Thursday, July 31, 2008

A Marriage Made in Eden, Part 4 of 15

Guest: Gay Hubbard

IDEA: God designed marriage to provide a safe place in which we can experience the changes that come to all of us.

PURPOSE: To help listeners think about God's reasons for creating marriage.

Q: Yesterday you said my question "Why SHOULD people get married?" cuts two ways. Then we talked about the first way – the many people who are saying today that they don't need marriage. We discussed the reasons why a lot of people choose cohabitation. But then you said that the question could also be asking, what are the right reasons for choosing marriage? What did you mean by that?

A: One reason for marrying is that it provides a context of permanence in a changing world. We want a safe place, a still point in a churning world. This idea has come to seem logical to me as I've thought about God's understanding of change – as well as what I think is his own clear investment in change. I believe God sees change as inevitable and (when it's in the right direction and for the right purpose) as highly desirable. It would be like God to provide an optimal environment in which we could change. The couple that marries at age 20 will both be very different at 30 and the circumstances of their lives and relationship will be different. But in the context of the commitment to permanence in Christian marriage, all of this change is worked out in the unchanging commitment of the couple to each other.

One couple said to me once, "Well, we'll be different at 40 and at 50 and on our 60th wedding anniversary. But we'll get different together, and we'll be different together. That's what marriage is about." I think they had this right.

I think of this permanent foundation for changing people and changing relationships like the pedal point against which a gifted jazz organist is both anchored to the key and free to improvise. I think God's idea is that marriage makes change safe rather than preventing it.

A second reason for marrying is that marriage is the formal link between two individuals who are then integrated into the larger community. We want connection even as we may chase individualism. Now in our post-modern world the importance of community has changed, and so has the sense of the importance of marriage. If we reduce "community" to the lowest common denominator as a "collection of like-minded" people, we've changed the nature of community. But God is very much into community. The Trinity is a community, and the body of Christ is a community. And marriage is a kind of community which is also part of a larger community – all because we need community.

A third reason to marry is that marriage is the form (like iambic pentameter) through which God has chosen that we express committed love. The form isn't arbitrary. It grows out of what it means to be created as male and female in the image of God. It is the form in which the love of the Trinity itself is expressed.