It is Mother’s Day. Which is always an odd day in Casa Pukeko: my mother lives in Auckland and had her 79th birthday this week, which we have always celebrated, leaving Mother’s Day to the card companies. I have been deleting emails from a whole lot of sales people trying to get me to get something for her: and today there is likely to be a fair amount of sermonizing on the need for mothers.
But they boys’ mother also lives some distance away: which makes it interesting in ball season. The Pro photographer was gratefully given tea in a photogenic cafe yesterday after helping me with suits and negotiating with the young fashionista who he is escorting to her (all girl) school social.
But we need to say that marriage is godly, and good. There is nothing wrong with choosing singleness: some women and men should not marry, for the quirky in strong in them, or they are fragile, or they have not the ability to make vows or give consent. Those Christ called eunuchs for nature. And then there are those who choose not to marry so they can do great things for Christ. THose who are married must consider their wife and their children and provide and protect them: the monks can take greater risk. Marriage is good, and those who preach great spirituality are generally in error. Hearthie said this a few days ago, ant it is true.
I feel sorry for those who aren’t free to enjoy the dichotomy of two bodies, one flesh in all of its meanings… I can be as gentle and sensitive as I am as a woman with total freedom because I am balanced in my husband, who is neither (except with me). And he, likewise, can be as strong and forthright as he is, and be balanced in softness. We really are one pair, and we really are *very* different people. It’s a beautiful thing.
It’s a hard thing… you live with someone who is so much not like you! So you have to learn communication styles and not to diminish the other sex’s usual styles of communication. You compromise, work together – and in all that process, you come closer to Christ.
Ach, let the lefties have their egalitarian marriages and their “marriages” between two of the same sex. I have something far more beautiful than they could imagine.
Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared, who forbid marriage and require abstinence from foods that God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth. For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer.
He put another parable before them, saying, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field, but while his men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also. And the servants of the master of the house came and said to him, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have weeds?’ He said to them, ‘An enemy has done this.’ So the servants said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ But he said, ‘No, lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them. Let both grow together until the harvest, and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.’”
He put another parable before them, saying, “The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his field. It is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is larger than all the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.”
He told them another parable. “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, till it was all leavened.”
All these things Jesus said to the crowds in parables; indeed, he said nothing to them without a parable.
There are going to be many sermons about Mother’s day today. But the texts are about heresiarchs, error, and the church. I guess the scholars set us up each week with the weekly texts that lead us to Sunday, but this week has been about living correctly: which is at times a challenge. Dealing not merely with our desires, denying what the world says we should indulge in, Being angry but not giving room for wrath, and considering the next generation.
There are two errors that we see discussed.
Firstly, the quest for holiness. To restrict your diet, to exercise in certain ways, to polish your spirituality until it burnishes: to not marry, to build your own mystery: to read the mystics (but not emulate them scrubbing floors). This is a great temptation, particularly to those who indulged in the pleasures of the flesh as a youth: the preacher who proclaims the errors and calls for purity has often been very much a bad boy in his teenage years and twenties. And it is an error. You cannot build your own way to Christ. We are all unholy and unrighteous. Our best and most beautiful acts reflect the beauty that is to come through shattered prisms.
And in this quest for personal holiness we destroy the very marriages, all too often, that are holy, and righteous: we leave good meat for some weird faux version of Tofu and call it good. We embrace our lies and build a hell for ourselves, and call it good.
The second error is corporate. It is to despair of our society, and withdraw. We are supposed to be akin to Mao’s guerillas: carp in a rice field. We are in the society, and we should be influencing it as much as yeast changes flour and water, or makes beer from a mash. We cannot be of the world: yeast is not flour. We must teach that which is true and correct and not fall into the errors of this age: and here Paul prescribed marriage and children so that we would sate our lusts in the marital bed, where that act is transformed into something sacramental.
We forget that the faithful, who seem to be small, few, broken, powerless, and beset from every side: who are called old fashioned, are not progressive, and whose teaching is called by some hate speech are akin to that mustard seed. The gospel has now been proclaimed even to the Antipodes, where this blogger lives. We forget that the church is not ours, but belongs to Christ.
And the marriage of Christ to the Church is to come: what we have in the best of our marriages is modeled on that, and like the taberancle of Moses, a shadow of what is to come.
So we need to continue to say truth. It will be called hate speech. We need to support the married, and care for the single. We need to consider how to reconcile the broken, counsel the children who have seen the marriage around them implode, and care for each other.
It is mother’s day. I better give Mum a phone call. And the church has a duty to not preach to her those pretty lies that lead to destruction.
[…] Brightness: Marriage is good (a rant for Mother’s Day). [Matt 13]; Notes on the British […]