Tag: Marriage
0 By the Power Vested in Me by this Mouse
I’ve often thought the NY Times wedding pages are a good harbinger of the trends to come. Long before ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ died a relatively quiet death and well before a seeming cultural consensus settled about homosexuality, the NY Times posted wedding announcements celebrating gay couples like they we just ordinary couples.
That’s not a comment on the rightness/wrongness of the issue; it’s just a comment that the Times foreshadow future trends.
So here’s another trend.
Those same wedding pages this week wrote a story about the ever-increasing trend of couples getting friends, duly vested in made-up online religions, to preside over their ceremony.
As much as I refuse to pimp myself out to marry couples who are just treating me in the same way they do the caterer, it’s also depressing that an increasing number of people prefer to circumvent any faith element in their wedding altogether.
This is the cultural climate in which we’ll need to figure out how to do Church into the future.
Here’s the article…and before you get your friend to perform your wedding after a few minutes on Google make sure he/she is legal.
IN the days leading up to their August wedding at the Ram’s Head Inn on Shelter Island, Kinara Flagg and Paul Fileri chose Andrew Case, a friend and former law school classmate of Ms. Flagg’s, to officiate.
In the eyes of the couple, Mr. Case, who had become a Universal Life minister through a quick online ordination, was the right man for the job. In the eyes of the law, however, Mr. Case, who was not a part of an active ministry, was officiating in the wrong county.
An increasing number of couples are steering away from traditional religious and civil wedding officiants in favor of friends and relatives who become ordained through online ministries. But many couples are unaware that while New York State recognizes marriages performed by those who became ministers by the power vested in a mouse, there are five downstate counties where such officiants are not technically legal.
Ms. Flagg and Mr. Fileri, who knew that Suffolk County on Long Island, which includes Shelter Island, was among the handful of no-online-minister zones in the state, obtained their marriage license in Monroe County (where Mr. Fileri grew up and which recognizes online ministries), making their wedding a legal union after all.
“It’s surprising that Suffolk County does not recognize these online ministers,” Ms. Flagg said.
Neither do the counties of Nassau, Westchester, Putnam or Dutchess, owing to a 1989 ruling by the Appellate Division of the State Supreme Court in a case involving a Suffolk County couple who were then embroiled in a divorce. In that case, the court ruled that the couple’s marriage and prenuptial agreement were void because their officiant was a Universal Life minister.
Though Ms. Flagg speaks for many married couples when she says “we wanted a friend to marry us, someone who could speak about us to our friends and family, rather than a person who doesn’t really know us and recites a lot of formulaic vows,” it remains that Connecticut, Alabama, Virginia, Tennessee, a part of Pennsylvania and (of all places) Las Vegas do not necessarily recognize the credentials of officiants who were created, for better or worse, through such online ministries as the Universal Life Church, the Church of Spiritual Humanism, Rose Ministries and the Temple of Earth.
For many years, New York City also did not recognize online ministers, but in 2006 began allowing them to officiate at weddings in the five boroughs. But the appellate court’s ruling still holds for the other counties. (In September 2007, a couple in York County, Pa., who had been married two months earlier by an online minister received a call from a county clerk who told them that a judge had ruled that ministers who do not have a “regularly established church or congregation” cannot perform marriages under state law. Their marriage, they were told, might not be valid. Representatives of the American Civil Liberties Union advised them to seek help from the organization if the legality of their marriage was ever challenged.)
New York Assemblywoman Sandy Galef, a Westchester County Democrat, who has been trying since 2005 to pass a bill in Albany that would give online officiants legal power to marry couples throughout the state, said, “We need to change the law so that people everywhere can be legally married by online ministers.”
“I have had lots of conversations about this issue with the Judiciary Committee staff in Albany, and everyone knows something needs to be done,” Ms. Galef said. “I’m not quite sure what is blocking this bill. Is there opposition from priests, rabbis and other clergymen who see this as both a competitive and economic thing? I just don’t know.”
The Rev. Kent Winters-Hazelton, who once served in a no-online-minister zone at the United Community Church of Wantagh on Long Island, in Nassau County, and is now pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Lawrence, Kan., said that he understood why some states still do not recognize online ministers.
“In some places, there is still an understanding that certain qualifications have to be met by a minister or a justice of the peace before they are legally able to perform marriages,” he said. “And I agree with that.”
Here’s the rest of the article.
4 Is Hipsterism Inherently UnChristian?
Ask yourself: Do I communicate primarily through inside jokes and pop culture references? What percentage of my speech is meaningful? How much hyperbolic language do I use? Do I feign indifference? Look at your clothes. What parts of your wardrobe could be described as costume-like, derivative or reminiscent of some specific style archetype? In other words, is your style an anti-style?
I like beards.
And, as I’ve mentioned before, I home-brewed before it was trendy to do so.
That’s about where I part ways with the hipster movement- that, and being a tail-end Gen Xer, I’m too old for the movement.
Take a look at seminary campuses, however, and you will see the hipster’s intentionally cultivated look of antiquation everywhere. It might lead you to conclude the trend is but a form of Christian subterfuge.
And yet….and yet…perhaps at root there’s something about hipsterism that’s deeply at odds with the Christian faith.
Consider the argument made in the NY Times by Christy Wampole:
The irony of the Hipster is the most self-defensive mode, as it allows a person to dodge responsibility for his or her choices, aesthetic and otherwise. To live ironically is to hide in public. It is flagrantly indirect, a form of subterfuge, which means etymologically to “secretly flee” (subter + fuge). Somehow, directness has become unbearable to us.
One of the points I like to make to couples preparing for their wedding is that marriage is a means of grace precisely because it forces us into a relationship of mutual vulnerability. Physical nakedness isn’t the only kind of nakedness required by marriage. There’s an emotional nakedness too.
And, in this way, I think marriage points out a deeper, more fundamental truth about what it means to be a Christian; namely, just as Jesus makes himself completely vulnerable to the Father and follows his path in faithfulness, we demonstrate our faith by our willingness to be vulnerable, genuine, real and authentic to others.
If this so then there’s something incongruent between following Jesus and following an intentionally defensive posture.
Of course, maybe this speculation hits home for me because, while fashion may not be my thing, I am ironic to the core. What Wampole says about herself could easily be my own confession:
I find it difficult to give sincere gifts. Instead, I often give what in the past would have been accepted only at a White Elephant gift exchange: a kitschy painting from a thrift store, a coffee mug with flashy images of “Texas, the Lone Star State,” plastic Mexican wrestler figures. Good for a chuckle in the moment, but worth little in the long term. Something about the responsibility of choosing a personal, meaningful gift for a friend feels too intimate, too momentous. I somehow cannot bear the thought of a friend disliking a gift I’d chosen with sincerity. The simple act of noticing my self-defensive behavior has made me think deeply about how potentially toxic ironic posturing could be.
Realizing I’m guilty as charged, I wonder if it’s not, after all, a bad thing that, as my 6 year old son likes to point out with glee, it only takes a 20 second trailer of The Blind Side (‘You threaten my son, you threaten me’) to get me to weeping like a baby. Seriously.
I’ve always been embarrassed by falling prey to such a saccharine movie but now I wonder if it might not be good news.
Here’s the full article by Wampole.
1 Married in the Image of God
Marriage counseling isn’t one of my favorite parts of ministry. It’s not that I’m bad at it, I don’t think. I’m a passable counselor. And it’s not that I mind being available to couples during stressful junctures in their marriage.
Mostly its that whenever I find myself offering advice to couples, I can’t help but imagine my own wife listening in, smirking lovingly, knowing full well I’m less than a perfect spouse and hardly one to qualify as an expert.
A while back though I gave a couple advice. I seldom give out and out advice while counseling. I was trained not to advise but to offer active listening, which I know can seem passive to couples starved for something to try and salvage their relationship.
Having no other clue how to help them stop the spiral of resentment and recrimination in which they found themselves trapped, I told them:
‘I know you have every reason to think you’re right and every reason to be angry. I know you don’t he understands how he’s hurt you and you don’t think she’s ever going forgive you and let go. I want you to put that away for a week. Forget about it and instead just focus on loving and serving the other. Whenever the old words and feelings creep up, do something, anything, to pour yourself out and serve the other instead.’
In truth, I was desperate, had no clue how to help them and thought this sounded just Jesusy enough to leave them thinking I’d done my job. I was surprised when they told me the following week that trying to do that had been the best week in their marriage in longer than they could recall.
‘Why is that?’ the husband asked me.
This week for our fall sermon series, Seven Truths that Changed the World: Christianity’s Most Dangerous Ideas, we’re talking about the Imago Dei, the scriptural notion that having made everything good in creation God creates us in God’s image.
The Imago Dei often gets treated vaguely- ‘we’re all children of God’- and left at that; however, Imago Dei cannot be abstracted from Trinity.
Christians often fail to recall that the God in whose image we’re made is three-personed: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Therefore the relationship that marks God’s own life, the love shared between Father, Son and Spirit, is the prototype for the kind of life and love we’re intended to share.
Theologians call it perichoresis. It means ‘mutual self-emptying’ or ‘mutual self-giving.’
When we talk about the Trinity, who God is internally and eternally, we believe God is perichoretic love. God is in God’s own life a community of self-giving, vulnerable love. God is a community, Father, Son and Spirit, where love is eternally given as a gift and nothing is expected in return.
We’ve been made in the image of this three-personed God. Moreover, as Karl Barth argues, we’re not made in God’s image as individuals. Rather it’s Adam and Eve together- their relationship- that comprises the image of a God who is, in himself, relationship.
Back to that couple.
The reason, I think, their vow to put resentments aside for a week and focus on loving and serving the other ‘worked’ is that such loving service best captures who, at their core, they were created to be. This is the image of God in them and that can mean no less than this is what it means to be fully alive. Any lasting healing that might come to their marriage surely must come by this route alone.
0 Till 24 Months Do Us Apart: Marriage As An Act Of Faith
Last week I performed a wedding along the Potomac River in the late summer afternoon sun. Lucas, the little ring-bearer predictably and adorably forgot to process down with his pillow so as the bride marched to ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’ the congregation could all hear Lucas’ mother whispering/shouting: ‘Lucas, Lucas get down here right now.’
The bride’s sister played a tender clarinet solo and, being a professional musician, it was impeccable.
The bride’s friends read tender texts from Kalil Gibran on the nature of love.
The couple’s friend spoke tenderly about their love and wished them well with the advice that all will be well ‘if they just keep loving each other.’
It was all beautiful, tender, romantic and COMPLETELY unrealistic.
As all weddings almost always are.
After I read scripture from 1 John 4 about God being love, I launched into my wedding homily. I don’t reuse homilies from couple to couple but I do repeat a few key points, and my aim in the wedding sermon is always the same: to quash the sentimentality that so often renders wedding ceremonies ‘beautiful’ without being truthful.
Because of course, as any (happily or unhappily) married person can attest ‘just loving each other’ is empty, naive advice. Marriage is work and risk. Marriage is sacrifice- that’s how Jesus, an otherwise single dude, can be an example of the love between husband and wife.
Were it as easy as ‘just loving each other’ marriage wouldn’t be a vocation that required vows to enter.
This is part of what I told that couple:
Marriage is a high-risk adventure, for a life lived together can expose the worst in people, all the intricate flaws that come with human nature. No matter how many times we have sat in chairs like these and listened to people like me announce “Dearly Beloved,” these are daunting promises to make. Marriage is risky business. Today the two of you are not just saying ‘I do’ to the person standing next to you; you’re also saying ‘I do’ to whomever or whatever that person is going to become- something that is unknown and unseen to the both of you. That is the risk you take today, but as far as the church is concerned it’s a beautiful risk. It’s an act of faith.
It’s this commitment to the unknown- at least in my view- that make weddings the beautiful gesture that they are.
It’s this same commitment to the unknown, this act of faith, that appears to be waning. According to the NY Times, for example, lawmakers in Mexico proposed the creation of short-term, renewable marriage contracts with terms as brief as two years. Which I guess makes marriage less a sacrament and more like a Best Buy service agreement.
Here’s the article from Sunday’s paper.
0 Why Fathers Really, Actually Matter
For all our lip service about the family being the foundation of society, for all the (renewed) prejudice against working mothers (at least in my neck of the woods), for all the articles and Chris Rock-straight-to-video movies about soccer dads and stay-at-home fathers, it’s telling that a headline like the one from Sunday’s NY Times still seems like news, like a point that needs to be made: Why Fathers Really Matter.
Admittedly, I’m biased. Most of the time, because of the relative flexibility of my schedule, I’m the primary week-day parent. This role has given me frontline experience in how our culture, perhaps unwittingly, acts as though dads DO NOT really matter or, at best, they’re a nice extra feature.
For example, I can’t tell you how many people, how many times upon seeing me with my kids during the day refer to it as ‘babysitting.’ As though they’re my wife’s kids and when she gets home I’ll get paid $10/hour. I’m even told that Dads watching their kids counts as ‘childcare’ according to the IRS. That’s hardly the only example. There’s the obviously surprised, awkward expression that creeps across a teacher’s face when you’re the one who shows up for the beginning of the year parent-teacher conference. There’s the bemused reactions in the grocery when folks see a DAD (!?) shopping for dinner.
While I’ll be the first to admit ours is a sexist culture, I’d also be quit to point out how another manifestation of our sexism towards women is how it renders fathers.
Back to the NY Times story. Recent research demonstrates what any sane person already knew: that fathers are every bit as important during pregnancy as mothers. As the father of two adopted boys and as a son who had no father active in his childhood, I would only add that a father’s role and impact on children doesn’t begin or end with biology.
Here’s the link.
2 11 Years Ago Today…
1 Should Ministers Relinquish Their Wedding Credentials? Should Christians Get Married in the Back Yard?
Three things I hate about religious work:
1.) Joel Osteen
2.) Clergy Meetings
3.) Wedding Coordinators
Actually, there’s a whole lot I don’t like about weddings, such as, the entire wedding industry. Wedding coordinators (at other churches, not mine) are very often pushy, patronizing and think they’re managing a show of which I’m a prop. Wedding coordinators aren’t the worst part of weddings. They’re only frequently the last bitter pill I have to swallow in a whole string of annoyances and, thus, they’re the ones who unfairly suffer my ire.
I hate how, for so many couples, the minister is somewhere at the bottom of the priority list when making arrangements for the ceremony. I hate that most couples nail down the caterer, photographer, DJ, wedding party, stationary and honeymoon venue before ever calling to see if I’m even available, which betrays, for all our talk about the sanctity of marriage, how most weddings are not- in the felt experience of the couple- a religious worship service.
I hate how many couples- or their parents- want to limit the “religious stuff’ in the service as much as possible, and I hate their surprised irritation when I refuse.
I hate how many couples, church members or not, Christian or not, just assume that I will perform their wedding, and I hate their surprised outrage when I say no.
And, most of all, I hate that everyone wants to sit the pastor at the ‘grandma table’ for the reception.
I’ve done a lot of weddings, and I do a good job when I do agree to do one. But to this day, the best wedding I’ve been a part of has been my own. I think it’s because, due in equal parts to our sensibilities and to our lack of money, our wedding was simple, spare and small. None of those factors kept it from being elegant or beautiful.
Friday is Ali’s and my 11th Anniversary. Since we got married, I’ve seen weddings whose price tag comes in over my annual salary. Somewhere such a wedding, I think, goes from Cana-like joy to ugly (pagan?) decadence.
It’s only natural I suppose for the next generation of couples to push back against that trend, as the article in the NY Times this Sunday highlighted, but I wonder if Christians are morally obligated to do so: to opt out of the wedding industry because its completely incongruent with vows anchored in ‘forsaking all else…’
In fact, I’ve toyed seriously over the last year with surrendering my wedding credentials, which now reside with the Clerk of Court. Doing so would mean I’m no longer able to perform ‘legal’ weddings. In other words, couples would be married in the eyes of God just not the State. Couples would have to get a justice of the peace to do that for them.
While I realize it would be another hoop for couples to jump through but would it really be any more time than, say, taste-testing wedding cake? And anyone who did jump through the hoop would be that much more likely to treat their wedding not as a prom but as a covenant.
Here’s the article from the NY Times on the trend towards simpler, smaller weddings.
0 Is It Possible to Marry the Right Person?
I make it a point in wedding counseling, when presented with the inevitable opening- something droll and sentimental like ‘we’re so much in love,’ to reply: ‘big deal, so what? Being in love is probably the worst time to make a life-changing decision.’
I stole that quip from Stanley Hauerwas. It’s true. Love can blind people into making bone-headed decisions that are obvious to everyone else. It does, in fact.
Tim Keller in his book, The Meaning of Marriage, steals another of Hauerwas’ maxims: ‘You always marry the wrong person.’
In generations past, there was far less talk about “compatibility” and finding the ideal soul-mate. Today we are looking for someone who accepts us as we are and fulfills our desires, and this creates an unrealistic set of expectations that frustrates both the searchers and the searched for.
In John Tierney’s classic humor article “Picky, Picky, Picky” he tries nobly to get us to laugh at the impossible situation our culture has put us in. He recounts many of the reasons his single friends told him they had given up on their recent relationships:
“She mispronounced ‘Goethe.’”
“How could I take him seriously after seeing The Road Less Traveled on his bookshelf?”
“If she would just lose seven pounds.”
“Sure, he’s a partner, but it’s not a big firm. And he wears those short black socks.”
“Well, it started out great … beautiful face, great body, nice smile. Everything was going fine—until she turned around.” He paused ominously and shook his head. ”… She had dirty elbows.”
In other words, some people in our culture want too much out of a marriage partner. They do not see marriage as two flawed people coming together to create a space of stability, love and consolation, a “haven in a heartless world,” as Christopher Lasch describes it. Rather, they are looking for someone who will accept them as they are, complement their abilities and fulfill their sexual and emotional desires. This will indeed require a woman who is “a novelist/astronaut with a background in fashion modeling,” and the equivalent in a man. A marriage based not on self-denial but on self-fulfillment will require a low- or no-maintenance partner who meets your needs while making almost no claims on you. Simply put—today people are asking far too much in the marriage partner.