Renewal of Marriage Vows

I have been asked to assist in the renewal of marriage vows for a couple of friends. Here is the ceremony that I have been working on. I would welcome your comments, evaluation, and feedback.

When asked to participate with you in the renewal of your marriage vows, the first idea to pop into my mind was the word faithfulness. As is often my custom, that thought sent me to the dictionary to explore this idea of faithfulness. The suffix of the word, the “-ness” part of it, conveys the idea of an instance or state of being, or a quality of being. That idea reminded me that part of what we attempt in marriage is to take the instance of making pledges in a marriage ceremony and extending those pledges into a state of practicing those ideals throughout our lives. So when we take a person as our lawfully wedded spouse—when we make marriage vows to love, honor, cherish, and obey—and when we pledge ourselves to our spouses and to them alone, we are establishing some standards by which faithfulness can be measured and some guideposts by which we can assess our progress through this most intimate of human relationships. As believers, we set all of this in the context of a covenant made with each other, before God, and in the presence of witnesses.

That definition almost immediately reminded me that faithfulness is one of the most prominent descriptions in the Scriptures for God’s relationship with God’s people. The words “faithful,” “faithfully,” and “faithfulness” are used 160 times in the Scriptures; and about three-eighths of those occurrences use the words to describe God’s faithfulness. That explains why Thomas O. Chisholm in 1923 penned the words to that timeless hymn praising God, “Great Is Thy Faithfulness.” Phrase after phrase in that hymn remind us of the divinely inspired image of what faithfulness means when we follow God’s example of faithfulness. With God there is “no shadow of turning.” God “changest not.” God’s “compassions … fail not,” what God has been God “forever wilt be.” The seasons of the year; the sun, the moon, and the stars; and “all nature” give manifold witness to God’s “great faithfulness, mercy, and love.” God’s pardon, peace, and presence cheer us, guide us, strengthen us, and give us “bright hope for tomorrow.” The refrain of the hymn asserts that “all I have needed, Thy hand hath provided” as each morning brings new mercies to us.

That kind of faithfulness is a worthy goal for us in our marriages; but frankly, the goal is way too high for us--and we can say that from two perspectives. No one of us will ever find a spouse who can fulfill our every need in every way and in every instance; and none of us can be a spouse who will be the perfect answer to all of our spouse’s needs. Marriages are not perfect because we are not perfect people. The expectations of perfection that we sometimes bring with us into marriage are quickly discovered to be unrealistic. Some people can’t handle that discovery, and either they create a make-believe life out of ignoring the imperfections in themselves and in their spouses, or they become disillusioned and either live a lifetime of muted disappointment or break up the marriage in hopes that someone else can become their “perfect spouse.”

What we are doing here today is to seek another path that steers us between disillusionment on the one hand and dissolution on the other. We are imperfect people in imperfect relationships—but, so what? Where did we get the idea that we could be perfect or that our spouse would be perfect? Why do we imagine that some other “perfect person” might be out there who could change things? Why does the reality of imperfections disappoint us when we must honestly acknowledge that we ourselves are imperfect?

Renewing vows is not a cure-all. It is not a magic potion or a remedy that can correct, counteract, or remove our imperfections. It is, rather, what the initial marriage vows were intended to be. It is a pledge to make a sincere effort to devote yourself and all you are to another person because you genuinely love that person. You want to be with that person--to live, to love, to support, to endure, to assist, to uplift, to strengthen, to forgive, to embrace, to enjoy so long as you both shall live. In this, the traditional marriage vows continue to have meaning: “I take you to be my spouse, to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part.”

These words that pledged faithfulness were somewhat empty words when you were first married, because you had little of the shared experiences with the better or the worse, the richer or the poorer, the sickness or the health. Now you know so much more. You have experienced so much together. You have had good times and bad. You have had ups and downs. You have had sickness and health. You have had gentle peace and the expected conflict. You have dealt with each other in each of your best and worst personas. And yet, through all of this, you have returned to this sacred time and this scared place to say:

• I truly love you, and I want us to spend the rest of our lives together.
• I pledge to you anew my constant love and faithful devotion.
• I beg your forgiveness for where I have failed you in the past.
• I plead for your patience for where I surely will falter in the future.
• I pray that God will strengthen me as I strive to meet your needs.
• And I pray the God will bless you through me as we walk together in love.

Will There Be Golf Courses in Heaven?

Back in May I discovered an on-line computer game called World Golf Tour. This game allows you to play games of golf on digitized versions of actual golf courses in competition with other “golfers” in a live, interactive computer simulation. Through experience in this competitive context, I have worked my way up to being a “Tour Pro” whose average golf score is 71. Since I am better at computer golf than I am in real-life golf (where 90 is a pretty good round for me), this fantasy golf experience has been a lot of fun. It also has opened up some windows to the world.

Recently my “foursome” was made up of players from India, South Africa, and the Netherlands. If I play early in the morning, my playing partners often are from Europe. Each player has an avatar (mine is a handsome young athlete) and an on-line name (mine is “elfreport”). You can become “friends” with other players you encounter in the competition, and my friends list grows steadily. You also can play various versions of golf. I especially enjoy the alternating shot games where two teams compete against each other with the members of each team hitting alternating shots. You often are matched up with someone you don’t know.

Players communicate through instant messaging. Some games have little interaction; others are constant talk-fests. Encouragement and advice can be shared with your teammate, and good-natured ribbing can be directed at your opponents. Occasionally you will get a “trash talker” who tries to bully, intimidate, and mess with your mind to gain an advantage in the game. Occasionally the game locks up unexpectedly. My biggest frustration so far came when the system seemed to lock up after one of my tee shots and my opponent dropped out of the game. After he quit and I was playing solo, the system came back up. My shot was completed, and I got an unwitnessed hole-in-one.

I’ve played against opponents from age 12 to way past my 68 years. Most of the players are male, but women play regularly and have no compromised skills because of their gender. I’ve played against gentle spirits and fiery competitors. Far too many players quit the game if they are having a bad round that will affect their handicap, and the really inconsiderate quit by closing their game without using the menu and lock up the game for the rest of the players. Some play while they are at work and complain when their play is interrupted by “business” or when their boss interferes with their play.

I’ve been contemplating how a Christian “athlete” should interact on World Golf Tour. Yesterday I was playing against a guy who I think was probably a high school senior. I discovered that he was from Georgia, and I mentioned that I had gone to Georgia Tech “way back when” (only later did I realized this in the 50^th September since I started at Georgia Tech). He said that he was thinking about going to a technical college in Athens. I was just about to “introduce a Christian theme” into our interchange by asking if he knew one of my former students who had been a pastor in Athens; but then he hit three consecutive putts that rimmed out and let go with a serious profanity that took the Lord’s name in vain. I decided that that wasn’t the appropriate moment to speak “religiously.”

 
I have noticed a few “gentle spirits” on WGT who I think are communicating a kind of silent witness. They speak encouraging words to friends and foes alike. They offer helpful suggestions. They are upbeat and positive even when they hit one in the sand trap or lose a ball in the lake. Like me, they may say “ouch” when they hit a really bad shot; but something about their play communicates a positive spirit. I’ve tried to be that kind of player, but is that enough? I know some people are uncomfortable when playing a round of golf with a pastor or religious figure, but I wonder what Jesus would do? I’m sure he wouldn’t “heal” a persistent slice or make a ball “walk on water” across a water hazard onto the fairway. Would his every shot be perfect? If it weren’t, what would his reaction be? How would he deal with fellow golfers whose humanity showed through? And, oh yes, will there be golf courses in heaven?

Let's See If I Have This Straight

A few of my recent posts from Facebook:

• Let's see if I have this straight. Social Security is going bankrupt in the distant future because expenditures will outstrip the payroll taxes coming in. So the solution to our current problems is to reduce the payroll taxes that employers pay (that is the employer's part of Social Security) to stimulate employment so that Social Security can go bankrupt sooner for the greater number of workers who will be employed in the near future. Huh?
• Let's see if I have this straight. It IS "class warfare" to ask the top 10% of Americans who are economically advantaged and control 90% of America's wealth to pay more taxes. It IS NOT "class warfare" to bust unions, cut Social Security, cut Medicare, cut college loans, cut funding for research on global warming, cut funding for education, advance "tort reform" (which makes it more difficult to sue for malpractice), and cut dozens of other programs that especially affect the bottom 50% on the economic scale. Somebody's "platform" shows whose waging war on whom!
• Let's see if I have this straight. Only 1.6% of Americans inherit $100,000 or more from the estates of their deceased loved ones, yet we need to get rid of the “death tax” so that the 91.8% who don’t get any inheritance will be protected. In reality, if estate taxes are eliminated, 0.6% of Americans are estimated to receive over $1 trillion more in inheritances in the next decade. That explains why 18 super-rich families are providing most of the money that is supporting the efforts to eliminate estate taxes. Source: Professor G. William Domhoff, Sociology Department, University of California at Santa Cruz, http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html

Dress for Spiritual Success

I can recall a time in American life when Sunday was a dress-up day. The majority of people seemed to be in church on Sunday, and those who were in church dressed in Sunday attire that set the day apart as something special. In many locations “blue laws” actually spelled out restrictions based on religious standards that were designed to make Sunday something of a Christian Sabbath. Most of those laws have now been repealed, and the “enforcement” of special treatment for Sundays has pretty much passed from the scene. So has Sunday as a dress-up day.

The prevailing trend in most successful churches today is a “come-as-you-are” dress code. First came special days called “casual Sundays.” Then every Sunday became casual Sunday. Eventually dressing up for church became viewed as stuffy and somewhat elitist. Requiring or expecting some kind of dress code now is considered a major deterrent to getting people to attend church. Today’s “Sunday” attire is more akin to leisure dress on a level of or even more informal than “business casual.” Basically we have de-formalized dress not only for Sundays but also for weddings, funerals, and other special occasions.

Accompanying this trend toward casual Sunday attire has been a secularization of the day itself. No one misunderstands the pro football fans who dress in their team’s colors or even paint their faces to show their support for their team. By their dress and conduct, these fans know how to make an occasion special, to express commitment and show support for their team. Devout Christians are as likely as any others to rearrange their schedules, attend these games, and dress for the occasion. These out-of-the-ordinary dress and behaviors set the occasion apart from mundane daily life. It builds team spirit, develops a sense of extended community, and fosters a system of shared values that bind the fans together.

Christians were wrong in trying to impose faith on the entire community through “blue laws,” but I think we also have lost something in secularizing our days and times of worship. Something of the awe and grandeur of worship has been lost as we have made the occasions informal, folksy, and secular. A sense of the holiness of God and the sanctity of worship has been lost. We try to stir up emotions by swaying and clapping to popular styles of music. We try to make worship occasions friendly and inviting to outsiders by creating a comfortable setting that accommodates their daily experiences.

I think we need to retrieve the sense of something “special” in the Christian experience. Our times together with each other and in the presence of God need to be distinctly different from the secular and the mundane. The church building should be a special place. The “church time” together with family and friends should be special. The expressions of a “team” spirit, a common purpose, a mutual goal, a shared commitment, and a supportive community should make our times together unusual and extraordinary.

I am not sure of how we can best accomplish these goals, but I think we must begin to strive for a sense of specialness about our “game days,” our times of worship and study, our opportunities to grasp together the holiness and awe of God’s presence. One simple place that we can begin is in our “Sunday” dress. As we attire ourselves and dress our children, we can reflect, discuss, and intentionally shift our attentions away from the secular mundane toward the specialness of being together in the family of faith, in the presence of the holy God, in the place we call “church.”

How we dress is a minor spiritual practice that might not seem like much; but like every spiritual practice, with intention, purpose, and interpretation, our “Sunday dress” can create an attitude of preparation that shifts our minds from secular to sacred and adds a special significance to the times we spend together in church.

The Fatal Flaw in the Tea Party Movement

When I first heard of the Tea Party a few years ago, I was strongly attracted to the idea. I generally was fed up by the machinations of the major parties and the polarized bickering that has become so common in every political discussion. Parties have their fixed agendas, and legislators seem swayed by the moneyed, who provide the funding for their next election. I thought, “The Tea Party. What a fresh idea! Turn the power back over to the people! That’s what democracy is all about.”

Of course, I am not one to take an idea seriously until I study it; so I went to the Tea Party’s website and read the mechanism by which the party was designed to work. This indeed is a people’s movement. People from local communities get together and decide what position the majority think should be taken on every major issue. They then select candidates to run under the Tea Party banner. Each candidate pledges to vote always and only in line with the position adopted by the local participants in the Tea Party. And that is the fatal flaw!

Yes, all of us get fed up when our legislators adopt positions and vote differently from what we think is best; but when you tie legislators absolutely to the views of their constituents, you eliminate the possibility of compromise. And that is where our nation is right now in trying to deal with the budget, the debt, appointments, and other legislative matters. When you have pledged to uphold the positions taken by your constituents without exception, you can do nothing to resolve gridlock.

If the Tea Party continues in its current mentality and succeeds, we will have 100 senators and 435 representatives in Washington, all of them locked into the interests of their particular state and their particular congressional districts. The Tea Party naively assumes that all Americans have the same interests. That is simply not the case. People from Idaho cannot understand the peculiar needs of large urban communities, and they certainly are not going to spend “their money” addressing the complex issues faced in metropolitan areas. People from farm states will hardly compromise on farm subsidies, but you can’t get them to support subsidies precious to urban states. States hit hardest by the influx of illegal aliens will certainly have different priorities than urban states with high unemployment or farm states in need of migrant workers.

When we insist that our representatives represent us and only us, we put our local, parochial interests ahead of the “common good.” The “common good” is what has been lost in the current debates in Washington. Maybe it already was gone in the horse-trading mentality that loaded our national budgets with fodder for every state, district, and constituent group. With the zealots on all sides arguing for “do it my way, or you’re out of office,” we have had no open doors for discussion of what is good for all of us.

I am concerned about our national debt, our over-extended budget, our wasteful programs that consume enormous amounts of our resources, our legislative dead-lock, and our “my way or the highway” mentality. I’m also concerned about our environment, our poor, our educational systems, and our unemployed and under-employed. I’m concerned about the power that money can buy, the desire to give as little as possible to the tax-man and to spend as much as possible on frivolous extravagances, and the hungry who don’t know where their next meal will come from. I’m concerned about states that can exist only because the federal government funds essential programs, whose populace would not be willing to pay sufficient taxes to support their own local needs, and whose officials always complain about the insufficient funding from Washington while doing everything possible to keep their constituent taxes low.

The central issue in all of this is selfishness. We are a self-centered people who have lost our sense of community and unity. The Tea Party is a manifestation of this selfishness carried to an extreme. We need again the spirit of those early patriots who, while representing their own particular state’s interests and cherishing the values of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, also affirmed justice, domestic tranquility, the common defense, the general welfare, and the blessings of liberty for themselves and their posterity (that’s us!). These ideals cannot be achieved in self-centered isolation; and they won’t be achieved in Washington until the ideals are recognized, endorsed, and embraced by each and every one of us.

Reflections on a Colleague

I am thinking today about a colleague of mine with whom I worked in my first job at the Baptist Sunday School Board. His name was D. P. Brooks, and he was always called “DP.” I don’t know what those initials stood for; but anyone who knew DP had little doubt what he stood for.

DP was close to retirement in 1978 when I moved to Nashville. He had had a long career at the Baptist Sunday School Board and at that time was the editor of Adult Bible Study, the largest circulation Bible study quarterly ever produced by the BSSB (or LifeWay Christian Resources, as it is now named). We worked together in the Adult Life and Work Section; and appropriately, life and work were the focus of DP’s thinking, commitment, and being. He believed that the gospel should be lived, not just studied.

DP came out of the Sandy Creek tradition in North Carolina Baptist life, but his study at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary embedded a deep devotion to Christian ethics in the weft and woof of his being. He not only believed in the Bible, but he believed that its words should be practiced. To him, faith that did not produce a radical redirection in the way a person lived was not faith at all. In the midst of a growing shift in Baptist life toward a focus on the inerrancy of “the Word,” DP would have been classified by the “Word” folks as an advocate for the “social Gospel” (though his critics would have disputed even the capitalization of “Gospel” here, since many of them saw no Gospel in the serious application of biblical principles to the central core of Christian faith and daily living).

DP had a broad range of ethical concerns that he kept before his colleagues as we developed and planned the Life and Work curriculum. He was passionate about issues of race, economics, equal opportunity, help for the poor and weak, exploitation by the privileged, humanity dignity, war, environment, and most any other issue that would be labeled “liberal” today. I would classify his as a modern-day Amos who looked at American society and voiced God’s displeasure at its trampling “the head of the poor into the dust of the earth, and push[ing] the afflicted out of the way” (Amos 2:7). In many ways he was a prophet whom the people of God commanded, “You shall not prophesy” (Amos 2:12).

I did not always agree with DP, but I never doubted that his “radical” convictions grew out of a deep commitment to the Scriptures and the teachings of Jesus Christ. He was able to pull out of almost any passage of Scripture some deeply significant moral issue that required radical change of direction in our personal lives and in our corporate and national experiences. That really is the essence of the prophetic voice, and it is a voice that is spoken too softly today or is quieted by both the secular media and the “moral majority” that are more focused on issues that serve their causes and that ignore the poor and the outcasts around us.

I don’t have all the answers about how we should be handling the issues we are facing in our country today; but something within me still hears the voice of D.P. Brooks that chides my conscience that we are missing the important moral and ethical issues as we squabble over budgets and deficits, jobs and welfare, individual responsibility and community needs, the rich and the poor, war and peace, economic growth and moral integrity, the environment and standards of living, me and we. In the midst of these weighty issues, the church seems to have lost its voice. We’ve lost it because we have become too much like the scribes and Pharisees confronted by Jesus in Matthew 23:15 for their striving to make converts (NRSV) or proselytes (KJV and NASB) when they should have been making disciples. We have infantilized the church by focusing on getting people to confess faith without calling them beyond that to loving God and loving neighbor in real and concrete way.

D. P. Brooks was a discipler who recognized that the task of the church is not completed when we baptize converts. We must go on to active and concrete expressions of love for God and neighbor that change our entire moral compass and lead us to Christlikeness. DP may be “resting in peace” now, but he has left a legacy of dis-ease in my heart about truly living out faith daily.

A Post for Wordsmiths

My sister sent me one of those cute emails that get passed around on the internet, and this one is so good that I am passing it on. I've taken the editorial liberty to "touch it up" a bit. I hope it will start your day with a smile.

An Ode to the English Plural

We'll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes,
But the plural of ox becomes oxen, not oxes.
One fowl is a goose, but two are called geese,
Yet the plural of moose should never be meese.
You may find a lone mouse or a nest full of mice,
Yet the plural of house is houses, not hice.

If the plural of man is always called men,
Why shouldn't the plural of pan be called pen?
If I speak of my foot and show you my feet,
And I give you a boot, would a pair be called beet?
If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth,
Why shouldn't the plural of booth be called beeth?

Then one may be that, and three would be those,
Yet hat in the plural would never be hose,
And the plural of cat is cats, not cose.
We speak of a brother and also of brethren,
But though we say mother, we never say methren.
Then the masculine pronouns are he, his and him,
But imagine the feminine: she, shis and shim!

Let's face it - English is a crazy language. There is no egg in eggplant, no ham in hamburger, neither apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins weren't invented in England. We take English for granted, but if we explore its paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square, and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.

And why is it that writers write, but fingers don't fing, grocers don't groce and hammers don't ham? Doesn't it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend? If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it? If teachers taught, why didn't preachers praught? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?

Sometimes I think all the folks who grew up speaking English
should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane. In what other language do people recite at a play and play at a recital?

We ship by truck but send cargo by ship. We have noses that run and feet that smell. We park in a driveway and drive in a parkway. And how can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites?

You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language in which your house can burn up as it burns down, in which you fill in a form by filling it out, and in which an alarm goes off by going on.

And in closing, if Father is Pop, how come Mother's not Mop?