why marriage matters

I want to share this here because I really came into a deeper awareness of the why marriage does matter whether you are gay or straight.

Audrey and Miranda were legally married October and next weekend we are having a big friend and family celebration in Glasgow Kentucky (Miranda's home town).  When Audrey came out to me 10 years ago, I never imagined that she would actually be able to be married and enjoy the same kind of wedding experience that her sisters had.
well, it is going to happen - it will be just like theirs - a family reunion, a kind of stressful event and a joy and great memory.  for many reasons marriage matters.
Here is what I wrote

Why Should the Church Care About Marriage?

“Marriage is an ongoing lesson in how God loves us.” Jenny Hicks, member of Karl Road Christian church.

 

In my 25 plus years of ministry I have performed many, many, weddings as a Christian minister.  Sometimes for family members, often for  church members and occasionally for strangers who came to me through friends.

I have this joke about how – like many ministers I know – I prefer doing funerals to weddings – because the people know that they need God at a funeral and they stay dead. (funny huh?)

Anyway, part of my context in officiating at weddings is that I am a minister who has been through marriage and divorce and remarriage. I know the challenge  of marriage and have been with people as they decided to marry and also as they decided to divorce.

And so, of course, the church needs to care about marriage.  We need to be a support and guide for every part of our lives – as  we continue to grow and learn about the mystery and challenge of a life committed to another person.   We  need wisdom and maturity to  learn about ourselves and  we need God’s grace to give and receive forgiveness.  There are so many ways in which the church needs to care about marriage.  In a world in which people are more and more deciding to delay and delete marriage – the church should care.

But I think the question by GLAD is – why should the church care about marriage for everyone?  Why should the church care that marriage is available to all people in the congregation – not just heterosexual people?

I posed this question to our diversity team.   In answering, we learned  how very easy it is  for people who can get married to dismiss the importance of marriage for  those  who cannot get married. We take for granted the privilege of filing  joint  taxes , adopting children and rights  in medical emergencies. But there is more.

Heterosexual couples have the opportunity and the privilege of making a lifetime commitment to one another publicly, spiritually and legally.  There has been an enormous change culturally over the last 25 years as people routinely co-habit  before marriage. They live together, buy homes, and enjoy most of what we used to call the “benefits” of marriage. In many ways, I think this has made the commitment of  marriage more meaningful.  My observation is that the moment when they are declared husband and wife is  often highly emotional.  The couple  is  now pledging before God and friends and according to the laws of the state that they are committed to each other  and responsible for each other in a whole new way.  Often we say words like “through sickness and through health, through success and failure….” The marriage vows are powerful promises.

There is something very different about being married than living together.  The escape hatch is closed and we are stuck working it out.  I still remember hearing Scott Peck say that the most important part of marriage is “the friction.”  Part of what keeps us together through the friction is the binding contract that is marriage.

One person on our team called marriage a “commitment and promise to work together toward a common future.”    In most weddings I will say  “ Marriage is created by God and is symbolic of the relationship between Christ and his church.” Maybe this is a also  a glimpse of the commitment that God has toward  each of us that we call “faith” and maybe this is the most important part of why the church cares about marriage.  It is one way in which we live out the intimate relationship that we have with God.  I agree with Jenny Hicks who said, “Marriage is an ongoing lesson in how God loves us.”

  And as we sat around the table talking about this, I could not see how we can  deny the  opportunity to marry to the LGBT community.  I wonder if there  was a time that churches had positions on whether or not interracial marriage was acceptable and whether or not divorced people could remarry in the church. How easy it must have been to ignore those issues because they didn’t affect us personally.

So now in 2014, the church needs to care about all  people of God.

We cannot pretend that it doesn’t matter.