It ends with love

Saint Paul, second only to Jesus himself, is without doubt the person who most moulded and shaped the Christian faith to be what it is today. Paul’s are the earliest of the writings we have in our New Testament and his letters will almost certainly have been read by many, perhaps all, the other writers of the Christian scriptures. And yet, you will search long and hard and fruitlessly to find any mention of  what we might call ‘family values’ anywhere in his epistles. One of the most surprising things about St Paul’s writings, at least when you consider what is now orthodox church dogma, is his teaching on marriage. Paul: the Apostle to the Gentiles, the fearsome Father of the Faith, the saint, always painted with a penetrating frown and forever holding the sword that was the only way his enemies could finally get him to stop talking about Jesus. Paul, the pillar of the faith; inspiration of the heaviest-weight theological thinkers- St Augustine, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Karl Barth. You’d have thought his teaching on marriage would be as close to  no difference to what we widely recognise as Christian orthodoxy: one man one woman for life anything else is living in sin; being hitched is the best thing since sliced bread and the holiest thing since individual communion hosts. 

That sounds like the sort of thing Paul would have said when he wasn’t telling women in church to shut up and cover their heads.

Except.

Paul’s attitude to marriage was this: ‘don’t do it’. 

Peter as we know was hitched: he had a mother in law for Jesus to heal of the fever, but Paul had confirmed himself in the single life. From choice, hardly surprising given his lifestyle. Here’s how he describes it in two Corinthians:

Five times I have received… the forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I received a stoning. Three times I was shipwrecked; for a night and a day I was adrift at sea;  on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from bandits, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers and sisters;  in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, hungry and thirsty, often without food, cold and naked.  

Given all that it’s unlikely there’s have been a queue forming even if he had posted his profile on Tinder, but who knows, there’s nowt so queer as folk- not St Paul obviously- but there are people with strange tastes out there that might have wanted to share Paul’s life.

But Paul was not having it. Here’s what he said:

To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is well for them to remain unmarried as I am. But if they are not practising self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement of the joys of conjugal bliss, more a case of, if you really can’t control yourself, at least make it legitimate. But it’s best to be a bachelor, superior to be a spinster. As an endorsement of family values it’s decidedly lukewarm, indeed, damning with faint praise.  That’s quite some distance between church teaching and Paul’s.

Despite the use his writings have been put to Paul wasn’t anti-sex per se. Rather he thought it was a distraction, an irrelevance, it just wasn’t that important; in the greater scheme of things it really didn’t matter enough to merit all the attention we tend to give to it. There were far more important things to get hot and bothered about.

Because. 

Time is short. There is not time to settle down or start a family; not time to be worrying about whether your relationship is healthy; no time to waste on even the nippiest of speed dating.

Our planet orbits the sun, a complete journey once every 365 and a quarter-ish days. What goes around quite literally comes around. So it’s only natural we think that time- which we measure in turns of the earth or trips round the sun- we think that time is a circle. Here is another year ready to start again, here is another turn of the cosmic merry-go-round, da capo after da capo never reaching the fine.

Paul knew differently. He knew that just years before- God called time on the world: 2000 years ago to us but to him no time at all. God had called time on the world, the world where they marry and are given in marriage, the world whose wealth rested on the institution of slavery, the world of empire, the world of crucifixion. That world was still there. 

But not for much longer.

The end times. That’s when Paul was living. 

And that’s when we’re living. The end times.

God is still calling time on this world.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to go out after this service and strap on my sandwich board declaring ‘the end is nigh’. I’m not talking swivel eyed millenarianism here, apocalypse now, or at best, tomorrow or perhaps the 27th November 2026 if my calculations are correct. 

When it all ends, nobody knows, not Paul, not me. But we know that God has acted decisively in the world; God has acted decisively in time, acted decisively by sending his Son to live among us, to die and to rise again. 

Time is still running out. There is less time left now than when Paul wrote his feverish words to the churches of Asia and the Mediterranean. We are closer to the end. We know this not just because the wheels have turned so many more times since then, but because we can see that so much of Paul’s world has now disappeared and what has come afterwards is a world much closer to God than it was before.

Ok, no sandwich board but still you might think I’ve taken leave of my senses here. 

But.

We do not live in uniquely evil times. All generations think their time is the worst. 

Much has changed.

And what has changed most of all, is that we live in a world utterly shaped by the faith of St Paul, we live in a Christian world.

Not a church-going world moresthepity. Not a bible carrying world.

But a world where the strong do not always dominate the weak. A world where more than ever each human life, is valued, cherished, loved. A world where the concept of human rights is, if not universally accepted largely taken for read. A world where most of us most of the time agree that we can’t let the weak go to the wall, that we should try to catch those who fall, that we are in some ways siblings with responsibilities to each other. A world where slavery is recognised as evil, where children are treasured, where women are not always the property of their husbands or fathers, where the sick are cared for, where most infants in many countries lived to become adults, where million of lives have been extended and improved by medical knowledge. 

That’s our world, not the world St Paul knew. 

St Paul’s world ran on slavery. A slave had no rights, over their own body, over their life. Unwanted children were exposed or sold and no child had rights. Women belonged to their nearest male relative or their husband, could not own property, were not educated, could be divorced at will. The sick were by and large left to die and most children born died in infancy and even had they lived would never have gone to school. An old person was a rarity. And people gathered to watch other people killed in an arena- by gladiators, by wild animals, by all manner of inventive and gruesome ways- for entertainment.

This was world St Paul knew. Whatever the fantasies of Christian fundamentalists, you do not want to go back to the times of the early church.

Yes, there are bumps along the road.

Yes, there are patches of darkness where the light has yet to reach, some where it has been extinguished.

Yes, there is no hiding that in some ways the world is a significantly darker place today than it was a year ago. Satan is emboldened. In West and East he walks boldly rather than slinks in the shadows. Sometimes as St Paul wrote 2000 years ago he ‘disguises himself as an angel of light’,

But.

God has called time on the world St Paul knew.  And the signs are unmistakable that we are nearer now to the end than we were then, signs not of the passing of time, or of  destruction or tribulation; rather signs of the coming of God’s kingdom, signs of God’s will being done, signs of his  purpose working itself out. Creation groans in the labour pains of a new world.

The world doesn’t end with a cataclysm. It ends with God. It ends with love.