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Good afternoon. Good afternoon. To those of you here and those of you in the overflow room, wherever you are. Welcome to the first of two Robert F.

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Jones lectures. This lectureship was established in 1949 by the women of the church of First Presbyterian Church in Fort Worth, Texas. The lectures are funded annually in memory of their pastor for 35 years, Robert F. Jones.

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Dr. Kimberly Bracken Long has been invited to be the Jones lecturer this year. Dr. Long holds a Bachelor of Music from the College of Worcester, a Master of Music from the University of Maryland College Park, the Master of Divinity degree from Princeton Seminary, and a PhD in Liturgical Studies from Drew University.

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She is currently the Associate Professor of Worship at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia, where she has served for more than a dozen years. Dr. Long is interested in the formation of ministers for liturgical leadership in the church, with a particular emphasis on the sacramental and eschatological dimensions of worship. Her gift for language shows in the titles of some of her scholarly works:

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Two that I particularly liked were Stammering, Mystery, Dancing Joy, The Many Languages of Easter Worship, and my favorite, White Limos, Red Velvet, and Elvis, What Vegas Can Teach the Church About Weddings. Her lecture this afternoon, as you've seen, is entitled, What's Love Got to Do with It? The Surprising Story of Marriage. And I like to imagine the women who established this lecture in 1949 sitting here as that title is announced.

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And I can imagine them straightening their backs, tugging at white gloves, checking the clasp on an ear bob, and one whispering to the other under the net of her hat, This is going to be good. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Kimberly Brackenlong. I just told Melissa that's the best introduction ever.

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Oh, what an honor it is to be with you, and what a pleasure it is to be with you for this year's Midwinters. You know, this is widely known across all of our seminaries, you know, y'all are the big deal. So I was really gratified and grateful when Ted invited me to be part of things this year.

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Ted was my pastor once upon a time, and so has remained dear to my heart. I've always actually had a soft spot for Austin as well, and I've enjoyed several collegial friendships here, so it's just lovely to be with you. Not only that, but Austin, the city, was the town where my older son found true love. So I suppose it's fitting that I would come here to talk about marriage.

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I'd like to start with three scenarios. Scenario number one is the dog. In a recent issue of the Southern lifestyle magazine Garden and Gone... Is that funny?

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I didn't expect you to laugh that soon. W. Hodding Carter writes about a momentous change in his life. Just as he and his girlfriend tuck into a stack of homemade pancakes, she says, Let's get a dog.

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With her shiny blue eyes, he writes, unkempt auburn locks, boundless mind, and short skirts, saying no to Lisa wasn't really an option. The best I could do was stall. Miming a full mouth, I slipped off to the bathroom. What was I going to do?

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Getting the dog is a classic early step, falling soundly between the first kiss and ordering what to expect when you're expecting. We'd been together for about a year, had shared an apartment for a few months. I wasn't opposed to this next move, but definitely needed more time to think it through. A couple of weeks, minimum.

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Four hours later, Lisa settled on a tall, sinewy black mixed breed with a startling white diamond lightening up his chest. Here's the point. Things don't happen in the same order that they used to. This is what used to happen.

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You start going out, you become an item, you get married, you move in together, you have sex, At least that's what they said the order was. You buy a house, you have a baby, maybe you have another baby, then you get the dog. But now the dog almost always comes first, or maybe after moving in together.

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Scenario number two, the pass. Some people take a pass on marriage altogether. It's not that they're afraid of commitment, rather they're afraid of divorce. People are living longer, lifelong monogamy seems less and less realistic, and living together is no longer considered living in sin.

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While certainly there is emotional turmoil when cohabiting couples split, there's considerably less legal and financial mess, especially if they've kept their bank accounts separate. Of course, other people are living together to see if marriage is a good idea for them. And while researchers used to say that this would bode poorly for them in the future, opinions on that are changing. It's important to realize that this is not just a lifestyle choice.

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People with higher levels of education and greater economic stability are more likely to marry than their counterparts in lower economic classes. Race is a factor, too. A couple of years ago, sociologist Ralph Richard Banks wrote a book called Is Marriage for White People? in which he analyzed the effects of unemployment and incarceration among African-American males and the reticence of educated black women to marry.

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Still others point to laws that make it harder for low-income women to receive assistance if a man is living in the home. The point is, there are all sorts of reasons why some say no to marriage, at least for a while. Scenario number three, I'll call the wait. Forty-six years after they fell in love, Mr.

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Lewis Duckett and Dr. Billy Jones got married. Perhaps you saw their story in the New York Times. Dr.

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Jones, a psychiatrist, was deployed to Vietnam not long after they met. And the two wrote letters back and forth almost every day using code and changing gender pronouns so no one would know that they were gay. Eventually, they moved in together and they adopted a son when he was just three weeks old. He is now grown and they are the proud grandparents of a little girl.

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In October of 2013, Mr. Duckett and Dr. Jones were married in the Riverside Church in New York. Solemnifying and making legal the life that they have shared together for four and a half decades.

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Three scenarios, just three of the many ways that marriage has changed in America even just during our lifetimes. Clearly the face of marriage in this country is changing rapidly and sometimes in ways that we could not have predicted. Four years ago, I started writing a book about marriage when, one, I realized I couldn't find the kind of book that I wanted for my classes, and two, when I remembered how woefully ill-prepared I was as a young pastor in working with couples who wanted to get married, or who were doing the hard work of trying to stay married, or couples whose marriages had So I decided I would write the book that I would like to have as a teacher and that I wished I'd had as a minister.

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And in beginning that research, I started looking into how we got to where we are today. I quickly discovered that what we call traditional marriage in this country is really not very old at all. One of the most well-respected historians of marriage is sociologist Stephanie Koontz. A History, you can't quite see it, but it's subtitled How Love Conquered Marriage.

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These days we simply assume that marriage is based on two people loving each other. But it wasn't always so. For most of history, says Koontz, marriage was not primarily about individual needs and desires of a man and a woman and the children they produced. Marriage had as much to do with getting good in-laws.

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and increasing one's family labor force, as it did with finding a lifetime companion and raising a beloved child. Originally then, marriage wasn't for love at all. Parents married their children to one another so that their fields were adjacent, or so that their families would be better connected. A prospective partner's skills, resources, and tools

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were at least as important and probably far more important than things like personality or attractiveness. Marriage marked one's entry into adulthood and respectability and provided a couple with the things our government does for us now, things like social security and medical care and protection from unemployment. In the upper classes, marriages were for the purpose of accumulating wealth or forging peace treaties, or making political alliances.

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Families with property consolidated their resources. Brides came with dowry, which were often the biggest infusion of cash or property or goods that a man would acquire in his entire lifetime. And by the same token, finding a husband was usually the most important investment a woman could make in her economic future. We can hear this reflected a little bit in this following account of a marriage between two villagers in late medieval England, an account which exists only because the people being married were children of two prominent villagers.

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It goes like this. On the last day of May, 1319, Henry Croyle, Sr. attended his manorial court at Briggstock, Northamptonshire, and transferred a semi-vergate of land, which means several acres, to his son, Henry Croyle, Jr., and his son's intended wife, Agnes, the daughter of Robert Penifater.

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At the same session, the younger Croyle endowed his bride with a small house, an adjoining yard, and six rods of land. That's the transaction that marked the marriage. People did fall in love, of course. Sometimes they even fell in love with their own spouses.

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As Koontz puts it, at the end of the day, or at least in the middle of the night, marriage is also a face-to-face relationship between individuals. But it still wasn't primarily about love. Marriage was too important to economic stability and political gain to be based on something as fickle as attraction or fondness. Certainly, people knew desire and affection, but not necessarily in the context of their marriages.

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Now, by the 17th century, Puritan writers saw marriage, in Belden Lane's words, as a training ground in the learning of affection. That's a nice phrase. And several prominent Puritan couples, as you may well know, are known for the joy that they took from their married state. so then we might hear Anne Bradstreet's poem of longing for her absent husband Simon this is a little part of it my head my heart mine eyes my life name more my joy my magazine of Earthly store if two be one as surely thou and I how stayest thou there while I at Istswich lie flesh of thy flesh bone of thy bone

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I hear, thou there, yet both but one. For Bradstreet and the Puritans, desire for the beloved and desire for God were all bound up together. It is such a great story, but unfortunately it's a story for another day. And yet who's to say whether Anne,

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who was 16 when she was married to Simon, the 25-year-old assistant to her father, whether she married for love or whether love grew because the two were married. If they did marry for love, it wasn't necessarily because they were free to do so. In the American colonies, parents still continued to supervise courtship and approve matches, and going against the wishes of one's parents could have dire consequences.

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Men were known to back out of prospective marriages if the bride's parents disapproved, either from fear that she would be disinherited or from the sector of hostile in-laws. As Kuntz puts it, few people in the 16th and 17th centuries believed that love conquers all. It wasn't until the late 18th century that people began choosing partners because of affection and were encouraged to marry for love. Due in part to the tremendous social and economic changes, far too complex to go over here, the measure of a successful marriage was no longer how big of a financial settlement was involved.

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or how many useful in-laws were acquired, or how many children were produced, but how well a family met the emotional needs of its members. So marriage gradually became understood as a private contract based on sentiment. The 19th century brought even more changes, and for the first time, marriage was actually considered central to people's lives. Now, people married for romantic love, for intimacy, for personal fulfillment, and mutual happiness.

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Expectations, interestingly, that collided with gender roles, with ideas about the purity of wives, and in some cases, the assumption that good wives were not to be sexual partners. Yeah, figure that one out. Meanwhile, husbands were now seen as providers and wives as nurturing homebodies, although it wasn't until the mid-20th century that families could really survive on one income. Does anybody want to go back?

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Now, obviously, I'm painting this picture with incredibly broad strokes, and the history of marriage is far more nuanced than I can convey in one lecture. But we can see, I think, even from a brief and generalized account, that marriage as we understand it is a relatively recent construct. It has not been much more than a century that people married for love. And it has been even less time since people began to expect the sort of emotional intimacy, sexual fulfillment, mutuality, and equality

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that many of us here today would think of when we thought about marriage. I do need to say at this point that, and perhaps you've already considered this, that this story of marriage that I'm telling is clearly a Euro-Anglo story. We are describing patterns that Americans both inherited and formed, and we're reflecting on an institution that was largely unavailable to slaves. at least in the ways that we're talking about.

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The history of marriage among African-American slaves is largely undocumented. There's not much evidence regarding courtship among slaves. And it's also -- one thing we do know is that it was the individual policies of slaveholders that determined whether any sort of formal unions were encouraged or even tolerated.

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And when they were, spouses could belong to different owners. And unlike the stories that we've been hearing today, property played very little choice in the-- or very little in the choice of a union, of a partner. So at this point, I think we can say that it would be inevitable that certain questions would emerge. If marriage, Kunzer articulates them this way.

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I want to give credit where credit's due. If marriage was about love and lifelong intimacy, why would people marry at all if they couldn't find true love? Or what would hold a marriage together if love and intimacy disappeared? Or how could household order be maintained if marriages were based on affection

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rather than male authority. Naturally, questions regarding the right to divorce, equal rights for women, attitudes toward illegitimacy, and so forth were soon to follow. Here's the most startling, and I think compelling conclusion to which Kuntz arrives. And I'm going to put it up here so that you can read it along with me.

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Not out loud, but just look at it. I guess you could if you wanted, but I don't know why you'd want to. The very things that have made marriage as a relationship and as a love relationship more rewarding have made marriage as an institution less stable. That's -- I'm going to say that one again.

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The very things that have made marriage as a relationship and as a love relationship more rewarding have made marriages as an institution. less stable. We end up with a paradox that marriage today is fairer, more fulfilling, more intimate, more passionate, more faithful, more loving than most couples of the past would ever dare to imagine. But if it doesn't work out that way, it seems less bearable to people.

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Relationships that might have seemed bearable 100 years ago, even 50 years ago, just seem intolerable as our expectations have risen. Yeah, it's a pretty wise conclusion, I think. And we're going to continue to sort of work on that the rest of the day and tomorrow. A century ago, George Bernard Shaw describes what happens when people get married.

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When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part. Maybe he was on to something. I don't know. We'll come back to that.

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So you may be wondering-- I missed that comment, but I wish I'd heard it. You may be wondering where the church has been through all of this. Frankly, the church didn't get too involved in people's marriages for the first thousand years. Marriage was a domestic and a legal category, but not an ecclesial one.

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We know from scripture, of course, that Christians did get married, even though Paul advised them that it was better to avoid it altogether if they could. now concerning the matters about which you wrote he said to the Corinthians it is well for a man not to touch a woman but because of cases of sexual immorality each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband the husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights and likewise the wife to her husband for the wife does not have authority over her own body but the husband does Likewise, the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. Do not deprive one another except perhaps by agreement for a set time to devote yourselves to prayer, and then come together again so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.

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This I say by way of concession, not of command. I wish that all were as I myself am, meaning celibate. But each has a particular gift from God, one having one kind and another a different kind. To the unmarried and the widows, I say that it is well for them to remain unmarried as I am.

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But if they are not practicing self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion. Which is funny all on its own, isn't it? Like the two can't coincide.

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I know that's not what he meant, sorry. In the early centuries of the church, then Christians got married the way everybody else did. It was a family matter, and the various rituals were done in various ways in different places.

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There would likely have been domestic betrothal rites, by handing over the bride, a celebration of cohabitation, which is my polite way of describing rituals that could get pretty bawdy. Sometimes Christians suppressed some of these customs that they thought that they were inconsistent with their faith, And on occasion, they invited the priest as a leader of the faith community to give a blessing to the newly married couple. For a number of centuries then, having clergy there to bless a wedding was something like requesting a house blessing today, something that particularly devout people might do, but most people wouldn't have done it.

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And even when they did do it, it was usually only when the groom was a member of the clergy. The earliest wedding liturgy we have in the Western Church dates to the fifth century and is probably from Rome. It's not, however, a marriage service the way we would think of it. There are no rites for betrothal, no rites for marriage, there are no vows being said.

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But rather, it's a celebration of the Eucharist that contains the blessing of the bride. So it was assumed the actual contract of the marriage would take place at home. the new bride and groom would come to the mass, celebrate Eucharist, and then receive a blessing. Early Christian writers did have a few things to say about marriage, however.

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One of the most widely quoted is Tertullian, who lived in the second century. He wrote, How beautiful, then, the marriage of two Christians, two who are one in home, one in desire, one in the way of life they follow, one in the religion they practice. Nothing divides them either in flesh or in spirit.

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They pray together, they worship together, they fast together, instructing one another, encouraging one another, strengthening one another. Side by side they visit God's church and partake God's banquet. Side by side, they face difficulties in persecution, share their consolations.

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They have no secrets from one another. They never shun each other's company. They never bring sorrow to each other's hearts. Seeing this, Christ rejoices.

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To such as these, he gives his peace. Where there are two together, there also he is present. Lest you think, however, that this is a love letter to his wife, consider another part of Tertullian's correspondence in which he gives advice on how she should live after he dies. I enjoin you to exercise all the continence in your power and to renounce marriage after my death.

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After assuring her that there is no marriage in heaven, he says, On that day we will not resume any disgraceful pleasures. Gets better, actually. God does not promise such frivolous, filthy things to those who are his own. He goes on to say that the union of man and woman was intended to be, quote, the seedbed of the human race, and that nowhere is marriage forbidden, but continence is better because it brings down the gift of the Spirit.

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so much for romance. Even though Tertullian was eventually castigated as a heretic, his views on marriage are echoed by Augustine, in some ways, some two centuries later. Augustine, too, considers marriage to be God-given, not for the sake of love, necessarily, but for the procreation and nurture of children. protection from sexual sin, so it's better to marry not to burn than burn, and an intimate and sincere form of human fellowship.

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Furthermore, he insisted on fidelity and rejected easy divorce. Now Augustine is really important to us because he made three key assertions that continue to shape how we think about marriage. I mean, ever since, maybe that's a better way. These three assertions of Augustine have shaped the way we

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I guess I said it, yeah, have shaped how we think about marriage ever since. Three, they're not there, just look at me. Three things, sex is sinful. Before the fall, Augustine said humans could procreate without lust, before the fall, but not after.

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Sex happens though, and he said that children are the good fruit born of sexual sin, and that they temper the lust of their parents. Anybody with a two-year-old knows that, I guess. Or still has the memory. Sex in marriage, then, is a venial sin.

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Adultery is a mortal sin. That's the first one. And here's the second one. For Christians, according to Augustine, marriage is also a reflection and expression of the enduring sacrificial love that Christ has for his church.

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which is described in Ephesians five. Here's where it starts to get complicated. So listen again to this passage if you haven't listened to it lately. Let me just say that I realize that there's a whole lot we could do in Ephesians five that we're not gonna do, so just go with me.

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Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, just as Christ is the head of the church, the body of which he is the Savior. Just as the church is subject to Christ, so also wives ought to be in everything to their husbands.

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Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her in order to make her holy by cleansing her with the washing of water by the word. so as to present the church to himself in splendor, without a spot or wrinkle or anything of the kind. Yes, so that she may be holy and without blemish. In the same way, husbands should love their wives as they do their own bodies.

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He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hates his own body, but he nourishes and tenderly cares for it, just as Christ does for the church, because we are members of his body. For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh, quoting Genesis 2:24. This is a great mystery, and I'm applying it to Christ in the church.

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Each of you, however, should love his wife as himself, and a wife should respect her husband. It's worth noting that when the Greek Septuagint was translated to Latin Vulgate Jerome translated mysterion mysterion into sacramentum so that Ephesians 3 532 then read this is a great sacrament and I'm applying it to Christ and the church.

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Chrysostom and Augustine both experimented with this idea of marriage as a sacrament, although neither one of them considered it a sacrament like baptism or Eucharist. Then things get a little bit fuzzier yet, and this is the third assertion. Augustine wants to say that marriage is like baptism because he insists that once you're married, You are, in some ways, partners for life, even if you separate or divorce.

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So the sacrament of marriage ends only when one spouse dies. The arguments get incredibly complicated at this point. Philip Reynolds, scholar at Emory, has just written 800 pages on how marriage became a sacrament. And he's not finished yet.

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So that gives you an idea of the complexities of this. I mean, it's-- but one of the most interesting things I heard him say was, as long as the conversations about the sacramental nature of marriage were still in-house, they were much more fluid. But once the church-- you know, what we would call the Catholic Church, I guess, at this point-- needed to make make a statement or a pronouncement over against what the reformers were saying then things needed to become a little bit more rigid I'm sure I'm completely oversimplifying what I heard Philip Reynolds say but that was the gist of it so needless to say we can't go into depth here about that process but we need to acknowledge that Augustine called marriage a kind of sacrament okay it's going to get a little thick right here so just

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Stick with me and I promise that we'll come out the other side and it'll still be, it'll be all right. It's a lot of detail. It wasn't until the 13th century that the church firmly establishes the view that marriage is a sacrament, a definition that was confirmed at the Council of Trent in 1563. By this time, marriage was understood in three primary ways.

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First, that marriage was a natural association. This included the assumptions that humans should be fruitful and multiply, and that sex in marriage is a remedy for lust. Marriage is a channel to direct passion to service of community and church. I would love to take a poll to find out whether marriage ever directed your passion towards mission trips or something, I don't know.

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But that was an assertion. It is inclusive, exclusive rather, and enduring, and adultery, fornication, and other sexual sins, as well as unilateral divorce were unacceptable. Because, it's worth noting, of the injustice done to women and children. Second, marriage was a contractual unit.

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This is huge. It meant marriage is voluntary. So this is, you know, we're talking about families putting their children together, so now you get to the point where people presumably can make their own decisions. It's intended for the lifelong relation, yeah, relation of love, service, and devotion to each other in all circumstances, so, you know, in sickness and in health.

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Each partner is to respect the conjugal rights and sexual needs of the other. And among the wealthy, it involved an agreement, of course, regarding property, gifts, and a dowry. Third, marriage was considered a sacrament. by which the church meant that marriage is a temporal union of body, soul, and mind that symbolizes a union between Christ and the church.

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We're going to say a little bit more about that tomorrow. Furthermore, marriage confers sanctifying grace upon the couple and the community. Only baptized believers could enter into sacramental marriage, which was binding until death. But once again, for all of the theologizing around marriage, most people in the lower classes still got married without benefit of the church or any involvement of clergy.

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Certainly some marriages were blessed by the church, but many people were considered married simply because they began living together. So this is the scene on the eve of the Reformation. the inheritance, if you will, of all of our churches when it comes to marriage. So, as you know, the Protestant Reformers come in, they deny that marriage is a sacrament.

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They countered that it is an independent social institution that does not require faith, nor does marriage confer sanctifying grace. They also denied that celibacy is better than marriage. They'd seen too much fornication and concubinage in the priesthood to be convinced of that. And three distinct Protestant traditions emerged.

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Whoops. Oh, yeah, that's right. I took his picture out. OK.

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John Witte, another scholar at Emory, interestingly, helpfully describes these three Protestant models in his book, From Sacrament to Contract. The first one is the Lutheran social. model, which is a way of saying that marriage is considered an earthly, a social estate of the earthly kingdom of creation, not a sacred estate of the heavenly kingdom. So that means it's governed primarily by the state and not the church, and that people are encouraged to be married when they came of age, unless they had this rare gift of continence.

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Pastors, this is so interesting because it's just such a different model than we think of today. Pastors were encouraged to, you know, minister to families, but all people in the priesthood of believers were supposed to counsel those who were contemplating marriage and to admonish those who were thinking about divorce. And the church had no formal legal authority over marriage at all. The Calvinist tradition, the covenantal model is the one that probably, you know, will have the most resonance for us, will sound the most familiar.

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And here, too, just pay attention to sort of the -- how the relationship between church and state continues to evolve. For Calvin and his followers, marriage was a covenantal association of the entire community. In other words, it took a village to get married in Calvin's day. So here's how it looked.

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The couple confirmed their engagement promises and made their marriage vows before God. So that enacted this sort of idea that there's a three-part agreement in marriage. Then the couple's parents, who had been trusted for their care and nurture since their birth, were there to give their consent. Then there were two witnesses, you might say priests, to their peers, if you think of priesthood of all believers.

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And then there was the minister who blessed the couple and admonished them in their spiritual duties. And finally, there was the magistrate who made everything legal, who recorded the event. So there's this-- you've got the spiritual and the legal all bound up in the ceremonial, but the rules are clearly defined as different. I think that's an important thing to file away when we start talking about our time.

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Marriage was understood to be ordained by God at creation, a lifelong union between a fit man and a fit woman. I think it means... Presumably it means something different than that. Of the age of consent for mutual love and support, for procreation and nurture of children, and protection from sexual sin.

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Did you notice how those things are reordered now? So remember, companionship used to be at the bottom. Well, now it's at the top. It's the most important thing.

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So, mutual love and support, then procreation of children, and finally, protection from sexual sin. For Calvin, before Calvin, rather, the primary purpose of marriage was considered to be procreation. With Calvin, procreation was reinterpreted to be a blessing flowing from companionship. After Calvin, the idea of companionship emerged as a central theological focus in all the Protestant traditions, which is a significant shift.

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Finally, the Anglicans built on the Calvinist model and established a Commonwealth model, which is kind of a way of saying, because the church is under the headship of the English crown, the family is like a little Commonwealth. underneath the umbrella of the larger Commonwealth of England. Ironically enough, given the way the Church of England came about, divorce was forbidden. The chief contribution of this model was a radical democratization of husband and wife, parent and child, church and family.

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So each relationship was defined with regard to the rights of each member of the household. So marriage laws got increasingly liberal and laid the groundwork for this enlightenment model, which we would call a contractarian model. Contractarian, yeah. So you can hear the word contract in there.

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So it's voluntary. It's a bargain struck by two people who want to come together for an intimate association. And under this contractarian model, The terms of the marriage are not preset by God or nature or church or state or tradition or community.

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They're set by the parties themselves in accordance with the general rules of contract formation and the norms of a civil society. It's beyond the scope of this work to give a thorough account of all the various religious and social developments that followed. But suffice it to say that ever since, American Christians have viewed marriage on something of a spectrum, a legal contract, yes, with rights and protections associated with it. By the early 20th century, Americans saw sweeping reforms and laws regarding marriage and divorce and alimony and wife abuse.

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child custody, adoption, child support. I mean, it's really astonishing to think of how much has changed in the last 100 years. And the state began to replace the church as the primary authority around marriage and family life. And yet, as we know from our experience, American Christians still see marriage as a religious commitment, too.

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For some, it is a sacrament. Some may say that it is somehow sacramental. For others, marriage is spiritual in a way that they cannot quite define. Given all of the ways that our understandings of marriage have changed over the centuries, over the last 50 or 60 years, and even since the turn of this century, the church is facing a number of questions regarding the nature of marriage.

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One of them, as I've already named, is the relationship between church and state, which is getting parsed in all kinds of different ways these days. Oh yeah, that's a lovely image I forgot to show you. I think all of the rapid changes are causing us to ask ourselves, what do we really believe about marriage as Christians? How can we take seriously the lives that people, Christian people,

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Non-Christian people, nuns, any people. How do we take seriously the lives that people are really living? And finally, can marriage bear the weight of our expectations? Listen to how theologian Margaret Farley puts it.

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This is a longer quotation than I would normally read, but she says it so well. What then can hold a marriage as a relationship? What will hold the relationships that form our marriages? Not presently a strong and unquestioned institution, not the love itself, not the sanctioned laws of marriage, not even the children born of marriage.

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Love is notoriously fickle, waxing and waning in ways we cannot always control. And all the laws proclaimed, even reinforced by sanctions, do not save us from our inabilities to live together in peace and in joy. Children do hold us to one another and to them, but we have massive evidence that they alone cannot save our marriages. Sheer free choice, the grit your teeth and do it sort of choice is so limited.

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We want to remain loving and faithful, peaceful and strong, utterly so forgetful and devoted in a relationship of marriage. This may be easily said, but not so easily done. If life with a particular other becomes intolerable, as it can become.

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It will not be made tolerable simply by choosing it so, not by controlling the other, or even by controlling oneself. Farley is not ready to give up on marriage. And thanks be to God, I'm one that does not bemoan the fact that supposedly one out of two marriages ends in divorce. But rather, thanks be to God that one out of two marriages makes it.

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So Farley's not ready to give up on marriage, and neither am I. Lest you think I'm completely cynical and curmudgeonly, I will tell you that I too married for love. And as the last 20 years have gone by, I have discovered that I knew virtually nothing about love at the time.

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Being married has, I'll probably cry now. I didn't think about that. Being married has made me a better person. Being married has made me a better Christian.

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Although God knows that in my case, the change is incremental. That said, being a Christian has made me a better marriage partner. And somehow Tom and I have taught one another something more about grace along the way. Perhaps the truth is that Christ has taught us both more about grace and allowed us to catch a glimpse of love, with a capital L, the love that will one day encompass us all.

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At the same time, I know something about what marriage is like when any sense of covenant, let alone joy, has been lost. I also know people for whom marriage is not possible. Perhaps there was never an opportunity. Perhaps love was lost.

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or perhaps they could not legally marry the person they love the most. And I know that life is messy, and that human beings are imperfect, and that the church isn't always the most helpful place to be when things start coming apart. Sometimes the body of Christ is just what it needs to be, thanks be to God. But we have some work to do to make the church a place of hope and nurture and redemption for those who would marry, those navigating the waters of marriage, as well as those for whom marriage has ended.

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So I hope that you will come back tomorrow to start some of that work with me. Thank you.