The Church as the Bride of Christ

November 12, 2023               24^th Sunday of Pentecost

Ephesians 5:24-30         Revelations 19:6-8

            The first marriage I ever officiated was for my brother, Billy, who lives in Colorado.  When he called me up and asked me to do the ceremony I told him, “Um, there’s a problem: I’m only a minister in training.  I’m not a minister yet.”  

Well, it turns out that this didn’t matter because the state of Colorado has some leftover frontier laws.  One of them is that anyone can marry two people anywhere.  The bartender can marry a couple in his bar, the ranch owner can marry them on the front porch, a train conductor could marry people on a station platform.  There were not a lot of ministers when Colorado was a frontier territory, but that didn’t stop people from wanting to get married.   Back then the catch was there had to be witnesses to the marriage, to prevent a person from marrying someone and then abandoning their spouse and running off to another town and marrying someone else.  As long as you could produce a witness who would vouch that the marriage had taken place, it was legal.

            So, in Colorado the legality of anyone, marrying anyone, anywhere still exists.  My brother and his wife got married on a ranch that is situated on a mountain side with a magnificent view that you can see in the all the wedding photos.  Now the catch is that in order to make the wedding legal, for tax and other purposes, you need to go down to the town office and register that the wedding took place, along with two witnesses who were there.  I didn’t have to be licensed to perform the wedding nor did I have to sign as a witness, like I have to do in New York.  Three weeks later, when I became a licensed local pastor, I was registered by the church to perform weddings in New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey.  (The last is because a lot of people in New York City get married in New Jersey because it’s cheaper to hold a reception there.)

            There are two types of weddings in the U.S: civil and church.  My brother and his wife didn’t want a regular church service wedding, but they are spiritual people, and they wrote their own vows that were spiritually based.  I think that theirs was a church wedding minus the building because of that factor.  They didn’t just go down to the courthouse and repeat the legal stuff that a justice of the peace would rattle off – they put into their vows a spiritual commitment to each other.

         The thing about a marriage is that there’s the civil component that enables you to register your status with the government and claim a social standing for the couple and their children along with the tax status for the state and federal governments.   And then there is a spiritual component to it, which is very important in the Christian faith.

         Marriage is one of the most sacred actions that you can undertake because it’s a covenant between two people.  Unlike a simple contract which is a transaction of goods and services a covenant has an emotional component to it.

            We can divide the concept of ourselves into four basic parts: physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual.  Where a contract is mostly physical – I will do X amount of work for Y amount of pay – a covenant considers all four things.

            In a marriage a couple pledges to take care of each other physically and to respect each other’s health and well-being, no matter what the conditions.  This is why we say in sickness and in health.   But that extends also to emotional and mental well-being.   If you deliberately attempt to manipulate or abuse your partner physically, mentally, or emotionally, you’re violating the covenant that you’ve set up between you to care for each other.   And, especially in a religious context you need to also allow for the spiritual care of your partner.  You need to respect the other’s relationship with God.  To restrict or not allow a person to have their own relationship with God is also a violation of the covenant.

            The purpose of marriage is to support each other in the physical world so that you can become more prosperous together than you would if you were single, and also to support each other so that you can grow and mature mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.  It is not healthy in the relationship if one person says to the other, “I don’t want you to change.”  Our mental and emotional states are not going to be in the same place in our twenties as they are in our thirties, or forties, or fifties, or beyond.  Change, and the growth it brings, are a part of life.  In a covenant marriage people should allow each other to grow, and help each other to grow, and each person should share in their changes so that they can grow together into something new.  

            Covenant marriages are made with the understanding that partners will support each other as they change through their learning experiences.  And while that happens, they learn how to love each other better through each change that they go through.

            So, how does this relate to The Church as the Bride of Christ?  Well, we’ve already defined that a church is a bodyof people, with different gifts and graces, who come together to learn about God and who use those talents to run the organization so that people can find places and the means to express God’s love through ministry and mission.  And then we’ve said that our church, all of us who have come together, are a family, with God as our parent; Jesus our elder brother; and the Holy Spirit our elder sister.

            But now we get down to the covenant that the church has with God, and that we also have personally with God, and that God has with us.  That’s a very sacred relationship that encompasses God’s care for our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being.  It’s a little bit of an old-fashioned notion because back when it was created, the man was seen as the head of the family and the woman as the follower.  That dynamic was transplanted into this metaphor.  In Christianity, Christ is how we can connect to the overwhelmingly awesome power of God, which is almost too big to comprehend.  But we can comprehend God through Jesus because he lived as one of us.   So, Jesus Christ becomes the groom and the leader in the relationship, and the church, as all of us, becomes the bride who follows.

            But it’s represented as a marriage covenant because it’s a two-way relationship that is working toward creating something that is positive for everyone through actions of love.   The important thing in a marriage is that you make a commitment to it.  We commit ourselves to Christ’s teachings and accept the authority of Christ because through our actions as Christians we are building a kingdom here on earth that is at once more divine and more humane because it is based on respect and kindness for other people and provides space for love, kindness, mercy, charity, and hope, in God’s name and with God’s love.

            So how do we make that happen?   Well, we have to commit ourselves to the covenant of making our church a place of living in love, growing in love, respecting in love, working in love, sharing in love, ministering in love, teaching in love, both inside these walls and outside into the world.  We commit to making this a safe loving space for all who enter our doors.  We commit to putting aside our egos and working for the greater good.  We commit to helping our brothers and sisters in Christ.  We commit to the care of our elderly and our children.  We commit to devoting some of our time to the little nitty-gritty stuff that has to be done to keep our church going.  We commit to making ourselves the most loving we can be so that our church can be a place where people come and breathe and say, “I am loved here.”  

When we do this, we will learn how to put away our former ways of life, our old selves, and we will be renewed in the spirit of our bodies, minds, and hearts.  And we will be clothed with a new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.