Thoughts on Weddings and Marriage

A sermon preached at Niles Congregational Church, United Church of Christ
Fremont, on Sunday, February 8, 2009, by the Rev. Jeffrey Spencer.

Scripture: Ruth 1:16-17 and 1 Corinthians 7:25-40

Copyright © 2009 by Jeffrey S. Spencer

I know it wasn’t one of our scripture readings today, but I’m going to start today’s sermon by talking about Abraham and his family.

We aren’t told how Abraham and Sarah got hitched – just that they were married and childless. So, in order to create an heir, Abraham had a child by Hagar, Sarah’s servant, a son named Ishmael. Then Sarah got pregnant and had a son named Isaac. Hagar and Ishmael were thrown out of the house (it was a jealousy thing), thrown out to die – but God rescued them and Ishmael became the progenitor of the Arab people.

Isaac grew, and after Sarah died, Abraham decided it was time for Isaac to get married. Abraham sent one of his servants back to the home country to find a wife for Isaac. The servant did this by hanging out at a village well, meeting a girl named Rebekah, getting invited to her father’s home for the night, and essentially buying the girl to be Isaac’s wife. That’s the way all good marriages are made: one of the parent’s servants purchases a spouse for the child. Or maybe not.

Anyway, Rebekah got pregnant with twins. When the twins were born, they came out fighting. Esau was born first, but Jacob was holding on to his heel, trying to pull Esau back in so Jacob could be the firstborn. The boys grew, Isaac aged, and it became time for Isaac to offer his blessing to his eldest son. Jacob took advantage of his father’s blindness and stole Esau’s birthright. This was not a nice thing to do. Esau was furious, so Jacob ran away.

Jacob headed to where his mother was from and happened to meet a girl, Rachel, at a well. Boy meets girl at a well; we know where this story is headed. Jacob went to work for Rachel’s dad, Laban, striking a deal: he’d work for Laban for seven years and then he’d take Rachel as his wife. The Bible says that the seven years flew by because Jacob loved Rachel. I think it’s the first time in the Bible that we see love as a motivator for two people getting married.

As I said, the seven years flew by and there was a wedding feast. That evening, the two love birds went off to their honeymoon tent and did what newlyweds do. But in the morning, it turns out that it wasn’t Rachel who went with Jacob to the honeymoon tent. It was her older sister Leah. No lights in the tent, I guess. When Jacob demanded an explanation from Laban, Laban said it was a cultural thing – you don’t give the younger daughter away until the older daughter is married. Well, Jacob was still in love, so he worked another seven years for Laban and then got married to Rachel. That’s the way all good marriages are made: multiple partners who happen to be siblings, along with their servants as your concubines. Or maybe not.

I retell these Biblical stories primarily to make an obvious point: there is not one unique presentation of weddings or marriage in the Bible. Even over three generations, in the matter of a couple dozen chapters of Genesis, the idea of weddings and marriage changes.

The exchange between Ruth and Naomi wasn’t a marriage vow, though that reading is sometimes used at weddings. The exchange was between two women, daughter-in-law and mother-in-law, both of them widowed, both of them needing family, both of them finding that family in each other. Ruth does go on to get married and have kids – but her marriage is about protection and survival. And her vow to Naomi, she keeps.

We get a totally different view of marriage from Paul in our reading from 1 Corinthians. Let me just say, Paul’s world view and my world view are different. He thought that Jesus is going to return at any minute to bring this age to an end, so there’s no point in bothering with marriage and families. If you’re a horn-dog, sure, go ahead and get married, but otherwise…

Well, I think that Jesus isn’t returning to end the age any time soon, so I think marriage and family is important. I think it’s important that people make a commitment to care for and be responsible for each other into an unknown future. I am pro-marriage. But just as the Biblical understanding of weddings and marriage has changed, over time so has mine.

The cliché is that girls are the ones who think about their weddings, who read the magazines and imagine what it will be like. Boys think about other things. I didn’t fit the cliché.

At some level I knew I was gay back in 9th grade, not that I would have admitted it to anyone, including myself. Denial is not just a river in Egypt. Cultural norms pushed me to date and I went out with two girls through my high school years. The second one, Abby, was a significant enough relationship that I started wondering about marriage. Would we get married? How would I know if I had found the right person to marry? Was marriage even a possibility for me?

Somewhere in that wondering was the inner conflict I had about my sexuality. At some level, I knew that my love for Abby was different from her love for me. At some level, I knew that the cultural script – boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, boy and girl get married and have 2.4 children – didn’t work for me. It made me question what marriage is and what a wedding is.

Jump forward three or four years. I was a junior in college and I was sick of denying who I was even to myself. I needed to tell someone that I was gay to that it wouldn’t be a secret, so it be real and I wouldn’t be able to hide it from myself any more. So I came out to a friend and I came out to the college chaplain, and both of them – God bless them – thought it was fine. At that point, three people in the world knew that I was gay: me, the chaplain, and my friend. By the end of the year I had told a fourth person, a woman who asked me out on a date and I explained why that wouldn’t work for me. But her question made me wonder about my future. As friends paired off, I wondered if I would ever be part of a pair.

In those days, I pretty much assumed that if I was ever part of a pair I would never be married. I had never heard of any institution – governmental or nongovernmental – recognizing a same-gender couple as being married. But then I got to seminary and I had classes in theology and liturgy and church polity, and I had discussions with friends about where the church stood and where the church should stand and how we could get the church there. That’s when I came to realize that different-gender couples typically have two weddings and two marriages going on at the same time – the legal one and the religious one. I couldn’t have one of them; the government wouldn’t allow it. But I could have the other one because I was part of a church that supported equality for same-gender-loving people.

Bump forward a few more years. I’d been ordained for a few years and was serving a church in Washington State. From time to time different-gender couples would drop by because they wanted to get married and wondered if we’d “do it” for them. Some people would assume that weddings were a service churches provided for the community. That’s the way they saw it in the movie – it’s always a guy in a black shirt with a white collar saying the “dearly beloveds.” Other people came to the church because getting married in a church building, getting married before God was important to them. It became my habit that, if all a couple was interested in was having one wedding and one marriage – the legal one – then I wasn’t interested in performing the wedding. If they were interested in the other wedding, the other marriage – the religious one – then I’d perform that wedding, and I’d sign the legal paperwork as a courtesy.

Usually, we’d get the paperwork signed before the service began, get it out of the way before the real wedding took place. It became my habit to say, as I signed the legal paperwork, “I now pronounce that you may file joint tax returns.” It would get a chuckle about 75% of the time. But I always found it strange that my signature sealed the legal contract. I’m not an officer of the court. I’ve had no legal training. I’m not even a notary public. But my signature made if legally binding. In a country that separates church and state – that just seems weird to me. And to top it off, I am legally responsible for returning the signed forms to the state. If I sign the legal documents and don’t return them, I am criminally liable. Go figure.

The idea of there being two weddings, two marriages in our society for different-gender couples was pretty well formed when I got a phone call from my father. My mother died quite young, in the first year after I was ordained. My father called because he had been seeing a woman for a while and he wanted to talk about their relationship. “Jeff, we’re thinking about moving in together without getting married,” my father told me. “What do you think about that?” Isn’t it supposed to be the kid who calls the parents to say ‘we’re moving in together without being married’ in an effort to shock the parents? But I knew what was going on. My father and his girlfriend were still a few years from retirement, but close enough that they were thinking about Social Security payments, and if they got legally married there would be implications for their incomes come retirement. I told my father that I didn’t care if they were legally married or not; I just wanted them to have a celebration where the families could come together and bless their union. Legal marriage is a legal thing, but religious marriage, that matters.

Then I had the experience to not only marrying a same-gender couple, but signing their legal paperwork, making their wedding legally binding. Because of some things I’ve learned between the legalization of same-gender weddings and the passage of Prop 8, I waited until after the wedding ceremony to sign the paperwork – that’s all legal minutia, so I won’t go into it. But there we were, in Ford Hall, signing papers, and for the second time that day I said, “I now pronounce you married.” The first time I said it, I meant that they were married in the eyes of God – which is pretty typical for any wedding I perform. I don’t think I’ve ever done a wedding ceremony and said “by the authority vested in me by the State.” This second time, however, there in Ford Hall, I meant that they were married in the eyes of the state, too. It was a moving moment in my ministry.

Which of these marriages is more important? Being married in the eyes of God. Which has more impact on their day-to-day life? Being married in the eyes of the state. I know that many people see these two types of marriage as intertwined, but for me, they are different. One, legal marriage, is a contract. The other, religious marriage, is a covenant.

I talked with my Spiritual Director about all this marriage stuff. She’s a Dominican nun from Europe. She was shocked to learn that clergy in the United States can sign the papers to make a marriage legal (to use the legal language, to legally solemnize a marriage). In her country, the legal stuff happens at City Hall, then you go to the church to get married. She also told me that in the Roman Catholic Church, where marriage is considered a sacrament, the sacrament is given by the couple to each other, not by the priest to couple. I think that’s beautiful.

Now, in Protestant Reformation tradition that comes out of the continent of Europe (in other words, in our tradition) we only recognize two sacraments, baptism and communion; so we don’t consider marriage to be a sacrament. But, in my opinion, it is still very sacred, and if the covenant the couple makes with each other before God comes to an end, God should be involved in that, too. And that’s why we have a service in our Book of Worship called “Recognition of the End of a Marriage.” And, yes, I have used it.

You know, churches (and other religious communities) have always been able to determine for themselves who can and cannot be married by their clergy in their sanctuaries. And many faith communities have placed restrictions on who can marry – due to religious status, ethnicity, gender, and whatever other criteria their religious beliefs decree – for decades, for centuries.

However, it wasn’t until June of this year that Christians like me, who support the marriage of same-gender couples, had the ability based on our Christian convictions to sign the paper work that makes the wedding legally binding. This freedom of religion was short-lived and was taken away by the passage of Proposition 8. I have prayed about how I should respond, and this is what I believe God is calling me to do:

Because I am no longer able to solemnize the legal status of marriage for some of the couples who come to me to be married (i.e. same-gender couples), I have decided that I will no longer solemnize the legal status of marriage for any couples who come to me to be married. I will continue to offer a religious marriage service that bind a couple in the eyes of God (provided they meet other premarital requirements I have set for all couples), but until I can solemnize the legal status of all couples, we will not solemnize the legal status for any couples.

I don’t take this stand to be mean. I don’t take this stand to punish. And I certainly don’t want to hurt anyone in our church community. But it boils down to is this: the marriage law in our state is discriminatory and the level of that discrimination has become more profoundly clear to me by my experience being able to legally solemnize the marriage of same-gender couples, however briefly. The law is discriminatory and I am called to resist that discrimination by not participating in the discriminatory law.

Martin Luther was condemned for his Protestant views in 1520 and appeared before the Diet of Worms. His prosecutor, Johann von Eck, presented Luther with a table filled with copies of his writings. Eck asked Luther if he still believed what his writings taught. Luther took a day to think about his answer. The next day, Luther apologized for the harsh tone of many of his writings, but said that he could not reject the majority of them or the teachings in them. Luther respectfully but boldly stated, “Unless I am convinced by proofs from Scriptures or by plain and clear reasons and arguments, I can and will not retract, for it is neither safe nor wise to do anything against conscience. Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen.”^[1]

I am not particularly happy that this is where my conscience has moved me, but it is where my conscience has moved me. Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen.