Singleness

When I was in elementary school, my dad gave me his old set of Peanuts comic books, and instantly I was obsessed with the world of Charlie Brown, Linus, Schroder, Lucy, and of course Snoopy. One of the most iconic frames in the Peanuts comics is the one of Charlie brown in his baseball gear and goofy hat, standing in the rain, but the rain cloud is only over his head. The image sticks with us because it is a perfect visual representation of Charlie Brown’s worldview. Everyone else is living their lives in the sun, but his own existence is cloudy, wet, and miserable.

When I was in elementary school, my dad gave me his old set of Peanuts comic books, and instantly I was obsessed with the world of Charlie Brown, Linus, Schroder, Lucy, and of course Snoopy. One of the most iconic frames in the Peanuts comics is the one of Charlie brown in his baseball gear and goofy hat, standing in the rain, but the rain cloud is only over his head. The image sticks with us because it is a perfect visual representation of Charlie Brown’s worldview. Everyone else is living their lives in the sun, but his own existence is cloudy, wet, and miserable.

For many, that’s a perfect visual representation of their views on living as a single Christian. Those who have paired up and joined in marriage live their lives out in the sun, while those who remain single and unmarried live in the perpetual shadow of their own personal rain cloud. This is why we must talk about singleness. Even if you’re not single and haven’t been single for years, chances are high that you know people who are: people who haven’t married, people who’ve lost their spouse, people who have divorced. If you’re a parent, this is and will be your children’s world.

Now, it is true that in the last several decades, the public perception of remaining unmarried has changed significantly. Fewer people are getting married, and those that are, are waiting much longer. One survey published in 2017 suggests that more than half the population believes that marriage is not an important criterion for becoming an adult. The single lifestyle is becoming more and more normal.

And yet, in the Christian church, we see a very different picture. I remember in college hearing from some of my female friends about going to college simply to get one’s MRS degree. Recently I heard a story about a church hosting a fellowship event for “pairs and spares.” There is this undercurrent of pressure in many Christian circles to find a spouse, and to fail in that pursuit is to fail as a human being. There is a pressure to find a mate, get married, and have children because that is what normal, healthy, Christian men and women do, and, perhaps more importantly, that is what God wants and expects of his followers. To be a fully developed human being, and to be a mature Christian, one must be married or at the very least on the road to marriage.

Surprisingly, this pressure to marry is similar to what the Pharisees of Jesus’ day believed. The Pharisees were a group of devout Jewish religious leaders who sought to apply Jewish law to every facet of life, and they believed that an unmarried man was not a proper man, or a fully realized man. Now this wasn’t a unique perspective in the ancient world, as even in Roman culture to have no family or children was to be without honor, for your legacy and lasting significance rested on your ability to have an heir. So to live as a single adult during Jesus’ time was considered to be deficient.

[Maybe something about how we often adopt this line of thinking about singleness?]

Now, in , Jesus is speaking to a group of Pharisees who are trying to trap him in their question on divorce. There’s an internal debate going on in the Pharisee camp about the appropriate reasons for a man to divorce his wife, and they try to get Jesus to wade in. As he’s prone to do, Jesus points to a righteousness that is higher than the Jewish law, and provides a position on divorce that is even stricter than the conservative view of his time. His disciples hear this exchange and they say, in verse 10,

“If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry.”

Hearing and perhaps beginning to understand the implications of Jesus’ position on divorce, the disciples ironically quip that it be best not to marry at all; to which Jesus replies in verse 11,

“Not everyone can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given.”

When we read Jesus’ response through the lens of our presumption that marriage is part and parcel of the Christian life, we’d say that Jesus is saying, “you’re right to be uneasy, for it is very difficult to accept this teaching on divorce and the importance of the marital bond.” But the “saying” that Jesus is referring to is not his teaching on divorce but it is actually what the disciples just said, that it is better not to marry! Jesus blows the doors off the near-universal belief that everyone should strive to be married in order to live as a fulfilled human being. He says that some of his followers are given the calling to be unmarried. He continues in verse 12:

“For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let the one who is able to receive this receive it.”

The life of a eunuch was not desirable. Literally, a eunuch was a man who had been castrated as a punishment or in order to work in harems or pagan temples, but the word could be used figuratively to describe men who were impotent or suffered from a genetic defect that made sex an impossibility. You can see that Jesus refers to both of those categories, and then he introduces a third: those “who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.” Now, Jesus is not referring to men who have castrated themselves, though there have been some unfortunate souls in the history of the church who have taken this verse literally…No, Jesus is speaking about followers of his who have been given the calling to forgo marriage as a way of pursuing the purposes of God in the world.

Being single, then, is not the Christian “Plan B.” Being single is not living in a state of deprivation, missing that key component that gives your life the fullness that God desires for his children. According to Jesus, being single is a way of serving God, pursuing his purposes in the world, and functioning as a follower of Jesus. Singleness is a good condition of life. It is a viable and blessed way to live as a follower of Jesus. Paul, in another passage speaking to the married and unmarried alike, says that living as a single Christian is a “gift from God,” in the same way that living as a married Christian is a gift from God.

This was a radical idea in the first century and it remains a radical idea for many Christians in the twenty first century. Singleness is a good condition blessed by God and given as a calling to some for the good of the church and the world. You do not need to be married to live a fulfilled life. Jesus shows us what it means to be human, he is the perfect human being, and he was single and celibate his whole life. He is one of the eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. So if Jesus, the genuine human lived and died a single adult, singleness must be a good condition of life blessed by God.

Following

Underneath these supposed explanations is the the presumption that single life is a state of deprivation for people who are not yet fully formed enough more marriage. Brown responds to these explanations in accordance with the teachings of Jesus and Paul, “I am not single because I am too spiritually unstable to possibly deserve a husband, nor because I am too spiritually mature to possibly need one. I am single because God is so abundantly good to me, because this is his best for me.”

When we begin to see that the single life is just another way to live as a follower of Jesus, no better or worse than married life, the shame that our single brothers and sisters feel should fade, as they begin to fight back the the thought, the lie that God is being less good to them by not giving them a spouse. Because if we say that being single is second best or Plan B, that is what we are suggesting - that God is being less good to single Christians. If a younger sibling marries before the older, is God less good to the unmarried older sibling? The answer is no. Any good theologian will tell you that God cannot be less good, because his goodness is not an attitude, it is an attribute. God is God because he is perfect in his goodness. As one writer put it, “It is a cosmic impossibility for God to shortchange any of his children.” You are married, and God is good to you. You are single, and God is good to you. You have cancer, and God is good to you. You lost your job, and God is good to you. The love and goodness that God had for you on Good Friday is the same love and goodness that he has for you today, tomorrow, and every day.

What do we do with loneliness then? What do we do with the intense desire to find a spouse, marry, and have children? What do we do with the longings to be desired and loved? I saw an article recently with the headline “There’s No Better Time To Be Single Than Now.” I thought to myself, not according to the people I talk to. To be single in the first-century, Jesus and Paul’s audience, meant risking financial security and social status. That isn’t really the case these days, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t difficult to live as a single adult in today’s world. Our’s is a world where people are living isolated from one another, where our practice of friendship is mediated through an electronic device of some kind, where we are taught that we must be self-sufficient and independent from all relationships, where we are losing the capacity to converse about the things that really matter in life. People regardless of their relationship status struggle with loneliness, but it threatens the unmarried in more obvious ways.

What can happen in the face of so many difficulties as a single adult, the idea of marriage can become so significant that we fall into the trap of believing it to be our only hedge against loneliness. But all too often, people discover that rather than living their lives alone, they live their lives alone with someone, because marriage is not the solution for loneliness any more than is wealth the solution for unhappiness. Marriage is a good thing, but it is not an ultimate thing, and when we look to marriage or to a relationship with another person to fulfill us and make us whole, we’ve made an idol.

The gospel is the only remedy for loneliness. The gospel is the truest fulfillment of your desire to be loved and cherished. When the weight of knowing that the Creator of the Universe saw you at your ugliest and most unlovable state, and even still he gave his life for you, to make you clean, and to give you a family to belong to, when the weight of that truth fully sinks in, let me tell you what happens. Your identity changes; the way you see yourself changes. You are no longer Joe Schmo, single and sad. You are the beloved of God. You are the dearly loved child of the King of Kings. You are the one who is totally known and totally loved. And that change of identity will become a wrecking ball that flattens the stronghold of loneliness in your life.

This is what Paul is getting at in when he says, “Whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” In light of the experience of the love of God for us on display in Jesus Christ, everything else pales in comparison. I love my wife tremendously. I cherish our time together. I long for her to be filled with joy and love and hope. I’d give anything and go to any length to meet her needs. I yearn with every fiber of my being for her to be well and whole and at peace. And yet I know that my love for her is a tiny fraction of the love that her Savior, Jesus Christ, has for her.

As we said last week, marriage is a reflection of the love that Christ has for his people, the church. It is a reflection, it is not the real thing. The real thing is available to married and single alike and in equal measure.

People who are single, like all people, suffer from chronic amnesia. We forget who we are. We forget that we are the Bride of Christ, the beloved of God, truly known and fully loved. Thankfully, the Lord has given us one another to remind each other of these things. If we’ve come to terms with the goodness of being single, and we’re committed to resting in the love of Christ, then to be single is not to be alone, but rather we can find immense relational fulfilment in the church. No person in the body of Christ should ever expect to be relationally impoverished, especially those who are single. Because it is here that we have the freedom to let people know our whole selves, because we know that we’re all sinners who rest on the grace of God, and therefore are motivated to share that grace with other sinners. It is here that we can forgive and expect forgiveness, because we’ve all experienced the immense forgiving nature of our God. It is here that we can have our strengths affirmed and our weaknesses called out in love. It is here that we can find support, generosity, hospitality, because among this people we operate according to the ways of the kingdom of God. Paul calls singleness a gift from God - a term that he reserves for those blessings that God gives for the use of building up the church, for growing it, for deepening it, for strengthening it. The church needs both the married and the single. The church is blessed by both the married and the single.

[Singleness as a gift?]

Whenever we are struggling with some aspect of our selves, whether it is our finances, our children, our marriage, or our singleness we have the propensity to turn in on ourselves - to become self-absorbed. The challenge for all of us is to stop focusing on ourselves and turn our attention to Christ - to let the knowledge of God transform our knowledge of ourselves. And when we turn to God, we see that there is a goodness to singleness, a goodness that can only be understood when we are filled with the knowledge of God’s love for us in Jesus and are actively participating in the church community. Whether you are married or single, you are called to rest in Jesus. Be satisfied fully with Christ. And know that satisfaction with Jesus should not make you passive. A person who is satisfied and filled with Jesus does not kick up their heels and say they’ve got all they want and need. It’s not like the satisfaction you feel after Thanksgiving, when you need someone to roll you over to the couch to recover from your satisfaction. No, when we are satisfied and filled with Jesus, we hit the road energized, ready to share the joy that we know, ready to show love in action to those around us. That is the life available and offered to every believer, single or married - a life of exhilarating contentment. It’s a life night and day different from the life of deprivation and loneliness some are prone to make it out to be. No, singleness is a good condition that is blessed by God, and when combined and understood alongside the overwhelming love of God, it will lead to a life full of adventure and joy. Let’s pray.

Paul

This is a lesson for us all, whether we are single or married: we must let our knowledge of God transform our knowledge of self.