A Thought For The Week Of July 11, 2016

"The Lord God said, 'It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.'" (Genesis 2:18) It's "wedding time." I'll spend a lot of hours over the next few weeks meeting with couples whose weddings I'll be conducting later this summer and into the fall. This verse from Genesis certainly offers a different view of marriage than we're used to. We live in a society is which marriage is almost always based on romantic love. That's the ideal. We sing songs about it; we make movies about it. Romantic love is what marriage is all about. Of course, it wasn't always this way, and there are still some cultures in which it isn't this way. People get married (in the past perhaps more than now) for a variety of different reasons and this verse reminds us that marriage isn't only about romantic love. Adam was alone according to the creation story, and so God created a partner for Adam - according to the verse, "a helper." That's always seemed to me to be a rather cold view of marriage, but actually it doesn't deny love or intimacy. It merely points out that in the midst of love and intimacy spouses are to be there to help one another. When I conduct weddings, I always give couples a selection of Scripture passages they can choose from to include in the service, and I've noted that in recent years I'm finding more and more couples selecting a verse from Ecclesiastes that speaks about the two partners helping each other - that two are better than one because they can help each other. I find myself wondering if there isn't a bit of a move back to a more biblical basis of marriage - not in terms of sexual orientation, which I'm not convinced was ever the focus of the biblical story, but in terms of the basic purpose of marriage and the role of spouses. We're to help each other. Love each other and share intimacy as well - but we are to be one another's helpers. That's the foundational purpose of marriage in the creation story.