The Meaning of Marriage Week 6 Embracing the Other

The following post is from a series of small group discussion guides I wrote for my local church to go along with the weekend messages. The message series, entitled "The Meaning of Marriage" heavily referenced the book of the same name by Timothy and Kathy Keller. The book can be found at your local bookstore, and original message series can be found at vineyardchristian.org

The Meaning of Marriage: For singles and marrieds (Week 6)

OPENING PRAYER: God, we thank you for making each of us different. We thank you for letting us have the freedom to find thousands of different ways of expressing ourselves, and most of all, we thank you for loving us all no matter what. Amen.

This week, we learned of the importance of “Embracing the Other,” that is, embracing the differences between us. The fact that men and women are different should come as no surprise, stand-up comics the world over make the differences between men and women a regular part of their routines, and you can’t go through the tv channel listing without finding a few dozen sit coms that center on this very point. Jokes are often made in scientific circles that men and women are “different species,” and gender differences are often a powerful undertone to many different political debates.

But with all of these differences, we’re expected to live with each other. In God’s plan for the universe, He has a special place for men and women to work in cooperation with each other, not in spite of our differences, but because of them

Icebreaker: Who is the oddly paired couple you’ve ever met? What made them work?

Previously, we looked at Genesis 2:18 “The Lord God said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.’” We discussed the Hebrew word that’s translated as “helper,” “Ezer” and looked at how it’s often used in the Bible to describe the relationship between God and human beings. It’s also interesting though that where the NIV says “suitable” is the word כְּנֶגְדּֽוֹ or “neged”(pronounced neh’-ghed). This word carries a complex meaning. In the book “Meaning of Marriage,” Kathy Keller describes the word has having the meaning “like opposite.” In many translations, the word is translated as “corresponding to,” picturing two puzzle pieces that fit together just so. When God created Eve, He was looking for a partner for Adam that wouldn’t just be different from Adam, but would be a kind of different that would be a completion of him. Complimenting him and matching him in a unique way that nothing else in creation would match.(God took all the animals before Adam beforehand to demonstrate this fact) As we’ve already seen when we looked at “ezer” this is by no means a “lesser” role, but very much an equal partner.

Discussion: Do you think it’s important to recognize the differences between couples? Do all couples recognize their differences right away, or do these differences become more obvious as they grow together? Is it hard to see how these differences can be completing each other?

Differences work out together. There is an entire trope in TV shows and movies about the awkward pairing of partners (usually cops in one form or another). Probably the first American film of the genre was “In the Heat of the Night” (Wikipedia shows that the Akira Kurosawa film “Stray Dog” predates it by 18 years), other well-known films of the genre include the timeless classic “Lethal Weapon” with Danny Glover and Mel Gibson. Wikipedia also includes a helpful list of other movies of the type, including films starring veteran cops teamed with criminals, cops teamed with dogs, and even one movie where Whoopie Goldberg gets teamed with a dinosaur.(“Theodore Rex” and apparently the winner of several “terrible movie” awards)

Discussion: Why do awkward pairings like this fascinate us so much? Why do we find it so entertaining to watch these apparently vastly different individuals be forced to work together?

The interesting thing about these films is that, inevitably, the awkward partners will find a way to work out in the end, usually better than they ever would have by themselves, and heartwarming, Hollywood induced lessons are learned in the space of not much more than an hour and a half. In fact, in many cases, these movies have sequels, which go on to start to struggle with having the same conflict, because we’ve seen the characters working together so well in the past.

In the same way, when we see men and women being drawn together in marriage, or even different people being drawn together in friendship, it’s often very hard at the outset to see how they’ll work together at all. So many times, though, we end up seeing that such pairings can work incredibly well! The Bible has many examples of this.

Discussion: Who is one friend you have that you would think of as being the most different from you? How do those differences help you enjoy each others company?

In first Samuel, we’re told the story of David and Jonathan, a pairing of friends who could not be more different. It practically reads like the description of a buddy copy movie. David is a country living shepherd boy, while Jonathon is the prince of the land, and the apparent heir to the entire kingdom. They meet after David slays Goliath and become fast friends for many years. When Jonathon sees that David is being prepared by God to become king in his place, Jonathon still embraces David as his friend, and recognizes that David is the one God intends to rule. Years later, when Jonathon is killed along with his brothers and his father, David mourns him as a lost brother, and seeks out Jonathon’s son, Mephibosheth, to live with him in the palace.

When Jesus was forming His ministry on earth, He had with Him many disciples who could not be more different from each other. Several were fisherman, a working class job which generally carried no education, one was a tax collector, a job which at the time was inherently dishonest and despised by the people. There was a revolutionary, a religious teacher, a prostitute, and any number of other disparate examples seen in the Gospels. By having such a following, Jesus was showing us a picture of the Kingdom He was forming. In one of His sermons, he says “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.” (Matthew 5:9) In the world Jesus was building, we would not fight over our differences, nor would we ignore them. We can celebrate the things that make us different, and draw success from the strengths it gives us.

Discussion: What does it mean to you that Jesus had such a wide variety of people following Him? What do you think it means to be a “peacemaker” when living in a world of these differences?

In a verse brought up on the weekend, Paul says to the Galatians, “So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:26-28) In this, we’re seeing Paul call out what was at the time, some of the biggest differences between those in the Church, Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female, but then highlighting that we are brought together in Jesus. So is Paul saying these differences don’t exist anymore? Of course not! You didn’t stop being a man or a woman when you were baptized, and no one loses their ethnic or racial identities just because they become a Christian. What Paul is saying here is that the dividing wall has been torn down. In the time these verses were written, all of the groups mentioned here are groups that would not have been allowed to worship together. In the Jerusalem Temple, there was a literal wall that separated areas that the Jews could enter, but the Gentiles could not.  (interestingly enough, when Jesus smashed the tables of the money collectors, it was likely one of the areas that the Gentiles were allowed to be, commentators think that part of why Jesus was so angry was because it was one of these open areas of the Temple, where anyone in the world could come to worship God, was being set aside instead for financial thievery.) It was also common in synagogues of the time for men and women to be separated in worship, the same in pagan temples. Even today, in some very traditional religious groups(even Christian ones) it is not unusual to see men and women required to sit separate from one another, sometimes even with a wall between them. Same goes for slaves and freed people of the time. In these verses, Paul is highlighting that we are brought together to worship God, even though the rest of the world says we should be kept separated. It’s interesting to look at recent history and see the role that the Church played in the Civil Rights movement in the United States. The people of God will always recognize that it’s His will to bring people together, not keep them apart.

Take a moment and pray with each other individually or as a group. 

Closing Prayer: “Father, we thank you for the differences in our lives, and for the chance to learn more about you as we grow with others who are separate from ourselves. We pray that you bless us with your site for those around us as we go through the week, and look for the signs of You in them. In your name we pray, Amen.