Many of you deeply appreciated Judy McVean’s beautiful comments for Mother’s Day. Because her words are something you might like to keep, here is what she said:

This is part of the rich pageant of being mom, isn’t it? Yet we do survive and thrive in the midst of the trial and error, the joys and sorrows and just plain wonderment of it all. Many times I called out to God, and my friends, for wisdom, patience, guidance and energy – I still do.

In being a mom to 2 sons, both adults now, I look back and can see a bunch of things I wish I had done that I didn’t, other things I’m so glad I did, and most of all I see that it’s not over. Our relationships are constantly evolving and I’m glad for this as life offers us endless new starts, and continued opportunities to improve and strengthen who we are with one another.

We all need new starts, don’t we? I started over many times with my kids. I wanted so much to be a good mom but I wasn’t always sure what that looked like. I vacillated a lot …. Some days I’d give all the power to my kids thinking that the freedom was kindness. Other days I’d grab the power back and enforce rules because the freedom became unmanageable and we were miserable. The result, of course, was confusion – for all of us. One of my new starts was in developing the confidence to create consistent expectations of the kids and myself and to attempt to be faithful in applying those on a daily basis. The Good Mom as the Firm, Consistent Mom was big learning for me and more stabilizing for my sons. Maybe this resonates for you?

I’m keenly aware that Mother’s Day and all the surrounding hoopla isn’t always a ‘happy’ experience for many. The word ‘mother’ can evoke complicated responses. Sometimes it’s because of a difficult past. Sometimes it’s because as a mom you’ve been hurt deeply by a child or have failed a child in a significant way. Maybe for some, becoming a mom is the stuff of dreams, not reality. Maybe your mom is missing in your life. If these descriptions come close to describing how you feel – be kind and gracious to yourself. Talk to someone. Pray for healing guidance to navigate this ‘barricade’.

Can we make a deal? Can all of us make a promise to consciously encourage a mom this week? Regardless of how you connect to the ‘mother’ category, how about finding at least one thing you especially appreciate about your mom, or someone else’s mom, and telling her about it. Dads, this is your opportunity to make points! And yes, I know that your wife is not your mother, but if she’s the mother of your children, that counts!

My prayer for each of us is that we will know that our Mother/Father God has arms big enough to hold everything that’s filling our hearts. As his child, may we seek the nourishment we need to grow as women and moms, able to nourish ourselves and encourage others on this amazing journey. May we never lose sight of His promise that he will bring to completion the good work he has begun in all of us – you, your kids, your home. Bless you mom!

Judy McVean

Form. Formation. I was a long way into this life of following Jesus and leading others before I made this simple connection: how we live is the form in which we become. We simply cannot learn the life and truth of Jesus, without also learning the way of Jesus. To learn what he said, to discover who he was and is, is embedded in how he lived and what he did.

Jesus is not only the truth and the life (John 14:6). Jesus is the way. In fact, in that set of three — way, truth, life — it is Jesus as “way” that is set forth first as a kind of entry point. We learn truth and life through our commitment to a Jesus-way-of-being.

Christians commit themselves to a way of life. The earliest followers of Jesus actually called themselves followers of The Way (Acts 9:2), a piece of history we should not easily dismiss. They did not think to call themselves Christians (Gk. christianos: the name of Christ with a latin ending which suggested “belonging to”, as in slave ownership). It was those who watched them work out their lives who first called them by this name (Acts 11:26). Perhaps we too should be reticent to call ourselves Christians. Perhaps it would be more accurate, more honest and helpful both to us and to those who watch us, to simply say we have committed ourselves to follow Jesus in his way.

We need a recovery of sorts. We need to reestablish the idea that form is the key to formation. For so many of us, spiritual life belongs to the unstructured part of life. It tends to exist in spurts and impulses. You know what I am talking about. This is where our present series on what we call the practices can help us.

There are basic ways in which followers of Jesus learn his life and truth. There are basic ways in which we learn The Way. We call these practices because these are things we do. There is a common core here: prayer and worship, reading and study, giving and forgiving, sabbath and service, hospitality and the shared life. Actually, we might say that genuine Christian life is nearly impossible without such basics.

If you would like to dive deeper into this discussion, let me recommend Dorothy Bass, Practicing Our Faith: A Way of Life for a Searching People (Jossey-Bass: 2nd edition, 2009). If you have been frustrated by the formless, chaotic nature of your spiritual life, you will be greatly encouraged by the thought that a Christian soul is made in the dailiness of walking the path with Jesus. May Our Lord lead you on.

Bob Osborne

Bob Osborne

The story from Luke 23:32 to 24:12 (The Message Bible)

Two others, both criminals, were taken along with him for execution. When they got to the place called Skull Hill, they crucified him, along with the criminals, one on his right, the other on his left.

Jesus prayed, “Father, forgive them; they don’t know what they’re doing.” Dividing up his clothes, they threw dice for them. The people stood there staring at Jesus, and the ringleaders made faces, taunting, “He saved others. Let’s see him save himself! The Messiah of God—ha! The Chosen—ha!” The soldiers also came up and poked fun at him, making a game of it. They toasted him with sour wine: “So you’re King of the Jews! Save yourself!”

Printed over him was a sign: this is the king of the jews. One of the criminals hanging alongside cursed him: “Some Messiah you are! Save yourself! Save us!” But the other one made him shut up: “Have you no fear of God? You’re getting the same as him. We deserve this, but not him—he did nothing to deserve this.” Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you enter your kingdom.” He said, “Don’t worry, I will. Today you will join me in paradise.”

By now it was noon. The whole earth became dark, the darkness lasting three hours—a total blackout. The Temple curtain split right down the middle. Jesus called loudly, “Father, I place my life in your hands!” Then he breathed his last.

When the captain there saw what happened, he honored God: “This man was innocent! A good man, and innocent!” There was a man by the name of Joseph… He went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus. Taking him down, he wrapped him in a linen shroud and placed him in a tomb chiseled into the rock, a tomb never yet used. It was the day before Sabbath, the Sabbath just about to begin.

The women who had been companions of Jesus from Galilee followed along. They saw the tomb where Jesus’ body was placed. Then they went back to prepare burial spices and perfumes. They rested quietly on the Sabbath, as commanded.

At the crack of dawn on Sunday, the women came to the tomb carrying the burial spices they had prepared. They found the entrance stone rolled back from the tomb, so they walked in. But once inside, they couldn’t find the body of the Master Jesus.

They were puzzled, wondering what to make of this. Then, out of nowhere it seemed, two men, light cascading over them, stood there. The women were awestruck and bowed down in worship. The men said, “Why are you looking for the Living One in a cemetery? He is not here, but raised up. Remember how he told you when you were still back in Galilee that he had to be handed over to sinners, be killed on a cross, and in three days rise up?” Then they remembered Jesus’ words.

They left the tomb and broke the news of all this to the Eleven and the rest. Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them kept telling these things to the apostles, but the apostles didn’t believe a word of it, thought they were making it all up.

But Peter jumped to his feet and ran to the tomb. He stooped to look in and saw a few grave clothes, that’s all. He walked away puzzled, shaking his head.

The LORD said to Moses, “Tell Aaron and his sons, ‘This is how you are to bless the Israelites.’ Say to them:
The LORD bless you and keep you;
the LORD make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you;
the LORD turn his face toward you and give you peace. (Num. 6:22-26)

For me, George Bernanos’ novel, The Diary of a Country Priest (1937), is an exercise in understanding how word and face work together in the ministry of blessing. Bernanos’ now classic work presents a young priest and his relationship with the small French village he is called to serve. The priest is poor, and sick, and finds himself serving a resistant and troubled flock. He is not an obvious success, carrying a persistent sense of inadequacy and self-doubt. But he is faithful to the character of his calling: to bless and not curse.

In the priest’s interactions with the persons of his parish – persons who have a hard time believing, persons who wound and hurt others – he makes a difference. It is a difference born out of his particular view of life, a view which contrasts with some of the religious idealists around him.

One such person is a nun who has recently left the nunnery to take up village life. She decides it is her calling to keep the church spotlessly clean and she goes about her task with a vengeance. She cleans out the cobwebs, removes the grime. The church sparkles, until Sunday that is, and then the masses traipse in the dirt of the world and the place is a mess again. Week after week of this proves too much for the nun; she kills herself trying to do the impossible. And so the priest makes this comment:

The mistake she made wasn’t to fight dirt, sure enough, but to try and do away with it altogether. As if that were possible! A parish is bound to be dirty… Which all goes to prove that the Church needs a sound housewife – sound and sensible. My nun wasn’t a real housewife; a real housewife knows her home isn’t a shrine. Those are just poet’s dreams.

In contrast to the nun’s vision, the priest does not seek spotless perfection. He carries an utterly realistic view of the village in which he lives and serves. It is like every other parish, he thinks, filled with people of unbelief and trouble, a messy place of stark incompleteness and woeful Christian inadequacy. There are very few sterling examples of faith to be seen. But – and here’s the key – this unnamed priest embodies such a graceful and consistent presence that, despite his faltering steps and regular moments of self-doubt, he makes a profound difference for people. His understanding of life with God is caught up in the joy of knowing that there is a gracious reality larger than human weakness, more profound than human failure. He says it this way:

Why does our earliest childhood always seem so soft and full of light? A kid’s got plenty of troubles, like everybody else, and he’s really so very helpless, quite unarmed against pain and illness… But that very sense of powerlessness is the mainspring of the child’s joy. He just leaves it all to his mother, you see. Past, present, future – his whole life is caught up in one look, and that look is a smile.

This is the underlying and foundational truth of the novel. What the country priest provides for his flock is a face in tune with the words he is called to speak. The priest puts a human face on grace. In fact, its by gracious words in tune with a gracious face we become the representatives of God for each other.

Jacob and Esau were brothers who lived estranged from each other for many years. Finally, when the brothers were to meet at last, Jacob was fearful. What would he find in his brother Esau? He was, after all, greatly responsible for the rift between them. But when they finally came in sight of each other, it was Esau who ran to Jacob. He embraced him, and kissed him. The long estranged brothers wept together. And Jacob said, “to see your face is like seeing the face of God, now that you have received me favourably” (Gen. 33:10).

See you this Sunday.

Bob Osborne

Today I lend this space to Melody Armstrong, a member of our Westside community. This is her reflection.

It is a profound thing to be known. Deeply known. When Jeremiah was a young boy, God told him: “Before I shaped you in the womb, I knew all about you. Before you saw the light of day, I had holy plans for you: a prophet to the nations — that’s what I had in mind for you.” [Jeremiah 1:5, The Message Bible]

Many of us are very careful in what we disclose about ourselves. Sometimes it feels too risky to be truly known; we’re not sure we can trust.  When we let people in, we risk getting hurt. We risk them misunderstanding us.  We risk them not reciprocating.

The good news is that we are known to God.  He sees us, regards us, even treasures us. He knows our name — not just the name we answer to — but our truest identity. It is a wonderful gift to see ourselves through his gracious eyes, to realize the beauty of his design in us.

Yesterday was an unbelievable March day. A warm sun thawed the heavy snow that had only recently covered everything. I grabbed my camera and headed out for a walk.  I am usually inclined to look out at the vast beauty of the landscape, but on this day I trained my camera on the items I tend to miss, the things under my feet and along my path. I ended up spending a good deal of time on my knees, taking pictures of the intricate details that revealed themselves beneath my more intentional gaze.

Along the edge of a nearby river, a huge, old piece of gnarled wood lay half frozen under the ice.  With an eye out for “hidden beauty,” I decided to take a closer look. After laying in the snow and shooting images from every possible angle, my jeans were soaked and I was beaming. I had found beauty. I had found an original masterpiece.  The patterns and designs in that lone piece of wood were mesmerizing.  I whispered my “thank you,” overwhelmed by God’s lavish creativity, how he can afford to hide such beauty in places that most of us never see.

And then I thought about how he stops and notices me. And you. Almost certainly he sees intricate design. Almost certainly he notices unique beauty, even in those parts of me that at times feel like dead wood, without value, fallen, cast aside. I may feel stuck on the edge of things, half-buried – but he takes special notice.

I see that old piece of wood as a symbol of our life in Christ, but with an important distinction.  We are not dead, but alive, “abiding in the vine,” grafted into the main branch that is Christ, the life-giver. We are never just dead wood, cast aside.  Sure, there are places in all of our lives that seem pointless, purposeless, and even dead.  There are parts of us where beauty seems completely absent. God knows better. He looks at us differently. The maker of all things beautiful sees our truest selves, and through his creative artistry finds a way to make even the worn out, broken places of our lives beautiful once again.

Thank you for listening to my story.  Enjoy the photo.

Melody Armstrong

This past Sunday we rehearsed the fourth of John’s seven signs.  In the story of the multiplied bread in the wilderness (John 6), we are given a moment and a teaching which brings us to the heart of the mystery of Jesus.  It is here that Jesus refers to himself as the bread of life; it is here that Jesus scandalizes his audience by telling them he would give his body for the life of the world.  And it is here that many of his hearers turned away from him.  What he offered seemed too strange.  But Peter answered for everyone who would truly follow: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.” (John 6:68, TNIV)

In the communion meal, we rehearse the center of our faith, the mystery of Jesus’ self-offering on the cross. In the communion meal we are reminded of the strangeness of the Christian way, a strangeness that confronts our minds and emotions. This point is crucial (an interesting word, related to the word cross, signifying something important or essential; that which resolves a crisis; something decisive). In and through the cross of Jesus, through his self-offering for the world, our deepest and most important crisis is resolved. The miracle of the multiplied bread in the wilderness, and the teaching which followed, is an invitation to see and embrace this.

I have long been fascinated by the contrasting visions of the two great Russian novelists, Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky. For Tolstoy, Christianity was a vision of simple morality, what he imagined to be the noble values of the Russian peasantry. Tolstoy romanticized the faith into something we could call moral idealism. But there was no rest in it, no peace, no point of resolution. Ultimately, there was no power to succeed. One of his biographers, A.N. Wilson, speaking of Tolstoy’s troubled life, said that Tolstoy never recorded any spiritual encounter with Jesus, nor did he ever admit to praying to Jesus. He just arbitrarily decided to live a kind of hybridized sermon-on-the-mount ethic. It sounds good in a way, but the lessons of Tolstoy’s life show how disastrously disappointing the results could be. His conflicted soul, his failures and slip-ups, his legendary battles with his wife are truly something to behold. Wilson sums up Tolstoy’s brand of Christianity with this telling statement: “Tolstoy’s religion is ultimately the most searching criticism of Christianity which there is. He shows that it does not work.” (A.N. Wilson, Tolstoy: A Biography. p. 301). Wilson points out that Tolstoy’s brand of moral achievement, of proud and self-centered “do-good-ism”, is ultimately an impossible life to build.  And that is especially so without the life of Christ deeply held within us.

There is something deeper that we need. And this is where Tolstoy’s Russian compatriot and contemporary Fyodor Dostoevsky can help. He carried an entirely different view of Christian faith, perhaps because he came to Christian faith by an entirely different route. In 1849 Dostoevsky was arrested for his part in an anarchist group set on overthrowing the Czar. He was sentenced to death before a firing squad, except it proved to be a mock execution. The Czar intended to teach the young radicals a lesson. At the moment of the execution, just before the rifles were to be fired, the death sentences of the young radicals were commuted to four years of hard labor. It was then, in Siberian exile, that a woman handed Dostoevsky a New Testament. He began to read the Christian story through the eyes of someone who had felt the edge of death. He knew what it meant to truly be “born again”.

Dostoevsky did struggle in his life. In contrast to Tolstoy’s vision of ideal perfection, Dostoevsky seemed to be a long way off, more the prodigal than the older brother. But at the center of his life and writing was a vision of saving grace, a vision which started at the point of personal human brokenness. He spoke about the moment in the Siberian prison camp when his faith was realized in the eucharist:

“… we took communion. When the priest, wafer in hand, spoke the words, “Receive me Lord, even as a thief”, nearly everyone kneeled immediately and the chains clanked, for each man understood the words to be directed specifically at him.”  [cited in Geir Kjetsaa, Fyodor Dostoyevsky: A Writer’s Life. p. 106-7]

In the miracle of the multiplied bread, and in the teaching of Jesus which follows in John 6, we are brought into the heart of who Jesus is, the reason he came. The sign has to be carefully understood. He is not bread for our pre-conceived plans of human success, whatever that might entail. He is the Savior of the broken and repentant, those who know they need help of the deepest kind.

Be careful how you see the sign.

Bob Osborne

“Giving up” is the phase most often associated with Lent. During this season, participants commonly choose to give up something for the sake of learning a deeper life, a deeper wisdom. What is often given up is something tangible like chocolate or TV. But it can be anything really. One can give up on a destructive attitude or way of speech; one can choose to give up on a habit or dependency. Whatever the case, this practice of self-denial becomes a profound way in which to learn the truest life. Perhaps it sounds strange to us, but the practice of self-denial teaches us what it means to walk the way of love. Love is not selfish and so it cannot live by self-gratification; love is self-giving.

Merely giving something up is only part of the wisdom here. We should give up in order to give to. To give something up allows us to make room for the needs of others, whatever that might be. You might give up on an expenditure in order to share your resources with someone. Or, you might give up defending yourself in order to seek the defense of another. Your imagination can supply the possibilities, but for me, this is what participating in Lent means.

During the Lent season, as we walk out the days towards Easter, we come to realize that the story of Jesus is profoundly a story of self-denial and self-giving. Paul writes to the Ephesians: “Follow God’s example, therefore, as dearly loved children and walk in the way of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God” (Ephesians 5:1-2). The way of Jesus, the way of love, is found in the willingness to put the needs of another ahead of your own. The confusion about love in our times is found precisely in the idea that love is first of all self-gratification before self-giving. But love’s greatest joy, and greatest satisfaction, is the well-being and happiness of the beloved.

Love is the willingness to make sacrifices, big and small. And don’t neglect the small ways that love expresses itself: a kind word, a simple expression of thanks. So the lenten journey involves the small reminders and daily practices of giving up. By these small actions we teach ourselves what this way of love feels like, and what this way of self-denial is meant to produce. And don’t fool yourself — the practice makes a difference.

I invite you to consider the thought that you could give something up for the sake of love, for the sake of becoming more like Jesus. We give up in order to give. It was and is the way of Jesus.

Tonight we are taking time to mark the beginning of this season with an Ash Wednesday event at Westside King’s Church. Consider this your invitation to begin the 40 day journey to Easter, the 40 days that carry us forward to the most exuberant of hopes. Tonight, for 40 brief minutes from 7:10 to 7:50 pm, we take time for two thoughts, two prayers, two songs, and the marking of ashes. We have prepared a devotional resource which will be available, a way to live thoughtfully and prayerfully as you make your way towards Easter.

If you come to our event tonight, you will walk out tonight with a smudge on your forehead, a sort of strange cosmetic. While smudges are to be washed off, you may choose to wear it for the evening in a kind of thoughtful reverence. Cosmetics are made for the adorning of the face, to make someone their most beautiful best. But this kind of cosmetic is meant to remind us of the beautiful soul, the heart that embraces love and truth and goodness.

Bob Osborne

Its not an uncommon view of things. But its wrong. Its reductionism at its meaningless worst.

Contrary to Fuerbach, we are much more than our material existence. And while I could take some time to describe the more that I think we are, I almost don’t feel I need to. We somehow intuit this truth about ourselves. We feel it in our passions. Sex and money are but two of the more prominent ways we look to invest our material life with the more we are looking for. We might not always know it, but as we pursue these things we are hungering for a reconnection to God.

Sex and money are good gifts when rightly understood, and rightly ordered, but they are created goods, gifts of God. They are not ultimate things, and they do not carry the power to fully and finally satisfy our deepest human hunger. Perhaps sex and money feel like the closest things we have to transcendence, but they remain only pointers to the more we crave. If we were wise we would see this, and invite God into these two areas of our human experience.

Our problem is how we see things. And how we think about things. It seems to me that our fall is a fall from awareness that “in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). Our problem is that we think we can live independently of God.

I remember the moment when my venerable old professor James Houston suggested that we could do our thinking in the presence of God. For some reason, I had automatically assumed that my thinking was necessarily a lonely exercise, something I did in that walled-off place I called my mind. For me, to think about my life, the world, my place in it, and what I was looking for — even about sex and money — was something I had to do for myself. But what if, said Houston, we shifted our perspective; what if we chose to do our thinking in the presence of God? We could do that, he assured us.

So let me give you a way of thinking about the material world you live in.

What we see and touch and participate in is nothing less than a gift, a creation, a sharing of God with us. I don’t much like the word “nature”; I much prefer to call it what it is — creation, the gift of God to us his creatures. This is not just semantics; this is an important way to see things. The idea of “nature” says that things are of their own origin. By contrast, the idea of creation tells us that God makes and gives; God shares. All that God has made, and all the goods that he has created — including sex and money — are things to be shared as part of the world he has given us. They have their proper use and proper order (talk for another time), but they are only relative goods. Sex and money make lousy gods.

I would like to prepare you for communion which we will partake of this Sunday. The Lord’s Supper is our recognition that this world, the bread of the field and the fruit of the vine, is God’s gift of life to us, God’s very gift of himself to us, God’s communion with us. We need not be cut off from him, nor take his gifts without him. Instead, we can share his life. And the heart of this life is Jesus himself, the one who entered our embodied existence to bring us to God. As we eat and drink this Sunday we do it with him, of him.

Communion is nothing less than an exercise in re-imagining the world, and, re-integrating our experience of material and spiritual, of life and God, of hunger and the secret of life itself. As you partake of communion this Sunday, consider that the secret of this food is the person of Jesus himself. He is the only one who can truly satisfy your hunger for life.

We now begin our journey to Easter though our new series: Seven Signs. We invite you to read John’s gospel as we do so.

Bob Osborne

Robertson McQuilkin doesn’t fit the stereotype of what we imagine a famous lover might look like. He was a seminary president; a little dowdy perhaps, a bit nerdish, at least by Hollywood standards. He had climbed to the top of his career as an educator when his wife Muriel was diagnosed with Alzeimer’s. After a few difficult years of trying to manage both his work and the care of Muriel he decided he only had one choice.

So Robertson became a homemaker and a caregiver. When he accepted his new life, he thought of it as an end to his ministry. Instead, it was a beginning of sorts. Not only was he now caring full-time for Muriel, but he was discovering that such a choice was both unique and rare. In a culture like ours, a culture that prizes individual freedom and self-realization, Robertson McQuilkin became (unexpectedly) the model lover.

Let me cite a passage from A Promise Kept that seems to sum up Robertson’s story. This moment takes place when Muriel had already begun to decline in her mind, although still able to be quite mobile. Because of the Alzheimer’s, Muriel was often restless, and sometimes panicked. But Robertson was patient with her:

Once our flight was delayed in Atlanta and we had to wait a couple of hours. Now thats a challenge. Every few minutes, the same questions, the same answers about what we’re doing here, when are we going home? And every few minutes we’d take a fast-paced walk down the terminal in earnest search of — what? Muriel had always been a speed walker. I had to jog to keep up with her.

An attractive woman executive type sat across from us, working diligently on her computer. Once, when we returned from an excursion, she said something, without looking up from her papers. Since no one else was nearby I assumed she had spoken to me or at least mumbled in protest of our constant activity.

“Pardon?” I asked.

“Oh,” she said, “I was just asking myself, ‘Will I ever find a man to love me like that?’”

[Robertson McQuilkin. A Promise Kept. p.18-19]

Its a simple anecdote, to be sure, but the beauty and power of it is clear. And that is why I nominate this rather plain looking academic as one of the great lovers of our time.

In our current reductionism, where love is sex, and sex is mere physicality, we have lost the image of great love. It is therefore necessary for us to find stories like that of Robertson and Muriel McQuilkin, stories that anchor us in a deeper meaning and higher calling. Of course, there was a time when Robertson and Muriel were lovers in the usual way we think of that term. But their love for each other did not deplete in the passing of their youthful beauty and physical strength.

In Ephesians 5, Paul tells husbands to love their wives in the same way that Christ loved the church. If you need to see how such a calling actually works, get the book.

Bob Osborne

Marriage is our last, best chance to grow up.

This past Sunday we began our series Sex and Money. We began with a talk about the relational dynamics of marriage, the true center of sexual identity and expression. While our present era thinks about sex as mechanics and body parts, the Bible speaks of it as a powerful expression of sacred identity and faithful relationship. The Bible speaks of sex within the context of covenanted relationship. As Chris led us through a meditation on Proverbs 5 we saw how this is so.

The church has, at times, avoided talking about human sexuality as if it were not there, or as if it somehow did not connect with issues of faith. But our sexual identity is at the core of who we are, and who we are matters to God. And to top it all off, we have to say that God dreamt all this up; all one has to do is to read the Song of Songs to see how the erotic is sanctioned by God when it is pure and whole. So we want to be clear that sexuality is good and to be celebrated. The caveat, however, and perhaps the thing that is beginning to sound strange in our present culture, is that sexual expression is meant for marriage. Sexual expression is meant for the context of covenanted love. Only within that context can sexual expression grow and mature and become all that it is meant to be.

Let me recommend a beautiful love story which may help you see this: Madeleine L’Engle’s Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage (HarperCollins, 1988). L’Engle, a celebrated author, tells about her marriage to Hugh Franklin. They are two of a kind, lovers of words and poetry and theater. When they find each other, and begin to build a life together, they become lovers in the truest and fullest human sense of that term. And, of course, it all begins with such ecstasy, such passionate intensity. L’Engle recounts how Hugh proposed to her:

He picked up a book of poetry off the shelves and began leafing through it, and then he read me Conrad Aiken’s beautiful words:
Music I heard with you was more than music,
And bread I broke with you was more than bread.
And then he said, “Madeleine, will you marry me?” [p. 68]

You can hear the violins. The emotions and passions are real. But what L’Engle then does for us, and what many of our current stories fail to do, is to show us the whole picture of her love with Hugh, a love that grows and matures through the course of their entire lives. To borrow from the quote I began with, you see Madeleine and Hugh growing up. Their marriage is the place where their love matures. L’Engle says:

A love which depends solely on romance, on the combustion of two attracting chemistries, tends to fizzle out.  The famous lovers usually end up dead.  A long-term marriage has to move beyond chemistry to compatibility, to friendship, to companionship.  It is certainly not that passion disappears, but that it is conjoined with other ways of love. [p. 76]

What L’Engle is showing us is the essence – and may I say brilliance – of marriage as this commitment to covenantal living. Marriage is the place we learn what real love is, the love that begins in the white-hot heat of sexual attraction to be sure, but then commits to endurance, and protection of the beloved, growing into the love that can only be found in and through time. As the story draws to a conclusion, L’Engle describes her husband’s illness, his withering body. But that doesn’t stop their love.

I go to my lonely bed, thinking of Hugh alone in his hospital room, grateful for the nurses who are so good to him. During the night I reach out with my foot through force of habit to touch his sleeping body. And he is not there. Nevertheless, we have been making love during this time in a profound way. He is making love with me in the pressure of his fingers. I am making love when I do simple little bodily services for him. How many times has he taken care of me! And that is intercourse as much as the more usual ways of expressing our sexuality. [p. 184]

L’Engle’s reflections on her own marriage through its seasons and changes gives us a window into what it means to be loved and a lover.  I think these are the kind of stories we need.

See you this Sunday as we continue our series.

Bob Osborne