Lake House Weddings & Family

I have four sisters. This past weekend, the fourth and youngest of them got married.

Instead of doing the traditional wedding, where you invite every Tom, Dick and Harry that you've met over the last twenty years and treat them to a night of dining, dancing, and drinking on your dime, my sister wanted to do something smaller and more intimate. She rented a large lake house outside of Charlotte and invited the immediate families on both sides down for the weekend. The wedding would be Saturday afternoon.

Everyone arrived on Thursday or Friday, we spent the day on the lake Friday, Friday night we BBQ'd and hung out at the house, Saturday we golfed (the guys) or lunched (the girls), and Saturday afternoon we had the wedding in the backyard. Afterwards, we had a catered dinner on the back patio overlooking the lake. The party went into the night, and then everyone went home on Sunday.

Aside from it being a great weekend, it also reminded me what really matters about a wedding, and why we do them in the first place.

The first reason, of course, is that marriage is a visible reminder to us of Christ's relationship with the church. It reminds us of the covenant that God makes with us, through Christ, that he is going to love us because he loves us, not based on the deservedness of the beloved, but simply because he has decided he will love us. It is unbreakable; it is unending. Marriage reminds us of this.

When we have a marriage ceremony, this is what we are commemorating. This solemn service is a reminder of the enormity of the commitment of marriage. It symbolizes far more than we typically think; more of us would do well to take it seriously.

The second reason we have a wedding, however, is so that the vows that we make are done in the presence of witnesses. If it were just about the solemn reminder of what we are doing, the ceremony could be done in my office. I could put the fear of God into the couple. Or, perhaps a judge, with black robe, hidden behind a large wooden desk, raised up so that the poor couple is put into a submissive position by design. Yet it's about more than the reminder; it's about the witnesses. And these witnesses to the vows aren't just witnesses, they are people who, ideally, will actually hold the couple accountable to the vows that they have seen them make. They will remind them of what they said they would do; they will help them keep those vows when life is difficult. They will be there for them, supporting them, so that when life or marriage gets hard, there are other people to lean on.

Whittle down the multitude of people at any given wedding to the handful of people who will actually take their "witnessing" seriously; who, when the hard part of the vows (the worse, the poorer, the sickness) becomes the reality of the vows, will actually be there to make sure that the having/holding and loving/cherishing will actually be maintained until death does the couple part; you might find that it's not much more than the immediate family anyway. 

Well-intentioned people want to celebrate with the couple getting married. They are genuinely joyful at the celebration the couple is experiencing; genuinely desiring to honor them and help them on in their marriage and in their life. But life is long. Memories fade. "Witnesses" forget what they saw. There are only so many commitments we can be a party to witnessing before it is beyond our ability to hold them all up when the difficulties come.

It's fun to have huge parties, but sometimes it can overshadow what it is that we are actually witnessing, and why we are even there to begin with. It was nice to know that as I looked at the faces of the people witnessing this couples vow, they were going to be with the couple long after the party ended...

How to be a Christian

Every Christian I know has at some point wondered whether they were doing it right.

We wonder whether we are doing the right things, praying enough, giving enough, committed enough, sinning too frequently, going to church too infrequently, going to the right church or the wrong church with the right doctrine or wrong doctrine, whether we loved their neighbor too little, and on and on.

It's sad that so many of us live under that pained confusion, not ever really embracing joy, actually feeling quite burdened about all we believe, but it's not surprising. 

We're the first Christians to ever have lived in the 21st century. We can read all that we want about the people who came before us, but they didn't live in our context. Some things will be the same. Much won't be.

We're also the first Christians to have unlimited access to everyone else's thoughts, all the time. We're exposed to hundreds of voices declaring that they've finally figured out exactly what Jesus would think, all the time. We're reminded over and over that even when we think we're doing pretty good in our faith journey, someone thinks we've got the whole thing screwed up.

I had a conversation with a friend recently who mentioned that he was preaching through a particularly difficult Old Testament passage, and before preaching it he knew that he was going to have a handful of young fundamentalists who were going to tell him that he didn't preach enough about the law and God's holiness and how God should slay us all in our path. It's no wonder that we feel conflicted, like we're messing up. What if those young fundamentalists are right? What if our primary way of approaching God should be in fear, as if we're one wrong move away from getting the lightning bolt? One misstep away from his wrath?

That fear–the fear that God is just waiting to catch us screwing up–is not just the fear that keeps the religious-types devoted, but it's also the fear that keeps the wayward from coming close. For every believer who comes to church with a scowl because they are pretty sure that's what God wants from them–unadulterated, pure, religious dedication–is another believer who avoids it because they just feel like they don't measure up.

Both the Pharisee and the Tax Collector are invited into the family of God because of the Gospel.

This is why the Gospel is about freedom. The Pharisee needs to be freed from the massive burden of self-righteousness, and no little amount of self-doubt, that comes along with believing we have to earn our credibility before God. The tax collector needs to be freed from the burden of knowing that he can't measure up, or is somehow kept at an arms length from the true kingdom. The Gospel doesn't agree or disagree; it actually provides a whole new framework. It's no longer about you. It's about Jesus.

The more we can embrace that freeing thought, the more we'll simply be Christians. No heavy burdens. Just resting in what Jesus has done.

Recapturing our Joy

The train of thought went like this:

I was somewhat sullen after a long summer, filled with more challenges and tragedy than I could have possibly expected.

I thought back to when I was feeling really fulfilled in my work and ministry, and remembered that it was earlier this year.

What was I doing then? I was writing more frequently–nearly every day, in fact. I was working up to something; writing was an outlet not just for my own joy but also for the burden I felt to share what God was doing in the world and how we should think about it.

I didn't feel like I could have that joy again.

And then I remembered the first post that I had written when I got back into writing. It was titled, "restarting and the Christian life." I read it again, and remembered. Sometimes you just need to get back on the horse.

The most shocking thing to me, perhaps, is that I got away from it to begin with. Why did that happen? What squeezed out the most joy-filled part of my day, the part I really looked forward to, the part that made me feel like every other part of the day was worth it? Of course I'm speaking about a work day here, not the day generally. There are plenty of things to make the day, each day, worth living, even if I were to place the general calling of the Christian that gave my life purpose to the side. A wife, children, the blessing of provision, and on it goes. Yet most of us go to work day in and day out and we can say that we love our work but what we mean is that we love spects of our work and we endure the other aspects of it because they allow us to do the things that we really love.

A friend of mine who is an exceptional communicator and pastors his church well through that gift said to me that he loved preaching so much on Sunday that he endured the meetings throughout the week just so that he would have a chance to do that. That sentiment resonates.

Somehow that thing that I really enjoyed, and felt like I was fulfilled in, got squeezed out. Life does that. We need to protect the things that give us joy, or they get bumped to the side. I think it's for the same reason that our most important relationships tend to get neglected; we assume they will always be there, so we don't invest much in them. Then we find that they have deteriorated. Or we find that we aren't doing the things that bring us joy anymore, because life took over.

That joy need to be recaptured.

There are things in your life that used to bring you joy. Maybe it was a particular activity, maybe it was a relationship. Maybe you used to find joy in reading, but you haven't read in a while. Maybe you used to find joy in your marriage, and you wonder where it went. Many times we are concerned we may never get that joy back. The answer, I think, is just to press in. Start reading. Begin the activity. Invest in the relationship. Just do it.

You may find that the joy can be recaptured after all.

Why the Resurrection Matters

Another Easter Sunday has come and gone and with it, the temptation to let the "Resurrection" fade into the background much the same as Christmas fades into the past and we are left paying off our credit cards from over-celebration. We don't celebrate in the same fashion for Easter. Despite the attempts to commercialize it with the Easter Bunny, new outfits, and candy, it still remains primarily a religious holiday that isn't recognized by people other than those who identify with Christianity. Yet the temptation to move on with our lives and compartmentalize the truths of the resurrection is just as much of a temptation as it is to throw out the wrapping paper and mentally move on to the next big event.

Easter is fundamentally different than Christmas, however. While the events of Christmas are incredibly important and contain a great deal of doctrinal truth, they don't stand on the same level as the events of Easter. In fact, the events of Christmas have no value whatsoever apart from Easter, since the death and resurrection of Jesus are the culmination of everything that he came to accomplish. If they never occurred, then his birth, life, and whatever else occurred would still have been interesting, miraculous, potentially life-altering even if we chose to use Christ's life as an example, but not near as important as they are because of the events of Easter weekend. I'm not sure if the importance of the resurrection can be overstated: if it doesn't happen, there is no hope, there is no ultimate salvation, and practically there is no foundation for the church. The first two points are theological in nature and I won't address them here. It is that last point–the practical necessity of the resurrection for the church–that I want to address.

As we examine the broader culture (at least of America) it's easy to notice that there are some very sharp disagreements regarding how we view various cultural issues. Pick any issue you'd like, and chances are you can find not just diverse views on the subject, but polarizing views. Our tendency is to believe that these disagreements are themselves the problem, but they aren't. They are a symptom of the problem. The real problem, as it turns out, is that we are standing on fundamentally different foundations.

Imagine that the two of us were standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon, and we began to describe to one another what we see. To a certain extent, our descriptions may seem similar. We might describe a deep gorge, the relative color of the dirt and clay, the vastness of what we are viewing. As we go further in our descriptions, however, they inevitably begin to diverge. One of us argues that the canyon is a thousand feet deep, the other says it is only a couple of hundred feet. Perhaps we argue about the vegetation, or what it is that makes it so beautiful, or how the sun sets–or rises–on the opposite end of the canyon. Soon we would find that our disagreement is so sharp, that it is impossible for us to figure one another out. We end up completely polarized, convinced that the other person is a lunatic.

Of course you may have already figured out the problem. We are viewing the same canyon, but from two different vantage points. Where we are standing makes all the difference in recognizing why it is that we disagree on our perspective. Once we understand that we are not even fundamentally seeing the same things, we can come to terms with the fact that we disagree.

This is why the real issues of culture have nothing to do with our perspectives on the issues, and have everything to do with the foundation on which we are standing. Christians in particular have taken for granted that for the vast majority of the history of the United States, most of the population stood on a similar foundation. Call it "Judeo-Christian values" or whatever you wish, but really it was just the foundation that there was a God and that we could find out more about him in the Bible. I don't assume that the entirety of the country was Christian, let alone religious, but at very least the foundation was roughly similar. Thus, if there were disagreements on certain subjects, they weren't extreme. We might be arguing about the color of the clay in the canyon, but at least we are looking at the same clay.

Unfortunately that foundation has shifted and the vast majority of culture is no longer standing on the same foundation. This is the effect of post-modernity that claims that there are no universal truths. One of the impacts of this was the supposed destruction of the meta-narrative, which is by it's nature a comprehensive truth claim. Of course the theory falls on it's head. Even saying that there is no universal truth is a comprehensive truth claim about how the world works, it simply shifts the responsibility for decision making to the individual, rather than the universal. Again, claiming that every decision is up to the individual is a universal claim. Thus the meta-narrative was not done away with, but simply changed, and as a result, we find that when we are describing what appear to be similar issues, they are not the same at all. Those of us who are Christians are standing on an entirely different foundation than those who are not-Christians, and vice versa.

This in itself is not a bad thing, it is just something that simply "is". If anything, it provides an opportunity for Christians to have more clarity about what it is that they actually believe. I also think that it should provide Christians more opportunity to have grace with skeptics, since we ought to understand that the issues is not a disagreement, per se, it is a foundational issue. We are not standing on the same footing. We aren't looking at the canyon from the same angle. I can't expect my skeptic friend to see the world from the same perspective that I do, unless we first understand where it is that we are standing.

All of this brings me back to the church, and my original point about the practical need to remember the resurrection. Over the past decade, at least, and perhaps longer than that, post-modernity has come into the church in a variety of ways. The easiest entry way has been to offer differing perspectives on traditional Christian perspectives. Some of those perspectives have been healthy and offered appropriate correctives in the church. Like all institutions (and individuals, I might add), when you have held onto a particular belief long enough, you typically end up abusing it in it's application. For example, the longer you believe you are a safe driver, the less likely you are to use your seat belt. The better you are at a particular activity–skiing, for example–the more likely you are to push the limits verging into the unsafe, even for an expert. The same goes for churches. What might begin as a helpful doctrine or tradition can end up being abused in the long run, in desperate need of correction and a reminder of where the application should begin and end. Other perspectives, however, have not been corrective in nature, but downright incorrect. As a seminary professor said, "the only corrective to bad theology is better theology." Unfortunately many of the critiques in the last decade have not been better theology, but just more bad theology from a different perspective. The pendulum might swing to embrace it, but it doesn't mean that we are any better off. Change for changes sake is not necessarily a good thing. So how do we combat these perspectives? The answer is the resurrection.

The resurrection provides Christians with the foundation on which unity can be built as a church, for at least two reasons. The first reason encompasses both Jesus death, and resurrection, which puts all Christians on the same plane. If Jesus death and resurrection are real, historical events that happened and on which Christianity is based, so that faith and confidence in those events is essential to being a Christian, then the very nature of them mean that all of us arrive into this new kingdom of God on the same train. No one gets in on their own power. No one is more righteous than another. In fact, we all have the same righteousness from the same savior and get in on the same ticket.

The second reason that the resurrection is necessary is that it proves that Jesus is the king of this new kingdom, and thus, he gets to set the expectations. I believe that one of the chief reasons that some of the sharp disagreements that the church has experienced with the culture have become sharp disagreements within the church itself is that many within the church have unwittingly shifted their foundation. This was more evident than ever in the week leading up to Easter when a variety of articles were published claiming to come from Christian sources, but as I examined them, I noticed that they weren't Christian at all. They claimed to have a similar value structure, but they so minimized the death and resurrection of Jesus that those two events were no longer the foundation on which they based the rest of their so-called "truth". Realizing that meant that I could accept their conclusions at face value–as the author's opinion–but also realize that they weren't Christian perspectives, even though they claimed to be. It has become increasingly easy for people in the 21st century church to disagree with Jesus, or try to change his words to fit our meaning, and the reason that we can do it is because we, essentially, deny the power of the resurrection or take it to mean something it doesn't mean. The resurrection is not hope just for hope's sake; it is hope because it revealed that Jesus really was who he said he was. Jesus really was God incarnate who had the ability to defeat death on our behalf. The power of the resurrection wasn't limited just to him; it's a power that all who put their faith in Christ have access to. Far from being just some nebulous, ill-defined hope, it is a hope that very clearly identifies Jesus as God of very God, and King of every King. In other words, if we believe the resurrection is true, we don't get to disagree with Jesus.

As believers, then, the starting point for our unity must be the resurrection of Jesus. This is what gives him His claim to authority, as well as clarifying for us why we don't get to be authoritative in our own right. The Resurrection is the foundation on which the Christian views the rest of the world. When we stand on the power of the Resurrection, then we may still discuss and dialogue about what, exactly, Christ believed, but we don't get to disagree with Jesus or the rest of the Bible, or interpret it to fit our cultural milieu or cultural understanding at the time. Rather we stand on the authority of Christ himself.

If there are sharp disagreements in the church, I am much less interested in knowing what you think about the disagreement, and much more interested in knowing what you think about Jesus. Is he the risen Lord, or not? If he is, then you and I can both submit our opinions to his. If he isn't, then we're not on the same foundation to begin with, and I don't care much that you disagree with me. We'll never agree on what the canyon looks like so long as we are standing on different lookouts.

This is why we can't put Easter in the past. Easter Sunday, and what it represents, are not just a day in the life of the church calendar, but the foundation on which every day must be built. To the extent that we remember that, we'll have a united church. To the extend that we forget it, we'll be divided. It might really be as simple as that.