The family highlighted is listed as such: Bride goes to temple and wants Jewish wedding. Groom is Seventh Day Adventist, but isn't particularly adamant, and agrees to the Jewish wedding. Bride's mum goes to a UCC church. The temple balks at the interfaith wedding, so mum gets the kids to have a co-officiated wedding at her UCC church. Getting it so far?
Bride has this to say:
“He [groom] would’ve been fine with a justice of peace, but I wanted a wedding, and I wanted a religious wedding,” she said. “I said, ‘I want God at my wedding and if he wants to bring his little friend Jesus along, then that’s fine with me.’”
Okay, you can get up off the floor now, catch your breath, and dry the tears.
A rabbi of local renown, who co-officiated the ceremony for the confused couple "said he believes churches should be blind to the cultural and religious differences that a couple might have." Does that include one spouse proclaiming Jesus as Lord, while the other spouse considers Him "[God's] little friend?"
The senior minister at First-Plymouth said that weddings are an advertisement for his congregation’s inclusivity and lack of anything deeper than passing discernment.
“We look at this as a moment for them (couples) to begin a potential relationship with the church or a moment for us to express the warmth of the Christian church,” he said. “Will the church be a place of compassion and inclusion and spiritual depth or not?”
Well, how about instructing the spiritually ignorant, for starters? The couple getting married in his church obviously need some instruction, as ambivalent as they are. But this minister does like to collect the lukewarm. He has, in a televised sermon, smugly intoned about one of his congregants that "still considers herself a Catholic", yet attends his church because she disagrees with Rome on many issues.
You know, a sewer will take anything that drops down the hole as well..
The article then prepares us for the coming section on Catholic teaching on Matrimony with this:
"Not all clergy are as progressive."
The director from the diocesan Family Life office then gives the proper Catholic teaching on marriage, and the article explores a catholic couple's long road to the Altar.
“The church is trying to present an authentic view of marriage and to preserve and protect that understanding,” he continued. “There are so many images and presentations in our culture of marriage that are not authentic and not Christian. They are warped views of marriage. We are trying to protect and preserve what God has established.”
The article concludes with it's punchline, that the UCC is starting a marital preparation course as well, though with the muddle of theology the UCC subscribes to, I can't imagine that it will be of much service.
2 comments:
I guess the Biblical warning about being unequally yoked hasn't been of interest to any there.
Biblical warnings are seldom of interest to those whom the warnings pertain. A reproof is difficult to bear, for the proud.
The UCC, from what I can tell looking at their social stances, is practically Unitarian.
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