• A Question about Marriage and the Bible – can you help

    I’ve been asked an interesting question by the Vice Provost, the Rev Cedric Blakey this week.

    The question is this – or at least something like this:

    If one were in conversation with a couple considering marriage, which married couples from the bible would you cite as good examples of marriage based on the biblical evidence.

    Let us make this easy and restrict things to couples in the bible who could be said to be married in the form that so many people want to tell me is the biblical model for marriage – ie one man and one woman, no sex outside marriage.

    I’d be interested to hear your suggestions. Which biblical couples affirm this model?

4 responses to “Here is the sermon…”

  1. Beth Avatar
    Beth

    I remember that workshop being done as part of an LGBT group meeting. I was slightly skeptical about it in the beginning, but ended up getting a lot out of it and thinking about God in ways that I hadn’t consciously before.

  2. Tim Avatar

    FWIW, in order to dot some `t’s and cross some `i’s, my sensibly heretical book The Five Gospels colours all the speech black apart from the saying about women grinding corn (which merits a grey, at best). Ie, none of the text goes back to any historical Jesus, with the apocalyptic context added by the gospel authors; the `thief in the night’ is an Christian saying of the early churches (witness other epistles, written before Matthew, where the image appears) and therefore probably planted, in that order, in Matthew.

    I guess taking what you most charitably will out of the passage is entirely reasonable, then. ๐Ÿ™‚

  3. Tim Avatar

    (I had to read that, and a bit from Romans at church up here, too… was “interesting” turning a blind eye to it. ๐Ÿ™‚

  4. Tracey Avatar
    Tracey

    Thanks for that Kelvin. When I read that Gospel at the 8:30 service, i remembered the severe fundamentalist church I was brought up in as a child, and it made me uncomfortable. Reading your comments, I remember my first few visits to an Episcopal worship service and remembering how joyful and non-scary it was, and being amazed by the fact that I didn’t have to be afraid of God. Thanks for the reminder.

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