A Vermont Wedding

I did a wedding last week for a young couple who lives in Massachusetts.  The bride was from Lexington.  She and her new husband attended the University of Vermont at the same time some years ago and then both received Master’s degrees from Columbia.  They only met later, though, while living and working in New York.  She wrote for the New York Times. He is a writer of children’s books.  They later moved to the Boston area to pursue another course, Teach for America in his case.  She plans to enter Harvard Divinity School in the fall.

 

I first knew the bride as a very engaged and inquisitive high school student at the Episcopal camp in Lexington.  She had lots of questions.  She still does.  And a lot of them, both then and now, have to do with faith.  And, both then and now, a lot of them have helped me understand my own faith better.  The Vermont wedding was such an occasion. 

She has good Episcopal instincts, even if she is more enamored of Buddhism at the moment than Christianity.  She worked with me to construct a service, in accordance with the rubrics of the Prayer Book, mind you, that was respectful of guests of many different faith traditions as well as those of none at all.  None of it was inconsistent with Christianity.  It just wasn’t always explicitly Christian.

The final blessing, however, was.  I suggested using the Nuptial Blessing from the Prayer Book.  It is quite beautiful in its realism about married life, and it is distinctly Christian, Eastern Orthodox in origin.  But the bride wanted to make one final change. 

She was not comfortable be with the line, “We give you thanks for your tender love in sending Jesus Christ to come among us, to be born of a human mother, and to make the way of the cross to be the way of life.”  The way of the cross, she said, would not be understood by many of those present, especially her non-Christian friends.  It is admittedly a difficult concept. 

We worked on finding just the right language that would work.  Finally we came up with “sacrificial love” to get at the idea.  “We give you thanks for sending Jesus Christ  . . . to make the way of sacrificial love to be the way of life.”  And that, I think, hits the nail right on the head. 

The way of sacrificial love is indeed something I learned something about from marriage, the most life-giving experience of my life.  It is something I have learned a bit about from being a parent, from which I have found more life than I can say.  It is something I have learned from friendship, which has been a great blessing indeed.  It is something I have learned from being a pastor, as in helping a young couple figuring out life and faith find a way to make a traditional liturgy work for them with integrity (well, fairly traditional). 

I think that is what Jesus says in the Gospel for this week when he talks about the bread of life, another metaphor I think my young friends would have struggled with. Jesus said to the crowd, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty” (Jn. 6:36).  The bread of life is the way of sacrificial love.  Those who receive it and live it, lack for nothing that matters for life. 

In fact, the Jesus way, over and over, turns out to be the way of sacrificial love.  It is the way of life.  It is a mystery that faith sees.  My young friends had the faith, by whatever name, to see it.  And they found a way to invite others to see it in their own way, too.  And, of course, they gave the same gift to me.

Peace,

Holiness and Integrity

This week’s Old Testament lesson (2 Sam. 11:1-15) is the story we usually know as being about David and Bathsheba. It is really more about David and Uriah, Bathsheba’s husband. And even then, I think I’ve been looking at this story a little wrongly. I’ve been thinking of it as being about David and Uriah in relation to Bathsheba. And that is partly true. I think I’m coming to see it as really being mostly about David and God. Well, mostly it’s about God.

You remember the story, of course. David, while walking on his roof, observes Bathsheba bathing. Uriah, who was a soldier, was away at the time fighting the king’s wars against the Ammonites. “So David sent messengers to get her, and she came to him, and he lay with her” (v.4). Soon Bathsheba sent word to David that she was pregnant.

When Uriah returned from the battlefield, David first directed him to return to his home and wife. David must have thought Uriah’s timely return to his wife would conceal the child’s true paternity.

Uriah, though, in a show of utter selflessness and honor refused to go to the comfort of his own house while the ark of God resides in a tent and while Uriah’s compatriots were away from home on the field of battle. David is not impressed with Uriah’s thorough decency. He resolved to have Uriah murdered instead.

The story is not so much about David and Bathsheba. Their dalliance merely sets up what is to come.

The story is not so much about David and Uriah, although the contrast between the two is striking.

The story is about David and God, and mainly it is about God’s response to David and God’s unshakable devotion to David. Or really, it is about God’s unshakable fidelity to the promises God has made to David, whether David deserves that or not. It is about God’s unshakable fidelity to God’s own integrity.

Now, to be sure, God will speak a severe judgment against David for David’s evil. That comes next week. But God does not retreat from God’s promise to David, either. That was last week. “Forever I will keep my steadfast love for David, and my covenant with him will stand firm. I will establish his line forever, and his throne as long as the heavens endure. . . . Once and for all I have sworn by my holiness; I will not lie to David. His line shall continue forever, and his throne endure before me like the sun. It shall be established forever like the moon, an enduring witness in the skies” (Ps. 89:28-29, 35-37).

In the end, the point is really not so much Bathsheba’s relationship with David or Uriah’s honor or David’s treachery. It is all about God’s holiness and not nearly so much what we do in response, good or bad. Our response matters, but God‘s integrity to God’s own word is the real point. Samuel is telling us something about God and not so much about Uriah, Bathsheba, or even David.

It is this: God’s holiness is in God’s integrity. So is ours. 

Peace, 

      

The Flag

It’s difficult, I think, for non-Southerners to understand why removing the Confederate flag from the capitol grounds in South Carolina could possibly be something that arouses such emotion to retain it.  Here’s the thing.  It’s difficult for me as a Southerner to understand, too.  It’s difficult because it requires me to come to terms with some things. 

 

When my son studied the Civil War in the eighth grade.  As the unit came to a close, all of the students wore Civil War costumes to school one day.  The boys were given the choice of coming as Union or Confederate soldiers.  And even though he lived in Atlanta and had ancestors who fought for the Confederacy, my son chose the Union.  It was not the majority choice.  It made me very proud.

It made me very proud even if I had been brought up to believe in something called “Southern pride.”  It made me very proud even if I had been taught in my own childhood that the Confederate flag was a symbol of something noble about a “lost cause” rather than a symbol of racism.  Those are the phrases I’ve been surprised to hear brought out again over the last few weeks as if they made the Confederate flag defensible.  Of course, they don’t.  The flag went up over the South Carolina capitol in 1962 and made its appearance in the state flag of Georgia, my home, in 1956.  They were always a symbol of opposition to racial justice and not of some vague myth of something called Southern pride.  Happily, that symbol has been removed from both, and needs to be removed from the one state flag in which it remains. 

So why all the emotional reaction to what is so obviously right?  I think it’s because Southerners have a hard time coming to terms with the Civil War.  It’s amazing the things I’ve heard this week about the War (Southerners always capitalize this word when referring to the Civil War) and the South’s motivations for rebellion as the flag removal issue was debated.  Here’s the thing I think Southerners have to face.  While the causes of the war are complex and the reason people fought are many, there’s no getting around that the defense of slavery is simply indefensible.  Any way you cut it, slavery had a lot to do with it.  In fact, it’s pretty difficult to get around that that was the main reason for it, or at the very least, that without slavery, the whole thing wouldn’t have happened.

This is what makes it very difficult for us, some more so than others.  It’s difficult for me to conceive of my ancestors who fought for the South as monsters.  I don’t know whether or not they owned slaves, but they may have.  It would still be difficult for me to see them as monsters.  I didn’t know them, of course, but I knew the children they reared as my grandparents, who themselves had a more moderate approach to race (my grandfather referred to the Klan as “fools,” but it may have been for the attire).  And I learned a lot about how to live and love from these people. 

Here’s what I as a Southerner have come to realize.  Try as I once might have, it is impossible to justify my ancestors’ actions in the War, at least to the extent I know what those actions were.  They may have been fighting to preserve a dying economic system.  It was indefensible.  They may have just been fighting to protect their homes and owned no slaves at all.  It is just as indefensible.  They were undoubtedly culturally conditioned and maybe it’s wrong to judge them by the standards of a later day.  Still, though, there’s no defense.  After all, they were capable of moral thought and, although I’m sure there would have been a price to pay, could have dissented from the majority point of view, just like their descendent, my son.  That would have made them the real Southern heroes of the War. 

So that’s what I have to come to terms with.  Most of my Southern compatriots three generations back were conformists in a system of evil.  I’m going to hold onto the fact that they weren’t evil themselves, not because of Southern mythology but because I have personal evidence of the love they passed down in my family.  But it doesn’t mean I can defend their actions in any way, unless there were some I don’t know of back there who had the moral courage to stand up for right. 

I think this is what white Southerners have to come to terms with.  Getting rid of the flag is a good step.  I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that coming to terms with it evokes no small amount of emotion.
 

And, by the way, I hardly think Southerners are the only ones who have some things to come to terms with.  It’s just that the presenting issues for us, like flags, are less subtle and lend themselves less to denial.  That may the grace of being a Southerner today.

Peace,