St. Nicholas Orthodox Church
Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese
9100 Youree Drive, Shreveport, LA 71115
Sunday, July 5, 2015 - Post-Liturgy Teaching on Marriage and Sexuality, Part 1

Last Sunday I said I would spend the next 4 Sundays at least, beginning today, providing some basic teaching about the Church’s understanding of marriage and sexuality, and how those things relate to our lives as Orthodox Christians living in the U.S. in 2015. Obviously, this is partially in response to current events, though it is also part of the ancient tradition, and timeless teaching of the Church, and essential to a proper Christian approach to life.

For this first presentation on Marriage and Sexuality, I’m really just going to focus on the positive teaching about those things. What is the purpose of human sexuality? What is the meaning of marriage? What do marriage and sexuality say about God and about us?

From an Orthodox perspective, what is essential about marriage? It is essentially an icon that images forth the union between God and man. It is an icon of the Kingdom of God.

We speak a lot about icons in Orthodoxy. Man is an icon - made in the “image” (icon) of God. Human marriage shares in the “iconographic” reality of human existence.

Humanity is comprised of male and female, men and women. But man, as a whole, is essentially the Church, which is the Bride of Christ. More about the Bride of Christ in a few minutes. But first, let’s consider the question of what is the purpose of man’s existence. We could say that the purpose of our existence is to be united with God, to live in communion with Him. That’s true for humanity as a whole. It’s also true for each individual man or woman. Of course, we know that we can’t even begin to be united with God on our own; He comes to us out of love for us, and unites us to Himself, provided that we are willing.

How does each of us know what our identity is? There are lots of suggestions today about gender identity, sexual orientation as part of identity, etc. As Orthodox Christians, we understand our identity to be found in our relationship with God. It’s in being united with God that we find ourselves, that we discover our identity. And outside of that, we are bound to be disoriented, confused.

Any definition of what it is to be a human person that ignores the existence of God, and His design and will for us, is going to lead to an error. Likewise, any attempt to understand sexuality that ignores God’s intentions is going to go astray.

Man is a sexual being. But that doesn’t mean that sexual activity is essential for man. Contrary to what the world tells us, we can live a completely full and fulfilling life without any sexual activity at all. Otherwise we’d have to say that the Lord himself, or the Virgin Mary, or many of the Saints who were virgins didn’t live fully human, fully worthwhile lives or something. That would be crazy.

What the fact that man is a sexual being does mean is that humanity is divided into two sexes - male and female; simply that. And along with that, there is a God-given design for the union of the sexes in marriage, and the multiplication of humanity through that union.

Now, not every particular person is called to participate in this union of marriage. Again, particular people may be called by God to live a celibate life. But as a whole, there is a design and an intention for a fruitful uniting of the sexes.

The book of Genesis describes this reality. Adam needs a companion; it’s “not good for him to be alone.” Community is necessary for humanity, and the division into sexes makes this possible. Eve comes into existence as Adam’s “helpmeet;” together they have children, and the human race multiplies, as mandated and blessed by God.

By providential design, this union between man and woman is what produces children. So there is a one-flesh, physical and spiritual union that takes place between man and woman, and this union produces children. It is fruitful. This is how the human race increases. This is the foundation of the family, and necessary for there to be a Church (that is, a community of God’s people). This is clearly God’s design, and it is purposeful. It has a biological reality; it also has a spiritual and theological reality.

So from an Orthodox Christian perspective, sexual union has a definite purpose with definite parameters. We could summarize its purpose by saying that it is meant to be an image of divine love. And we could summarize the parameters by saying that, first of all, sexual union is by definition the union of the two sexes.

In particular, it is the union of one man and one woman, who are united together into “one flesh.” And just as every expression of God’s love is necessarily and essentially fruitful and creative, so human sexual union between husband and wife is by design fruitful, creative. It produces offspring. At least, ideally, that is the case. That is the design. Obviously there are practical exceptions (as in the case of couples unable to have children because of infertility).

Now with all of this, we have to remember that we live in a fallen world, where things don’t necessarily always go according to God’s design. We definitely recognize that as Orthodox Christians. We know it to be the case in our own lives. We have to come to terms with the reality we call sin. We’ll consider the sinful side of things further in later presentations.

But for right now, I want to focus on what God’s design and purpose are. What is the ideal that we should be aiming for? According to the teaching of the Church, which is also found in the Holy Scriptures, sexual activity finds its true fulfillment and proper expression in and only in a permanent (that is, totally committed and monogamous), sacrificially loving relationship between a man and a woman, in which there is ideally the possibility of bearing children and the purpose of establishing a family. And the word we have to describe this totally unique relationship is “marriage.”

Bringing children into the world isn’t its only purpose. It also has the purpose of uniting the man and the woman in a joyful, loving union. That’s what we call the unitive aspect of marriage and of the sexual act. It bonds the husband and wife together. But both its unitive quality and its creative, child-producing quality are aspects of its purpose, and both relate to the union between God and man. Again, we could say its highest purpose is to serve as an icon.

All of marriage’s God-given ends are, by the way, inherently unselfish. And selfishness - a desire to please oneself first - is totally foreign to true marriage and godly sexuality. Ideally, from a Christian perspective, sexual union between husband and wife should be an expression of genuine love, which is always sacrificial.

I’ve said that marriage and the sexual union are meant to be an image of divine love. And I said at the beginning that marriage is essentially an icon of the union between God and man. We can see that this is the case in the Scriptures.

Marriage is really the theme of the whole Bible. We find it at the beginning of Genesis, and at the end of the Apocalyse, the last book of the Bible. The whole story begins with Adam and Eve and their relationship together with God; it ends with the “wedding feast of the Lamb.” 5 verses before the end of the Revelation, it says, “The Spirit and the Bride say, come!” It’s the Church speaking to Christ as the Bridegroom and saying, “come and be united with me!”

Marriage is the analogy that is most often used throughout Scripture to describe God’s relationship with mankind. Throughout the Old Testament, we hear about how God loves Israel as His bride, but that Israel is always playing the harlot. God is faithful but Israel is not. (See especially Hosea, Jeremiah, and the other prophets).

So idolatry - worshiping gods other than the true God, putting other things and ourselves before God, is understood as analogous to adultery or fornication. Spiritually we as the Church - as the human race - have only one true Spouse, and that is God. Everything else is adultery, harlotry.

Early in both the Gospels of Mark and John, Jesus is called the “Bridegroom.” And this is one of the dominant titles for Christ, not only in Scripture, but throughout the tradition.

So on the one hand, we have God creating male and female, man and woman, and giving them to each other in a marital union. And on the other hand, we understand that God made each of us, and all of us together as a whole humanity, to be His bride. That’s what the Church is. And in Ephesians, Paul makes it explicit that human marriage between husband and wife is an image of the divine-human union of God with us as His beloved; of the marriage of Christ and the Church.

Just like with any Orthodox icon, marriage as we know and practice it in the Christian tradition, follows particular customs and conventions and canons. Otherwise, an icon isn’t a true icon. It doesn’t properly express what it’s mean to express. You can’t just create any image of the crucifixion and say that’s an icon of the crucifixion. There have been very blasphemous depictions of the crucifixion, or of Christ in general. Whatever they may be, those are not Orthodox icons.

Likewise, for a marriage to be an icon of the union between Christ and the Church, particular characteristics are required. As I’ve already said, those include having a husband and a wife (a Bridegroom and a Bride) with the one representing Christ in the icon, and the other representing the Church in the icon. This doesn’t conflict with the fact both men and women are part of the Bride, with respect to Christ the Bridegroom. It also doesn’t indicate that men are spiritually superior to women or anything like that. It does indicate, however, as St. Paul states, that husband and wife each have a particular part to play; each brings a particular quality to the marriage, without which you don’t have a true marriage. Most of all, it indicates the beautiful bond of sacrificial and complimentary love and respect that exists between Christ and the Church, as it is meant to exist between husband and wife.

There is an essential “otherness” about men and women (as they say, men are from Mars and women are from Venus!). While they are both fully what it is to be human, there is a natural strangeness between the sexes. This may be understood as analogous to the division and otherness that exists between God and man. Of course, sin creates further division between God and man, between male and female, and between people in general, beyond what divisions already exist by nature. Christ comes into the world precisely to heal the divisions that exist, as St. Maximus the Confessor says. In the Kingdom, this healing of divisions will appear as a new mode of existence, hinted at by the Lord when He says that in Heaven “they neither marry, or are given in marriage.”

For now though, providentially in this world, marriage is precisely, at least ideally or at its best, a foretaste of that healing of divisions between male and female, and an image of the mystical heavenly union.

Again, there is also a permanent, totally committed quality to true marriage (it’s not just temporary, until we get tired of it or something) just as the union between Christ and the Church is permanent, eternal. And a true marital union should be loving and sacrificial, not selfish and about what I can get, what I can enjoy. Ultimately, it’s only Christ who can enable the husband to be a true husband and the wife to be a true wife. This means that even if you have a man and a woman who are sexually united, it’s not a true and accurate icon of marriage unless these other qualities are present of total commitment, genuine sacrificial love, and the intention for the marriage to be fruitful in producing children if God blesses it.

So what do you have if you try to remake marriage into something that it’s not? What do you have if you disregard the canonical tradition of icon making, and make a version of a icon that cannot be blessed by the Church? What if you take an icon and stomp on it? You have iconoclasm, which was condemned by the 7th Ecumenical Council as a heresy.

Now I want to be clear. There are many ways that we can fall short, in our marriages and sexual expression within marriage, of the perfect icon of divine love for man. Those of us who try and fall short, in one way or another, of being ideal husbands or wives are not intentionally embracing the heresy of iconoclasm. We’re just not being very good icons; we pray that Christ will restore the image and perfect the likeness in us. So I’m not saying we’re embracing heresy by failing to be the best possible spouses, as along as we are actively repenting for our failure.

It would also, of course, not be the case that celibate people are somehow participating in a heresy by not participating in marriage. Unless it is done out of a loathing of marriage as something unclean (which is an attitude condemned by the canons of the Church), the state virginity and celibacy is very much blessed by the Church for those who are called to it, as in the case of monastics. They are certainly not being iconoclasts, but are actively participating in the actual union of the Church with Christ the Bridegroom.

However, anyone who would actually promote and encourage distorted versions of sexuality or broken forms of marriage would be - whether they realized it or not - embracing this heresy of iconoclasm.

So promoting so-called “same-sex marriage” would undoubtedly be a form of this kind of iconoclasm. But so would be the promotion of no-fault divorce, or fornication or pornography. In the New Testament, what’s condemned repeatedly is what’s called “porneia” in Greek. This would cover anything outside of the blessed, loving, marital union of husband and wife. All of these, and many other broken sexual acts far fall short of what God clearly intends for marriage to be.

Finally, I want to end by saying again that our response to the sexual chaos in the world around us should not be to despise other people or to be fearful or angry to anything like that. Rather, it should be to repent. To confess to God that we have fallen short of being the icon of His love, and to beg Him to enable us to be what we want people to see when they look at the Church, and when they look at us as Christians. On our own, this is impossible. But with God all things are possible. May we repent and by God’s grace become the light shining in the darkness.

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