A Wedding On the Air

I recently performed a wedding that was broadcast on the radio.

I teach the weekly Baraca Radio Sunday School Class from the First Baptist Church of Anderson, South Carolina.  A couple who had been attending the broadcast at our church early Sunday mornings asked me to marry them.  The lesson each week is available 24/7 on the church's website: www.andersonfbc.org/baraca.

We followed the usual schedule for the broadcast, with a shortened lesson/sermon along with a vocal soloist and the wedding as the only deviation from our regular Sunday morning radio ministry.

The transcript of the lesson follows:

This is a distinctive morning for the Baraca Radio Sunday School Class, focusing on Christian principles of love and marriage, and culminating with the actual exchange of vows between Teresa Ross and Jack Abraham after our lesson.
A few weeks ago, Teresa came to me, worried about “love, honor, and obey” in the traditional vows. Was I going to call for her to obey Jack?  I told Teresa, that idea of the wife obeying the husband went out with the kerosene lamp.
When Pansy and I married, nearly forty-nine years ago, we both were mature Christian adults.  We never asked who was going to be the human head of the house.  We both had heads, and we both intended to use them.
Some years ago, when one of my nephews was getting married, I saw the absurdity of the husband being the head of the house simply because he is a male.   Terry was a handsome fellow, every bit of twenty years old.  He stood there with his beautiful bride, Denise, who also was twenty.  As I sat listening to the call for her to obey him, I thought, 
“What maturity, what wisdom does this boy have that gives him authority over this sweet girl that makes her promise a church full of relatives and friends that she is going to obey whatever he tells her to do?”
The codes of Bible times definitely favored men. In the time of Jesus, for example, a man could divorce his wife if she burned the toast. She had no recourse.   But the great biblical principle of marriage is in the first chapter of Genesis.  God created both the male and female in His own image. Because both are created in God’s image, they have equal standing before God.
All through the first chapter of Genesis, God as God makes the various elements of the heavens and the earth, He says each part of it is good.  
God made the sun and the moon and the stars, And God saw that it was good (v. 18). 
God made the simpler forms of life that inhabit the sea and the air, And God saw that it was good.  And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds and the cattle according to their kinds, and everything that creeps upon the ground according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.
After God made the first man and woman, God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.
But let’s go back to the creation of that first couple: So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
First, it says God created man in his own image. But then it says male and female he created them.
That first reference is to what we traditionally call mankind, or humankind.  But the writer wants us to know humans include male and female.  He made both to share His likeness.  Bottom line: He created both man and woman in His image.
He gave them charge over the rest of creation.  So the image of God means we are superior to the other life forms.
But it also means we are spiritual beings.  The image of God doesn’t mean we look like God, physically.  God is Spirit, not a physical being.   The second chapter of Genesis has God walking around in the garden like a farmer looking after His land.  But that is poetry.   
The New Testament says, God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.
So when God made male and female in His image, it meant each of us shares God’s essential qualities.  We share that with God, and we share it equally with each other.
I’ve presided over weddings in various settings.  My first wedding ever was for college mates at Hardin-Simmons University out in Abilene, Texas.  I still keep in touch with that bride and groom, Freddy and Maxine Blalock.
  Probably my most beautiful wedding location was at the foot of Toccoa Falls when I was one of the ministers at the First Baptist Church in Toccoa, Georgia, back before the terrible 1977 flood.  
I’ve done weddings at Anderson University,  at Table Rock State Park up in the South Carolina mountains.  I did a wedding in the back yard of a farm with live music by cows just across the fence.
  I did the honors for Phil Marett Junior and his wife Lynn as I stood by a hot air balloon and the couple stood in the basket.  They ascended after the ceremony.
My most unusual wedding experience was in Scotland.  Pansy and I were witnesses for a couple we met only minutes before the ceremony, in the village of Gretna Green — in a blacksmith shop, of all places. The story behind that goes back to England in the seventeen-hundreds. You had to announce your wedding at least two weeks in advance and had to be married by Church of England priests.
Scotland had no restrictions.  A couple could marry simply by declaring their intentions before two witnesses.  So the Old Blacksmith Shop in Gretna Green became a popular place for elopers. 
About all it took was for the officiant to ask, “Will you?”  The couple would say, “We will.”  Then the official would say, “OK, then you are.”
England has relaxed its marriage laws, and the fire no longer burns in The Old Blacksmith Shop, but thousands of couples with the fire of love in their hearts still exchange vows over the original anvil where the blacksmith once performed ceremonies for run-away Englanders.
Pansy and I went to Gretna Green, thinking we would tour The Old Blacksmith Shop. But just as our guide was getting us started, the man doing the weddings came in and asked us to be witnesses for Becky Barnett and Mark Jones, from Liverpool.
The secular ceremony called for faithfulness of one man and one woman to each other as long as they live.  Mark and Becky, both in their early thirties, also repeated the familiar vows "for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, for better or worse."  Then, as the wedding official struck the anvil with a hammer, he declared Mark and Becky to be husband and wife. Then the four of us signed official papers, documenting what had just happened.
The newlyweds invited us to a restaurant in the wedding complex for tea and "biscuits"  -- we call them cookies. So, over tea and cookies, we discovered a mutuality and have kept in touch.
Mark and Becky are both creative artists in Liverpool:  she a visual designer, he a musician.  
They had lived together about ten years before they finally got married.  They laughed at marrying as just doing what the culture expected. 
Mark said, when they decided to go ahead and marry, he didn’t think marriage would make any difference.  But it did.
They both began to sense a commitment they did not have, could not have — outside of marriage.  It put a secure flooring under their relationship.  This from a couple who had laughed at conventional morality. They had lived together for ten years.  They had a non-religious ceremony.  But they came to see the need for a permanent, loving commitment.
I’ve talked at length about casual settings and casual attitudes toward marriage.  Love often just means the excitement of the physical.  Too often, what we call love is selfish: What’s in it for me? 
The way they spell love, it has an “I”right in the middle of it.
I went along with those unusual settings because I wanted to help the couples.  But I wonder whether these settings reflect the desire to keep a safe distance away from the church building, for the generation that has rejected church in large numbers. But novel locations make great pictures. 
We have pictures of our grandchildren in a little corner next to our family room.  Jonathan and Vicky sent the pictures three or four years ago, and I had them framed as a birthday present for Pansy.  The pictures are sweet.  They caught Ethan at age eight and Addie about five.  But our grandkids have moved on beyond those pictures.  Ethan is pushing toward twelve and Addie has hurried past eight.
There’s usually a photographer at a wedding, recording the soloist’s magnificent song.  The bride’s dozen red roses.  Her gorgeous wedding dress.  The wedding pictures bring back memories of the ceremony.  But life moves on beyond that day.  Much like my grandchildren, we change.
Sometimes, the wedding never turns into a marriage.  Something goes wrong.  The song is a mere echo on the backroads by the rivers of your memory and aren’t necessarily gentle on your mind.  The one remaining rose is pressed between pages of a Bible that’s never open.  The bride gave the lovely wedding dress to Goodwill and cut the groom out of the picture but still admires the dress.  We’ve seen couples like that.
But every wedding is a sign of hope.   As pastor in New York’s Hudson River Valley, 
I re-married a couple in the parsonage.  In that community, I also married a couple in their eighties.  Talk about hope! The groom’s first wife had died, and he was marrying her sister.   On a snowy Sunday afternoon, I stood in the archway between the living room and dining room — a step away from the table, richly laden with the wedding feast.
We’ve come today to the marriage vows for a mature couple who didn’t run away to Scotland. Teresa and Jack have been planning this wedding for months.  They came to me, a Christian minister, asking the blessing of God and the church.
Genesis 2 gives the basis for marriage: Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh.  Jesus quotes that.  So does Paul.  
The example of Christ does not permit any person — man or woman — to be harsh and demanding, especially toward the marriage partner.  It’s not easy to be harsh and demanding in a sweet, loving spirit.
In First Corinthians 13 (vv. 4-8a), Paul spins a poem about the greatness of God’s kind of love. 
Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right.  Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.  Love never ends; 
So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
The challenge for each Christian, especially each wife and husband, is to model God’s kind of love.

A Song for Father's Day

“My mama was a cotton picker and

My daddy was a field hand.

My mama had the face of an angel and

My daddy was a mighty man.”

I googled those lyrics again and again before they finally came up in a Twitter.  Here at Father’s Day, I needed the words because they are a good poetic description of my parents.  

And yet, these words are not just poetry.  They are pretty literal.  

Well, not quite literal.  When I was growing up in West Texas, my whole family spent the fall months in the cotton patch.  This meant my brothers and sisters and I missed most of first semester of school — however long it took to harvest Uncle Jim and Aunt Chessie’s crop — but we didn’t pick cotton.  We pulled bolls.  The end result was similar: We filled Uncle Jim’s trailer with the white fluffy stuff.  But the process was different.

When you picked cotton, you plucked the cotton out of the burr or boll.  When you pulled bolls, you broke the boll off the stalk with the cotton in it, removing the stems and the leaves, and put the boll and cotton into the sack. West Texas gins had an upfront process that separated the cotton from the burr.

Everything about manually harvesting cotton — whether picking or pulling — has disappeared with technology.  It’s all gathered by machines, and I’m not at all nostalgic about “the good old days.”

Even so, if the harvest had been mechanized in the 1940s, Daddy would have had to find some other way to scrape out a living for his wife and five kids, probably involving all seven of us in that endeavor as well.

Another way the words to the song aren’t literal:  We never called our female parent “Mama.”  She was always “Mother.” In retrospect, it seems odd that the softer, more outwardly loving parent had the more formal appellation, while we called our sterner parent the softer name.  “Father” would never have worked.  He was “Daddy.”

Some of the lyrics to that song about cotton picking fit our family to a T: 

Mama in the song wore a skirt made from a flour sack.  So did Mother and my two sisters.  And my brothers and I wore flour-sack shirts — all made on a foot-powered sewing machine — to go with our overalls.

Another line from the song hits home: “I still draw strength from my daddy’s strong back and my mama’s sweet face.”

Daddy was not big and muscular, but he was strong.  In the cotton field, owned by his youngest sister and her husband, Daddy moved quickly along three rows at a time, straddling one and working the one on either side.  He did that while we toiled over one or two rows, depending on our level of physical maturity.

He quit school when he was thirteen or fourteen, probably because his mother or daddy one too many times told him what he was supposed to do.  To show them, he left home and was on his own the next fifty years.  Along the way, he was no more disposed to taking orders from the men who signed his paychecks than he had been with his folks back home.

He never learned a trade, but he was good with his hands, stacking feed, chopping cotton, milking cows, driving a John Deere or Farmall tractor on somebody else’s farm, or pushing a wheelbarrow of cement for a building contractor.

We lived in a string of different communities, most within a thirty-mile radius of Sweetwater, the county seat of Nolan, County, Texas, as Daddy moved from farm job to farm job.  But we frequently returned to the small farm belonging to Mother’s mother. As Robert Frost said, in “The Death of the Hired Man,” “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

Grandma was always ready to take in Mother, her only child, and us grandchildren, but she probably felt a case of “have to” when it came to her son-in-law.  

Daddy had a quick mind.  If he’d had the patience to learn chess, he would have been a master.  In card games, checkers, or dominoes, he could anticipate his opponents’ moves and what cards or dominoes were in their hands.

Texans play “Forty-two,” a bidding game with dominoes.  I’ve seen him get, literally, fighting mad when his partner in Forty-two made what he considered a dumb play.  Once, with a nephew as his partner, Daddy jumped up and almost knocked over the card table in his effort to hit my cousin.

Though he owned no house, he was the head of any house he lived in, other than his mother-in-law’s.  You argued or disagreed with him at your peril.  As the eight of us were at breakfast in Grandma’s crowded kitchen one morning, I was seated next to Daddy.  I expressed my opinion about something, and he said, “I don’t care what you think.”  In return, I said, “And I don’t care what you think.”  Before there was time for another thought, I found myself in the back yard, he had his belt off, and my back end was stinging.

He and Mother struggled financially all their lives, never owning their own home and buying their first car after I was out of college and seminary.

With his harsh exterior, “loving” was nowhere near the top of my list of adjectives for Daddy.  But with hindsight, I can see, even as he lived with pressures of holding a job and keeping Sears, Roebuck and Piggly Wiggly at bay as they pressed for payment, he found ways to express his love:

When he and my older brother Lee Roy and I would hitchhike into Sweetwater on Saturdays, he would buy us hamburgers and give us enough change for movie tickets.  

He expressed affection by getting me or one of my brothers in a headlock with his left arm and raking his right knuckles across the scalp in a “Dutch rub” or a “dry shampoo.”

If any of us got sick, Daddy left the nursing to Mother, but he kept close watch to see whether it was anything serious.

When we made good grades or received recognitions, we would get a hug or a pat on the back.

When I went forward during a revival meeting to acknowledge my faith in Christ, he wasn’t there to see it because he wasn’t much into church in my pre-college years.  But he was visibly moved when we came home and my older sister told him and Mother, “Lawrence professed this morning.”

When any of us got recognition in school, he and Mother were proud. When I was in high school plays, he was there. When I graduated from high school, they were there.  

When I publicly declared my sense of calling to the ministry, he expressed his joy, and he was there to hear my first “sermon,” all three minutes of it.  When I started to college to study for the ministry, he told me he was proud of me as he apologized for having no money to spare that he could give for financial support.

He was on the edge of tears when I told them I was going to the seminary in Kentucky, rather than the one much closer by in Fort Worth.

Both he and Mother readily came to love Pansy, with good reason.  They were always glad to see us back for visits, and they loved our sons.  The last time I saw Daddy alive, he was heavily sedated and in and out of wakefulness.  Shortly after I arrived, when Mother said, “Lawrence is here,” his very last words to me were a question just before he sank back into sleep: “How are Russell and Jonathan?”

Today, thirty-five years after his last Father’s Day, I think of positive examples he left me:

• A deep desire for honesty — even though it often cost him a job because he was too quick to speak his mind

• A determination to work hard — leaving me in the dust when it comes to manual dexterity

• An unembarrassed, unapologetic love for his wife — often finding ways to get her small gifts, a box of handkerchiefs or inexpensive perfume for no special occasion

 • A love for his children -- even though it may not find expression often enough

So, though he and I didn’t often say it in words to each other when he was alive, I’ll say it now:
 I love you, Daddy.

The World Came to Live Next Door