The Marriage Metaphor

Hello and welcome to Our Daily Bread. I'm Sheridan Voisey and I've titled today's reading The Marriage Metaphor. After 22 years together, I sometimes wonder how my marriage to Merrin works. I'm a writer. Merrin is a statistician. I work with words.

She works with numbers. I want beauty. She wants function.

We come from different worlds. Merrin arrives to appointments early. I'm occasionally late. I try new things on the menu. She orders the same.

After 20 minutes at an art gallery, I'm just getting started while Merrin is already in the cafe downstairs wondering how much longer I'll be. We give each other many opportunities to learn patience. We do have things in common. A shared sense of humour, a love of travel and a common faith that helps us pray through options and compromise as needed. With this shared base, our differences even work to our advantage.

Merrin has helped me learn to relax while I've helped her grow in discipline. Working with our differences has made us better people. Paul uses marriage as a metaphor for the church and with good reason. Like marriage, church brings very different people together requiring them to develop humility and patience and to bear with one another in love. And, as in marriage, a shared base of faith and mutual service helps a church become unified and mature. Differences in relationships can cause great frustration, in the church and in marriage.

But managed well, they can help us become more Christ-like. Today's scripture reading is from Ephesians chapter 4 verses 2 to 13. Be completely humble and gentle. Be patient, bearing with one another in love. Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you are called to one hope when you are called.

One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all who is over all and through all and in all. But to each one of us grace has been given as Christ apportioned it. This is why it says when he ascended on high he took many captives and gave gifts to his people. What does he ascended mean except that he also descended to the lower earthly regions?

He who descended is the very one who ascended higher than all the heavens in order to fill the whole universe. So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers to equip his people for works of service so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. Let's pray together. Father, whether it's in marriage or in our families, in friendships or indeed in our churches, we all know that that combination of similarities and differences is just what makes our relationships so rich and also at times so very difficult. Lord, would you use the differences between us and our brothers and sisters in Christ to help us grow in humility and patience today so that we become more and more like him? It's in Jesus' name we pray this. Amen. Thanks for listening today. I'm Sheridan Voisey and today's encouragement was provided by Our Daily Bread Ministries.