Ownership (Newsletter Article)

The day before I married Jennifer, I facilitated Youth Sunday School. Since I have spent the last semester trying to broaden my relationships with the rest of the congregation through visiting and teaching Adult Sunday School classes, most of my teaching with the youth this fall has been filling in for other teachers. Since I needed a stand alone lesson (I prefer to teach in teaching units), I decided to teach a little bit on what the Bible says about marriage.

We looked at several Bible passages, one of which was I Corinthians 7. As I asked the students what the passage was about, several shared very accurate answers. One student shared something especially observant. David Orr shared, “Really, in a lot of ways, this passage is a lot about ownership.”

Some students scolded David a little bit, I think because a few of the girls thought he was being chauvinistic. David was correct though, there is a sense of ownership in the biblical theology of marriage. Although, in a radical thought for 2,000 years ago, the ownership was mutual. The passage said this:

The wife does not have authority over her own body but yields it to her husband. In the same way the husband does not have authority over his own body but yields it to his wife (I Corinthians 7:4-5).

There is an obvious sense of ownership in marriage. That is one reason why we wear wedding rings. We want show that we are taken by someone else and belong to another, and we want others to know that our beloved is not available for them. This ownership, when abused or misunderstood, can be unhealthy. A sense of being “owned” by our spouse in a loving, compassionate, affirming marriage can be affirming and a true blessing.

Strangely, as I have thought about this, there is a sense of ownership in almost any relationship. We call children we parent “my children”, and we claim our close friends as “my best friend”. As a pastor who works with youth, there are times when our teens and young adults claim me with an honoring sense of ownership. Having a stake and a sense of ownership in one another’s lives is a part of loving one another enough to be “invested”.

When I was younger, my mother’s boyfriend lived with off and on a little over 10 years. He was actually involved with my mother for longer than my father was, who my mother was married to. When Sylvan, my mother’s boyfriend, died during my junior year of high school, they were still unmarried. I felt like I had lost a second father, but my grief was complicated by the sense that I had no “ownership” of him. I couldn’t call him my stepfather, even though he had that role in many ways. One of my most important relationships in my life I had no stake in, and that person had no official ownership of any relationship with me.

God’s word call us to the same kind of ownership and investment in his church. Romans 12:5 says “so in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others”. That is part of the reason we encourage a commitment of membership to the local church as well as a believer’s baptism. Church is about more than activities. It is about investing enough in one another, and caring about that we have a stake in one another’s lives. Enough so, that even though we are not related by blood or marriage, we can honestly call one another brothers and sisters in Christ.