Undocumented Marriages

Good, stable relationships are worth
registering and celebrating.

Meanwhile, Isaac, whose home was in the Negev, had returned from Beer-lahai-roi.  One evening as he was walking and meditating in the fields, he looked up and saw the camels coming. 
When Rebekah looked up and saw Isaac, she quickly dismounted from her camel. “Who is that man walking through the fields to meet us?” she asked the servant.

And he replied, “It is my master.” So Rebekah covered her face with her veil. Then the servant told Isaac everything he had done.

And Isaac brought Rebekah into his mother Sarah’s tent, and she became his wife. He loved her deeply, and she was a special comfort to him after the death of his mother.

Genesis 24:62-67 New Living Translation (NLT)

When I ask couples in my office how long they've been together, many distinguish between the years they have been legally married from the years they have simply lived together.

Most people see a significant difference between the two.  They assume that as long as a couple is not legally married that their partnership can be terminated without any major hassle.

While it is true that breakups of people just living together may seem less costly and less complicated than having to hire a attorneys and going through court hearings to work out their separation, the
"emotional divorce" people go through may be every bit as painful. And details regarding finances, property and, if there are children involved, custody and child support issues, may be equally complicated, or even more so.

The fact is, most couples living together are, for all practical purposes, about as "married" as two people can be. They just don't have their relationship registered and publicly celebrated.

There are legitimate reasons for a society to ask to have marriages documented, especially if there are children involved, but I also believe it is in the best interest of the couple. A public declaration of a decision to live together and share all things in common, along with gaining the public support of friends, family, and of ones congregational family, can add immeasurably to a couple's stability and to the durability of their relationship.

In any case, by pooling our finances and risking our future in the radical joint venture of moving in together, we are in fact actually "married", whether or not that is what we intend.

As an analogy, while it is a good thing for all drivers to have a driver's license, that is not what makes them drivers. They are in fact drivers because they get behind the wheel and share the same highway in the same way as the rest of us.

In scripture, the common elements involved in all male/female unions are found in Genesis 2:

For this reason they leave father and mother 
(establishing a separate and publicly recognizable relationship)
and become joined to one another 
(forming a faithful and exclusive relationship), 
and the two of them become united as 'one flesh'.
(experiencing a physically and emotionally bonded relationship).

These three factors are what make people truly 'married'.

In times past, the legal part of marriage was worked out between the families of the couple, as to what kind of dowry was required, for example. That agreement was typically celebrated by some kind of wedding feast and ceremony, symbolizing the support of the joined families and the rest of the entire community, a proven and positive way to launch a new relationship.

So if you have delayed officially registered and celebrated your living together relationship, I strongly recommend that you do so. It's the right thing to do as far as the law is concerned, and solemnizing and publicly announcing your journey together can be a great help in your arriving at "happily ever after".

Guest Post: Chaplain’s MDiv capstone project explores ‘healing and redemption’ in jail ministry

Local Jail Chaplain Jason Wagner, center, with Willie Scott and Nathan Comer
(photo by EMU Weekly Digest photographer Macson McGuigan) 

by Christopher Clymer Kurtz

When Eastern Mennonite Seminary Master of Divinity candidate Jason Wagner presented his capstone integration project this spring, he was introduced by Nathan Carr, a man he’d gotten to know on the job.

“God works through him in one of the worst places a person can be,” Carr said. “I and many others are thankful to have had and still have the jail chaplain in our lives.”

A licensed minister, Wagner serves through Virginia Mennonite Missions in the Rockingham-Harrisonburg Regional Jail. He leads Christian services, offers pastoral care, coordinates visiting ministries, and advocates for active church involvement in jail ministry. In his months-long project, Wagner set out to explore “what it means to seek healing and redemption within the walls of a punitive system.”

Carr met Wagner while serving a jail sentence last year, after experiencing an “overwhelming” feeling of relief on a night he spent crying and praying. “God reached out and spoke to me and touched me and healed me,” Carr said – and the next morning, his pastor suggested he connect with Wagner.

The two would create a “friendship and brotherhood in Christ,” Carr said. “It was always exciting to hear what verse or helpful advice he had to offer.”

Wagner recounted his experiences and thoughts from his research and jail chaplaincy in a presentation titled “Against the Grain,” which began with a description of a Sunday evening service in the jail:

Twenty to 30 men crowd into a small classroom to have a time of worship. The men are dressed in orange jumpsuits and come cuffed together in twos from their pods. The visiting ministers and I stand by the door, shaking hands and introducing ourselves to the inmates.

One of my practices when leading worship in the jail is to proclaim over the gathered inmates that they are the church. Furthermore, I name that the presence of God is within the jail and that we, together, are a people, brothers in Christ, called to love and serve one another. I also name that in our worship, we experience what we are made for – to commune with God.

‘Just show up’

Jason Wagner serves through Virginia Mennonite Missions in the Rockingham-Harrisonburg Regional Jail. He leads Christian services, offers pastoral care, coordinates visiting ministries, and advocates for active church involvement in jail ministry.

For years, Wagner has interacted with people just out of the jail and facing difficulties, in part through his involvement at Harrisonburg’s Our Community Place.

Ministering inside a jail, in an “overwhelming” and traumatizing system that violates human dignity, is a calling that’s no more noble than any other, he said in an interview. Rather, “God places you where you’re at. You just show up and be a faithful presence, an expression of being with, in a robust way.”

That’s the Gospel, in his words: “We have a propensity to instrumentalize the Gospel, to make it a means to an end,” he said. “But it is the end. It’s the means and the end – a tangible community in and outside the system. A ministry of presence – that’s what I’m called to.”

In his chaplaincy, Wagner observed the traumagenic nature of incarceration that can result in the ongoing transmission of despair. “The intense conditions of being crammed into a place with other very stressed and hurting people creates the potential for an experience of even deeper pain and disorientation,” he said.

But worship, he said – quoting Angola Prison Seminary director John Robins – can be place for inmates to “reinterpret their personal history,” and allows space for incarcerated people to make positive choices as humans rather than as merely navigators of punitive dehumanization.

It’s “an act of subversion of the world,” he said, “because it projects a new world in which people can imagine life and wholeness in redemptive and new ways.”

Wagner speaks of such spiritual awakening with familiarity. At age 22 he had a “mystical experience” that resulted in conversion through an “encounter in relationship that made my life shift on its axis.” In subsequent years he became a founding member and elder of Early Church in Harrisonburg, and as a seminary student, he delved into the Bible through “academic, critical study of sacred text” even while asking, “How is this text living and active?”

The call

Carr’s eagerness to connect with Wagner is an example of “the deep cry and hunger for the redemptive love of Christ” that Wagner observed as part of “my own jailhouse conversion” during his first time leading music in the jail, he wrote in a 2017 Virginia Mennonite Conference article.

“The Lord Jesus calls us – the church – to be salt and light in a world that is bland and dark,” he wrote. “The jail is a significantly dark and bland corner in our community, housing deeply wounded exiles who are doomed to repeat their crimes if left isolated.”

Wagner’s capstone presentation ended with a message for the church, which he said is “compelled by the good news of Jesus to be on mission and boldly open up to those suffering in our community.”

Particularly “given that the majority of those who are housed in our local jail will soon re-enter our community,” he said, “it is the call of the church to draw near and open its doors and do the work of healing and discipleship that sets people free to do the right things for the right reasons.”

Link to EMU News Digest:
https://emu.edu/now/news/2018/07/chaplains-mdiv-capstone-research-explores-healing-and-redemption-in-jail-ministry/

P.S. After his recent release from the local jail, Nathan Comer lived with Wilmer and Mary Louise Lehman for several weeks prior to Christmas, 2017, as a part of a support team provided by the local Mt. Clinton Mennonite Church.

Does Scripture Teach Salvation By Good Works?

Bronze sculpture by Alan Collins, at the Loma Linda University
and Medical Center

When an expert in religion asks Jesus about what one must do (emphasis mine) to inherit eternal life, he responds with a question, "What do the scriptures say?"

When the man responds with "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength," and adds the less familiar"Love your neighbor as yourself," Jesus commends him with "Do this and you will live."

Jesus then tells the familiar story of the Good Samaritan, clarifying what kind of fellow humans are to be seen as our "neighbors", and then adds, "Go and do likewise."

So is Jesus saying we gain our right standing with God by doing? Where does God's amazing grace come in?

This question at first troubled me, but I now see the passage as being all about grace.

In the first place, the mortally wounded man left to die by the roadside is completely dependent on having unmerited grace extended to him, and through a most unlikely person, an avowed enemy. Without receiving first aid in the form of having his bleeding stopped and his wounds dressed, and without his being transported to an inn for ongoing care, he would have never survived. He couldn't have even been able to dial 911 for help.

That's how God's pure, unadulterated grace works. God rescues us at the point of our greatest helplessness and hopelessness, without our earning or deserving it.

But the Samaritan in the story is the recipient of the identical kind of unmerited favor. Among Jesus's peers, there were no "good" Samaritans (except for dead ones). This heretical and hated outsider would have been seen by Jesus' listeners as the least deserving of God's favor, as the least likely candidate to be the designated hero in the story--as the person who was truly "right with God".

So in working through this unlikely 'Shiite', God shows his unmerited grace to both the one helping and the one being helped. Whenever any of us allows ourselves to be channels of God's mercy, without any thought of reward or merit of our own, that's grace. That's "amore". That's God's unconditional and extravagant agape love.

In God's economy, grace is what it's all about. And it is awesome and amazing indeed.
                                                                           
And it's what saves us.

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"For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God—not the result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are what God has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life."

 - the apostle Paul, Ephesians 2:8-10 (NRSV)

From Utmost East To Utmost West--A Miracle Story

Alma Jean and I with the Zhou family, Bo Hu, daughter Emily
and Hongyan. Miracle daughter Eliana, age 8, took the photo.

We were greatly blessed having the Hongyan and Bo Hu Zhou family back for a visit with our house church group recently. They had moved to California from here nine years ago.

Hongyan came to EMU as a visiting scholar from the Chongqing University of Medical Sciences in China in 2004, and became a part of our house church congregation through staying with one of our members, Rachel Stoltzfus. (Rachel, who lived near campus, made a practice of opening her home to international students ever since she and her husband moved to the area decades ago, and she continued that ministry until her health no longer permitted and she went to live with her daughter in Maryland. Hers is a wonderful story in itself, told here.)

Hongyan had become a believer through the influence of a US teacher of English at his University, and he and his wife Bo Hu, who worked at a bank, became very active in one of a growing number of house churches in their city. After coming to the states, Hong Yan was granted religious asylum by the US State Department and immediately sought to bring his wife and their young daughter here as well.

Bo Hu and Emily were able to join him and were welcomed into Rachel's home in 2006, and she and Emily, then a fourth grader, soon became a beloved part of our community and our living-room-size church family. In 2009 the three moved to California to be closer to Bo Hu's parents, and where Hongyan got a job in nursing, having just completed his nursing degree.

Meanwhile, Bo Hu, then in her late thirties, had experienced several miscarriages, and her doctors in California discouraged her from pursuing another pregnancy, expressing fears about whether her offspring, at that stage in her life, would be normal and healthy. Their next major test of faith had to do with going through a time of uncertainty about whether she was again pregnant or had a tumor developing in her uterus. When an ultrasound revealed no sign of a heartbeat, their doctors recommended they have that removed, and offered to have the procedure done on that same day.

Seeing how heartsick they were over this, they were given the option of having one more test done at the Valley Medical Center at San Jose.

This time a tiny heartbeat was detected, much to everyone's great joy. But as the pregnancy progressed, later examinations showed possible signs of Downs Syndrome, and there was a bright spot on the heart that was troubling. So they were advised by their doctor and their geneticist to have an amniocentesis done to verify this and to have an abortion done if needed. They declined, putting their trust in God for whatever the outcome might be.

Months later, Eliana, a Hebrew name chosen by Emily which means "the Lord has heard my prayer", was born, a healthy and amazing blessing!

Eliana, Christmas, 2017

Eliana will be in the fourth grade this fall, and Bo, having just earned an RN degree, will be finding full time work. Emily is completing her last year of college at UC Berkley, where she had a full tuition scholarship she earned, amazingly, by winning an art contest in Virginia as a new elementary student in her first year in the states. She hopes to enroll in dental school in the fall of 2019 after completing her senior year this coming May.

Is this a wonderful story or what?

The phrase "From utmost east to utmost west" comes from a hymn "God is Working His Purpose Out" by Arthur Ainger. 

Our Evangelical Hypocrisy On 'Social Action'

Mennonite Central Committee and other relief and service organizations are often criticized for being too focused on physically bettering people's lives and not enough on evangelizing them.

Some of the questions raised are, What good is it to educate people and to improve their health and their means of livelihood if we don't help them with their eternal spiritual needs? And while we should of course offer emergency relief to people who are hungry and homeless, shouldn't our primary mission be to change people's hearts and prepare them for the life to come?

Jesus' life and ministry is a demonstration of the fact that both are important.

According to his inaugural address Jesus' mission, and ours, is to "bring good news to the poor, to heal the brokenhearted, to announce release to captives, to bring sight to the blind, and to free those who are in prison." All of this is in fulfillment of our obligation to love God above every other love or allegiance, and to love our neighbors as ourselves.

Here's where our hypocrisy comes in. The fact is that few of us pay attention just to our spiritual needs. Rather, most of us spend an extraordinary amount of time and money on the kinds of "social action" that benefit ourselves and our families.

For example, we invest whatever energy and resources necessary to make sure we have the best housing in the best neighborhood possible, that our children have the best education available, that our every health needs are met to the fullest and finest extent, and that we have all of the recreational and entertainment opportunities we can afford.

In short, these are among the many ways we love ourselves and our own families. And up to a point, we should.

But that's where the "as yourself" question comes in. Shouldn't we be equally dedicated to the same kinds of needs in our neighbors around the world?

Of course we can't do everything needed for every one in need. But together, as communities of faith, we should never assume that we deserve better than others, just because we are North Americans, or assume that others' needs are primarily spiritual while ours are by right every bit as earth-based as heaven-based.

It's at the heart of our Bible: "Love your neighbor AND/AS yourself."

How Much Tolerance Can Christians Tolerate?

Church discipline appears to be a thing of the past.

We place such a high value on being open minded and non-judgmental that we tend to look the other way when fellow members are involved in wrongdoing, either pretending its none of our business, that it isn't really a problem, or that it will just take care of itself.

Everyone's favorite proof text used to support this is the oft quoted "Judge not that you be not judged." Never mind the fact that Jesus certainly never meant this to mean we shouldn't discern between right and wrong, or that we should never confront another when he or she is guilty of a wrong. 

In fact, in its Sermon on the Mount context, Jesus goes on to say that we are to first remove the large log of wrongdoing in our own eye so we can then see clearly in order to help another remove the unwanted "speck" in theirs. He also insists we are to know others by their fruit (their behavior) and later gives instruction about how to confront a fellow member of our congregation when he or she has gone astray (see Matthew 18:12-20).

I do believe there are limits to what even the most tolerant among us consider tolerable. We each draw a line somewhere as to what we would never find acceptable in our community of faith, things like child abuse, bigamy, embezzlement or other criminal behaviors, or such actions as the following:

breaking and entering

lying and other forms of deception

physical, psychological, or other forms of torture and abuse

armed robbery

malicious wounding

organized acts of terrorism

using explosives to destroy people or property

destroying land or other natural resources

stabbing or strangling 

forcing people from their homes or communities

committing mass murder

Without question, most believers would speak out against members of their congregations engaging in such behaviors--and would disapprove of their supporting or belonging to any groups or organizations that do.

But with one huge, glaring exception. 

Most Christians raise no objections to members joining military forces routinely encouraging, training and/or commanding its enlisted members to do all of the above and more whenever commanded to do so.  Thus we are in danger of accepting, on a mass and organized scale, what we could not accept or allow on any other basis. 

Not only do many Christ-followers condone bombing and other forms of destruction in their nation's name, they often pray for the success of its mission, even if it involves actions that reflect anything but love for God and neighbor.

How have followers of Jesus come to tolerate, and even bless, such violations of the most basic ethical codes of our faith? Unlike legitimate police force, necessary in human societies to maintain order within national boundaries (and intended to preserve life and bring individuals to justice under laws designed to protect individual rights), military forces have a long history of plundering and destroying without benefit of such civilized restraints.

True, we pacifist Christians must repent of the many "beams" of self righteousness, materialism, and cowardly indifference that impair our own moral vision. But remove them we must, all of us, lest history write off the church as having been irrelevant and mute in one of the most pressing moral issues of all time.

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The regenerated do not go to war, or engage in strife. They are the children of peace, who have beaten their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks, and they know no war. Since we are conformed to the image of Christ, how then can we kill our enemies with the sword? Spears and swords made of iron we leave to those, alas, who consider human blood and swine’s blood as having well nigh equal value.

- Menno Simons 16th century reformer

My Top Ten Ways To Relieve Depression

Depression is a condition over which we may have little control. The brain, like any organ of the body, is subject to disease, and some of us may be more genetically prone to clinical depression than others.

But no matter what triggers this plague of emotional darkness and despair, depression not only affects our feelings, but our functioning, i.e., our sleep, appetite, energy, and motivation. Fortunately, there are ways we can at least limit its impact, as follows:

10. Anti-depressant drugs can be helpful for some, in spite of their occasional negative side effects, and the fact that many have been proven to be only only slightly more effective than placebos in clinical trials. Some people also report feeling better from taking over the counter medications like St. Johns Wort and certain herbal products or natural food supplements. But sometimes the line between reputable fish oil and questionable snake oil is not as clear as we would like.

9. For persons with severe and prolonged clinical depression, older therapies like electroconvulsive treatment (ECT) or newer variations like Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) are producing positive results for some.

8. In cases of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), a move to a more sunny climate appears be helpful, or the use of light therapy.

7. A positive placebo effect can also be a part of any therapy for depression. Whatever increases a sense of hopefulness in any of us can result in increased dopamine, serotonin and endorphin production in our brains.

6. Some people find journaling helpful as a way of expressing their laments, naming and externalizing their distresses and writing down some of their own best wisdom for dealing with their condition. see https://harvyoder.blogspot.com/2011/08/wise-selfworried-self-journal.html

5. Avoiding being sedentary, getting plenty of good physical exercise is a proven way for the body to produce mood enhancing endorphins.

4. Avoiding being solitary by nurturing good relationships with others is extremely important to mental health. Depression often makes us want to withdraw from others, which inevitably makes the condition worse. Seeking help from friends and from members of our faith community as well as from professional counselors and medical professionals can make a major difference.

3. Changing our vocabulary, purging them from habitual words like 'terrible', 'horrible', 'awful', is also very important, along with avoiding too many generalizations like 'never', always', and forever'. And its always a good idea to replace the over-use of 'I can't' with something like 'It's really hard, and I haven't found a way yet'.

2. Observing regular mini-sabbaths from life stresses, but especially from the stress of worry, is vital. Or setting aside an hour a day for some serious worrying, then declaring the rest of the time as a sabbatical from worry and anxiety, is sure to help. see https://harvyoder.blogspot.com/2017/11/rx-for-anxious-dedicated-worry-hour.html

1. Taking time to meditate, pray, sing, reflect on the goodness of God and of all creation, and on all the blessings we can possibly record on the assets side of our memory ledger needs to become a priority. And then to reach out to share those blessings with others as we are able.