Well, I was reading from Lewis and had his thoughts going through my head, and then I stumbled across a painting that my wife did a couple weeks ago. Yes, Saundra likes to paint. She doesn’t think she is very good, but I do.
Song of Songs 2:10-14; 8:6-7; Revelation 22:1-5; Matthew 22:1-14
Have you even noticed watching someone paint, maybe Bob Ross, that the way the painting looks at the beginning is very different from the way it looks finished. "Hey! That's a tree!"And sometimes it looks good for a while, then it turns ugly, then a few brushstrokes later - beauty breaks out all over?
Anyway, this painting of Saundra’s got me thinking about the very different ends of paint in a bottle and paint on a canvas. The paint that stays in the bottle fairly quickly ends up in the trash and then in the landfill for centuries, useless to all, unseen, dried up, flaky, ugly, molding and decaying. Yet the paint that is put on a canvas may also have a lifetime of centuries in a different way as people look at the paint, the painting, the artwork that has been created by the paint, passing the paint from owner to owner, from location to location, being seen by dozens or hundreds, or even millions of eyes. It is all in whether or not the paint comes out of the bottle or not.
Well, as this mixed with Lewis’ ideas and I realized that I had missed my Valentine’s Day sermon, certain ideas began to crystallize.
For Friday was Valentine’s Day, a day devoted to love, but not necessarily agape, the self-sacrificing love of the New Testament. No, the love which Valentine’s Day is devoted to is described by the Greek word eros, the physical love of a man and woman for each other – passion, fueled by emotional energy, romance, and diamond rings. It is the emotion found in our first reading from the Song of Songs, sometimes known as the Song of Solomon, where two lovers talk of how beautiful they each are to each other. Believe it or not, reading the Song of Solomon to each other can be a wonderful romantic experience even with old married couples, especially if you use a modern translation. Yes, the Bible has romance!
Have you even noticed watching someone paint, maybe Bob Ross, that the way the painting looks at the beginning is very different from the way it looks finished. "Hey! That's a tree!"And sometimes it looks good for a while, then it turns ugly, then a few brushstrokes later - beauty breaks out all over?
Anyway, this painting of Saundra’s got me thinking about the very different ends of paint in a bottle and paint on a canvas. The paint that stays in the bottle fairly quickly ends up in the trash and then in the landfill for centuries, useless to all, unseen, dried up, flaky, ugly, molding and decaying. Yet the paint that is put on a canvas may also have a lifetime of centuries in a different way as people look at the paint, the painting, the artwork that has been created by the paint, passing the paint from owner to owner, from location to location, being seen by dozens or hundreds, or even millions of eyes. It is all in whether or not the paint comes out of the bottle or not.
Well, as this mixed with Lewis’ ideas and I realized that I had missed my Valentine’s Day sermon, certain ideas began to crystallize.
For Friday was Valentine’s Day, a day devoted to love, but not necessarily agape, the self-sacrificing love of the New Testament. No, the love which Valentine’s Day is devoted to is described by the Greek word eros, the physical love of a man and woman for each other – passion, fueled by emotional energy, romance, and diamond rings. It is the emotion found in our first reading from the Song of Songs, sometimes known as the Song of Solomon, where two lovers talk of how beautiful they each are to each other. Believe it or not, reading the Song of Solomon to each other can be a wonderful romantic experience even with old married couples, especially if you use a modern translation. Yes, the Bible has romance!
But this leads to the question:
What is the purpose of marriage?
For much of history, marriage has been an economic contract, a way for two people to reduce the work of living by helping each other. Eve was created as Adam’s helper – And then marriage became a way to ensure the survival of children in a time when men worked the fields and protected the women and children from bandits. Economics and safety.
What is the purpose of marriage?
For much of history, marriage has been an economic contract, a way for two people to reduce the work of living by helping each other. Eve was created as Adam’s helper – And then marriage became a way to ensure the survival of children in a time when men worked the fields and protected the women and children from bandits. Economics and safety.
But what about today? What is the purpose of marriage in a day when a woman or man can earn a living alone, when dishwashers and microwave ovens, prepacked food and industrial farms have made it simple for anyone to prepare food, when Walmart provides ready-made clothing, when society has police and lands which are basically secure from bandits, when daycare providers and school systems raise most children? What is the purpose of marriage in the modern world?
Today's English, particularly in London, have mostly discarded marriage in favor of two single people living together for years or decades of time as “partners”. They aren’t even couples, but simply roommates with benefits, people who see themselves as temporarily living together until they move onto a different roommate. This is partially because the English tax system and the English health system provide no advantage to being married. So they have “partners” - not spouses, not even common law marriages, for there is no assumption of permanence.
In our society, our most common arrangement today is for two people to live together for a few years, then split up and try it with someone else. Children may or may not be involved. Marriage may or may not happen later. Our divorce rate has been falling – but that’s only because we have raised the bar so that only the most committed get married today. Our break-up rate is perhaps even higher than it was a few decades ago, because we simply don't get married until we are fully committed to it and "worn-out" by being single. So why get married?
We have to go back to an understanding of theology and ancient Jewish law to understand the true purpose of marriage.
In ancient Israel, the Law that Moses brought from God to the people of Israel included a rule about how to determine facts in a trial. All facts must be established by the testimony of two or three people. If you could not find at least two people to testify to a fact, then it wasn’t admissible evidence.
And it is from this that we find the real purpose of marriage.
In God’s eyes, marriage is extraordinarily special. We were created as two parts of a single creature – A man and a woman who form a couple. For years we search for the other half of ourselves and when we finally find that other half, we know it deep inside. And we marry.
Therefore, whenever you see each other, remember that it is like looking at part of yourself in the mirror. Whenever you touch each other, remember that it is your own body that you touch. Whenever you speak to each other, remember most supremely that you are speaking to yourself.
In the best marriages, over time the he and she disappear. After a few years, friends always refer to them as “them”, and the couple refers to themselves as “we”, for it has become impossible to remember that he and she can be found as separate from “them”.
And the magic that makes this possible is the Holy Spirit of God, which blends together the roughness of the he and she and gives them one purpose, blinding them together into the one “we”.
This is why it is important for married couples to find a church to attend together. It is because you, the couple, must to join together in love with a third member of your marriage – The God that created you and brought you together, the God that arranged the entire Universe so that you could be married. Always remember that in the best marriages, there is a third member besides the he and the she – there is the all powerful “I AM” that created all things. Without God, marriages become just business partnerships or worse, slave and master relationships. Without God, the love fades.
Invite God into your marriage. Find God and together ask Him for help each day. Find God and live together in peace and love until the day that you die – and then you will see God, the One that kept you together through the years of happiness.
Marriage was not created for the purpose of satisfying lust. It was created because under the Law that God gave to Moses, all truth is verified by the testimony of two or three witnesses. You are each the witness of each other’s life, able to speak at the end of time about the truth of the other’s life, able to testify about the truth of the other’s goodness, able to speak the truth that this other person was important and meaningful and loving to at least one person in the Universe.
And God the Son is the other witness Who sees both of you and testifies to the Truth of your lives, the importance of your lives, the existence of your lives. He is the necessary second witness, and the third witness when you two stand together against the evil in the world, against the Devil that accuses, God the Son is the Witness that will back up your testimony.
But there is even more…
We don’t think about this much, but every man and woman we encounter is immortal. Some will spend their eternity alone, separated from God and light, cast into the outer darkness because they did not choose to honor God, but wanted to follow their own path. Looking at our reading from Matthew 22, the parable is about a king who allows all people, good and bad to come to the marriage of His Son. But one man showed up not wearing a wedding garment. He did not honor the King or the King's Son. God allows that; God is polite, God accepts all people, good and bad. But those who do not honor God and God’s Son are cast into the outer darkness. Let me explain that.
In first century Israel, when there was a wedding, everyone brought their oil lamps and candles with them to the village square or other wedding venue. The party went on all night, sometimes for days and nights. If you were thrown out of the party into the outer darkness, it was DARK! There were no street lights, no window lamps, no glows from television sets, no city or industrial lights reflected on the clouds to give a glow. Remember, Israel usually has very little humidity and clouds. There’s no light except the stars and what moon there was that night to give you light. That is how dark it is in the outer darkness.
In the distance you can hear the music of the wedding feast of the Lamb, Jesus. You can hear the crowd laughing and singing. But where you are, it is dark, you are alone, and there are lions and jackals and bears roaming around. All you can hope for is to run into someone else who has rejected God, someone else who is equally as selfish and self-centered as you are, someone else who wants to be in total control just as much as you do. It doesn’t seem so bad until you realize that this includes people like Hitler, Pol Pot, Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Saddam Hussein, Stalin, Billy the Kid - who murdered in cold blood for pleasure, and whoever else you can think of. They are out here in the outer darkness too. They have practiced and practiced their ruthlessness, their need for control, their evil, in some cases for a thousand years or more. And you will be here encountering them for eternity, for you will still live forever. This is the outer darkness where those who dishonor God and God's Son end up.
Or there are those who will spend their eternity in the New Jerusalem described in Revelation 22, learning directly from Jesus. I read books such as the letters of James and I John, and I can glimpse the holiness of these Apostles. Can you imagine what they are like today, living with Christ for the last two thousand years? John Wesley was known in his day for being the kindest, most gentle man, full of grace – can you imagine how he has grown in the last two hundred and thirty years since his death? For that matter, take the nicest, kindest, most holy person you know and think about what they will be like after a thousand years of sitting at the feet of Jesus. What beauty!
We don’t realize it, but the holiest things we ever encounter on earth, apart from the blessed bread and wine of Communion are the people around us. Each is an unfinished portrait of God, an image of God, potentially so good and holy that they will be like those gold-framed portraits we find on display in a museum or in an ancient English mansion. Holy images, holy incomplete paintings of God walk by us every day, paintings that if we could see them in their complete, final stages, they would take away our breath with their beauty.
And there are also paintings of God who walk by which are destined for the outer darkness, the trashcan, to be buried forever in the landfills of that outer darkness, crumbling, flaky, molding, decaying.
We each have the opportunity to touch up these paintings, these people, the good ones, even the great ones – and especially the ones that have started poorly. We can speak a few words, and like God speaking in the Creation story, the painting becomes more beautiful. Or we can speak different words and it is like putting a blood-red diagonal slash over delicately painted spirals and flowers. We encounter the holy every day, every time we speak with someone.
Our paintbrush and palette is our mouth and our actions. Encouragement and hope are beautiful yellows and blues and violets – Sarcasm is black, insults are slashes of blood-red paint. Wonder is the golden tinge of sunlight on clouds while hugs are the green of springtime moss. Warmth and listening puts orange and the brown of deep piles of fallen leaves of a warm Indian summer forest walk in a person’s soul.
A child says something in Walmart – and we can speak back in many ways. What can we say that will make him more beautiful? "You are so smart! I know you always help your mother!" especially when she is not helping her mother.
A woman complains in ugly ways about her family to you. How can you help her move around the paint so the ugly goes away and beauty comes through? "It sounds to me like your daughter is simply looking for friendship and doesn’t know how to find a good friend. Maybe I could take her shopping?"
A man says something sarcastic about his wife. How can you remind him of why he married her, the beauty he once saw?
And this, my friends, is the real core of marriage. For in marriage, we are given a special relationship with a special portrait of God, a holy, immortal soul whom we have special responsibility for. How will you help that soul that is your spouse become even more beautiful and glorious in front of God? What will you say today that will lift up your spouse, help them cover up and remove the ugly streaks, add onto them the glory that is God’s words and deeds?
For our words and deeds each day affect the souls around us, none more than our husband or wife. You may say that you’ve always wanted to create something beautiful. Every single day, you put brushstrokes on the ones around you, making them beautiful or ugly with every word and deed. Take responsibility for the glory of another, working like a master painter, a Michelangelo, a DaVinci, a Rembrandt working to present your spouse to God, beautiful in soul, when you both walk in front of God at the end of time. Can you imagine the happiness in your marriage if you work to beautify your spouse’s soul through uplifting, positive words?
And as you go out to eat today or shop, look for other people, other portraits of God that you can touch up – just a dab of color here for the wait staff, just a brushstroke there at the checkout - so they will also walk in New Jerusalem at the feast of the Lamb, avoiding the outer darkness.
For your words and deeds can be spray cans of red and black, vandalizing God’s creations. Or your words and deeds can be a glorious palette of beautiful color – if you desire – to be used for God’s glory. It is your choice.
Lift up your friends and lead them to Jesus. Pray for your enemies that they may know Christ through your words and deeds. And lift up those who are different from us, yet worship Christ in their own way, that we may come to know them as friends.
Amen.
Today's English, particularly in London, have mostly discarded marriage in favor of two single people living together for years or decades of time as “partners”. They aren’t even couples, but simply roommates with benefits, people who see themselves as temporarily living together until they move onto a different roommate. This is partially because the English tax system and the English health system provide no advantage to being married. So they have “partners” - not spouses, not even common law marriages, for there is no assumption of permanence.
In our society, our most common arrangement today is for two people to live together for a few years, then split up and try it with someone else. Children may or may not be involved. Marriage may or may not happen later. Our divorce rate has been falling – but that’s only because we have raised the bar so that only the most committed get married today. Our break-up rate is perhaps even higher than it was a few decades ago, because we simply don't get married until we are fully committed to it and "worn-out" by being single. So why get married?
We have to go back to an understanding of theology and ancient Jewish law to understand the true purpose of marriage.
In ancient Israel, the Law that Moses brought from God to the people of Israel included a rule about how to determine facts in a trial. All facts must be established by the testimony of two or three people. If you could not find at least two people to testify to a fact, then it wasn’t admissible evidence.
And it is from this that we find the real purpose of marriage.
In God’s eyes, marriage is extraordinarily special. We were created as two parts of a single creature – A man and a woman who form a couple. For years we search for the other half of ourselves and when we finally find that other half, we know it deep inside. And we marry.
Therefore, whenever you see each other, remember that it is like looking at part of yourself in the mirror. Whenever you touch each other, remember that it is your own body that you touch. Whenever you speak to each other, remember most supremely that you are speaking to yourself.
In the best marriages, over time the he and she disappear. After a few years, friends always refer to them as “them”, and the couple refers to themselves as “we”, for it has become impossible to remember that he and she can be found as separate from “them”.
And the magic that makes this possible is the Holy Spirit of God, which blends together the roughness of the he and she and gives them one purpose, blinding them together into the one “we”.
This is why it is important for married couples to find a church to attend together. It is because you, the couple, must to join together in love with a third member of your marriage – The God that created you and brought you together, the God that arranged the entire Universe so that you could be married. Always remember that in the best marriages, there is a third member besides the he and the she – there is the all powerful “I AM” that created all things. Without God, marriages become just business partnerships or worse, slave and master relationships. Without God, the love fades.
Invite God into your marriage. Find God and together ask Him for help each day. Find God and live together in peace and love until the day that you die – and then you will see God, the One that kept you together through the years of happiness.
Marriage was not created for the purpose of satisfying lust. It was created because under the Law that God gave to Moses, all truth is verified by the testimony of two or three witnesses. You are each the witness of each other’s life, able to speak at the end of time about the truth of the other’s life, able to testify about the truth of the other’s goodness, able to speak the truth that this other person was important and meaningful and loving to at least one person in the Universe.
And God the Son is the other witness Who sees both of you and testifies to the Truth of your lives, the importance of your lives, the existence of your lives. He is the necessary second witness, and the third witness when you two stand together against the evil in the world, against the Devil that accuses, God the Son is the Witness that will back up your testimony.
But there is even more…
We don’t think about this much, but every man and woman we encounter is immortal. Some will spend their eternity alone, separated from God and light, cast into the outer darkness because they did not choose to honor God, but wanted to follow their own path. Looking at our reading from Matthew 22, the parable is about a king who allows all people, good and bad to come to the marriage of His Son. But one man showed up not wearing a wedding garment. He did not honor the King or the King's Son. God allows that; God is polite, God accepts all people, good and bad. But those who do not honor God and God’s Son are cast into the outer darkness. Let me explain that.
In first century Israel, when there was a wedding, everyone brought their oil lamps and candles with them to the village square or other wedding venue. The party went on all night, sometimes for days and nights. If you were thrown out of the party into the outer darkness, it was DARK! There were no street lights, no window lamps, no glows from television sets, no city or industrial lights reflected on the clouds to give a glow. Remember, Israel usually has very little humidity and clouds. There’s no light except the stars and what moon there was that night to give you light. That is how dark it is in the outer darkness.
In the distance you can hear the music of the wedding feast of the Lamb, Jesus. You can hear the crowd laughing and singing. But where you are, it is dark, you are alone, and there are lions and jackals and bears roaming around. All you can hope for is to run into someone else who has rejected God, someone else who is equally as selfish and self-centered as you are, someone else who wants to be in total control just as much as you do. It doesn’t seem so bad until you realize that this includes people like Hitler, Pol Pot, Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Saddam Hussein, Stalin, Billy the Kid - who murdered in cold blood for pleasure, and whoever else you can think of. They are out here in the outer darkness too. They have practiced and practiced their ruthlessness, their need for control, their evil, in some cases for a thousand years or more. And you will be here encountering them for eternity, for you will still live forever. This is the outer darkness where those who dishonor God and God's Son end up.
Or there are those who will spend their eternity in the New Jerusalem described in Revelation 22, learning directly from Jesus. I read books such as the letters of James and I John, and I can glimpse the holiness of these Apostles. Can you imagine what they are like today, living with Christ for the last two thousand years? John Wesley was known in his day for being the kindest, most gentle man, full of grace – can you imagine how he has grown in the last two hundred and thirty years since his death? For that matter, take the nicest, kindest, most holy person you know and think about what they will be like after a thousand years of sitting at the feet of Jesus. What beauty!
We don’t realize it, but the holiest things we ever encounter on earth, apart from the blessed bread and wine of Communion are the people around us. Each is an unfinished portrait of God, an image of God, potentially so good and holy that they will be like those gold-framed portraits we find on display in a museum or in an ancient English mansion. Holy images, holy incomplete paintings of God walk by us every day, paintings that if we could see them in their complete, final stages, they would take away our breath with their beauty.
And there are also paintings of God who walk by which are destined for the outer darkness, the trashcan, to be buried forever in the landfills of that outer darkness, crumbling, flaky, molding, decaying.
We each have the opportunity to touch up these paintings, these people, the good ones, even the great ones – and especially the ones that have started poorly. We can speak a few words, and like God speaking in the Creation story, the painting becomes more beautiful. Or we can speak different words and it is like putting a blood-red diagonal slash over delicately painted spirals and flowers. We encounter the holy every day, every time we speak with someone.
Our paintbrush and palette is our mouth and our actions. Encouragement and hope are beautiful yellows and blues and violets – Sarcasm is black, insults are slashes of blood-red paint. Wonder is the golden tinge of sunlight on clouds while hugs are the green of springtime moss. Warmth and listening puts orange and the brown of deep piles of fallen leaves of a warm Indian summer forest walk in a person’s soul.
A child says something in Walmart – and we can speak back in many ways. What can we say that will make him more beautiful? "You are so smart! I know you always help your mother!" especially when she is not helping her mother.
A woman complains in ugly ways about her family to you. How can you help her move around the paint so the ugly goes away and beauty comes through? "It sounds to me like your daughter is simply looking for friendship and doesn’t know how to find a good friend. Maybe I could take her shopping?"
A man says something sarcastic about his wife. How can you remind him of why he married her, the beauty he once saw?
And this, my friends, is the real core of marriage. For in marriage, we are given a special relationship with a special portrait of God, a holy, immortal soul whom we have special responsibility for. How will you help that soul that is your spouse become even more beautiful and glorious in front of God? What will you say today that will lift up your spouse, help them cover up and remove the ugly streaks, add onto them the glory that is God’s words and deeds?
For our words and deeds each day affect the souls around us, none more than our husband or wife. You may say that you’ve always wanted to create something beautiful. Every single day, you put brushstrokes on the ones around you, making them beautiful or ugly with every word and deed. Take responsibility for the glory of another, working like a master painter, a Michelangelo, a DaVinci, a Rembrandt working to present your spouse to God, beautiful in soul, when you both walk in front of God at the end of time. Can you imagine the happiness in your marriage if you work to beautify your spouse’s soul through uplifting, positive words?
And as you go out to eat today or shop, look for other people, other portraits of God that you can touch up – just a dab of color here for the wait staff, just a brushstroke there at the checkout - so they will also walk in New Jerusalem at the feast of the Lamb, avoiding the outer darkness.
For your words and deeds can be spray cans of red and black, vandalizing God’s creations. Or your words and deeds can be a glorious palette of beautiful color – if you desire – to be used for God’s glory. It is your choice.
Lift up your friends and lead them to Jesus. Pray for your enemies that they may know Christ through your words and deeds. And lift up those who are different from us, yet worship Christ in their own way, that we may come to know them as friends.
Amen.
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