Today, I’m starting in the beginning, in the very first part of scripture.   That is where it all started.  For in the dawn of creation, everything had been made to fit a pattern--like the parts of the body that function together for health and wholeness... light and darkness, earth and sea, and plants yielding seed and fruit trees bearing fruit.  When fish in the sea and birds in the air, and all the other mysteries of creation had been put together, when everything had been made, God said there is something more that is needed.  He said, “Let us make man after our likeness and let him have dominion over all that we have made.” 

          So God created man in His own image, male and female He created them.  And God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth, and subdue it, and have dominion over it.”  God’s world would have been incomplete without someone created in His image with whom He could communicate.  So He made man.

          But man in God’s world would have been incomplete in himself so He gave him woman to be his companion and helpmeet.  Therefore a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife and the two become one flesh.  Thus, creation begins to function with something as essential at the heart of it, as the heart is essential to the body.  And that something is mutuality.  

          Mutuality means what the word means--two or more people who need each other in a family of whatever number.  Each needs the other.  Each must make a contribution to the fullness of life for the other.

          Paul had it beautifully presented in his letter to the Romans.  “I want to come to Rome to bring you some spiritual strength and that means that I will be strengthened by you, each of us helped by the others faith.” Mutuality means that each contributes and each receives.  Benefit is never one sided.  There is always mutuality in the Christian faith.

          This is the nature of marriage and the family.  When God saw that it is not good for man to be alone, He gave him woman to be his companion.  There is something mutual here.  Here is our clue to the meaning of life in all of our human relations.  Relationships are first of all established by God with a purpose.  The blessings of those relationships will be lost unless we follow God’s idea.

          This is a beautiful thing.  When marriage takes place, two people stand together and say “I need you.” Many say, “I can’t live without you.” That’s true of friendships.  “I need you.”  That’s true of church membership.  “We need you,” and you say as you come to be a part of the church, “I need you.” 

          It happens that something goes wrong.  Why is it that so many marriages destined to be the bloom of life turn out to be the blight.  Why is it in so many homes that marriage was to be the haven in the tempest, but it has become the tempest in the haven?  Why is it that it was to be a heavenly thing and it turns out to be hell?  Why is it that wedlock somehow becomes deadlock?  The home that was to be the fulfillment of dreams becomes a nightmare.

          Why is it that this thing that has in it such potential for good, also has such potential for destruction.  I remember a story a long time ago.  This girl had an ulcer.  The doctor said, “You’re worried about not getting married, and that’s why you have an ulcer.” Well it happened that some time later she was married and her ulcer healed, but her husband got it.  Why is it that marriage cures some and yet it brings hurt to others.

          Here is something that offers us the greatest thing we can imagine.  The beautiful gift of God in the dawn of creation holds for man and woman the healing and happiness of life, but also the most devastating emotional and mental agony possible.  Many of the darkest crimes and most crushing heartbreaks come out of it.  But loyalty and love and the deepest and most enduring relationships are rooted in it.  The drama of the ever lasting conflict between its good and its evil has inspired poets, authors and playwrights and is the subject of some of our greatest literature.

          Every time I think about this, my mind goes to the Sonnets from the Portuguese. I guess it is because I had a professor who required some memory work in it.  Don’t you know what it meant to Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Barrett Browning when she wrote,

“The face of all the world has changed since I heard the footsteps of thy soul.” 

          So much has been written about it.  If you are looking for a clue to bringing the best of the gifts of marriage and ensuring it against the thefts and losses, you will find it in the beginning of creation--the marriage and the home is God’s idea.

          And, it isn’t going to work unless it works for the purpose for which God had in mind.  The very first thing that God had in it was mutuality.  Each needs the other.  Every aspect of marriage and the home finds its right direction and interpretation when it is related to God’s meaning for it.  Human nature made to go God’s way, because of sin, goes the other way.  There is a tendency to pull away.  If we do not follow God’s way we have to pay the penalty.  God created marriage with the goal of meeting the needs of beings created in His image--it is not good for one to be alone.

          When marriage does not have that mutuality, the companionship of two people, each developing to their fullness, giving and receiving the most that both can share in love and understanding and unselfishness, if it does not have this, that marriage fails to reach its heights.  And the level it does reach varies according to the individual.  Why?  Because marriage must be held together by something bigger and wiser than our own desires.

          Selfishness is the root cause of the violation of the mutuality of human beings whether it be in the marriage relationship or friendship or business or the church or society.  Marriage relationships to be strengthening and fulfilling are not without their struggles--the clash of mind on mind, will against will, disagreements and heartaches.  These can become destructive or they can become the heat that separates the gold from the dross.

          God helps us to purify our affections.  God helps us to grow out of our selfishness into a commitment that recognizes the importance of the other.  The search for happiness is often the search to satisfy ourselves which ignores the very nature of creation, which is that we are not complete in ourselves.  There is something else that has to be in it.  We must find it in relationships wherever they are.

          We need for mutuality to meet the needs of the other.  If our obsession is to meet our own needs we are doomed from the start.  The search for identify about which we have heard so much in recent years is a noble search.  God grant that all of us may find ourselves.  But too many times that search has ignored God and has become selfish and seeking after happiness with thoughts of only what will meet my own needs.

          The tragedy of the Prodigal Son is that in the beginning, he said in the family, “Give me that which belongs to me.” It is more than a request for funds.  It is the expression of a philosophy of selfishness.  And we see what happened to him until the day he looked back and saw in his father’s house.  He knew that he was not complete.  And so when he came to himself, when he discovered who he was....that was a discovery that had someone else involved.

          Life begins with God.  He created us for each other.  He saw that it was not good for man to be alone so He gave him woman for a companion and he ordained marriage.  Through Jesus’ teaching and Paul’s theology about the family, it all comes out that there is a mutuality in every relationship.

          Mutuality in marriage is my topic for today.  You see mutuality in marriage in the beginning was just the model for all relationships that were to take place in relationships throughout the centuries to follow.  It grew from marriage to children in families to all the other relationships in life.

          We cannot have a relationship if we are seeking friendship for ourselves without thought of the friend.  We are bound to have no friends.  We will never find fulfillment in any of these relationships.  To find ourselves we have to go seeking to supply the needs of others.  Happiness and joy in these relationships is a by-product.  It is something we discover on the way.  It is a serendipity which comes to those who love and do not think of themselves but are always seeking to add joy and happiness to others.  The person who is always acting (I’m saying acting and not saying, saying does not cover it.)--what’s in it for me, how well are you looking after my needs, I have to do it my way--is one who seeks but never finds, and who gets cheated.

          Helmut Thielicke in his book, How the World Began, says, “I’ve often asked myself what actually happens when two people love each other?  When another person enters my life, am I thrown off my track, like a billiard ball which collides with another and thus must change its course.  Am I remolded, or is it my real nature which is brought out and I have discovered.”

          Then he tells about two elderly sisters, one who was the mother of a family who seemed to have all the fullness of life.  She had poured out her life in service to her family and sacrificed herself for them and others.  In the process she had become a vivid and vital person who had developed all that was within her to an amazing extent.  She had a sister who was highly cultivated who all her life had thought of nothing but the development of her own personality and absorbed all the benefits of culture she could obtain.  But nobody else ever seemed to matter, just herself.  Dr. Thielicke said, “It was she who wanted to develop herself who seemed dried up and one sided, compared to the one who had forgotten herself and lived for others.” 

          Isn’t this the secret of good fathers and mothers.  They are never seeking to only fulfill themselves.  They are giving, that is if they are good fathers and mothers.  They are never concerned only about themselves.  They make sacrifices but in the process they themselves changed.  Under this light I would like to point out that marriage is the model for all other relationships which are a part of God’s creation.

          It is fitting to recognize that those qualities of Christian beauty with which many mothers have adorned themselves was not a special gift handed down from heaven as though she had been chosen for a royal seat.  It was born and grew in the process of forgetting herself in the struggle with the things bringing up children entails.

          Patience begins to grow love, the capacity to forgive and the ability to trust a child or young person as she helped the child to grow in these qualities.  She discovers a treasure.  It is as though she were plowing in that field where the man plowing suddenly struck a treasure.  But it is not hers alone.  There is somebody else working with her.  

          I think sometimes we fathers overlook the responsibilities we have in our mutuality.  I will never forget a summer in Montreat when my children were small.  I was going out to have a good time and play golf.  One of my sons said, “You said you were going to help me do something.” I said, “I’ll help you when I come back.” He blew up, and said, “You always say that but you never do it.” I thought how Bobby Burns would love that,

“Oh that some power would enable us to see ourselves as others see us.” 

          And I saw it from the standpoint of my son.  I think I changed some, at least I changed a little because I saw myself through the eyes of my son.  As we grow older, we ought to improve in our mutuality with our children.  I was reading in a magazine.  There was a father saying to a child, “Can’t you ever remember to take your coat off when you come in?” Later on, instead of that negative way, he said, “Why don’t you take off your coat and stay with us a while.” There are so many little things that if we think about them we can practice mutuality.

          I remember a friend years ago.  He ran a grocery store.  He was so involved in his grocery store and was doing well.  I remember one of my sons when he was young asking me, “Will he go to heaven.” He liked him, and I said, “Well, I suppose he will.”  Then my son said, “Who’s going to keep the store?” 

          I think some of us are so committed to our way that that’s the image we have.  I remember his wife saying, “I would like less of things, and he and the children and I would have more together.” We need to stop and think about marriage.  What really is important?  We have to lose our lives in order to find them.  That’s what Jesus said.

          Dr. George Buttrick in his book on prayer reminds us that Jesus asked nothing for himself but daily bread, strength in the testing, and grace to reveal God to the world.  He points out that Ibsen in the play Peer Gynt has the hero committed to the faith that he would be himself.  He visits an asylum where he assumes that the people are outside of themselves, out of touch with themselves, and they don’t know who they are.  The director corrects him.  “Outside themselves, oh no.  You’re wrong.  It is here that men are most themselves, themselves and nothing but themselves.  None has a tear for others’ woes or cares what another thinks.”

          Buttrick says, “Selfishness is always lunatic.” Jesus was the only fully rational soul, for he only is fully delivered from the insanity of selfishness.  God gave us such a beautiful thing in the beginning in relationships, and we have planted the seeds of selfishness.

          There was a city whose officials had dreamed of making it beautiful.  At great expense they dredged the river that ran through the city.  The water was tapped in a far off hill.  The city was transformed into a beautiful park with an unbelievably refreshing stream flowing through it.  Pleasure boats and canoes plied to and fro through the city.  But weeds began to grow in the stream.  Not even the canoe could glide along.  The weeds were grubbed out, but they returned.

          Finally a wise man suggested that they forget about the weeds and plant willows along the banks.  Soon the city’s beauty had been increased by the fern like trees gracing the city.  Their penetrating roots went below the stream, searching for food. In so doing they established themselves and the weeds could find no place to grow. 

          In every marriage, weeds of sin will grow, disrupting forces will appear.  Exaggerations of wrongs will threaten our happiness.  Tensions will inflict pains and a host of other damaging forces of sin will come.  Let these grow unchecked and the destiny is heartbreak and all kinds of damaging results.  But those who sow the seeds of mutuality of love that seeks not its own in obedience to God’s word that you may lose your life in order to find it, all of this will destroy the petty things in human relationships.

          The attitudes of mature people will starve the childish response.  Thoughtful love will choose a soft answer to turn away wrath.  The tree of life which God planted in the garden in the beginning of creation will grow again with fruits in human relationships, the joy of mutuality.  The selfishness that hurts and destroys will find no place in which to grow.  It is a hard goal to reach, but it is the goal God gave us in creation for beautiful living.

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