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Sunday, January 10, 2010

Healthy and Unhealthy Relationships, Part One
Second in a Series on Love, Relationships, Marriage and Sexuality: Insights from the Bible

By Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz

Colossians 3:12 – 14 New Revised Standard Version

¹² As God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. ¹³ Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. ¹⁴ Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.

We are at the beginning of a series on Love, Relationships, Marriage and Sexuality, and we are looking for insights from scripture, and from our faith, to counter some of the false messages we get from media and culture.

I talked last week about the trepidation I feel about trying to communicate with such a diverse audience of 4000 members and constituents, who include persons grieving the loss of a loved one, people who are newlyweds, persons who have been married for awhile, single people, divorced persons, committed gay couples, couples who have chosen not to have children, and couples with many children.  You can add your particular situation to the list.

And I asked for your feedback, your questions, your suggestions and your ideas.  Those have been arriving in abundance and I still hope for other feedback.

One of the first Emails I received was from Tom Drake who sent the report of some adults who asked some children, ages 4-8, what love means.  Here are some of the profound answers.

• Rebecca, age 8: when my grandmother got arthritis, she couldn’t even bend over and paint her toenails any more.  So my grandfather does it for her all the time, even when his hands got arthritis.  That’s love.
• Billy age 4: when someone loves you, the way they say your name is different.  You just know your name is safe in their mouth.
• Karl age 5: love is when a girl puts on perfume and a boy puts on aftershave and they go out and smell each other.
• Chrissy age 6: love is when you go out to eat and give somebody most of your french fries without making them give you any of theirs.
• Terri age 4: love is what makes you smile when you are tired.
• Danny age 7: love is when my mommy makes coffee for my daddy and she takes a sip before giving it to him to make sure the taste is OK.
• Bobby age 7: love is what is in the room with you at Christmas if you stop opening presents and just listen.
• Noelle age 7: love is when you tell a guy you like his shirt and then he wears it every day.
• Yummy age 6: love is like a little old woman and a little old man who are still friends even after they know each other so well.
• Karen age 7: when you love somebody, your eyelashes go up and down and little stars come out of you.
• Jessica age 8: you really shouldn’t say “I love you” unless you mean it.  But if you mean it, you should say it a lot.  People forget.

I have had several other Emails which I will be sharing with you over this series.  I had one church member, a father of young children, tell me after last week’s sermon about the typical challenge of balancing being a husband and father and doing his paid job and being supportive of his working spouse.  He said, “This is hard! It’s the hardest thing I have done!”

And I really identified with that and told him so.

Judy and I were married when she was 21 and I had just turned 22.  We married the week after we graduated from college. We had dated during college and got engaged our senior year. We had our first conflict after we had been married for about a week and it resulted from an insensitive remark and gesture on my part about dinner one night. We both have learned some things since then about how and when to speak to each other and sometimes how to cook together. We have grown up together.

We set off to seminary three months later where we lived for three years in a studio apartment in married student housing with our only bed being a hide-a-bed sofa which we unfolded each night and folded back up in the morning. She taught middle school all that time and supported us but we had very little money and would sometimes go to two or three different grocery stores on a Friday evening depending on which store had the best deal on ground beef and which had the best prices on something else.

We came to Littleton after graduating from SMU and I was the associate minister for three years at Littleton United Methodist Church and she taught High School English. We had no children for our first seven years of marriage until we moved to Colorado Springs with a new born son who had shown up with a disability. After that move, we were in a new, skeptical congregation. Just who does this 29 year old preacher think he is? We had one car, and for the first time in Judy’s life she had no teaching job. It was a very discouraging time. At that church the congregation met in a school gymnasium for two years and then we went through three building programs before we got into the final sanctuary. The demands were very heavy and we had become parents again five years after Todd’s birth when we welcomed Meredith into our growing family.

While I was almost always home each evening for dinner, there was usually a church meeting after dinner three or four evenings a week. And I was brought up short one week, when our daughter, Meredith was five and was assigned to draw a picture of her family. What she drew, and Judy showed me, was herself, her brother and her mother together in one group and her father over to the other side of the picture all alone. It was a painful and sobering portrayal that I took seriously and so I began to do some things differently.

When we came here to St. Andrew I wound up commuting back and forth from Colorado Springs for two years so that we could prepare to launch Todd into a new living arrangement with typical housemates. Then after moving here, Judy commuted for three years back to her job in Colorado Springs to the parent information center she and another former teacher had established for the 70,000 families in Colorado who have a child with special needs.

We have been married for 44 years. She is my best friend. We are best friends, business partners, parenting partners, sexual partners, spiritual pilgrimage partners and sometimes cooking partners. She is my adviser, counselor, editor, stalwart loving critic, and she was my nurse last year after major surgery.

I am still learning how to be the best spouse I can be and I still have lots of room to grow and learn because sometimes I can be really focused and self absorbed and introverted, and sometimes I need to listen better including the example of last week, when we had our most recent communication glitch. She said one thing and I heard a different thing. I don’t know if that has ever happened to any of you!

And one of the many things we have learned together as a couple is that love is more than just what we feel at times. It is commitment, acting in love even when the feelings may be weak, bearing with one another as the Colossians passage says, and being able to forgive each other.

We are a good match and are able to laugh together and play together, and we enjoy most of the same things, although we, also, have other things that each of us enjoys individually.

When I meet with engaged couples and ask them to tell me their history, they often begin by saying that when they got to know each other, they became, first of all, good friends. My response is that I hope that through all of their lives they remain, first of all, good friends.

One of the Emails from last week was from a parent who told me that when one of her sons was in high school and beginning to date, he came up with a set of guidelines for girls he wanted to date:

1. She must be smart. He had to enjoy conversing with her.
2. They must be friends first.
3. Looks don’t count (appearance does not trump guideline one or two).

His mom saw this as an interesting philosophy for a sixteen year old boy.

Many of you remember the book, Tuesdays with Morrie, in which sports writer Mitch Albom is visiting weekly with his former college professor who is dying.

Morrie tells him this: “There are a few rules I know to be true about love and marriage. If you don’t respect the other person, you are gonna have a lot of trouble. If you don’t know how to compromise, you are gonna have a lot of trouble. If you can’t talk openly, about what goes on between you, you are gonna have a lot of trouble. And if you don’t have a common set of values in life, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble.” The biggest value in a marriage, says Morrie is that, “you believe in the importance of your marriage.” From Tuesdays With Morrie by Mitch Albom, p 149.

By the way, those guidelines from Morrie might be useful, not only for persons who are already married, but also for persons who are thinking about marriage. Use them to evaluate how ready you are.

Philosopher Joseph Campbell says this about some guidelines for marriage. “When you make a sacrifice in marriage, you are sacrificing, not to each other, but to unity in a relationship. You are no longer in this one alone; your identity is in a relationship. Marriage is not a simple love affair, it is an ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of ego to a relationship in which the two have become one.” That quote might be a bit more controversial as a discussion topic, and my concern, about even using the quote, is that the sacrifices need to be made mutually and not just by one partner.

Judy and I have had the advantage in our relationship of having a common faith, a reliance on God and a common commitment to serve God and others outside ourselves. It might seem to be obvious for pastors and spouses but it is not always true. For many of you, this shared faith is true as well, and for others, that faith is more important to one spouse than to the other.

I have some suggestions for each member of the couple where faith and spiritual issues are more important to one partner than to the other. If you are the spouse to whom faith is not as important, let me suggest that you still give a try at being in worship and in service opportunities with your spouse, and to give respect to that partner’s practices and beliefs, since those beliefs and values are essential to your partner’s identity.

For the spouse to whom faith is more important, I encourage you to let your faith show itself in action (a quote from the Bible). If our faith does not help us become more tolerant and gracious and compassionate toward all persons, it is not the faith of Christ.

We talked last week about the importance of grace and forgiveness in any relationship because we all are unfinished, imperfect, sinful people who occasionally really screw up. Let me end with a story from writer Dean Nelson, who tells, in his recent book, about a time he did something that he knew would have terrible consequences.

He and his wife had spent two years planning their 25^th anniversary trip to Belgium where they had made plans to ride bikes along the canals and enjoy the arts and the sights and the jazz clubs. They had taken other anniversary trips but this was going to be the most special. On the Friday before they were to leave on Wednesday, they were at a notary’s office getting their revised wills notarized. They had their passports with them. His wife asked him to look and see when his passport expired. When he looked, you might imagine what he saw. It had already expired and they were five days away from the planned departure.

The notary told them that he could go to Los Angeles and stand in line all day to get it renewed. He checked on that and they only did that by appointment and the next appointment was the next Wednesday after they were supposed to depart.

He called a different office in Washington, DC where the person told him that they could fax some documents to him, he could sign them and FedEx them back with his expired passport. He got the documents, filled them out in the FedEx parking lot and sent them back. On Monday he called the DC office to check. Well, they had gotten everything but he had forgotten to sign one of the documents. His passport was rejected.

Here is what he says:

“My wife saw my body language and stood behind the chair I was sitting in while I discussed my options on the phone. She reached down and began to massage my shoulders. I tucked my chin at first hoping she wasn’t actually feeling for my windpipe, but when I realized that she was getting the picture that our anniversary trip was not going to happen because of me, after two years of planning, and she was still willing to share this shameful moment with me, I understood the concept of grace.” From God Hides in Plain Sight, by Dean Nelson, p. 141.

They were finally able to get the passport after some other machinations; it arrived by FedEx by 7:30 Wednesday morning, just two hours before the van arrived to take them to the airport. Here is how he ends this story.

“I remember the trip. I remember the tension that I caused. But what I remember most was that at my lowest point, I did not get condemnation. I got a neck rub. I got a massage that said, we are in this together regardless of how badly you screwed up.”

That message is a very Biblical message, is it not? It is the good news of the gospel, the good news about how God relates to us, and with that grace, we may be able to extend grace to each other in our friendships and our workplaces and in our families.