Hilton Head Island, SC – August 25, 2013
The Chapel Without Walls
Genesis 2:15-25; Genesis 34:1-12
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” – Genesis 2:18
The main meaning of marriage is not what most of us think it is, I think. Traditional Roman Catholics and many modern evangelical Protestants believe that procreation is the primary purpose of marriage. That’s why they oppose most if not all methods of birth control, and abortion under any and all circumstances. Making babies is the main meaning of marriage.
A few weeks ago the cover story of Time Magazine was about the 20% or so of modern couples who choose not to have children. This is a repudiation of the traditional notion for marriage. It is one thing to be physically unable to have children, and quite another to decide not to have them. However, through the years I have told many couples in my pre-marital meetings with them that choosing not to have children can be a legitimate choice, both ethically and existentially. However, if couples don’t have babies because they think cherubs would cramp their style too much, or cause them to forego too many pleasures they would like to have, their decision may be too selfish, self-centered, or self-absorbed. (There is a lot of self in any of those factors.) Still, some people probably know intuitively or intellectually that they would be very poor parents, and so, on behalf of the children they never have, they spare those never-to-be-born children the obvious deficiencies of parents-who-know-they-shouldn’t-be. Marrying with the intention of never having children is certainly acceptable, but that clearly cannot be the main meaning of marriage either.
Most people marry because they think it will make them happier throughout the rest of their lives. That presupposes they will stay married to the one they marry for the rest of their lives. But of course that doesn’t happen with everyone. In the US of A, it happens in only one out of two marriages, although that statistic is misleading. However, I’m not going to take time to explain why that is so. In any event, not every marriage results in lifelong bliss. In fact, no marriage results in lifelong bliss. Anyone who thinks it does is living under a pleasant delusion. It may be pleasant, but it is a delusion. No one’s life can be unmitigated happiness, nor can any marriage be perfect. Nevertheless, on their wedding day, perceived happiness is the emotional impulse which impels many couples into marriage.
Back in the day, when Kathryn Hepburn and Spencer Tracy or Doris Day and Rock Hudson were making romantic movies (before we knew the whole story on either Spence’s actual marriage or Rock’s un-marriage), we probably thought romance was the main meaning of marriage. Couples had these strong feelings for one another, don’t you see, so they acted on those feelings, don’t you see, and they lived happily ever after. In 2013, however, just 3.107% of couples who have been married for at least ten years still believe romance is the main meaning of marriage. (I made up that figure. It might be as high as 8+%, but not a percent higher.)
Furthermore, sex cannot be the prime purpose of marriage either. Obviously it is possible to have sex without being married, but marriage is society’s best societal means for avoiding indiscriminate sex. That’s a very good thing, but it isn’t the main meaning of marriage.
The story of Dinah in Genesis 34 is a strange tale that is not widely remembered. Considering its details, that may be just as well. Dinah was Jacob’s daughter by his wife Leah. A man named Shechem, who was not a Hebrew, was smitten by her, and he “had his way with her,” as we quaintly say. Then he actually fell in love with her, and wanted to marry her. Shechem’s father Hamor came to Jacob and suggested that Jacob’s daughters should be given to Hamor’s sons in marriage. Jacob said Hebrew women couldn’t marry men who were not circumcised. No problem, said Hamor; we’ll have it done. Then, when the sons were very sore (as you can easily imagine, especially if you are a male), Jacob’s sons attacked them and killed them all for the dastardly assault on their sister. Genesis loves this kind of story, even if we find it beyond bizarre.
There is an important implicit notion of marriage here, however, and it is this: families have always been very careful about who marries whom, because they want to keep property within the management of the family. Hence there were dowries in the old days. Maintaining wealth within the clan is one of the reasons for marriage. But it is not the main reason.
So if having babies is not the primary purpose of matrimony, or not having babies, or happiness, or romance, or sex, or keeping property within the family, what is the main meaning of marriage? That is the subject of this sermon, and as I hope we shall all soon understand, marriage affects everyone: young people and old people, married people and single people, bachelors, spinsters, divorced and martially separated people, the newly born and the yet-to-be-born.
I am astonished that I have never preached a sermon like this before. It comes about now, late in my preaching career, because it finally dawned on me what is the main meaning of marriage. However my insight occurred only after I have officiated at over five hundred or so weddings. By a rough mathematical process, I suspect I have been the officiant at that many weddings, although I do not have an actual accurate count.
Because I am old, I have always used the wedding service of the old Book of Common Worship of the old Presbyterian Church USA. That was before it became the UPCUSA, the United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America. The Presbyterians stole most of their stuff in their prayer book from the Episcopalians, who stole most of their stuff from the Catholics. What can I say but what the Book of Ecclesiastes (one of my favorite biblical books in my old age) says: there is nothing new in under the sun.
There is a single all-important phrase from the wedding service that I want to highlight, because it represents the essence of this sermon about marriage. The preamble, or opening statement in the order of service for weddings, makes this declaration: Let us therefore reverently remember that God has established and sanctified marriage, FOR THE WELFARE AND HAPPINESS OF HUMANITY. Marriage is intended to provide happiness, but it is meant to provide happiness for everyone, not just for particular couples. In other words, marriage is primarily a social institution, not an individual institution, even though it doesn’t seem like that to us. We think marriage is intended for the good of two people, when it reality it is intended for the good of all people. Marriage exists for everyone, not just for married people and their children. To suppose that marriage is only for the married is completely to misunderstand its main meaning. Theologically, marriage is a social contract, and not an individual contract.
The term “social contract” has long been used by philosophers, social scientists, and historians to describe the implicit pact which exists in every society between the people and the state. Plato wrote about it in ancient Greece, and then Thomas Hobbes in 17th century England. Later Rousseau, Locke, Jefferson, and Madison, among others, wrote extensively about it. The idea is that a bond exists between people and their government, and it decrees that government should do only what the people want, not what the government wants.
As long as there have been governments, there has been an official state recognition of the social institution of marriage and of every particular marriage ever performed within that jurisdiction’s confines. In Europe and later in the Americas, church records were originally the primary place where marriages were recorded. As time went on, however, particularly in Europe, state marriages became a state requirement. So in almost all European countries, and in most other countries except the United States, couples may get married in a church, but they must also get married in the town or city or county registry office for their marriage to become official.
Anthropologists tell us that almost every society that ever existed has had marriage as an essential ingredient in its long-term social cohesion. The social contract cannot exist without marriage. Every clan, every ethnic group, every nation has discovered that marriage is absolutely necessary to its survival. Almost no people have ever tried to form a society without marriage. Intuitively over the past fifty thousand years or so of the survival of our species, Homo sapiens, we realized that men and women had to pair off. Now, with same-sex marriage becoming more common, it also is part of the social contract. Here is the point: Marriage is THE social glue. More than any other factor, it is what holds us together as persons and people and peoples.
The creation story in Genesis tells us that in a few brief sentences. But because we don’t speak Hebrew, the language in which Genesis was first written, we may miss the primary point. Everyone knows it was Adam and Eve who were in the Garden of Eden. What most don’t know is that those names mean something. They aren’t like Spencer or Rock, or like Kathryn or Doris. The Hebrew word (and in this case name) Adam means “Mankind” or “Humanity.” What it doesn’t mean is A Man. In these days of politically correct language Mankind has fallen into disuse because its emphasis seems to be on MANkind. Even “Humanity” is now in disfavor because HuMANity won’t do either. “Humankind” is apparently OK, because it is Humankind. This emphasis on emphasis is ridiculous, but there it is. Just remember, “Adam” equals Humanity. “Eve” means either “Mother” or “Living.” But the story of creation is not just about two people in Eden (which means “Delight”); it is about all of us and how we got here. We are creations of God, each of us; that is what Genesis insists in the very beginning.
There are actually two creation stories, Gen. 1:1-2:4a, and then Gen. 2:4b-25. There are reasons for this, but we won’t get into that either. Ask me later if you’re really curious. In the second account, after everything else has been created, God puts – quote – “the man” into the Garden of Eden to till it and to make crops grow. However, “the man” in Genesis 2 is not called “Adam;” he is just “the man.”
But God decided the man (the quintessential, the prototypical, the first man?) needed someone to be with him. The text says, “Then the Lord God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone. I will make a helper fit for him’” Gen. 2:18). It was then that God took a rib from the man and fashioned it into a woman. The story concludes with the man observing, “This at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman” (in Hebrew ishshah) “because she was taken out of Man” (in Hebrew ish) [Gen. 2:23]. Linguistically, where they gain their ultimate meaning, man and woman are inseparably related. And it gives the final theological stamp of approval on the pairing which all societies have followed, by saying, “Therefore a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves unto his wife, and the two become one flesh” (2:24).
Not all men and all women either choose to marry or do marry, even if they want to marry. That is completely acceptable. But most people everywhere eventually marry, and it is that decision which is what God intends for most but surely not all of us. Furthermore, that decision becomes the primary building block of human society. An old song said, “Love makes the world go ‘round.” It isn’t love per se that does that; it is marriage. In the best of all possible worlds, there is growing love in every marriage as the years pass. However, we know that is not always the case. Still, marriage in and of itself is the factor upon which every society and culture is constructed. God intended marriage for the welfare and happiness of humanity.
In one of the prayers in the old Presbyterian wedding service, it refers to the fact that God brings couples together by His providence. Providence means God’s use of our choices for His purposes. God never matches people together for marriage. Were that true, it is obvious in many instances He made some very bad matches. All of us have known couples who married, and we said they would never make it, and they didn’t. On the other hand, there are mismatched couples who succeed swimmingly in marriage, despite themselves, and despite our initial misgivings. But it is imperative to understand that we decide whom to marry; not God; God never does it. But God is always prepared to bless those decisions, if we allow Him to do so.
New Testament experts say that the apostle Paul did not write the letter to the Ephesians, even though it is ascribed to him. If so, that’s a good thing, because whoever wrote it made some highly dubious observations about marriage. “Wives, be subject to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is head of the wife as Christ is head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior” (Eph. 5:22-23). What male chauvinist claptrap that is! Such advice may have worked in the 1st century, but in the 21st century, at least in the developed world, it provokes ire in the hearts of most women, who have been striving for centuries to become liberated from the subjection into which men have forced them. However, Ephesians 5 does indirectly remind us that ideas regarding marriage change greatly through time, even though marriage itself is always the social glue which binds the human race into one united society. When we think about marriage, we think about many millions of individual wives and husbands, but God thinks about many scores or hundreds or even thousands of individual societies.
Our middle and last hymns this morning are the only two hymns with which I am familiar that focus on marriage and the family. The lyrics are a bit saccharine for 2013, but they are worth pondering anyway. Even if we probably would not express these thoughts in these terms, it still behooves us to think about the thoughts.
But what about the many marriages where sadness or rancor are the most obvious operative factors, both to the couples themselves and to everyone around them? Tolstoy began his great novel Anna Karenina with the memorable declaration, “All happy families are like one another; each unhappy family is unhappy in their own way.” Many unhappy couples stay married because they think God and social convention require it of them. Many individuals who would be very happy in marriage never marry, because they fear matrimony might impinge on their inner tranquility. Troubled marriages are sad in every respect, most of all to God. Nonetheless, even in the worst of circumstances, every marriage, however it individually operates, contributes to the good of the whole, because God has established and sanctified marriage for the welfare and happiness of humanity. Marriage itself is a social necessity, whatever may be the character of each particular marriage.
God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make a helper fit for him.” …Therefore a man leaves his father and mother, and cleaves unto his wife (Gen. 2:18,24).