August 28th: "I'm Not So Sure About...Marriage and Sex"

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First United Presbyterian Church

“I’m Not So Sure About…Marriage and Sex”

Rev. Amy Morgan

August 28, 2022

Ephesians 5:21-33

Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ. 22 Wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord. 23 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. 24 Just as the church is subject to Christ, so also wives ought to be, in everything, to their husbands. 25 Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, 26 in order to make her holy by cleansing her with the washing of water by the word, 27 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. 28 In the same way, husbands should love their wives as they do their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29 For no one ever hates his own body, but he nourishes and tenderly cares for it, just as Christ does for the church, 30 because we are members of his body. 31 "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh." 32 This is a great mystery, and I am applying it to Christ and the church. 33 Each of you, however, should love his wife as himself, and a wife should respect her husband.

We’re going to start today with a brief overview of “biblical marriage.” Now, if we’re going to talk about “biblical marriage,” we can’t ignore that the vast majority of our Bible is the Old Testament. So that’s where we’re going to start. 

Some Christians will point to the story of creation to assert that marriage, as defined by God, is between one man and one woman. Adam and Eve. The man and the woman. Okay, sure. But that is not how God’s chosen people Israel ever lived. As we heard in the story of Jacob’s family, marriage usually involved multiple wives, given in a contractual, economic agreement. Slaves or concubines were also usually part of the deal. The whole goal of marriage was to produce male heirs to inherit wealth and continue the family line. Jacob’s family situation, while it may sound long and complicated, was normal. It was the status quo in ancient Israel. It was the way of things when the creation stories were written down. 

Marriage did not involve much, if anything, in the way of ritual or romance, typically. Other stories from Genesis and Levitical texts indicate that having sex meant you were married. You could rape a woman, and that made her your wife. If your wife didn’t produce male children, you could have sex with her slave to produce heirs. So the whole question of sex before marriage was a moot point. Sex was marriage. Unless it was with another man’s wife, because she was that man’s property so it would amount to theft. 

Mind you, in the ancient near east, all of this was standard practice. And there were very good reasons for it. Most children died before they reached age 5, so you needed lots of male babies if you hoped to have any male heirs reach adulthood. More than half of all women died in childbirth, so one wife might not suffice to get the job done of producing male offspring. In the patriarchal society of ancient Palestine, women were property, their job was to make male babies, and marriage was an economic contract. That’s the primary form of “biblical marriage.” 

Anyone interested in that? Not me. If that’s what we, as Christians, are supposed to be striving for, I think I’ll find a different religion, thanks. 

But, of course, there is the New Testament. And surely Jesus offers some significant correctives to this barbaric and patriarchal image of marriage. That must be where we look for advice. 

First, let’s look at what had already changed in Jewish theology and practice of marriage by the first century. By this point, marriage was more or less monogamous. Family alliances would still be formed through marriage, but one man would typically marry one woman. The man was usually much older than the woman, with the men being in their late 20s or early 30s, and the woman being in her early-to-mid teens. There was still a strong emphasis on producing male heirs, but women had more authority within the household to manage economic affairs. 

Now, we may ask what divine revelation led to these shifts. Are there scriptures, prophesies, or wisdom literature that guided these changes? No. The simple answer is, by the first century, the Jewish people were living in a Greco-Roman culture, and their marriage arrangements fairly closely aligned with that culture. This may come as a shock to some of us, but the people of God have been adapting their marriage customs to mimic the surrounding cultural norms for a long, long time. 

But then this Jesus fellow comes along, and things get a little wacky. He’s well into his marriageable prime and yet does not take a wife. He shows disdain for “traditional” marriage by rejecting his own family, talking about how he will turn family members against each other, and augmenting the marriage standards in Jewish law to unattainable ideals. Several women become his disciples and supporters, and he advocates for women who are deemed unacceptable by traditional Jewish standards. 

Jesus kind of throws dynamite on the ideal of marriage, except as it serves as a metaphor for the coming reign of God on earth. He liberally employs marriage practices like feasts and waiting for the bridegroom to illustrate what the kingdom of heaven is like. But those metaphors do little to tell us how we’re supposed to pursue marital bliss today. 

But before Jesus’s stories and teachings were written down, we had the Apostle Paul, who did have a few practical things to say about marriage. Basically, he didn’t think it was the best. Because he was convinced that Jesus was returning in glory pretty soon, he didn’t see the point in getting married, unless you really needed to in order to control your sexual desires. He saw it kind of as the lesser of two evils, but not really good. Compared to the hedonism of the Greco-Roman cults, marriage was a better ideal. But staying single, as he did, was more preferable. 

So where does this teaching in Ephesians 5 come from? Why this sudden concern with the role of husbands and wives? 

I mentioned last week that several of the letters of the New Testament were written under Paul’s name, but scholars are pretty certain Paul didn’t actually write them himself. The letter to the Ephesians was likely written about a generation after Paul died and reflects a time in the church when Christians were convinced Jesus was not returning in glory immediately. This meant they were going to have to figure out how to live their lives within their cultural context in a way that reflected their theological commitments but also kept them from getting fed to lions. So some practical concerns need to be addressed. 

Dating back as far as Aristotle, Greco-Roman writers and philosophers developed what are called “Household Codes.” They shared a similar format and usually said something along the lines of, “the order of the state depends on the order of the household. Therefore, just as the state rules the citizen, so the man rules his wife, parents rule their children, and masters rule their slaves.” This formula is found in many non-Christian writings around the first century. Other Household Codes can be found in the New Testament, but I want us to look at how Ephesians 5 takes up this formula and puts a distinctive twist on it. 

In many ways, according to the instruction in Ephesians, a Christian marriage would look no different from any other marriages in the first-century Roman empire. Patriarchal hierarchy is reinforced. Men have authority over women. 

But if we look closely and compare Ephesians 5 with other contemporary Household Codes, as well as other Household Codes within the New Testament, several important distinctions arise. 

First, the writer of Ephesians grounds the marriage relationship in the context of mutual submission, submission to Christ, love, and the mysterious unity of Christ and the church. Now, let’s unpack each of those. 

Other Household Codes in the New Testament, including the one in Colossians that likely influenced the writer of Ephesians, mention only the submission of the wife, children, and slaves. There is no mutuality mentioned. So this is a unique contribution of Ephesians that indicates a shift even within the first few centuries of Christianity. 

The idea that submission within marriage is voluntary, an act of faithful submission to Christ, would have been unique in the first century. The Empire would have been recognized as the highest authority, and household submission would have been in service to civil stability. Non-Christian Household Codes mandated compulsory submission as citizens were obligated to obey the state. 

Now, I also want to point out that the NRSV translation we read tries to soften the tone of this passage and make it more palatable for modern audiences by translating the Greek word phobos as “reverence” or “respect.” As you can hear from the relation to the English word phobia, this word means “fear.” It is fear of the Lord that inspires mutual submission, and a wife should fear her husband. 

But this isn’t horror-film type fear. It means to stand in quaking-in-your-boots awe of something. It is the appropriate posture toward someone with tremendous power and authority. It’s the feeling we might have looking at photos from the Webb space telescope or in the presence of our favorite celebrity. But the point is that submission is not mandated “just because.” It is an invitation grounded in the full comprehension of the awesomeness of Jesus Christ. 

The concept of love within a marriage, believe it or not, was also unique. Love and romance were not expectations of first-century marriages. Perhaps love and affection would develop over the course of a marriage, but they were not primary to the relationship. Marriage was still very much a business arrangement. 

The typical formula for these Household Codes would have been, “wives, submit to your husbands. Husbands, rule your wives.” So when Ephesians says, “husbands, love your wives,” that would have been a “wait a minute, hold the phone” moment. It may be hard to believe, but this was a radical idea. And the kind of love Ephesians is talking about is not romantic or sexual love. There are eight different words for love in Greek, each of them with a very different meaning. The word used here isn’t the word for sexual love, or deep relationship, or familial love. It is agape love, that love that is core to Christian community, love that is expansive and inclusive. For Ephesians, marital love is not about the relationship between two people. Even marital love is a function of the whole community. 

Finally, the really unique contribution of Ephesians to the tradition of Household Codes, and especially within the Christian tradition, is this idea that marriage is modeled on the relationship between Christ and the Church, in particular the mysterious union between Christ and the Church. It is Christ’s authority and self-sacrifice, Christ’s nourishment and tender care, that form the basis for the marriage union. The writer of Ephesians takes a verse from Genesis about two becoming one flesh, a verse that is repeated by Jesus in reference to marriage, and applies it to the union of Christ and the Church. He says that this is a great mystery, which is the word that eventually becomes sacrament. Here, in Ephesians, for the first time, Christians begin to view marriage sacramentally, as a way of living out their faith in Christ, as a way of expressing Christ’s union with the Church. This is new, within the Bible, within the New Testament. 

So, here are the things I hope we might take away from this very brief analysis of marriage and sex in the Bible. 

1. There is no singular, static ideal of marriage in the Bible. In other words, when someone starts trying to talk to you about “Biblical Marriage” you should either laugh, really hard, or walk away quickly. There is no such thing. 
2. What the Bible does say about sex and marriage strongly mirrors the context of when the texts were written. Jewish and Christian marriages, from the outside at least, looked remarkably similar to the marriages of all the other people around them. And their ideas about marriage and sex changed over time in response to cultural changes. 
3. But the people of God also strove to honor God in their most intimate relationships, creating distinctive approaches to sex and marriage in their contexts. 

Now, how does any of this help us understand sex and marriage today?

First, I hope we can see how enshrining any ideal of marriage taken from more than 2,000 years ago is unhelpful and probably also unfaithful. The Bible just doesn’t function as a marriage how-to guide that can be applied to all times, places, and cultures. We shouldn’t panic if our marriages look remarkably similar to the marriages of non-Christians today, and we should be willing to allow our ideas about marriage and sex to respond to cultural changes. This should not freak us out. It’s been happening throughout the entire history of God’s people, and there’s no reason it should have stopped after the Biblical cannon was closed in the 4^th century. 

Second, we should, however, strive to honor God in our most intimate relationships, creating distinctive approaches to sex and marriage in our context. But where do we draw from for guidance? Just as the writer of Ephesians chose to draw from the relationship of Christ to the Church for his model of Christian marriage, we have a wealth of scripture and theology to guide us. No one scripture or metaphor is going to work for every couple at every point in their relationship. First-century marriages were fairly homogenous, whereas our society today recognizes a variety of marriage arrangements. In fact, the status-quo first-century marriage would be illegal in today’s society, so maybe we shouldn’t be too judgmental of how some folks choose to go about this today. 

This is not to say “anything goes” and people should just do what feels good. What feels good to one person can hurt another. This is where Ephesians’ guidance toward mutual submission might be helpful. If we are looking out for one another’s welfare, tenderly caring for each other in ways that put the interests of others above our own, we will be fostering loving, healthy relationships that reflect the unity of Christ and the Church and that honor God. 

Relationships that are God-honoring and life-giving can come in many forms. Ancient Israel discerned that polygamy was God-honoring and life-giving. First-century Christians discerned that male headship was God-honoring and life-giving. And today we have discerned that relationships that exhibit mutuality, consent, and emotional health are God-honoring and life-giving. 

Following this pattern of discernment that faithful people have utilized for millennia may not be as simple as rules like, “no sex before marriage,” or “the man is the head of the household,” or “divorce is sinful,” or “marriage is between one man and one woman.” Rules are so much easier. 

But the fact is that the rules have changed, again and again. And that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it may be the only way for us to find deeper unity in our relationships with each other and our relationship with God. 

In a society that doesn’t equate sex with marriage and women as property, sex before marriage isn’t stealing someone’s property and jeopardizing someone’s inheritance. The Church might be extremely helpful in guiding people toward healthy, mutual, life-giving and God-honoring sexual relationships if we could just let go of the idea that abstinence before marriage is the only path to righteousness. Instead, we leave young people, especially, to figure it out for themselves because their sexual activity falls outside the acceptable confines of some rules that don’t actually exist in the Bible even. And so many of their relationships end up lacking the beautiful and mysterious union that Ephesians describes. 

In a society where half of all marriages, Christian or otherwise, end in divorce, the Church might be helpful in guiding people to God-honoring and life-giving relationships if we could just let go of the idea that someone has to be the head of the household and that divorce is pretty much all the time condemned by God. We could be helpful in assisting women escaping abuse and help couples develop tools for listening and mutual compassion. 

I want to just conclude by sharing that when I was in seminary, I took a class called, “Sex and the Christian Body.” The course explore, pretty explicitly, sex, gender, sexual orientation, relationships, and marriage. I want you all to know this because I want you to know that there is not a subject regarding sex and marriage that is off-limits for me. I am a safe person to talk to if you are having trouble in your relationship, if you have shame about sex in your past or present life, if you are struggling with addiction, or if you are discerning about your gender identity or sexual orientation. I am not a licensed counselor in these fields, but I can listen compassionately and offer pastoral care and refer you to professionals if needed and desired. 

Friends, I want us to discard these toxic myths about what makes for a “Biblical marriage” so that we can make space for exploring truly life-giving and God-honoring intimate relationships. In some ways, our relationships will look just like everyone around us. But I hope they will also be distinctive in ways that others notice and yearn for. 

To God be all glory forever and ever. Amen.