Why Marriage?

I’m on my way back to Chicagoland after a wonderful wedding celebration in Our Nation’s Capital over the weekend.  After happy nuptials, a wedding feast, and many hours of dancing, a friend asked me to write a blog post about marriage.

Note:  I’ve learned through the years that when parishioners have asked me to preach a sermon about a specific topic, they usually hope I will express what they already believe about that topic. 

But when asked to write a blog post on the subject of marriage, the asker genuinely seemed to want to know why marriage is important.  “Why get married?”  she asked.  This was not a commentary on our friends whose wedding we had just witnessed.  It was more for herself.  She was honestly wondering.

Within the Christian faith, there have been several historical, Biblical reasons why marriage is a good thing:

• God wants us to have a helper in life.  (Genesis 2:18-24)
• God doesn’t want men to treat women like property (Ephesians 5:25-33)
• God wants us to have (healthy, religiously sanctioned) sex lives.  (Hebrews 13:4)

Jesus went to at least one wedding but the celebration at Cana is more about the miracle of turning water into wine than the miracle of two people falling in love with each other at approximately the same time and deciding to spend their lives together.  Still we often mention this miracle of turning water into wine as proof that Jesus blessed marriage.

After officiating at over 100 weddings over the past 25+ years, I have known people who married:

• to have sex
• to gain property or financial security  (“She has a nice condo.”  “He has a good job.”)
• to please parents
• to show the world that “someone wanted me“
• to escape something or someone
• because they didn’t know what else to do after college
• for the presents and the attention

These are not good reasons to marry.  In some cases, they are terrible reasons. 

I also worry when someone tells me “I can’t live without her/him.”  A more mature sensibility is that “I can live with him/her; I just don’t want to.”  Herein lies the best reason to marry, if you ask me.

We marry someone we love and like because we want to make a life together with that person.  The Roman Catholic theologian Karl Rahner who – interestingly enough – never married wrote that every couple who marries creates a new little church.  Domestic New Church Plants, if you will.

A healthy church is a community that worships together, serves together, makes sacrifices together, celebrates together, prays together, cries together, and laughs together.  A healthy church has a mission and relationship of give and take.  Sometimes people take care of you.  Sometimes you take care of them.

If we marry with the expectation that it’s about the wedding, we are doomed to live a lonely life – albeit with matching towels and nice wine glasses.

If we marry assuming someone will always take care of us and make us happy, we will be disappointed.  Marriage is about taking care of each other.  And happiness is an ephemeral thing.  Contentment, joy, and deep peace are not.  Gratitude and spiritual maturity – which grow in community – nourish that contentment, joy, and peace.

So, my sweet friend who asked me to write about marriage, here it is.  It is a miracle – as surely as turning water into wine is a miracle – when two people fall in love, build a life, and devotedly stay together for the rest of their lives.  Many factors make marriage difficult – if not impossible: illness, addiction, selfishness, boredom, etc.  We have no idea what the future holds, in terms of the twists of life.  There are cruel turns and unfair challenges. 

But it’s better to go through such trials with someone we love, with someone who loves us.  And the special intimacy is the frosting on the cake.