Help me with Divorce (and Marriage and Remarriage)

My Text for Sunday Evening at St Philips: Matthew 5:31-32:

"It has been said, 'Anyone who divorces his wife must give her a certificate of divorce.' But I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, causes her to become an adulteress, and anyone who marries the divorced woman commits adultery.

So...

• Is this the final word on divorce?
• How does divorce cause her to become an adulterer?
• Is there room in Scripture for a person to get remarried after divorce?
• Historical situation?
• Pastoral Implications?
• Best things to read? Sermon to listen to?
• Anyone I should call?

I want to get this one right.

And it is not easy.

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Pic taken from my iPhone of Evening Congregation out for dinner last night. A local city restaurant opened for us, and about 75% of the congregation came. It was fun. They had to find more seats and make more food!

What was read at your wedding and why?

We marry lots of peeps here at York Street. In the spirit of minimising some of the choices in my previous post, I now here list the Bible verses we ask people to consider as readings and then to choose from for their wedding:

• Genesis 1:26–2 :4
• Genesis 2:18-25
• Ecclesiastes 3:1–14
• Ecclesiastes 4:9–12
• Song of Solomon 8:6–7
• Romans 12:9–18
• 1 Corinthians 13–1-8a
• Ephesians 5:21–33
• Philippians 2:1–11
• Hebrews 13:1–6
• Colossians 3:12–14
• 1 John 3:18–24
• 1 John 4:7–16
• John 15:9–17
• Revelation 21:1-4

Are we missing any?

What was read at your wedding and why?

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Pic on Flickr by YouDidn'tDidYou Photography.

York Street Forum TODAY only (The Baartz' on Marriage)

Just sent this email out to some who work in the northern part of the City. Thought I'd make this forum more widely known:

Marriage is wonderful, and marriage is tough. It’s especially tough if you are working, you’ve got kids, a mortgage, and everything else.

We want to be of service to you. Today: Andrew and Rachel Baartz are our guests, as they speak on Marriage. I heard their thoughts on Tuesday, and it is great stuff.

Andrew and Rachel Baartz were on the ministry team at St. Philip's during the 1990's. While serving the business community and executives, a significant appetite for the application of the Bible to marriages became very apparent. Now, while involved in technology businesses, they have continued serving the business community, particularly in the area of marriage and relationships.

There are many different people who receive this email: some are married, some are single. Some are divorced, some are remarried. Some are struggling, some are not. Some who know family or friends who are about to get married. Either way, it’s good to hear simple and practical ways in which to make marriage work, especially if you are working hard!

Here is a link to the Study: The Resurrection and the Sanctity of Marriage.

Our York Street Forum are at 3 York St, Sydney, and our times are:

• 12.40PM-1.15PM TUESDAYS
• 1.10PM-1.45PM THURSDAYS

For more thoughts on marriage, I was interviewed last week on marriage by the Sydney Morning Herald. The article is called What Men want in a Wife. (Scroll down for my interview)

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Pic on Flickr by CHAUSS513.

Advice> Good Books on Marriage

Do you marry couples? Or are you married and read good books on marriage?

• What books are you recommending at the moment?
• Are any good ones for those who do not share a Biblical Worldview?

I want our marriages to be strong. And your help will help.

Thanks.

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Pic on Flickr by Ron in Blackpool.

So you met an American Girl? (How to do Long Distance Relationships)

A young man I knew an eon ago Facebooked me for advice. He is Australian, and he is dating an American. They are followers of Jesus. They are keen for advice from someone who has been through the the whole trans-Pacific relationship thing. I met Dr Laurel in January 1998 in Atlanta GA, and married her in May 2000. I am excited for this couple.

But if there are others reading this, I want you to know for the record: I do not recommend the trans-Pacific relationship. We managed it by the Grace of God. If I may sound pagan for a moment, for a relationship like this to work, all the planets have to align at once. And that is not easy. But God is sovereign over the affairs of men.

Anyways, that being noted, I put this together and emailed them (I have tried not to include things that belong to every couple: prayer, love, good communication etc)

1. Enjoy this time and each other as a gift from God.
   
2. And yet overseas relationships necessarily take more time. It’s good to allow for that. So don’t make blithe promises you can’t keep. The Pacific Ocean is a serious body of water and a large barrier to overcome.
3. Make the most of your time apart: It’s certainly easier to be pure, and also you are forced to express yourself almost exclusively in written words. (Less so now with Skype. Pity.)
4. And yet, the best way to plumb the depths of your friendship is certainly face to face. You want to maximize that as much as you can. Don’t believe that sending an email is truly relating. The verse I'm thinking of is 3 John v13-14.
5. Don’t believe the illusion that to marry someone from another country is ‘exotic’. It quickly ceases to be, and starts to be very, very normal. And the exotic thing is at first an attraction, but it can end up very quickly being a destructive illusion.
6. Be aware that if you meet someone overseas, then it often has an ‘unreal’ element to it. Your guard is down, you are on vacation, or you are working in a new environment. People see you as different, and you usually have a lot to talk about. But back down on earth, things are far more ‘normal’.
7. Home is always and only where you live as husband and wife. Never talk about ‘home’ as being the country of your origin or where your parents live. If you see home as being ‘back with the parents’, then it will harm your relationship. That’s in Genesis 2:24.
8. I decided in my heart that wherever we lived at any one time was the place we would live until we die! (Or until God changes our mind). The reason for this is that if I say: ‘We’ll be here for 3 years’, then we’ll always pine for another place, and we will be less likely to put down good roots. I found that easier to decide in my heart than my wife did.
9. Become international, by which I mean: don’t see yourself as particularly Australian, or as an American. That will only put distance between you both. I say this especially to Australians, who like to make loose and unfair distinctions between Australians and Americans. So American jokes are out. To me, it is far too insecure anyway.
10. Your marriage does not mean that you have legitimate travel for the rest of your lives! It means that you will basically travel only one dark path: LAX to SYD. For us, it excludes the rest of the world. We can never spend money going east of New York City. It is almost irresponsible for us to do so.
11. Get involved quickly in a church: both feet, and don’t hold back.
12. Make your vows in one country, and a have decent celebration in the another one.
13. You will face difficult choices if God gives you children: One of you will live further away from Grandparents than the other. There is not much you can do about that, except by persuading one set to move, or by moving to a third country denying both sets of parents. But living near grandparents may be very good and helpful for you (and for them), but it is not the Golden Calf. You’ll just have to talk about that with each other and with your parents.
14. Obey all rules of immigration and do it quickly and thoroughly. Start on the path of dual citizenship as quickly as you can.
    
15. If God gives you kids, register their birth quickly at the consulate of the nation that the child was not born in. Make sure that their dual citizenship is secure early on.
    
16. Keep in touch with friends from both sides of the Pacific.
17. Your true home is not your simple address. As Hebrews says: 'Long for a better country prepared by God.'
    

So, have you been in a relationship like this? Care to offer any other advice? Or critique mine? Which points are wrong or right?

You may be helping my new friends if you care to comment. And feel free to forward this post as an email to those you know in a similar situation.

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Pic on FLickr by KyussQ.

The Long View

The Wedding Vows from the Prayer Book:

I, N, in the presence of God,
take you, N, to be my wife,
to have and to hold
from this day forward,
for better, for worse,
for richer, for poorer,
in sickness and in health,
to love and to cherish,
till death us do part;
This is my solemn vow and promise.

Gordo is alright. Gordo wrote a post on marriage. And someone else posted a comment on his Blog saying that for 10 long 'unrelenting' years, things had been difficult. 10 years! It is comments like this that make me understand why we don't write our own vows. Here is the comment made by Gordo's correspondent:

We have been married for [many] years. For much of that time my wife has been more or less depressed, and we have just come out of the end of a ten year period of it. This has been the longest unrelenting period of it. Perseverance pays off, because at the moment we are like newlyweds, though rather experienced newlyweds. Life has certainly had its joys and sorrows, but we are now both more committed to one another than ever.

That's righteous. And it is the long view.

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Pic on Flickr by Prosaic-.

"Love doesn't sustain marriage. Marriage sustains Love"

In May 1943, German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a letter to a young bride and groom, advising them on the nature of the union they were about to enter:

"Your love is your own private possession, but marriage is more than something personal — it is a status, an office. Just as it is the crown, and not merely the will to rule, that makes the king, so it is marriage, and not merely your love for each other, that joins you together in the sight of God and man. As you gave the ring to one another and have now received it a second time from the hand of the pastor, so love comes from you, but marriage from above, from God. As high as God is above man, so high are the sanctity, the rights, and the promise of love. It is not your love that sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love."

A further reflection on Bonhoeffer's quote is in this Washington Post Op-Ed piece : “Marriage was a status we graduated into, and it was bigger than we were. It defined us, and not the other way around. Now we seem to be losing the institutional imperatives of marriage, leaving only the private relationship -- and that is increasingly likely to turn on such things as personal satisfaction.” (If its a match between Bonhoeffer and Bruce Willis, I choose Bonhoeffer.)

So, my question is this: Have the following words any power under God to save a marriage?

...to have and to hold
From this day forward,
For better or worse,
For richer or poorer,
In sickness and in health,
To love and to cherish,
Until we are parted by death.
This is my solemn vow and promise.”

Love, Justin.