Beyond the Cookie Cutter--August 18, 2022

Beyond the Cookie Cutter--August 18, 2022

"Now concerning the matters about which you wrote: 'It is well for a man not to touch a woman.' But because of sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband." [1 Corinthians 7:1-2]

Let's get this much clear at the outset, before we get lost in the weeds: if your reason for supporting Christianity is just to help you live the cookie-cutter life you've been told you're supposed to want, you're in for some disappointment.  

You know that cookie-cutter picture of the "ideal" family that gets held up as part of the American Dream, right? It's got the husband and wife, the 2.5 kids, the white picket fence, and the dog, all living in suburban bliss with a perfectly manicured lawn in the background.  And there's nothing inherently wrong with that picture per se... it's just that sometimes Respectable Religious folks make it sound like Christianity is primarily a way to get that kind of family, or that church, religion, and the gospel are "good" things only insofar as they help to promote "family values."  It's sort of assumed sometimes that the goal of every follower of Jesus should be to get married, settled down, have a manageable number of children, and then teach those kids to do the same.

To be really honest, sometimes to listen to what passes for "Christian teaching and preaching" on the internet, on TV, and on the radio, you'd think that Jesus mostly taught helpful hints for finding a romantic partner, keeping a marriage strong, and lessons he'd learned from his own experience on how to raise your kids to be respectable and upstanding citizens.  Given how many books line the shelves of "Christian" bookstores on how to raise teenagers in a "Christian" way, how to handle schooling and adolescence to bring up "godly" young adults, or how to keep the flame of your marriage burning, you'd think that Christianity was mostly a religion centered on how to get married, find the perfect dog, set up that picket fence, and, well, get the rest of that cookie-cutter picture to happen.  Those same shelves upon shelves of "inspirational" voices have very little to say about how you can follow Jesus if your life doesn't fit in that cookie cutter--only at most how to try and get your life to fit back inside it if you've "gone off course" somehow.  And to be frank, that's about as much as the watching world sees of "Christianity," and it sounds to their ears like we have very little to offer other than dating advice, parenting rules, and crushing social pressure to find and keep a spouse.

What a surprise, then, to realize that not only does Jesus have very little to say about "family values" as usually described [other than that his coming will cause "division" in families between spouses, parents, children, and in-laws!--see Luke 12:49-53 on that], but also that both Jesus and Paul seem pretty ambivalent about how important being married is to having a full and thriving life!  Neither Jesus nor Paul were married, to the best of our knowledge; neither had children, again to the best of our historical evidence.  And neither of them making getting married and having kids the center of their message--again, much to the surprise of anybody who's listened to "Christian" talk radio.  Now, don't get me wrong, Paul here isn't really "anti-marriage." He doesn't say people can't or shouldn't get married or have romance in their lives, not exactly.  But he certainly doesn't think that romance is the be-all, end-all that Respectable Religion often makes it out to be, either.

As we'll see over the course of the next section here in First Corinthians, Paul doesn't seem to be really "pro-marriage" or "anti-marriage," so much as he is fiercely concerned that ALL of our relationships, whatever they are, don't dehumanize each other or treat people like commodities we can use and throw away.  Now even in just my own experience, I've seen people who are married treat their spouses like they were merely objects or hired servants, rather than partners with mutual love and respect... and I've seen people who were single all their lives whose lives were as rich and full with friends, family, community, and others that nobody ever thought, "They must be missing out because they are unmarried."  In other words, from Paul's perspective, there is no one cookie-cutter way you have to arrange your relationships in order to be a Christian, but rather it's a question of how we embody Christ-like love, respect, compassion, and honor with everybody.  His advice to the Corinthians is noticeably NOT, "You can only really be happy in life if you've found a romantic partner and picked out the exact shade of white you want for your picket fence," but rather he asks, "How do we love rightly [like Jesus] in every relationship in our lives?"  We can find ways to love like Jesus in marriages, and we'll also need to figure out how to love like Jesus in our friendships, parenting, with strangers, and even with our enemies.

So here when Paul says, "let each man have his own wife and each woman her own husband," it's not a commandment as if to say, "You can only be a good Christian if you are married or working toward being married."  It's rather to say, "There are additional challenges to life when you are married, so there's a good case to be made for staying single--but compared to all the other ways we can go wrong in our impulses to objectify people and commodify love into sex, I'd rather people be married than just to use others like they are disposable."  But notice here--for Paul, Christianity isn't just a means toward the goal of getting everybody paired up and posing for family photos in front of their suburban dream-houses.  The Christian faith can be lived by married people, unmarried people, folks in nuclear families, folks in extended families, folks who are single all their lives, and folks who have remarried in life--there's not just "one way" to do it "right."  And if you've been bombarded by the barrage of voices telling you that "real" fulfillment only comes by fitting into the cookie cutter model foisted on you by Respectable Religious people, Paul himself begs to differ.

Bottom line--we're missing the point if we add our voices to the chorus of folks selling parenting advice or tips for finding a spouse and packaging it as the Gospel.  Jesus has not come to give us "five ways to add fire to your romance" or pressure you into a couple so you'll look "successful." Whatever relationships we have over the course of our lifetimes, though, we are called to let them all be transformed in light of the love of Christ, which breaks out beyond the strictures of a cookie-cutter mold.

Lord Jesus, allow us to love and to be loved in ways that reflect your own care for us all--whether or not that meets with anybody else's expectations.