Marriage and the New Creation

In the sermon on Sunday, we noticed that Jesus roots his teaching on marriage based on the creation story in Genesis 1-2. But that’s not the only thing Jesus had to say about marriage. Jesus also gives his own revelation on marriage in the age to come. As we said, people were always going to Jesus to see what he would say about hot button issues, and in every generation, marriage is a hot-button issue. Sadducees came to him and asked him a question regarding marriage, but it actually was more of a test to see what Jesus would say regarding life after death.

Sadducees believed that people died and that was it. Based on their interpretation of scripture (the Law of Moses), they rejected the notion of life after death, which they regarded as a pagan influence. They were the ruling party in Jerusalem, and their teaching was official Jewish doctrine. As much as people see Pharisees as Jesus’ enemies, they were the party he had most in common with theologically. Both Jesus and the Pharisees believed that at the end of this age, God would physically resurrect the dead and bring them to judgment (Daniel 12:2).

The Sadducees had a good question regarding how that was to work practically. They brought to Jesus a scenario of a women who had seven different husbands die. In the resurrection, would she be married to seven men? That seemed like a wicked way to live forever. God would surely not be the author of that kind of existence, would he?

Jesus replied thusly: “The people of this age marry and are given in marriage. But those who are considered worthy of taking part in the age to come and in the resurrection from the dead will neither marry nor be given in marriage, and they can no longer die; for they are like the angels. They are God’s children, since they are children of the resurrection” (Luke 20:34-36).

Marriage is for this age only, this age which is frequently characterized as that time of refining and testing in preparation for the age to come. In this age, marriage is bound up with our mortality, our need to have children, and our own psychological needs. For Christians, it teaches us how to live in a small, divine community of love, refining our character and allowing us to live a life of love for which we were made. In the world, marriage is fraught with difficulties and social inequalities, with women traditionally viewed more as property than as mission partners. (Christians ought not pretend to be immune from this.) Whether for character refinement or for social arrangements, neither of these will continue into God’s new age of perfection and new life.

If we do not experience marriage in the age to come, what will fill that void in human experience? As much as we know, God and community will be there, family seems to make life “complete” here and it’s hard to imagine happiness and fulfillment without it. Another picture of the future is John’s vision in Revelation, where he sees the holy city Jerusalem (representing) God’s people, coming down from heaven to earth, “prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband” (Rev. 21:2). This is what I mean when I say that we are to find our completeness in Christ. Many churches are a bit more comfortable in worship than ECC with the idea of Jesus being our husband and using language of intimacy in worship of him. It is uncomfortable to think of that sometimes, but it’s very much true. Our missing piece, the one to whom we say, “You complete me,” is Jesus Christ. That’s the primary relationship we’re called to foster now and for eternity. And Jesus says we also find him in other people, especially “the least of these” (Mt 25). Digging into fellowship with other disciples, whether we’re married or not, is a way that Jesus has designed that we work on our intimacy with him. I’ve heard some say that in the coming age, it’s not that we will be married to nobody, but in a sense, married to everyone, experiencing the deepest and purest love and devotion with all God’s people.

Because of this, Paul says to go ahead and get on with living as though we’re already in that age, because, in a sense, we are. Because the kingdom of God has broken into the world through Jesus, and because he will be coming back soon (yes, Paul was living in this hope even back then), why bother with secondary matters? Paul says that single people ought to stay single, and that “those who have wives should live as if they do not; those who mourn, as if they did not; those who are happy, as if they were not; those who buy something, as if it were not theirs to keep; those who use the things of the world, as if not engrossed in them. For this world in its present form is passing away” (1 Cor 7:29-31). There is nothing wrong with marrying, but we ought to be focused on higher things – building for the kingdom. How do those with wives live as though they didn’t? I wouldn’t think that it would mean to abandon one’s spouse, but together, the couple are no longer to structure their marriage according to the age that is passing away, but find that they now live in a different story and are a part of a new family in Christ. Together, their primary call is to build up the family of God rather than their own bloodline. Together, they focus on growing into the loving character of Christ rather than preserve traditional social arrangements. The breaking in of God’s new age takes away the status and stigma the world associates with being married, single, divorced, widowed. We are all one family together, finding our completeness in Christ, loving each other and treating each other as family members with dignity.

May this week bring many opportunities to grow in selfless love, and may you boldly seize those opportunities.

strength

The wonderful thing about the cloud of witnesses that surround us, is that we are all gifted and called in our own unique ways.  We all have our own unique gifts and talents and abilities that support one another, and fill in the places where we individually fall short.  The body of Christ can be compared to a lot of things, and one of the most powerful images for me is one that you may not expect: an ant colony.  

Picture ants, each carrying what they are able to carry and playing their part to work together to take a piece of food back to the home to feed the colony.  Where one ant would physically fall short of the goal, a group, working together, is able to accomplish much more.  

God desires you.  He has given you the gifts and talents that you have, and in the places that you fall short, God will come in with other brothers and sisters in the cloud to support you, pray for you, encourage you, and love you.  While we fix our eyes on Christ so that we don’t grow weary and lose heart, we also lean on those who come alongside us in the journey.

No servant is greater than his master.....so as you live a life of that proclaims the gospel in the face of hardship, remember that our Savior has walked that path already and sympathizes with our every need.  

No servant walks the path alone....so seek out one another to pray for each other.  Find others who you know are in places of hardship and pray for them. 

As we walk together, let’s watch as God turns our weakness into strength, for the glory of His kingdom.

Pastor Ara

More Than Red Shoes ...

Thanks again Katie Han for the inspiration to free my red shoes from closet captivity.  It brought much discussion and laughter in the lobby after worship last Sunday and got me thinking …

I remember another woman who had a rockin’ pair of red shoes … Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz.  Dorothy was led to believe those shoes would make her invincible in the midst of her trials journeying down the Yellow Brick Road.  That was until Glinda the Good Witch revealed to her the truth: 

You’ve always had the Power, my dear, you just had to find it for yourself.

We hear this message all around us.  We are told that nothing is out of our reach if we just work hard enough it.  But in my almost 50 years of living, I have come to see this as misleading.  And this is especially true with with objectives that matter most like becoming more Christ-like, reflecting it to others, and impacting a world with acts of justice and mercy.   

Accomplishing things of the Spirit – requires the Spirit.  And as I said on Sunday which bares repeating:

The Spirit works best through the person with the humbled and receptive heart rather than the person standing in the rockin’ red shoes or whatever the male equivalent of that might be. 

My prayer is that we all grow in the humility and receptivity needed for the Spirit to enter in.  For with it comes the release from playing God to self and others, and ultimately our best chance for witnessing His transformative work around us and in us. 

Your Fellow Journeywoman,

Pastor Dawn

How Not to Conquer the World

Fellow Citizens! I hope this note finds you encouraged in your quest to change the world, or to put it more correctly, encouraged as you live more and more by faith into a world that has already been changed by the coming, the death, the resurrection and exaltation of King Jesus. I, like many of you, am getting ready to celebrate July the 4^th (while on vacation) and I think my sermon said about all I wanted to say on the topic.  But I leave you these words from NT Wright to ponder further on the topic of our heavenly citizenship and our role on earth:

This is the point at which a great deal of Jesus’s own kingdom agenda comes into its own.  His great Sermon on the Mount opens with the Beatitudes, which are normally read either as a special form of “ Christian ethic” (“This is how you are to behave, if you want to be really special people”) or as the rules you must keep in order to “go to heaven when you die.”  This latter view has been reinforced by the standard misreading of the first Beatitude.  “Blessings on the poor in spirit! The kingdom of heaven is yours” (Matt. 5:3) doesn’t mean, “You will go to heaven when you die.”  It means you will be one of those through whom God’s kingdom, heaven’s rule, begins to appear on earth as in heaven.  The Beatitudes are the agenda for kingdom people.   They are not simply about how to behave, so that God will do something nice to you.  They are about the way in which Jesus wants to rule the world.  He wants to do it through this sort of people—people, actually, just like himself (read the Beatitudes again and see).  The Sermon on the Mount is a call to Jesus’s followers to take up their vocation as light to the world, as salt to the earth—in other words, as people through whom Jesus’s kingdom vision is to become reality.  This is how to be the people through whom the victory of Jesus over the powers of sin and death is to be implemented in the wider world. 

The work of the kingdom, in fact, is summed up pretty well in those Beatitudes.  When God wants to change the world, he doesn’t send in the tanks.  He sends in the meek, the mourners, those who are hungry and thirsty for God’s justice, the peacemakers, and so on.  Just as God’s whole style, his chosen way of operating, reflects his generous love, sharing his rule with his human creatures, so the way in which those humans then have to behave if they are to be agents of Jesus’s lordship reflects in its turn the same sense of vulnerable, gentle, but powerful self-giving love.  It is because of this that the world has been changed by William Wilberforce, campaigning tirelessly to abolish slavery; by Desmond Tutu, working and praying not just to end apartheid, but to  end it in such a way as to produce a reconciled, forgiving South Africa; by Cicely Saunders, starting a hospice for terminally ill patients ignored by the medical profession and launching a movement that has, within a generation, spread right around the globe (N.T. Wright, Simply Jesus, 218-219).

- Pastor Bo Bannister