Thankful for Relationship

I'm so thankful this year for relationship: that I have a personal and primary relationship with my God - how awesome that the gospel gives me that! And secondly, for relationship with his people in varying degrees - what a privilege to persevere in love with one another. We have a great God, who is for us and with us!

photo: my dad photographing the sunset on Thanksgiving

Marriage & Singleness: Gifts to the Church

I believe it was a couple of weeks ago now that I listened to a 2009 CCEF conference recording of Lauren Winter, who teaches at Duke Divinity School, travels to lecture and teach, and has written a few books.

It was refreshing to hear vision for God's purpose in singleness as more than simply preparation for marriage. It's helped me to carry around in my mind and heart certain truths that comfort and direct me in treasuring Christ and fueling desire to treasure him more for all of life.

One night last week I took the time to transcribe, somewhat paraphrasing at times, the ending section of her lecture. It's a bit long, but I really wanted to capture all of this and put it up here. I may wait for another post to comment on it. In the meantime, I added emphasis to parts that are particularly powerful to me. Here it is:

The church, in my opinion, does not do singleness very well. At every turn, we hold up marriage as normative, and actually I think, as superior to singleness. And we convey in subtle and not so subtle ways that you’re not really a part of this community or an adult if you’re not married. 

What I want to suggest is that it’s a problem not only because it makes single people feel lousy, although that’s part of what it does, but finally it’s not a therapeutic problem but a theological problem. The problem is this: marriage and singleness were not given to individual people. They were given to the church. And both witness to the church different theological truths, different pieces of God’s economy, and we miss the point of marriage and singleness when we fail to realize that. 

Marriage witnesses to the church a picture of faithfulness. It instructs us of God's faithfulness to us and gives us hope to the possibility that we may be faithful to God.
Julie Rubio - “marriage consists not simply or even primarily of a personal relationship, rather it crystallizes the love of the larger church community. The couple is not just two in one, but two together within the whole with specific responsibility for the whole. They must persevere in love because the community needs to see God’s love actualized among God’s people.” 

Similarly, singleness is also vital for the church, and not just because single people supposedly have more time on their hands to do stuff for the church, which is part of the contemporary apologetics for singleness that just drives me bananas - because single people also have lives like married people do, and also because of what it says about marriage. It implies that once you get married you’re supposed to turn inward and just steward your own nuclear family. I don’t see that as a picture of marriage that is consistent with the gospel. 

The main gift of singleness is that, just as marriage instructs the church on these vital theological truths, so singleness also instructs the church in something just as vital.
Henri Nouwen  in his book “Clowning in Rome,” says: "God will be more readily recognized as the source for all human life and activity in singleness. The celibate, [or let us say the single person] becomes a living sign of the limits of interpersonal relationships and of the centrality of the inner sanctum that no human being may violate.” He goes on  to say that all of us are called by God to cultivate an empty space for God. All of us are called to do that, but that vacancy for God is more obviously on display among single people than it is among married people, because married people can easily fall into the mistaken thinking that because they have this other person they are in fact not vitally dependant upon God.

The key theological point is this: of course marriage and family are places where God can meet us, work, and pour out grace in our lives. But one of the heresies, I believe actual heresies, of the American church is the mistaken implication that marriage and family is the primary source of grace in people’s lives. 

It is of course reasonable that the church tries and devotes a lot of energy to helping people be married well - get married, stay married - it’s very hard to do those things in this culture.  But we err when we begin to suggest that marriage is the primary source of grace in our lives because of course the real place that we find grace is not in our families or marriages, it’s in the family that is the church.  Single people remind us, they witness to us, about the Christian hope that the kingdom of God unfolds not primarily through nurturing our nuclear families. It unfolds through church bonds and witness to the stranger. My colleague Stanley Hauerwas who teaches ethics at Duke, points out that unlike Judaism, which makes new Jews through giving birth, Christians don’t make new Christians by giving birth but by showing witness and hospitality to the stranger. Now of course if you want to set up a situation where you have to love the stranger, have a child. If you want to give yourself a neighbor whom you have to practice loving, get married. It’s not that marriage and family are unrelated to evangelism and discipleship, but as Stanley writes, “as Christians we believe that every Christian in one generation might be called to singleness, yet God will create the church anew.” 

Jesus says that in heaven people will not marry nor be given in marriage. Now, happily married people don’t like this teaching. Because we believe we will be our most particular selves, when we are resurrected, we aren’t going to mush into some indistinct other self. And we are made ourselves in part through our relationships. But what I take him as saying is not just something about marriage, he’s saying something about what it’s going to look like at the end of time when God has consummated his program. What I think he is saying is not that we will cease to be in relationship with those we are in relationship with here, but rather that the relationship that we will be in is the relationship of being Christian brothers and sisters. 

Singleness tutors us, the whole church, in the primacy of the relationship of sibling in Christ. 

photo: Bolzano, Italy summer 2007 

Ghosts Upon the Earth

I've been enjoying Michael Gungor's new album, Ghosts Upon the Earth. I love when I come across an album that I like both the musicality and lyric content. Here are lyrics to "Ezekiel" - beautiful picture of Christ redeeming his bride.

I found you naked

I found you lying there in blood

Your mother left you

Your father threw you out unloved

I clothed your body

I washed the blood and earth from your hair

I gave you jewelry

I gave you everything I had

I gave my heart - my heart, my love - I gave my heart - my heart, my love

You became mine

You were a stunning bride

The world they saw you and how you loved their eyes, my bride

You broke my heart - my heart, my love - you broke my heart - my heart, my love

You sold your body exposed yourself to all, my love

You slept with strangers; you gave them everything we had

Come back my love

My love come back

Come back my love

My love come back

And below is their acoustic performance of "When Death Dies." I don't know about you, but I say that beat boxing cellist is pretty amazing.