Upholding These Two Persons

At Saturday's wedding the reader recited the passage from Matthew 19:

And he answered and said, Have ye not read, that he who made them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife; and the two shall become one flesh? So that they are no more two, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.

The culture that took the above passage to heart has almost completely vanished. In half a century fundamental Christian beliefs--bolded above--about the nature of mankind and the nature of marriage are not widely accepted.

"Made them male and female" has given way to a multitude of genders, not only in the general population but sometimes in the same individual in the course of his/her life.

More fundamentally, human beings were not "made" by a sentient God but are the product of molecules banging together randomly over billions of year.

And while "two shall become one flesh" was never meant to be a physical truth, its spiritual and metaphorical meaning is now highly disputed. In the secular world marriage is not a mysterious fusion of two beings overseen by a Creator; it's a contractual arrangement between individuals that can be terminated like a business partnership.

One's bloodline can be ignored, but it can never be erased, according to the modern view. A man cannot change his race or genetics, so leaving one's mother and father does not occur permanently even through they may be dead. A man cleaving to his wife to form a new entity makes no scientific sense.

"Let not man put asunder" is hardly mentioned in the era of easy, no-fault divorce, which has been embraced by Christians, non-Christians, liberals and conservatives alike. The breakdown of the institution occurred decades before the debates about gay marriage began.

It's a wonder that my niece and her now-husband chose to have a "traditional" wedding, complete with Gospel readings.

The priest asked, "Will all of you witnessing these promises do all in your power to uphold these two persons in their marriage?"

We will.