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Sunday, January 03, 2010
Love One Another
First in a Series on Love, Relationships, Marriage and Sexuality: Insights from the Bible
By Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz
1Corinthians 13:1 – 7 New Revised Standard Version
1If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3 If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing. 4 Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. 7 It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
I don’t know if you remember Tom and Ray Magliozzi. They are the brothers who have a weekly radio program on NPR that advises callers on how to deal with car problems. The two brothers have their own repair shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts and they are excellent engineers with degrees from MIT, so they know a bit about cars and car repair.
I listen to them, when I can, not only for the car advice, but because they are also, funny. It turns out that they have a Saturday morning column in the Denver Post auto section and two weeks ago they were not only giving car advice but marriage advice in their column!
A young woman wrote in who had just gotten married and was asking Tom and Ray about a funny habit her new husband has of never using his turn signal until he is right into the intersection and about to turn, and then just keeping the signal on for just a moment. He says that he does not want to burn out his blinker bulb too quickly so he only wants to use it for a couple of seconds at a time. Well, Tom and Ray offered their usual prickly and humorous advice. Part of their advice was to tell couples, in a serious relationship, to make sure that they drive together before getting married because they may learn some new and important things about each other.
I am telling you about that column, not to talk about how long to use turn signals, but only to note that there are lots of people around who want to advise us and teach us about relationships and about marriage. Some of the advice is sound and much is questionable.
We are beginning a seven week sermon series today on love, relationships, marriage, and sexuality for several reasons. I want us to get back in touch with some of the many insights and stories about those issues from the Bible and to know that the Bible spends a lot of time and space discussing those topics. Some of the material is more instructive and lasting than other parts. We can see from the beginning that human beings are created to be in relationship and that being lonely is the first thing declared bad in the Genesis story.
Rules and guidelines about marriage and sexuality appear throughout the books of Exodus and Leviticus. The Song of Solomon or Song of Songs in the Old Testament is a book of romantic poetry that is surprisingly frank and will have you saying that you did not know such a book was in your Bible. And, Paul the apostle addresses marriage, relationships and sexuality quite a bit in his letters to the Corinthian congregation, and once again, his insights may be a surprise to you.
There are many other reasons I have chosen this series of sermons. Our culture of TV and movies offers so many wrong and destructive messages about love and relationships that we need to counter those shallow messages with something healthier. Women are wrongly taught that only one body type really matters and we are given false messages about what it means to be an attractive person. Incidentally, one of the good things about the Dove soap campaign recently was to help us have healthier and more realistic notions of body image.
Our kids get so many bad messages about love and relationships and sex from Sit-coms, and it is our role as parents and church to help kids have more maturity and insights about love. We only have to read a newspaper, or see the internet or TV news to learn of celebrities who have broken their marriage promises and betrayed the trust of a partner. You can name the same list I can: Tiger Woods, Governor Mark Sanford, John Edwards, Elliot Spitzer, Senator John Ensign, the list goes on and is a reflection of the biblical sin of hubris, or arrogance and pride.
The list of reasons and questions for the sermon series goes on. What does our faith teach us about being a couple when church and spirituality are more important to one spouse than to the other spouse? What can we learn, not only from the Bible, but also from science and psychology, about the origins of heterosexuality and homosexuality? How can we treat all persons with understanding and compassion?
There are questions such as, is it normal and typical for couples to go through high points and low points in a relationship? Yes, of course it is, and perhaps this series can provide some insights for couples to talk more with each other and to strengthen that relationship.
And, can people be single and live a fulfilling and happy life? My immediate answer is yes, of course, and we need to remember that the two most important people in the birth of Christianity were single, Jesus and Paul.
We will be using the resources from Scripture to talk and learn together over these next few weeks. I believe that God’s love and compassion that we see so easily in Christ are resources and examples for us in all of our relationships. Jesus’ first public appearance in the Gospel of John is at a wedding where he makes wine available, not for people to get drunk and abuse alcohol, but to announce that his message is one of joy and abundant life. That is what wine meant in Biblical times.
Today we will be using resources from the Bible, like this profound poem on love at its best, that St. Paul gave us. “Love is patient, love is kind.” What if we just stopped right there and worked on learning to do those things? We will hear more instruction next week from Colossians which is another text we read at weddings. “Bear with one another, and if anyone has a complaint, forgive each other just as the Lord has forgiven you.”
Perhaps one of the most important resources from scripture, as we begin to talk about any of our relationships: friendships, family members, spouses, committed partners, parents and kids, is the teaching of Christ about forgiveness. Forgiveness means that we realize our own fallibility and tendency to make mistakes. It means not letting the hurt we have experienced from someone control our lives. It means not forgetting the hurt, but, if we want an ongoing relationship with that person, which we may or may not want, to not let that hurt stand in our way. Forgiveness takes time and it is, finally, holy work.
We do not have healthy and mature relationships with anyone without practicing the Biblical principle of forgiveness, forgiveness of the other person and forgiveness of ourselves. I’ll talk more about that in the next few weeks.
There are several other resources I have been using and will be using that you might want to look at and read with me.
- The Seven Principles For Making Marriage Work by Dr. John Gottman
- Making Love Last by Rev. Adam Hamilton
- The Good Marriage by Dr. Judith Wallerstein.
- Before You Say I do: A Marriage Preparation Manual for Couples by H. Norman Wright and Wes Roberts
- Homosexuality and the Christian Faith by Dr. Walter Wink – the best book we have on understanding same sex identity.
I give engaged couples, Before You Say I Do. I have also listed in the bulletin the nine psychological tasks for making marriage work from Dr Wallerstein’s book, and that might be a good discussion starter for all of our couples over the next few days.
There are two other resources upon which I will be depending. Your life experiences will be a resource for us together, and I will depend on you for two things.
- Please email the questions you hope will be addressed in these seven sermons.
- Please send me your ideas and thoughts about what has made your relationship work. I am particularly interested in what has kept people together for twenty years or more and what counsel you would want us to offer younger people about love, relationships, marriage, and sexuality. I will count on you for some dialogue to help me to know what to address.
One other resource for me is being able to be married to Judy Martz for the past forty four years and to learn from her and to be privileged to be her life partner. We both have come from families where our parents had long tenure as couples. Judy’s parents were married for almost 69 years until her father’s death a few months ago.
Finally, I ask for your prayers as a resource for us together. Some of these topics are personal and controversial, and I am trying to address a congregation of 4000 people. I’m addressing a congregation with great diversity:
- Couples who have been married for a while and are experiencing the typical ups and downs.
- People who have experienced a painful divorce and are still dealing with that pain.
- Teenagers who are trying to sort out who they are and what is most important about love and relationships.
- Older people who are in a committed relationship but have chosen, for complicated reasons not to marry.
- People who are single and who are happily single.
- Same sex couples who are deeply committed to each other.
- Couples who have been married for forty or fifty years or more who can teach me and all the rest of us about how to do that successfully.
So I ask not only for your insights and questions and emails but also for your prayers as we learn together how to do what our call to worship from I John tells us: Beloved, let us love one another, or love is from God and whoever loves is born of God and knows God, for God is love.
Amen.