When the Bible speaks poignantly about the issues of the day.

I've blogged about gender-neutral marriage elsewhere, several times, before.

This isn't a blog about that.

This is a short post about how Christians are meant to relate to each other.

The irrepressible Cranmer has a rather splenetic blog about the first legal challenge to the new marriage laws in the UK. You can read it here. He notes that the couple in question identify as practising Christians. Fair enough, we can chat about that over weak tea in a church hall. Or better, a pint in a pub. Or at the Church I'm part of. 

Cranmer causally tosses a bible verse in that is powerfully relevant, and something I've been thinking of recently when I disagree with other people who love Jesus;

"I say this to your shame. Is it so, that there is not a wise man among you, not even one, who will be able to judge between his brethren? But brother goes to law against his brother, and that before unbelievers! Now therefore, it is already an utter failure for you that go to law against one another. Why do you not rather accept wrong? Why do you not rather let yourselves be cheated?"

Paul writes here in 1 Corinthinans 6:5-7 of a radical attitude towards in-church lawsuits that is anathema to the un-surrendered life, and foolishness to individualism. But it is the way of Christ, the foolishness to the Greeks, one of the implications of the Gospel. It seems to me to be a sort of legal echoing of Jesus' strange command to turn the other cheek.

It will be interesting to see how this case plays out. It also will be interesting to see how these verses can speak into relationships between Christians over a wide variety of issues.

Hmmm.

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If this whet your appetite, then go and read my friend Luke's reflections on the Zimmerman Trial, a post on why we probably don't understand Christianity, or about the plight of people, in a post regarding the damage of the Image of God.