#gs2019

Sacramental Realism.

I situate myself first in this: I am a sacramental realist.  That is at the core of my religious outlook as an Anglican, and certainly as a priest.  I truly believe that the things we say about the sacraments are real, and not just because we say them.  That the sacraments do convey some inward Grace, and that God does truly work through them, that God is truly present in them, and that we are called (and certainly I am called) to participate in them robustly.  I find the metaphysical reality and the physical reality both utterly credible and indistinguishable.  I love the sacraments, and take a high view of them.

Marriage: Relationship, Law, and Sacrament.

Marriage is a sacrament.  Marriage, however, is also two other things: it is a legal reality, and it is a practical reality.  When I some years ago told a priest and friend that my partner and I were not married, as we were neither legally nor sacramentally married, he was adamant that of course we were, and he was right.  When the State recognized us as married, that did not change the fact that we already had been.  God has always been a part of our relationship, and the practice of Christianity has always at least loitered on the edges, and often been rather central, to who we are together.

The Church makes life far too hard for itself when it talks about marriage as if these three things were one thing, the same thing, and impossible to separate.  Worse, some try to lower our estimation of the Church’s place in marriage, and to suggest that marriage is really, fundamentally, a legal construct, and the Church just blesses relationships, much as we bless backpacks, bicycles, and birettas.  That attends too cheaply to the other two things which marriage is, and cedes far too much ground to the State.

So, look: marriage as a relationship has something to do with the Church, marriage as a sacrament has something to do with the Church, and marriage as a legal matter belongs to the State, and sometimes the Church acts with the State.  I believe that last point is a mistake, but a central one to what I have to say on this subject.  Let us go there now.

A Lifelong Union.

You see, when we talk about the Church’s teaching on marriage, I wonder what is really meant by that.  I mean, I know what the speaker is referring to when they say that: they mean a lifelong union of one man and one woman.  Except that the Church has certainly shifted position on the matter of divorce and remarriage in the last hundred years, and nobody wants to talk about that as a shift, but instead to just accept it as a ground truth, if for no other reason than that so many of our congregants, and certainly also our clergy and our episcopate, are themselves in second or third marriages.  That is not to say that our current position on divorce is suspect, but certainly to say that it is off the table and under the radar, it is not something we talk about, and we kind of like it that way; it’s settled by fact and history, and for pastoral reasons we should not talk about it.  I think it’s probably safer to talk about it than we think, but it is like many things we do not talk about because of the fear that we might have to justify it, and in failing to do so, harm someone.  We certainly should not open people up to such harms.  I am comfortable to name that point, and to talk about it, but I don’t think we need to spend time there.

What the Church Teaches on Marriage.

So when someone talks about the Church’s teaching on marriage, they mean that it is a lifelong union of one man and one woman.  When they say that phrase, though, they mean other things, too: that this has always been the Church’s teaching, and that the fact that the Church teaches it means it is correct and immutable.  They may or may not make an appeal to Scripture in so doing, but often will; and we will deal with that later.  Still, this is a statement about Tradition, about authority, and about consistency.  Those aspects are all apparent, even if they are not always articulated.  The point in referring to this as the Church’s teaching is to say that it is Truth, and thus correct, eternal, and immutable.

I wonder, though, what the Church has really taught about marriage.  After all, for a long period of history in the civilizations where Christianity was present, marriage was not an entirely contentious issue.  Let’s assume that the Church’s teaching was, is, and should be that marriage is a lifelong union between one man and one woman; well, this was the practical reality, the lived experience, the legal and social regime for a very long time.  There was little or no reason to think of it as anything else!  In the absence of conflict, would the Church really have needed to teach this?

I do not find it credible that it would have, that this is some cataphatic teaching of the Church, some positive affirmation that the Church has always made with an awareness of alternatives.  The Church, to put it simply, has not needed to.  There have not been alternatives available.

A More Humane Institution.

The Church’s teachings on marriage, then, would have been not technical ones about marriage as such, but general teachings about how to live, and how to make lives and society more humane.  The Church might have (and did, at least in places) taught about the importance of marriage as a loving institution, and as a place to practice right relationship.  This is, after all, a core of the sacramental reality of marriage, but about that more, later.

Instead, marriage has gotten defined largely as a result of things which have arisen, social and technological changes which have given rise to conflict: women’s liberation, birth control, and modern conceptions of gender and sexuality besides.  We wouldn’t know that marriage could only be between one man and one woman if there weren’t alternatives to run up against; it would simply be taken for granted.  The Church might as well teach that marriages must take place on Earth: we have not taught such, even though it has been our practice, because we have encountered no conflict on the matter.

What Conflict Raises to Consciousness.

I mention conflict intentionally, rather than change, because things change all the time without there being conflict, and we do not view this necessarily as violation of norms.  That is not to say, though, that conflict only arises on matters of essential things, of things which matter; but where conflict arises on things which are adjacent to the Church, the Church often feels compelled to pick a side, and for very good reasons the Church tends to be an essentially conservative institution.  Hot takes, though, even when they are conservative, do not necessarily preserve the essential character of the thing.

I do not think, then, that the Church has a clear and robust and consistent teaching on marriage that we can appeal to except appealing to what we have always known, what we have always felt.  Our statements about the Church’s teaching on marriage, then, have a tendency to be matters of personal history, rather than matters of essential Truth.

Marriage is Specifically a Sacrament.

Still, I have accepted that marriage is a sacrament, that the Church has some right involvement in marriage; what is the essence of marriage?  What does it mean for it to be a sacrament?

First, it has nothing to do with whether our marriages are recognized by the State or not.  The fact that we conflate those two points is, again, an accident of history, and in this case the history of Christianity’s relationship to power: its alignment with empire and colonial forces, and the comfortable (if compromising) position that has entailed.  We have not had to think about whether our marriages have legal force because they do.  If we marry people sacramentally, we do so orthogonally to matters of law: we might sacramentally marry people even if the law would not recognize their marriage, and we might not sacramentally marry people whose marriage is perfectly legal.  This is not a controversial statement, but is an area which is too often unexamined, comfortable as we are to assume the unity of these three aspects of marriage.

The Institution of Marriage.

So, as with any sacrament, we look to Christ for guidance, and we search out the roots of the sacrament in Christ’s life, person, practice, and teaching.  If we have the time, we always invoke the institution of such sacraments in Christ, as for example we recall the institution narrative at the Eucharist, or make reference to Christ’s own healing works when healing someone.  As a professor in seminary noted to us about the marriage liturgy, we have a reading which recalls the institution of marriage, and it is this: Jesus went to a wedding.

That’s kind of it.  You see, Jesus didn’t invent marriage.  It already existed.

Made from Ordinary Things.

This raises a more general point about the sacraments which is utterly essential for the sacramental realist: every single sacrament is overlaid on something which already existed.  We might say the sacraments are the heightening or the perfection of something which already existed, but it would be foolish to suggest otherwise than that the sacraments are built on the foundation of ordinary things.  This is no accident, but precisely the point.

We know what it is to wash ourselves, and baptism is a rite of cleansing and preparation which carries washing to its transcendent edge; it is always renewing and refreshing to enter into water, and baptism is that to the nth degree.

We know what it is to eat, and to eat with loved ones, and to give thanks for being fed, and the Eucharist builds on those things to carry us to a meal in the upper room, to bring us into encounter with Heaven itself, for the divisions between us to be stripped away, and for us to be nourished in the way that food never satisfies.

So it is for all aspects of the sacraments, and for all the sacraments (of which I have no definitive list.)

For the Life of the World.

The sacraments renew us and renew the whole world by stripping away what is mundane and fallen and imperfect in these things, and letting us experience them anew, renewed, transcendent.  All of Creation is made by God and declared good, but there is a thick layer of soot over it all.  The point of the sacraments is to draw us back into our original relationship with God and to lift us up out of the dust, to lift even the bread and wine and water out of the dross of life, and to be able to experience and see and feel and touch and taste and intimately, utterly, profoundly know what is real that the dust cannot cover, that all the problems of life and even death cannot destroy.  The sacraments are alive, and are us fully alive, and not in some symbolic or metaphorical way alone, and not just for some didactic or practical end, but for the transformation of ourselves, our souls, our bodies, and everything.

Marriage was Always a Central Relationship.

That marriage existed before Jesus should not come as a shock.  The Hebrew Bible is filled with memories of our spiritual ancestors and their relationships in particular.  Their commitments to one another, in violation and in fulfillment, are often at the heart of the story of salvation history itself, of God’s covenant and purpose and presence.  These are core relationships, and they have always existed.

So Jesus went to a wedding, and he spoke about marriage elsewhere, and through his incarnation, his enfleshment, his ministry on Earth, he left us with marriage as something more than it had been: as now, for us, a sacrament.

Sacraments do not Displace.

Like the other sacraments, it does not displace the things which came before it, and perhaps it even imbues those things with some shadow of the sacrament’s energies itself.  I know that when I wash my hands at the Eucharist, I am reminded of the renewing, cool waters of baptism; and when I wash my hands in the washroom at the Indian buffet, I am reminded of that washing, also.  And this is not a mere remembering or associating, some recalling of accidental similarity between unrelated things, but it is a reconstituting, in a smaller way, of myself as not just someone who goes through life led by needs and urges and wants and demands, but as someone who is a belovèd child of God, made clean and whole and one with all the Body of Christ.

We do not say that Christians should not wash their hands because they are washed in baptism, although we could justify that from Scripture (one who has been made clean does not need to wash again.)  We know better than that.  Likewise, we eat meals which are not the Eucharist (although we might long for that heavenly city where all meals are at the Table of the Lamb.)  We allow ourselves to eat of worldly things even if they are not what feeds us.

Sacraments and Boundaries.

So, too, marriage is a thing which has a life of its own apart from the Church.  The law could indeed create a legal regime of marriage which was so abhorrent to the Church that we would have nothing to do with it, but that is not what is before us here, and even if it were, it would do us no good to not try to engage with that institution and teach and guide and work to make it more humane.

We should not conflate what the State does with what the Church does.

The Faith does have some boundaries, and though they can be stumbling blocks, we do make those same stumbling blocks our cornerstones, as Christ quite wisely told us we would have to.  It is not inherently wrong or unjust for there to be limits on the practice of our faith, but those boundaries must make some kind of sense, theological and practical both.  We might ask people to wait to receive communion (although I did not, personally) until they have been baptized, so that the experience of the sacrament of belonging will be situated within the sacrament of adoption; but Christ would never tell us to refuse to feed someone who longs to eat.  We must remember that we are stewards of the sacraments, not their owners or their masters, and that the boundaries we place around them are lightly held and permeable.  All such boundaries are relational; look at how long the rubrics for refusing someone communion are as compared to how frequently it actually happens.  We know that we must be accountable for those boundaries, and that they must be enforced only for very, very good reason, and to prevent some demonstrably greater harm.

Marriage and the Missionary.

We know that intuitively, though we practice it imperfectly.  Anglicanism’s history on the matter of marriage as a sacrament is particularly instructive.  In North America, we seem to have consistently defiled and denied the plural marriages of the indigenous peoples here.  In Africa, however, it seems that a variety of approaches were taken: in some places, men who maintained plural marriages could not be baptized, but their wives could; in others, missionaries were advised that while men in plural marriages could not be ordained, no one was to be refused baptism, and that it did more harm to break up a family and leave a mother as a pariah without support than to allow an existing plural marriage to continue, as long as a man did not take more wives.

None of those examples are perfect, but they illustrate the permeable nature of boundaries around sacraments, and indeed they illustrate early instances of Anglicans having to actually think about what marriage was and could be.  I am not sure, however, if they were enforcing an Anglican (or even Christian) ethos of marriage, or simply a social and cultural norm around marriage; certainly in many cases we can say that they were doing one, or the other, or both, on a variety of matters, but particularly on the front of marriage, it is difficult to make a distinction between the two.  (I am worryingly sure that if the Anglican Church ever does embrace plural marriages of one form or another, it will be because people who look like those missionaries and colonizers wish to adopt the practice, and not because of recognizing indigenous practices besides.)

The Sacramental Character of Marriage.

So then, if the purpose of a sacrament is to elevate something into its heavenly form, to a more perfect reflection of God’s intent for us, what is the nature of marriage as a sacramental relationship?

I feel that the answer to that is clear, although I must state also that I cannot speak from experience.  My partner and I, although God has always been a part of our relationship, and is very much so now, and even though we managed to find a way to stomach being married in the eyes of the State, have not been married in the Church.  We cannot participate in that way in a sacrament which exists in such an impaired state within our Church, any more than we could take communion in a Church which refused to feed all who are hungry.  A sacrament which does not expand on what is real, on our relationships, and carry them closer to their perfection, is hard to accept as a sacrament.  Likewise, I have not married anyone.  This is a personal detail of which I do not often speak, and do not like to speak, and it is a source of pain.  I might marry a couple if I were asked, if I felt that the sacrament could be offered in a way which did not feel impaired, which felt like acting in concert with the Church and with God, but that is hard to see from here.  I wonder sometimes if my partner and I should get married in this current imperfect regime that exists within the Anglican Church of Canada, and work to draw it closer to the Kingdom of God by being a part of it, but I’m not sure.  It’s a painful reality.  It’s an impaired church.

Still, it is quite clear that Jesus calls us to make marriage a place of profound union.  Where the Fall divided us from one another, from the rest of Creation, and from God, marriage creates a crucible, a temenos, a sacred vessel in which divisions can cease, and we can truly allow ourselves to be with one another.  We should strive for that in all relationships, and it is sometimes found in most marriages, but the sacramental character of marriage is to make that the defining reality of the relationship.  That is the transformation that occurs before the altar in our faith: that the reality of our non-separation from one another is acute and undeniable.

Not all marriages end up reflecting that very well, as indeed we can leave Communion and go very quickly back to not being at peace with one another, and hoarding wealth, and many other things which cause us to draw away from God, rather than nearer to.  Still, that is the type of marriage, that is the essence of its sacramental character, and that is what Christ instituted for us.

Marriage is the place where we do not have to be in impaired relationship.  It is the place where we can truly be ourselves.  It is the experience of radical union with one another and with God.  No persona and pretense, no need to keep up appearances.

Gender, the Fall, and Relationship.

A strongly constructed sense of what it means to be a man and to be a woman can, indeed, be one of the greatest barriers to marriage as a place where all divisions cease.  I have observed no small number of marriages in which a man and a woman felt that by virtue of gender they had certain roles which must be maintained and expectations which must be met.  A man might expect that his wife must have sex with him, however and whenever he wants; a woman might expect that her husband must provide for her above all else, even to the sacrifice of his health.  Those are stereotypes and caricatures, but that is precisely the point: they are the stereotypes and caricatures which some people are genuinely led by society into experiencing and inhabiting, to the maintenance of an impaired relationship with themselves, with one another, with their partners and with God.  Gender can become something which keeps us from experiencing the reality of the Kingdom, and from experiencing the Grace of the sacrament of marriage.

I think we probably know even less about gender than we do about marriage, theologically.  Though we have spent more time on it across the history of Christianity, I am not sure we have gotten any farther, because we have been situated for so long in societies in which it was not questionable, it was not a moving target, it was not something for which we had alternative visions which could bear fruit enough for us to judge them.

It is a fond thing to look back at the beginning of Genesis and to experience maleness and femaleness as something of God’s intent for us, but that is the most profound kind of anachronism: it projects our knowledge of the world after the Fall into the Garden itself.  That is not tenable in Christian theology.

After the Fall.

After the Fall, we find ourselves in an impaired relationship.  We experience death, or we are in such a broken relationship with ourselves and God and the world that we are terrified and captivated by death.  The question of whether we live or die is a much more fundamental one than the question of gender, and while we accept that question as one which is utterly broken by the Fall (and destroyed in the Resurrection), we seem convinced that gender is what God originally intended for us.

We cannot use appeals to nature to determine God’s intent, because either nature is fallen, too, or we are so broken and distorted in our thinking, experiencing, and knowing after the Fall that we cannot just look at something and accurately see what is going on.  This is the essence of the Fall itself: we really, really want to know good and evil.  We want to know how to distinguish things, to tell them apart, to divide things up (ourselves and the whole world included) in an either-or dichotomous system.

The Fall is what tells us: things are either male or female.  We look at Creation and we see a diversity of sexual morphologies in the animal kingdom and humanity, and we are so wedded to our dichotomy of sex that we dismiss anything outside of that as an outlier or an aberration, which is an extremely weak commitment to observing nature to determine God’s intent.  We like our categories, and we implicitly work to maintain them.  That’s what keeps us in the Fall.  That’s why the Genesis story needs to remind us: male and female, he created them all.  Whatever categories we seek to place things, and particularly people, into, it’s all of God, we’re all of God.

Rejecting Category.

If we should give to death no power and withhold our assent to its claims, how can we treat gender differently?  Why are we so sure that gender as we know it, as we experience it, and as we understand it, are present in the Garden?

That, too, is a matter of personal history overwhelming theology, and taking precedence over salvation history.  If death is destroyed in Christ’s Resurrection, then Paul is surely right that in Christ there is no male or female.  That’s what our restored image in the sight of God, no longer beholden to the soot of this fallen world, is like.  We are present, we are not categorized.  We are loved, we are not divided.  We are God’s own.  That’s all.

To take gender and sexuality as we grew up with them, or as we imagine they were a hundred or two hundred years ago, then, and to imagine that they are part of the essential character of what it is to be human, is an error.  Given that, to imagine that they are an essential part of marriage, which is a sacrament constituted by relationship where all divisions cease, is beyond impairment and into idolatry, into the corruption of a sacrament by the very thing it is supposed to go beyond.

To make marriage into a matter of reproduction is to deny the marriage of Abram and Sarai.  To make it into a matter of role is an essential misunderstanding of our humility and our integrity and our wholeness before God.

We Must not Cede Marriage to Society.

It is our response to a conflict which originated in secular society which has caused us to define marriage, and to define it in terms of that conflict.  And we have attempted to maintain the sacrament in a way which threatens to destroy it: by ceding to secular categories and laws and so many other things what belongs to God, and that is ourselves, and our lives.

If we began with a blank slate, knowing nothing of these culture wars, would we really take the positions we have?  If the Church taught more about marriage, I am confident that we would not.  But the Church has not taught enough about marriage, it has been negligent as a steward of the sacrament, being intent instead to let the sacrament, the relationship, and the legality of marriage be one thing, and to mostly be disinterested in it.

Jesus Calls us to More.

Jesus calls us into radical and new relationship, into a revelation of the sacredness and the holy character of what seem like everyday things: water, bread, and us.  The most important of these things is us.  He does not tell us that the only way to experience the Kingdom is to be married, and indeed some marriages will always have a destructive relationship at their core, and many people are not called to marriage at all.  Jesus laid out an image for us of what marriage looks like in the sight of God, and what relationship looks like in the Kingdom.  He did not mean to displace marriage, or to say that the accidental character of gender was a defining feature, any more than he meant to confine any of the parables to the details of the particular people and situations within them.