An idiosyncratic reading from 1 Corinthians 7, beginning with verse 29: “The apocalypse gathers, like an impending storm. Let us lean into it, let even those who have spouses be as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no possessions, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the property and propriety by which this world manages itself are passing away.” The Word of the Lord.

The wielders of Western cultural might long ago enshrined marriage high among its most esteemed estates. Even now, in neighborhoods where both church and marriage have long declined, self-identified Christians—“church-going” or not—still tend to understand human relations “maritally.”

What I would like to suggest today, if you will forgive my impudence, is that we children of the church need not be distressed by this decline, nor need we struggle to reinvigorate either an ecclesiastical or a marital valuation, not if the gospel has indeed seized us, not if the good news is that no one and nothing has to survive. What I would like to suggest today is that we are well past time to reimagine how we who gather as church are together to live and die.

Centuries ago, marriage was named by theologians as one of the church’s seven sacraments. We are, I think, inclined to believe that to be a sacrament is to be high on the scale of goods. What I would like to suggest today is that we’d do well to think otherwise.

The English word “sacrament” and its Latin equivalent are an attempt to translate the Greek word “musterion.” “Musterion” signifies something very close to what we mean by the English word “mystery.” The church is the church—the church has said—only as it gathers to enter into a mystery. And the way it enters into that mystery—it has said—is by liturgies of the sacraments, by patterns of work, the work of the people who heed the gospel.

And what is that mystery into which the gathering church enters?

It is the mystery, the Apostle Paul says, that God hid from the foundations of the world . . . until Jesus walked the dusty roads of Galilee and was hanged outside the Holy City of Jerusalem. This mystery is very particularly what is displayed on that bloody cross, a body, its protective boundaries torn away, right out in public, for all to see. It is the mystery that is no respecter of property and propriety. Indeed, it is the mystery that undoes property and propriety. And it is the mystery that turns to those with neither property nor propriety, those whom a proprietary world casts aside. It is the mystery that comes alongside of . . . moves in with, dwells as one of . . . the humiliated, the poor—and in so doing performs the invitation: “My body opens to you, come into me all you who labor and are heavy-laden, come into me you whom the world would abandon to live and die alone, for in me you will never live or die alone.” Indeed, this humiliated body of this humiliated Jesus is on Easter Sunday saturated by the glory of God, and thus disclosed as the site where God embraces the forsaken peasant Jesus and . . . with him all the forsaken gathered in his hospitable body.

So, what does this have to do with marriage, with this marriage today? Simply this: Jesus is the mystery of God. That is, Jesus—crucified/resurrected, humiliated/glorified, abased/exalted—Jesus . . . is the one sacrament in which all that we might call “the sacraments” are to be performed. Indeed, there is no church, no gathering of those who have been seized by the  gospel that is not the work of entering into this body which—by means of the flaying whips and spikes and spears of Rome—opens invitingly to us. The church is the journey of those who prayerfully work knowing in their bones that there is no strength for the journey other than the strength that is pleased to dwell in the broken body and shed blood of Jesus. It is the way of the cross, the gospel says, that is the way of life. Entry into this body is entry into the glory, the holiness, the salvation, of God.

Is then marriage “a sacrament”? Yes. Yes, it is. But it is a sacrament only insofar as it, too, travels into and with the body of Jesus that walked the dusty roads of Galilee and was hanged outside the Holy City of Jerusalem. That is, it is a sacrament only insofar as it, too, will not keep itself untouched by the bio-medical waste . . . discarded . . . by the for-profit health care . . . property management schemes . . . of this present evil age.

And so, far from elevating marriage, imagining it as a sacrament . . . humbles it to the lowly estate into which Jesus plummets and which he never—not even in resurrection—shakes off. Saying marriage is a sacrament is saying, “Whatever this world calls ‘marriage,’ we enter it only and always on the way to the God who will not be found elsewhere than where God is found in Christ, that is, among those nobody with status would be tempted to call ‘the beloved.’”

One of the most confusing things about marriage is that time and time again, one finds that it is to one’s spouse that the call of God leads. Indeed, to find your neighbor takes no special visual acuity, but only a nearsighted, perhaps legally blind, glimpse, through a fog, of the one asleep on the other side of the bed. It is confusing to realize that the love of your life, the one you love with all your heart, the object of your passion and desire . . . that this one is also to be loved as the gospel calls us to love strangers. But it is so. We are in particular to love that one, right there, that spouse, one who perhaps will not give in to time-honored marital categories. That is not to say that there is some abstract principle that demands that we love our family members first and only then love strangers. The love that moves in, with, and under marriage in the concrete has no use for abstract principles. That we are to love “the beloved” as we are to love a stranger is simply to say that when we love the one God loves, we love the one we see—perhaps see over and over and over again, sometimes in the heat of passionate lovemaking, sometimes in the coldness of the morning after the shouts of a prolonged angry and bitter late-night confrontation. Marriage is a sacrament, but it is a very ordinary one, as ordinary as mourning, as ordinary as rejoicing, as ordinary as buying, as ordinary as any of the other ways we deal with the world. By that, I do not want to demean marriage and certainly not this marriage, a marriage, if anything, I celebrate with too much pulsating joy. I mean rather to say that marriage—and this marriage in particular—is exalted in this world, as was the humiliated body of Jesus, into whom God breathed the Holy Spirit on Easter Sunday.

As we eat and drink the broken body and shed blood of Jesus in this sacramental moment, let us remember that even now the apocalypse gathers like an impending storm, let us who have or will soon have spouses, who mourn or rejoice or buy or otherwise deal with the world—let us resolve to do so as if we did not. For the property and propriety by which this world manages itself are passing away.