(Tim) From the Pulpit of Church of the Good Shepherd
Wedding of Lucas Weeks and Hannah Bayly
May 17, 2008
That He Might Sanctify Her
Ephesians 5: 21-33
Lucas and Hannah, it’s a curious thing that the God Who made us, the One who is our Creator and therefore knows us best, has not left us free to develop according to our own inclinations. He does not abandon us to our own sentiments and passions...
As I was in the prime of my days, When the friendship of God was over my tent; When the Almighty was yet with me, And my children were around me; When my steps were bathed in butter, And the rock poured out for me streams of oil! (Job 29:4-6)
(Tim) Lord willing, in a few hours our third daughter, Hannah Marie, will be married to Lucas Dee Weeks, son of Ron and Doris Weeks. This will leave Mary Lee and me with one child still living at home--Taylor, our fifteen year old son.
As I sit here writing the wedding sermon, it occurs to me that the joyful sadness Mary Lee and I feel as our Hannah departs is a graceful sadness...
Continue reading "Joy tinged with sadness on a wedding day..." »
Marriage is the melding together of two completely incompatible forces, man and woman. Yet this terribly difficult work is the black soil God has ordained to produce creation's most precious and beautiful fruit, children.
Presiding over marriage ceremonies can be ticklish, and one of the many hurdles is what is known as "the unity candle," a row of three tapers, two lit prior to the beginning of the ceremony and the third immediately after the exchange of vows and rings. The question is what to do about the first two candles after the third has been lit?
For years, the bride and groom did the right thing without thinking about it: together, they took the two outside candles and, joining the flames, lit the middle candle together and then blew out the two outside candles. Then, several years ago during a rehearsal, a bride told me she and her bridegroom would be leaving all three candles burning because "After we're married, we don't lose our individual personalities and get swallowed up in each other."
"Well actually, yes, that's precisely what happens" I responded. "The 'two become one,' not three." So this has been added to the things we have to discuss during our premarital counseling sessions. I have no defense for the fact that I was officiating at a marriage ceremony where this mindset was present. Shame on me for doing such a poor job during our premarital counseling sessions, but we all learn, don't we?
Dad used to say every article in Reader's Digest fit into one of three categories: "Oh, the wonder of it," "Oh, the horror of it," and just plain "Oh."
Last week I was skin diving off the beach of Florida's Caladesi Island State Park. Mary Lee and I had a wedding in Orlando on Memorial Day and we'd taken a couple days of vacation in the Clearwater Beach area. Mary Lee had heard that Caladesi Island was beautiful so we drove up to Honeymoon Island and took the ferry over. She was on the beach with her book and I was out in the water looking for sand dollars and shells. All of a sudden my mask got dark, but the darkness seemed to be inside the mask!
Being color blind, it took a moment to realize what the darkness was, but soon it was clear I'd gotten a nosebleed and my mask was filled with blood. I ripped the mask off and rinsed it out, but as soon as I put it on, it again began to fill with blood. Then it occurred to me that, for once in my life, the nosebleed thing was no big deal. After all, I was in water and the water quickly washed it all away.
For a while, I kept pulling the mask off to rinse it, but then I realized the nose bleed was less of a big deal than I'd thought: I didn't even need to take my mask off and rinse it since the purge valve would work as well with blood as it did with water. So then I just cleared the mask in the normal way, blowing air into the mask to displace the water and blood. (Now you know more than you ever wanted to know about nosebleeds while skin diving, right?)
Mary Lee got up from her perch on the sand and came out into the water to talk. She suggested I go over and offer to help two men who were looking for a pair of sunglasses one of them had dropped into the water. I swam over and offered my help. They told me the general area where they thought the sunglasses had fallen and I began to sweep the area under water. A couple times I came up to get oriented, once quite near one of the men. Seeing the blood, he asked me whether I was worried about sharks? I said, "No, not really," but when I went back under, I was worried about sharks.
There wasn't much I could do, though, other than to get out of the water and gross out the people on the beach as I stood there waiting for the bleeding to stop. Much better to be under water with the water washing it all away. While waiting I remembered my son, Taylor, had said that if a shark attacked you, you needed to punch it in its gills or eyes--not its mouth. My fist was ready.
It took about a half hour before the bleeding stopped. I was relieved not to have to worry about sharks anymore. The two men left without finding their glasses and I continued to sweep up and down the beach, picking up dead sand dollars and shells. About an hour after the men left, I found a pair of sunglasses, but Mary Lee said they were ugly so we threw them out on our way back to the ferry.
In the car on the way home we talked about how disastrous it would be if the nosebleed returned during the wedding, but we forgot to knock on wood...
Note from Tim Bayly: Chris Arsenault and his wife are professional photographers, and Chris just left a very helpful comment below this post on digital wedding photography. I hope our good readers will open the comments under this post and read his comment.
In premarital counseling, I encourage the couple to limit their spending as much as possible on everything except...
Hiring a wedding photographer.
Here's a helpful article pointing out that wedding photographers are one of the last bastions of non-digital photography. I'm a complete convert to digital photography myself. I started with a Canon PowerShot A80 but this year moved to a Canon Powershot S2 IS 5MP Digital Camera with 12x Optical Image Stabilized Zoom
Well, read the article for an overview of the subject, as well as recommended questions to ask prospective wedding photographers who promise to take digital pictures. And for the record, I would recommend that anyone who is in the habit of taking pictures on a digital camera hire a wedding photographer who agrees to take digital pictures only.
Note: The following essay is the fruit of research I've done on the history of marriage ceremonies, specifically their liturgy. I've asked the question "How can my work as a pastor officiating at marriage ceremonies be used by God to strengthen the commitment within our congregation to God's Truth in the area of the meaning and purpose of sexuality?"
I've been to too many weddings in which the presiding pastor didn't bother "improving" the time, by which I mean that the very areas of biblical doctrine our culture hates were carefully (or maybe even thoughtlessly) excised from the liturgy--the three purposes of marriage, the warning of the seriousness of vows, the word 'obey' in the woman's vow, any mention of the wife's duty to submit to her husband, and so on.
So this essay is my effort to think through this aspect of pastoral ministry biblically, and to record my new commitments concerning how I will preside at the weddings of our congregation. The essay is published in a collection of essays offered by...
Continue reading "Marriage ceremonies that defend the faith..." »
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