Sermon for the Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany, January 29, 2012
Solemn Evensong
By the Reverend Stephen Gerth
Year 2: Isaiah 51:9-16, Galatians 5:13-25, Micah 6:6-8


I’m going to talk tonight about fornication. I’m not going to talk about all of the issues which the subject raises. I’m not an moral theologian; I speak as a pastor and priest. I want to say something about fornication as it leads Saint Paul’s list, which we heard in tonight’s second lesson, of the works of the flesh that will prevent us from inheriting the kingdom of God.[1] And I’m going to begin with the American Prayer Book. 

In 1789, the editors of the first American Prayer Book shortened the opening paragraphs of the service of Holy Matrimony which had been in use by them before the revolution. In the new American book, by comparison with the English book, the minister began very simply. Holy matrimony is “commended of Saint Paul to be honourable among all men.”[2] 

We Americans chose to leave out, among other things, the English book’s enumerations of the purposes of Holy Matrimony that were essentially unchanged from the first Prayer Book of Edward VI of 1549 and are still part of the standard book of the Church of England. 

The first reason for marriage was for procreation of children. The third reason was for “the mutual society, help, and comfort” given one another.[3] 

Number two, I suspect, is the reason all three purposes may have been omitted. This is that sentence in full: 

Secondly, It was ordained for a remedy against sin, and to avoid fornication; that such persons as have not the gift of continency might marry, and keep themselves undefiled members of Christ’s body.[4] 

For the record, all of the new rites of the Church of England reference physical, sexual union without using the word ‘fornication.’ But the meaning is very plain. 

It’s always been hard to obtain the truth about the private lives of people. That said, I have the impression that before the Victorian heyday of the English-speaking peoples and its Anglican churches, many marriages were celebrated when a child was on the way. I have a memory of reading someplace that marriages often didn’t happen before the modern era, except among the richest people, unless there were a child on the way—but on a Sunday afternoon of writing a sermon at home, I simply don’t have the books at my disposal to be sure. 

Sometime in the years 1983 to 1985, the rector of the parish I served in Dallas called me and the other three assistant priests into the hallway where the clergy offices were. He was dumbfounded that the second couple in a week had been in his office for pre-marital counseling and they were already living together. He said something to us like, “Gentlemen, we aren’t going to marry people any more who are already living together.” He was the father of two daughters at the time, one in high school, one in college. 

I didn’t do many weddings as the new and youngest priest on a staff of five. I confess I think I told a bride or two to use her parents’ address on the parish papers. My own sense is that in the twenty-eight years I have been ordained, I have presided at the weddings of very few people who do not know each other physically before marriage. 

Saint Paul writes to the Galatians in the second lesson tonight, “Now the works of the flesh are plain: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissension, party spirit, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and the like.”[5] 

Nothing is more joyful than the mystery of biology that brings human beings into the most intimate physical contact. And nothing has caused us humans more grief. 

I mentioned in a newsletter this summer an article by a priest in the Church of Wales about the very complex history of the marriage vow in the Anglican tradition because of a linguistic shift which the Church managed to ignore. You and I hear the verb “will” as a future tense; middle and early modern English knew it as a present tense.[6] 

It seems we have ended up with a kind of textual confusion about marriage that is something like the kind of mess we have had with the theology of the Eucharist since the chalice was taken from the laity. Young, baptized children were excommunicated at that point—no chalice, no wine, no communion for an infant. The first holy communion and the confirmation before communion enterprises were born of this. I suspect that straightening out our marriage rites will be no easier for the wider church. 

Dennis Nineham in his classic 1963 commentary on Mark wrote: 

St Paul…very seldom refers to Christ’s earthly teaching, even when discussing questions of practical conduct; he tends rather to seek the ‘mind of Christ’ through meditation on the Old Testament and direct communion with Christ in the spirit.[7] 

We just can’t know about Paul and the challenges of his community. But we do know something of the history of fundamental human questions. We know our own experiences of living, in addition to the gifts of Scripture, reason and tradition. 

When the question has arisen in my ministry and in my own life about how we humans live with one another, how we touch the person we love, I try to say nothing more than that I am on the side of love. I encourage people to take responsibility for themselves. I believe people should be truthful with each other, especially the person they love. I have faith and hope that Jesus would does not disagree. 

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
 

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