness. And, interestingly, the best biblical example of this faithfulness, read aloud in countless marriage services, is Ruth's pledge to Naomi:
Don't urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the LORD deal with me, be it ever so severely, if anything but death separates you and me.The fact that we use this pledge for marital covenants (!) highlights that this is what marriage is about. God's election and covenant faithfulness -- incarnated in Ruth's pledge to Naomi -- is what makes a marriage a marriage. (Another biographical note: When we began planning our wedding liturgy, this was the first text we agreed on. So it's very dear to both of us.)
And, if we recover our identity as Gentiles -- as I began all this a moment ago -- we soon realize that we're not a part of this marriage. God married Israel, not us. Yahweh is not our God. Yahweh is Israel's God. So, as Paul helps us see, we have to be adopted into this family. And "in Christ" we are adopted. We are "grafted in".
This means marriage, for us, is Christological, not natural. Reproduction isn't the point of marriage. Grace is.
This identity as "adopted children" puts further strain on attempts to place reproduction at the center of Christian marriage. We are not God's "children of the flesh". We are not circumcised. We've been adopted through baptism. And what this again highlights is God's election. His choosing us. What makes us family isn't DNA but the free choice of God. Also known as grace. And this is how family is understood in the church: We are not biological relatives, but we are all "family" through God's choosing us in Christ.
Marriage is an occasion of joy because it's a proclamation of Jesus' love for the Church: I choose you.
Kendra and I also have a reminder to one another of how true this is. When we're in one of those moments of grace, she'll say, "You're stuck now". To which I'll respond: "Nope, I choose you". That's our short-hand way of reminding ourselves that Christian marriage is a demonstration of God's joy and delight for the Church in Jesus Christ (Ephesians 5.12-21).
Because this divine grace, this godly choice, is the only image that gives marriage and sex any meaning in our world.