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Sunday, February 14, 2010
Making Love Last A Lifetime
Seventh in the Series on Love, Relationships, Marriage and Sexuality: Insights from the Bible
By Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz
I John 4:7-9, 11-12 New Revised Standard Version
7 Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. 8 Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. 9 God's love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him.
11 Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.
I want to express my thanks to each of you for the feedback and ideas that have gone into the last seven weeks of our sermon series on LOVE MARRIAGE RELATIONSHIPS AND SEXUALITY. I have now gathered a very thick file folder of communication from members and friends with your stories that have been, sometimes inspiring, sometimes painful and sometimes humorous.
I want to start today with one of the humorous ones. It is a brief cartoon from the Cathy comic strip. Cathy is a single woman and is talking in these four panels with her friend about Cathy’s boyfriend Irving:
Cathy: I want a man who’s more spontaneous with me than Irving is.
Friend: Did you tell Irving that?
Cathy: No, I want someone who is cozier sometimes.
Friend: Did you mention that to Irving?
Cathy: No. I want someone who’ll talk about problems with me.
Friend: Did you mention that?
Cathy: No
Friend: Cathy, how do you expect a man to be everything you want if you don’t give him a hint?
Cathy: I want someone who is a better guesser!!
The cartoon is painfully true, isn’t it? It reminds me, not only of the importance of keeping close to each other in a relationship and not expecting the other person to just guess at what is happening, (members and authors wrote about that consistently), but it also reminds me of a brief conflict resolution strategy that an old friend of mine taught me that really works. It is a three part approach to working through a conflict at work or in marriage or in any relationship.
- GET THE FACTS
- SAY WHAT YOU FEEL
- ASK FOR WHAT YOU NEED.
Each of these is critical. Many times we have formed an opinion about some person or issue or dispute without having all the facts. One of our active members says, “Facts are our friends,” but how often have we gotten all exercised about something and then checked it out and found that it never really happened. We did not have the true story, the entire story, or all the facts.
After we are certain about the facts, then we need to say what we feel. No one else is an expert about your feelings but you! And feelings are not something we can argue about or try to talk someone out of when they feel sad or left out or confused or angry. A feeling is a feeling and if my friend, coworker or spouse is upset after they have gathered the facts, I just need to listen to the feeling and understand it.
Get the facts. Say what you feel. Then-ASK FOR WHAT YOU NEED!!
That is the important part missing in the Cathy cartoon. She wants Irving to play “guess-em,” and most of us are not good at playing “guess-em,” maybe, especially, us men. Or at least I am not good at it.
If my spouse, friend or coworker identifies what they need from me, for what they are hoping, then I have a better chance of responding. I may not be able to fulfill all of that need or that request, and I have to decide about that, but at least we have a better chance of doing so when the need has been identified.
Get the facts. Say what you feel. Ask for what you need.
I have been amazed, since we began to talk about these topics of love, marriage, relationships and sexuality seven weeks ago, at the number of articles and books that have been addressing the same topics. I have mentioned Elizabeth Gilbert’s new book, Committed, her follow up to Eat Pray Love.
In the past week I have seen articles in USA Today and the Wall Street Journal, now that it is close to Valentine’s Day, about couples who have been together for lots of years. They are sharing what is working for them. One couple in the WSJ article, married fifty years, said that compromise was the key to their successful relationship and that it is not enough for each spouse to give fifty percent-it must be each person giving seventy five percent. The husband said that he was happy to do that because he valued his wife more than anything in the world.
But frankly, some of the more inspiring testimonies to longevity came from our own congregation, in the past few weeks, from Emails that I received.
Let me start with a facetious one. One husband, in one of our forty year plus couples, told me something that worked for the two of them as they successfully raised four kids. He said that during the hardest times of marriage, they half jokingly told each other, that whoever would file for divorce first had to take all four kids!
Another of our longevity couples wrote me this:
“We have been married 59 years and I am convinced that it will be ‘til death do us part. My parents were divorced when I was 8 years old, a much rarer occurrence back then, and I did not want that for my children. His father died when he was ten years old and the difficulty of that made him realize that he always wanted to be there for his children so he always put family above his career. Has it always been moonlight and roses, of course not? Am I perfect, no, is he perfect, no. We deal with that. We’ve never argued about money. As depression kids, we kept our wants simple and affordable. We have never spent a lot of time arguing and neither of us always has to be right.”
Another of our couples wrote me this-from the husband:
“We have been married 48 years, since we were 18. We have moved 19 times around the world, been active in 18 different churches. We have two wonderful sons and 7 amazing grandchildren. We love every minute of every day sharing our energy by helping others with our time, talent and treasure. We try our best to do the following:
- Communicate, communicate, communicate. Listen to each other sharing the good and the tough times. We talk every day no matter where each of us is.
- We love to relax and cuddle together.
- Always try to settle differences before the sun goes down.
- Spend lots of time telling and showing each other how much we are in love and why.
- I write a note to her every day about my thoughts and hopes and wishes for us and for her and always thank her for all that she is and all that she does.
- We pray and worship together no matter where we are.
- We love to laugh and have fun together and with others.”
How is that for an inspiring way to have a strong relationship?
Every one of these couples has had the ups and downs and challenges and disappointments that are in any relationship. Judy Martz reminded me that one thing useful to us and to others is, in times of challenge and crisis, to turn toward each other instead of isolating oneself from the other.
Other couples have told me that their common experience of feelings of love for one’s spouse wax and wane at times and that what is important is realizing that love is more than a feeling and that it is a commitment and a decision.
The Bible tells us that as well. There are three different words for love in the New Testament and they all matter and are all important. The first New Testament word is the Greek, Eros - romantic love, “feeling” love. The second Greek word for love is filia or the love between friends. The most mature kind of love is the Greek word Paul uses in his most eloquent poem in I Corinthians. It is agape- a sacrificial, steady, and decisional love that is patient, kind, never boastful or conceited or rude, never selfish or quick to take offense and keeps no score of wrongs. That agape love lets us be involved in loving actions and compassionate deeds with each other, even when the feeling kind of love may be weak.
Let me mention how important it is to love and respect oneself before we can participate in giving and receiving love with another person. Jesus assumes it is good and important to love and respect oneself when he gives us the great commandment to love God and love our neighbor AS WE LOVE OURSELVES. In fact, it may be impossible to truly care for another person, fully, unless we care for ourselves. The marvelous list in your bulletin from Dr. Bonnie Messer about Basic Rights In A Relationship are first of all a matter of loving and respecting oneself and not letting someone else deprive us of that respect and of our basic rights.
Let’s talk about the goodness of being single. Two single women, one in her thirties and one in her forties each wrote me eloquent two page Emails about being happily single. While the Bible tell us in Genesis that it is not good for human beings to be alone and that we are created for relationship with God and others, that may or may not mean being married for every person.
Elizabeth Gilbert talks about this for several pages in her new book, Committed, and tells about how important it has been for her to be an unmarried and childless aunt for some nieces and nephews.
One St. Andrew member in her thirties wrote that she is sure there are single women who seem to think that the only way to be happy is to be desperately searching for a husband. She also says that, “Most of the single women I know have managed to create happy, fulfilling, rewarding lives, full of family and friends and adventures. I think the passivity of women in film and television is what makes me most angry. It is as though it’s simply impossible for adult men and women in relationships to simply TALK about what they want out of life and make decisions TOGETHER about marriage, rather than the woman simply waiting around for the man to propose.”
Another single woman in her forties told me, “I think happiness depends on our perspective and we can choose how we do or don’t enjoy our life no matter what our marital status is.”
Let’s look at two other topics that we have touched on the past few weeks. Jesus seems, in the gospels, to have a rather harsh approach to divorce-seeming to allow it in only one circumstance-that of adultery. It strikes some of us as a statement that is not consistent with the teachings of Jesus elsewhere about compassion. I think it is important to understand the first century culture and context of Jesus words. In that very patriarchal culture, it was the husband who had all the power. The husband could decide about whether to stay married or not. The wife had no power and all the husband had to do was to say to his wife in public three times, I divorce you, and the marriage was over. So when Jesus takes a strong stand against that kind of casual divorce, he is actually taking a stand for women’s rights and also strengthening the notion of marriage as a commitment.
I do not think that this means that spouses who have worked hard on a marriage in couples counseling or who have betrayed trust, and cannot rebuild that trust, never have the option to reconsider their marriage. That would go against the compassion that Jesus consistently teaches in the Bible. I do not want a wife or husband to allow themselves to be abused or mistreated by the other, and I do know of situations where divorce can be an option-I say this very carefully and with much prayer-that a couple never, never takes this lightly and only goes through counseling and prayer and much soul searching.
Our United Methodist Social principles statement puts it this way: “God’s plan is for life-long, faithful marriage. The church must be in the forefront of premarital and post marital counseling in order to create and preserve strong marriages. However, when a married couple is estranged beyond reconciliation, even after thoughtful consideration and counsel, divorce is a regrettable alternative in the midst of brokenness.”
The other resource from the teachings of Jesus is the assumption that we humans are frail and broken at times and when we have failed and made painful mistakes, God is gracious and gives us another chance.
If I am meeting with a couple before their marriage and one or both of them has been married before, I always ask what they have learned about themselves, about marriage and about what did not work in a previous marriage and how they are different now.
Lastly we touch on a topic where, in a marriage, one spouse has more interest in spiritual matters than the other. This is a good thing if the less interested spouse can still be supportive and even attend worship. One person wrote, in the past month, of that happening in her marriage and how important what was said, that particular Sunday, was to both husband and wife.
The other side of that is how important it is for the spiritually active spouse to show, in the relationship, the deeds of compassion and kindness that should be the result of any faith that we practice. Our actions are more important than our words. And true Christian faith is a matter, Jesus reminds us, of deeds and acts, instead of words and ideas.
We have provided each other a variety of resources in the past few weeks. There are books that are still on the bookshelves, quote sheets and inserts in your bulletin that are also on the sermon wall. And, in today’s bulletin there is a service, on this Valentine’s Day, for couples who want to take this home and reaffirm their commitment to each other. In addition, we have provided a communication class for couples, led by Dr. Bonnie Messer, and 26 people attending after the first session!
The last resource is that reminder again from Genesis that God has created human beings to be in relationship with each other, not only as couples but also as friends and “chosen extended family.” This is what the community of faith should be for each other. God says in Genesis, it is not good for human beings to be alone. God has created us, not for loneliness but for relationship with each other and with God.