Marrying the builder!

Epiphany 2: 14.01.07 – Isaiah 62.1-5; 1Corinthians 12.1-11; John 2.1-11: 9.30 at St. Mary’s: Revd. Dr. Alan Winton
 

I’ve just spent an enjoyable few evenings in the last fortnight meeting with groups of couples who are planning to get married this year in the churches of our team, and another one is planned shortly. We gather them together so that we can explain the process of organising a wedding in the church just on a few occasions to large groups, rather than on thirty separate occasions to the individual couples. And of course this year we had the added bonus of doing it in very congenial surroundings for which we were very grateful.

One of the details we have to obtain from the couples for the wedding register is their occupations, and that can lead to interesting discussions. Sometimes the jobs people do are at opposite ends of the spectrum, and sometimes a couple both share the same career, and the story is often that they met at work, and it was there that romance first blossomed. However I’m not sure I’ve ever come across the scenario that is described in the book of the prophet Isaiah, which sent a shiver down my spine given the work that’s been going on this past year on New Church House. Isaiah writes: “As a young man marries a young woman, so shall your builder marry you”!

This is truly a bizarre and troubling image. Personally, and call me old-fashioned if you like, but I rather prefer the image of the young man marrying the young woman in that equation. No offence intended, but I can’t imagine builders were any better looking in post-exilic Israel than they are today. Good looks are not the first quality you look for in a builder - unless you’re wanting a cute male model to masquerade as a builder to advertise Levis - and the idea of your builder marrying you is enough to induce a cold sweat. But of course builders, just like anyone else, do have a right to get married, so perhaps the image is not as outrageous as it first sounds; it just seems a bit strange in the Bible.

Well, of course, in this verse the builder in question is a reference to God himself. In fact, the Hebrew term used in this text can mean builder or restorer. The metaphor here does make sense if you think about the context in which the prophecy originated. It comes from the time when Jerusalem was being rebuilt, houses were going up and the city walls and Temple were in the process of reconstruction. The prophet was attributing the return of the people and the restoration of their homes to the work of God – he was the one rebuilding their lives.

But if the context offers some explanation of this verse, we’re still left with the question ‘why did God the builder want to marry the people?’  Throughout the Old Testament there are several occasions on which God is seen as the husband to Israel the bride. We need to apply a bit of historical imagination to understand this rather unusual metaphor.

Of course we live in a society today that has undergone huge social change, not least in the role and situation of women. Today many women choose to have a career over marriage and a family. Young women in this country no longer need to feel that the only way to a secure future is to find a husband to provide for them, because they can do that themselves; and they are also now freed from the inevitability of having children, which has become a matter of choice. Women can quite legitimately and effectively live independent lives and many choose to do so. But in previous generations and even more so, in ancient societies like that of Israel in the time of Isaiah, such a choice was almost never available. Marriage was pretty much the sole route to security and a future, and the unmarried woman was generally in a very precarious and in many ways hopeless situation.

Isaiah picks up these ideas and applies them to the situation of God’s people. Earlier in the passage he has used the words ‘forsaken’ and ‘desolate’ to describe their situation, which is precarious indeed, for they are like the woman who remains unmarried: they seem to have been a people without hope, for whom everything has gone wrong, and for whom the future looked bleak. But the promise of God is that they shall no longer be seen in that way for they have a new name ‘My delight is in her’ – they are, in effect, God’s betrothed. He will not leave them abandoned, defenceless and hopeless, but the one who is helping them rebuild their homes, will also love them and care for them – hence the unusual verse, “so shall your builder marry you”.

It is a metaphor not unlike another favourite biblical image, that of the adopted child. St. Paul often uses the idea of God’s people as adopted children. The thought is that once we were alone, left to fend for ourselves, without security and without much hope for the future, but God loved us and reached out to us, making us his own by adoption, bringing us under the shadow of his protection and care, giving us a future.

Both the marriage of the desolate woman and the adoption of the orphan child are powerful images of hope in human situations where there was little expectation for the future. They are images of redemption, of God’s desire to seek us out and help us in situations when we cannot see our way to a better, hopeful future. They are very real and very graphic images of the way that God will not abandon us, but instead will seek us out and when other human supporters are lacking, he will be the one to offer us hope. Now this sermon could go on to develop that theme of hope in a variety of ways, but today I want, as it were, to stay with the particular imagery.

I find this a particularly fascinating and intriguing aspect of the Bible’s teaching. On the one hand, Christians are known as those who support and promote what are often called family values. In church we have a high view of marriage, of the value that the security of a loving home provides for children, of the family as a key building block of society. And yet the Bible is full of stories of what you might call dis-functional families, and much of the theological imagery that biblical writers draw on involves relationships and family ties going wrong. And that is to say nothing of the sometimes shocking comments that appear on the lips of Jesus on the subject of family relationships.

Now this is difficult territory, and perhaps explains why, with a few notable exceptions, many Christian leaders are not quick to stand up and trumpet views about traditional family values as certain sections of the media would like them to. Part of the reason is that those who minister in the church know and care about far too many people for whom that would be simply to rub salt into an open wound. People whose pain is very real, who don’t need to hear again about the high standard which for a whole range of reasons they haven’t been able to live up to, or the high expectations society has of neat relationships into which some people just don’t see themselves fitting. Those who minister in the church will probably know many people who have already discovered or really need to discover the God who delights in redeeming what appears lost, who delights in bringing hope and new life into situations that many would think were beyond repair, who accepts us even when we don’t quite fit the norm.

Our attempts at being good children to our parents, at being honest and loving and faithful in our relationships, at being patient and wise parents to our children, will often fail to reach the highest standards, but it is such human frailty that the Bible takes and uses to illustrate the redeeming love of God, to whom no situation is ever closed and finished, to whom no situation is beyond hope. And if the Bible illustrates hope with such images, then we can be sure that in our attempts at forging good and loving relationships, however much we may fail to meet society’s norm, there will always be hope that out of our frailties and under the eye of a loving God new possibilities may always arise.

As Christians we do have high standards and society will have its expectations, but we also need to have a keen sense of how easy it is for human beings to fail to live up to them, and above all else we need to have a keen sense of the nature of the God whom we worship, whose first action is not to condemn us in our failings but to redeem us from our troubles.

We who seek to live our lives in faithfulness to God need also to be slow to judge and condemn, and quick to see how we can have a part in bringing hope and a future to those who have been hurt and scarred and left desolate by the failure of relationships, or because they live lives that just don’t fit the norm.

“As the young man marries a young woman, so shall your builder, your restorer marry you”.

However much we may struggle in our relationships, God will not abandon us, he will not give up on us, he loves us and with him and among his people there will always be hope. Amen.