In the name of God, I, David, take you, Tonya, to be my wife from this time onward, to join with you and to share all that is to come, to give and to receive, to speak and to listen, to inspire and to respond, and in all our life together to be loyal to you with my whole being, as long as we both shall live.

In the name of God, I, Tonya, take you, David, to be my husband from this time onward, to join with you and to share all that is to come, to give and to receive, to speak and to listen, to inspire and to respond, and in all our life together to be loyal to you with my whole being, as long as we both shall live.

Tonya Rhyne and David McCullough were standing right there in the Chancel a few minutes past 7:00 p.m. on June 18, 2004, when they spoke these vows to each other.  Not long before, I had made this declaration:

We have gathered in the presence of God to give thanks for the gift of marriage, to witness the joining together of Tonya and David, to surround them with our prayers, and to ask God’s blessing upon them, so that they might be strengthened for their life together and nurtured in their love for God.

It was a declaration that what was taking place was not a private event.  It was deeply personal, to be sure, but not private.  Hear that declaration again and listen for all of the things that were taking place:

We have gathered in the presence of God to give thanks for the gift of marriage, to witness the joining together of Tonya and David, to surround them with our prayers, and to ask God’s blessing upon them, so that they might be strengthened for their life together and nurtured in their love for God.

We were gathering.  Putting ourselves in the presence of God.  Giving thanks for the gift of marriage.  Witnessing the joining together of Tonya and David.  Surrounding Tonya and David with our prayers.  Asking God’s blessing upon Tonya and David.  And, we were doing all of those things with a distinct purpose:  “so that [Tonya and David] might be strengthened for their life together and nurtured in their love for God.”

Marriage, for a Christian, is deeply personal, but it is not private.  For a Christian, a wedding is a ceremony in which the entire community that is the church unites in its effort to help two people become joined — in the presence of God, in the presence of each other, and in the presence of everyone who has gathered that day, in body and in spirit.  The marriage that comes out of that ceremony likewise is deeply personal, but not private.  For a Christian, marriage is a relationship not merely of two people, but of two people who are members with all of us in the community of faith.  In its ideal, the entire faith community unites in its effort to help the two people within a marriage become increasingly joined and to be an example of and witness to the nature of God’s love.  That truth about Christian marriage is the subject of our Second Lesson for today.

We are continuing our progress through the Gospel of Mark, addressing the provocative questions that Jesus posed to the people around him.  In the days leading up to today’s passage, Jesus and his disciples have travelled from outside Jewish territory on a journey that eventually will take them into Jerusalem.  This past Sunday, we found them re-entering Jewish territory and stopping off at their home base of Capernaum.  Today, we see them travel down the eastern side of the Jordan River and cross the river near the town of Jericho.  By giving us these travel markers, the author of Mark is pointing out that Jesus has returned to the place where he was baptized by John and where God's Spirit drove him into the wilderness to be tested by Satan.[i]  Jesus is about to be tested once again.

[Jesus] left that place and went to the region of Judea and beyond the Jordan.  And crowds again gathered around him; and, as was his custom, he again taught them.  Some Pharisees came, and to test him they asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?”  He answered them, “What did Moses command you?”  They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her.”  But Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you.  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.”  Then in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter.  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.”

Jesus has been teaching the crowd of people that by now in his ministry are pretty much ever-present, but some Pharisees have interrupted that scene to pose a test.  Within the Gospel of Mark, the Pharisees begin early on looking for a way to discredit Jesus — ever since Jesus entered a synagogue and cured a man, even though it was the Sabbath.  Jesus was angry and grieved, Mark tells us, at the hardness of heart he encountered in the Pharisees that day.  And, we read, “The Pharisees went out and immediately conspired with the Herodians against [Jesus], how to destroy him.”[ii]  The Herodians are the people who support Herod Antipas, and today’s passage takes place in the territory that Herod Antipas ruled on behalf of Rome.  This is the same Herod Antipas who divorced his wife to marry his brother’s wife.  John the Baptist criticized Herod Antipas for this double divorce and remarriage, and he ended up dead, with his head sitting on a platter.[iii]  So, we know that divorce is a sore subject for Herod Antipas, which makes it the perfect topic for the Pharisees to use for their latest test.  “Is it lawful,” they ask Jesus, “for a man to divorce his wife?”

When we preachers reach this point in the story, we have a choice:  we can start talking about divorce, or we can start talking about marriage.  We can lament over the current prevalence of divorce and over the damage a divorce leaves in its wake — damage that not only leaves permanent scars on the immediate players, but harms all of society.  But, before you and I can have a meaningful conversation about divorce, we must have a good understanding of marriage.  Our society teaches that marriage is a service to the self.  It emphasizes personal happiness and feelings of fulfillment as the goals of marriage.[iv]  If being with my spouse brings me personal happiness and our marriage makes me feel fulfilled, then it is good.  If not, then I need to “move on” and “take care of myself.”  “After all,” this line of thinking goes, “don’t I have a right to be happy?”  This emphasis upon personal happiness as the primary goal of marriage shapes everything from the way we plan a wedding ceremony to our opinions about divorce.  But, what if we begin from a different place?  What if we begin where Jesus did?

Jesus began talking about divorce by talking about creation.  To do that, Jesus drew upon one of the two stories of creation that we have in the Book of Genesis.  The first story of creation, now within chapter 1 of Genesis, describes how God brought order to chaos and then created various parts of the universe.  In that first story, we hear over and over that as God completed each aspect of our world, he pronounced that it was good.  When creation was complete, we read, “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.”[v]  In the second story of creation, we get a different version of the course of events, and we also hear about an aspect of creation that God pronounced “not good.” 

We had that portion of the second story of creation in our First Lesson for this morning.  What was it within his creation that God declared was “not good”?  [“It is not good that the man should be alone.”]  As one commentator has written, “[O]ne man alone, surrounded by nature, with God close at hand.  . . . But when God saw it — when God saw one person, God, and the great outdoors — God didn’t say, ‘It doesn’t get any better than this.’  Instead, God said — about this and only about this — ‘It  is not good.’”[vi]  The remedy, God decided, was not merely to create more people, but to create, as the original Hebrew of this passage reads, “a suitable partner as his partner,” and to create this partner to be “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.”  The remedy, God decided, was to make it possible for two people who began as one to again “become one flesh.”

This is where Jesus begins when he seeks to answer the Pharisees’ question about divorce.  Jesus begins by telling the Pharisees what a true marriage is and — let us not miss this — by telling the Pharisees who is at work in creating and sustaining the bond that is possible between two people.  Jesus also tells the Pharisees why.  Jesus tells the Pharisees that God has a purpose for marriage.  That purpose goes beyond individual happiness and extends over and above whatever personal goals any of us might have for ourselves.  Marriage, Jesus explains, is a bonding together that God creates and grows and sustains because it is not good that any of us should be alone. 

It is not good that any of us should be alone, and marriage is one relationship that God has given us to help us attain the fullness of life for which he has created us.  And it is not the only one.  Marriage is not the only relationship that God has provided for us, and occupying the same household is not a prerequisite for living in God-given relationship.  As the apostle Paul so eloquently explained, God has given us the church as a way for us to live in human relationship and attain the fullness of life for which he has created us.  In marriage, God declared, two people become one flesh.  In the church, “we who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another.”[vii]  As Paul told the Christians living in Corinth, “in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body — Jews or Greeks, slaves or free — and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.”[viii]

It is not good that any of us should be alone, and that is why God has given us each other.  And, as we especially celebrate on this Day of Pentecost, God has poured out his Spirit upon us to help unite and bond and sustain us in relationship with each other.  Without that Spirit, Paul reminds us, “enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, and envy” are free to infiltrate and poison our relationships.[ix]  But the fruit of God’s Spirit — “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control”— that is what will give strength to the bonds between us.[x]  When you and I find ourselves being pulled apart — in our marriages, our households, in our family of faith — when you and I find our relationships coming undone, it is God’s Spirit and the fruit of that Spirit that can heal us and soothe us, that can enable us to grow in relationship and to help each one of us attain the fullness of life for which we were created.

At the wedding of David and Tonya McCullough, I invited their families to stand, then asked, “Do you give your blessing to David and Tonya and promise to do everything in your power to uphold them in their marriage?”  I then invited the rest of the congregation to stand, then asked, “Will all of you witnessing these vows do everything in your power to uphold Tonya and David in their marriage?”  When Tonya and David exchanged their rings, I said

Tonya and David, by the covenant you have just made before God and before this congregation, you have bound yourselves to live together as husband and wife.  You give and receive these rings as a token of that covenant.  Let this be the outward expression of the holy love that binds you, that giving and receiving you might be united by the Lord himself, sharing all that lies before you in the light of the love that led you here.

United by the Lord himself.  What took place here in the chancel that evening was not a private event.  It was deeply personal, to be sure, but not private.  The wedding that took place that night, the marriage that continues, and all of the loving relationships that all of us have are a gift to us from God.  A gift we are meant to share beyond our family and friends, beyond this one church.  A gift we are meant to share with all of God’s children until all of us attain the fullness of life for which we were created.  Amen.

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