Roland H. Bainton - "Splendid Venture" (May 8, 1955)
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Transcript
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(regal, hymnal pipe organ music) | 0:03 | |
♪ Praise God from whom all blessings flow ♪ | 0:29 | |
♪ Praise Him all creatures here below ♪ | 0:37 | |
♪ Praise Him above ye heavenly host ♪ | 0:45 | |
♪ Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost ♪ | 0:53 | |
♪ Amen ♪ | 1:05 | |
- | Oh God, most merciful and gracious, | 1:13 |
of whose bounty we have all received, | 1:17 | |
accept this offering of thy people, | 1:20 | |
remember in thy love those who brought it | 1:22 | |
and those for whom it is given, | 1:25 | |
through Jesus Christ, our Lord, amen. | 1:28 | |
- | The them of morning's splendid venture has reference, | 2:04 |
to marriage, parenthood and the forming of a home. | 2:09 | |
This is to be sure it's something of an enlargement, | 2:15 | |
of the theme of Mother's Day, but after all, | 2:17 | |
no mothers without fathers and no mothers without children, | 2:21 | |
all of this is in the context of the home. | 2:26 | |
It is a splendid venture. | 2:30 | |
It's splendid and it's also a venture. | 2:33 | |
The married service says for better, for worse, | 2:39 | |
for richer, for poorer, | 2:45 | |
in sickness and in health. | 2:48 | |
And one cannot foresee in advance, | 2:53 | |
which it will be. | 2:58 | |
In a majority of cases, | 3:03 | |
the balance will probably be on the side of the better, | 3:04 | |
and the richer or the adequate, and health. | 3:10 | |
But not always. | 3:15 | |
And anyone who has taught school | 3:18 | |
as I have done for 36 years | 3:20 | |
and has seen the alumni coming back | 3:23 | |
after five years, 10 years, 15 years and so on, | 3:25 | |
knows that there are some out of every class | 3:30 | |
who will return after weathering stiff gales. | 3:35 | |
There are accidents which may separate husband and wife, | 3:44 | |
by land, and water and by air. | 3:48 | |
Even crossing the street is precarious. | 3:53 | |
And the kitchen ladder and the cellar stairs | 3:56 | |
may break hips and sever arteries. | 3:58 | |
We live dangerously. | 4:01 | |
And there are swift, | 4:05 | |
and frightful diseases not yet conquered. | 4:08 | |
And by the end of a week, a husband or a wife who was hale, | 4:15 | |
maybe no more on this side of the great divide. | 4:20 | |
And as for children, | 4:28 | |
they obviously are more subject to diseases | 4:31 | |
than those who have acquired maturity and immunities. | 4:34 | |
And they're more subject to accidents, | 4:40 | |
I was calling recently in New York | 4:42 | |
on a graduate student couple, | 4:44 | |
and their child actually had gone out | 4:48 | |
of a closed window on a third story | 4:52 | |
and landed on an iron fence, | 4:56 | |
with a prong through the leg. | 5:01 | |
The grandfather took the child off, hailed a car, | 5:07 | |
and luckily there happened to be a doctor in it, | 5:11 | |
and he staunched the wound, and the boy's gonna make it. | 5:13 | |
But one is not always so fortunate. | 5:17 | |
These are the things that can happen. | 5:24 | |
The purpose in mentioning them is not | 5:27 | |
to deter anybody from making this splendid venture. | 5:28 | |
After all the way in which young people take | 5:34 | |
this kind of thing is superb. | 5:36 | |
I've seen several instances in which one party | 5:40 | |
was carried off or crippled by polio. | 5:43 | |
One young woman left with two little boys. | 5:47 | |
After a period of adjustment she has equipped herself, | 5:51 | |
nd is carrying on in a profession very similar | 5:55 | |
to that of her husband. | 5:57 | |
Another young woman crippled, a mother, | 6:00 | |
manages to propel herself | 6:04 | |
around the house with a wheelchair. | 6:06 | |
She's able to drive a car. | 6:07 | |
And she is able to control three bursting boys | 6:10 | |
without making them feel sorry for her. | 6:15 | |
There's another family | 6:21 | |
in which the first child was a Mongolian idiot. | 6:24 | |
And as soon as feasible, | 6:29 | |
they went right ahead and had another child. | 6:30 | |
The second one is perfectly normal, | 6:34 | |
and is a great help in dealing with the older defective. | 6:37 | |
All of this kind of thing can happen. | 6:46 | |
One marvels in fact, that things go right | 6:48 | |
as often as they do, | 6:50 | |
particularly with regard to the birth of babies. | 6:52 | |
It's amazing that usually they're normal. | 6:56 | |
But not always. | 6:59 | |
The Catholic marriage service has | 7:03 | |
a good deal to say about sacrifice. | 7:06 | |
I've never heard that note struck | 7:10 | |
in a Protestant wedding ceremony, | 7:12 | |
but it might well be there. | 7:17 | |
because there is sacrifice. | 7:20 | |
And there is sacrifice even | 7:24 | |
if everything goes along normally | 7:26 | |
without any of these drastic emergencies. | 7:29 | |
Founding a home, rearing children, | 7:35 | |
all of this involves renunciations, joyous renunciations, | 7:39 | |
but renunciations just the same. | 7:45 | |
They are perhaps greater for the woman than for the man. | 7:49 | |
Her situation has changed in the course of a century, | 7:57 | |
in some respects for the better, | 8:03 | |
in some respects, for the more difficult. | 8:05 | |
She has a better time of it than her great grandmother | 8:11 | |
with regard to the size of families, | 8:16 | |
and the mortality of children and of mothers. | 8:19 | |
In the old days, a mother with a baby at the breast | 8:24 | |
was asked whether this was her first, | 8:28 | |
and she said, "Yes, the first on the second dozen." | 8:30 | |
Families often were that large. | 8:36 | |
Add a great many of the children died in infancy. | 8:40 | |
I was reading recently | 8:46 | |
a tribute to his wife, by Thomas Platt, | 8:50 | |
who was a president of Yale College in the 1830s. | 8:54 | |
He married his wife on the day before her 15th birthday. | 9:00 | |
She died at the age of 24 after burying six children | 9:06 | |
of whom only two survived. | 9:13 | |
"She often said to me," he says, | 9:18 | |
"that bearing, and tending, | 9:21 | |
and burying children is hard work, | 9:24 | |
and I've had my full share. | 9:28 | |
But it's what God made me for, and I rejoice | 9:32 | |
to be able to bring more souls into his kingdom." | 9:37 | |
Today we do feel that it's so important | 9:45 | |
to bring more so soul into the kingdom. | 9:47 | |
We're rather concerned as to what will become | 9:53 | |
of them after they're here. | 9:56 | |
The size of families has been reduced, | 10:00 | |
and modern medicine has brought it to pass | 10:04 | |
that the great majority of them reach maturity. | 10:08 | |
The trials of our great-grandmothers | 10:14 | |
are not in this respect, repeated in our generation. | 10:17 | |
But in other respects, | 10:22 | |
the lot of the wife may be more difficult, | 10:24 | |
because frequently she has wider interests, | 10:28 | |
she is better trained. | 10:32 | |
Often, she is quite as professionally equipped | 10:35 | |
as her husband. | 10:40 | |
She may have been engaged in a profession before marriage, | 10:42 | |
and this she gives up. | 10:48 | |
And then she finds herself involved | 10:52 | |
in a routine, largely manual, | 10:55 | |
by day and by night, | 11:00 | |
babysitting, doctoring, nursing, | 11:05 | |
scouring, scrubbing, washing, | 11:09 | |
even with all of the devices, disinfecting. | 11:14 | |
She finds her life reduced to a primordial routine. | 11:20 | |
And she is tempted to describe herself simply as a mammal. | 11:26 | |
She craves intellectual stimulus, | 11:32 | |
companionship on the level of other | 11:36 | |
than merely physical and manual tasks. | 11:41 | |
Then too, she gives up her economic independence. | 11:47 | |
She ought to. | 11:52 | |
While she is bearing and rearing a family, | 11:54 | |
she should not have the responsibility of earning a living. | 11:58 | |
She should be released from that, | 12:04 | |
but the release means the relinquishment | 12:07 | |
of her economic independence. | 12:11 | |
The money no longer comes in in her name. | 12:14 | |
She has nothing that she can call her own. | 12:17 | |
And there are some who feel rather irked | 12:22 | |
by that shift from a position of independence | 12:27 | |
and competence, to one of dependence. | 12:33 | |
And for the mother, this may be harder than for the father. | 12:40 | |
On the other hand, let it not be thought | 12:46 | |
that he makes no renunciations. | 12:48 | |
I'm a man and I may exaggerate them. | 12:52 | |
But I'd like to say a word. | 12:56 | |
He earns the money. | 13:00 | |
The salary comes in in his name, but it's not his! | 13:02 | |
(congregation chuckles) | 13:07 | |
He can't spend a cent without consent! | 13:11 | |
He'd better not. | 13:16 | |
A younger member of the faculty came to me a few weeks ago, | 13:21 | |
and he offered me $50 for a bicycle. | 13:23 | |
And after a day or two, he came back and he said, | 13:27 | |
"We've had a family consultation. Offer withdrawn." | 13:29 | |
He can't even engage in charity. | 13:37 | |
He can't even give anything away without a consultation. | 13:40 | |
There's nothing new about that. | 13:43 | |
Martin Luther wrote to a friend and said, | 13:45 | |
"I'm sending you a vase as a wedding present, | 13:47 | |
p.s. Katie's hid it." | 13:50 | |
The man is not independent, and he ought not to be. | 13:56 | |
And what's more, he may have to take on extra jobs | 14:01 | |
that he doesn't too much relish | 14:05 | |
in order to eek out the income. | 14:08 | |
Certainly that happens in the teaching profession. | 14:12 | |
Most young teachers would be glad to have the summer open | 14:16 | |
in order to engage in reading preparation | 14:19 | |
of courses, research, and publication. | 14:21 | |
But very commonly, they have to take on summer school work | 14:25 | |
in order to supplement the income. | 14:28 | |
A young man in the sciences | 14:33 | |
frequently take on jobs in industry. | 14:35 | |
I had one friend who was in biochemistry. | 14:37 | |
And he took on testing of milk in dairies. | 14:41 | |
Good work, he was glad to do it, | 14:47 | |
but then he would have preferred to have been able | 14:50 | |
to devote his time to a research problem | 14:52 | |
on something not yet solved. | 14:56 | |
the husband has to make accommodations | 15:01 | |
with regard to his mode of living, | 15:03 | |
with regard to his recreations, for example. | 15:07 | |
Occasionally he may go off with masculine friends | 15:12 | |
for some sort of an athletic jaunt, | 15:17 | |
but normally he will plan to take his wife | 15:20 | |
and his children on whatever there may be of a vacation. | 15:23 | |
And he'll have to reduce his speed. | 15:30 | |
He's got children and he will soon find out | 15:34 | |
that there are two modes of travel, | 15:36 | |
first-class, and with children. | 15:38 | |
(congregation chuckles) | 15:41 | |
He can't travel at the same speed. | 15:46 | |
He can't travel for the same length | 15:47 | |
of time during the day in an automobile. | 15:50 | |
He can't end up at any hour of the morning. | 15:53 | |
You simply have to adjust to the schedule of children. | 15:56 | |
And whereas, he used to perhaps go to bed | 16:05 | |
after enjoying the idyllic moonlight, | 16:10 | |
now, he'll have to get there in time to get up | 16:13 | |
with the chickens and the children. | 16:17 | |
There are adjustments then, | 16:21 | |
which have to be made on both sides. | 16:23 | |
Not only are there adjustments, | 16:28 | |
but almost certainly there will be clashes. | 16:30 | |
And that is painful to both parties involved, | 16:36 | |
because they love each other. | 16:40 | |
And when they clash, they feel guilty about it, | 16:43 | |
but they're almost bound to have some clashes. | 16:47 | |
And they may be even more acute | 16:53 | |
if the partners are persons | 16:56 | |
of intelligence, character, determination, and will. | 16:59 | |
By marriage, they become one flesh, | 17:07 | |
but they don't become one mind. | 17:09 | |
Some of the clashes arrive out of a difference in tempo, | 17:14 | |
and timing, in the case of the husband and of the wife. | 17:20 | |
The man goes out on his profession during the day, | 17:28 | |
he has adult contacts. | 17:32 | |
He talks with people on his own level. | 17:35 | |
He may be talking most of the day as a matter of fact. | 17:37 | |
And he comes back rather weary | 17:40 | |
of talking, he wants to be quiet. | 17:42 | |
And his wife has been engaged | 17:46 | |
in a manual routine by herself part of the time, | 17:48 | |
part of the time with only the company of little children. | 17:52 | |
And when evening comes she would like to talk | 17:56 | |
about something, she'd liked to talk in the first place. | 18:00 | |
(congregation laughs) | 18:03 | |
And talk about something on a rather different level | 18:04 | |
from that in which he has been engaged. | 18:08 | |
There's really nothing new about this. | 18:11 | |
Martin Luther had the experience, | 18:14 | |
during the day he sometimes preached three times, lectured, | 18:16 | |
worked on books and had conferences with students. | 18:21 | |
And when night came, he wanted to just drop in a chair. | 18:23 | |
And his wife had slaughtered an ox, | 18:28 | |
and brewed beer, and washed and spanked children, | 18:30 | |
and superintended servants. | 18:33 | |
And when Luther settled down, she would begin, | 18:36 | |
"Herr Doctor," she always called him doctor. | 18:39 | |
"Herr Doctor, was the prime minister of Prussia | 18:43 | |
the cousin of the Duke of Brandenburg?" | 18:47 | |
"Ah," said Luther, "I have to have patience | 18:52 | |
with the Pope, and heretics, and my family, and Katherine." | 18:54 | |
(congregation laughs) | 18:57 | |
Which isn't saying how much patience she had | 19:00 | |
to have with him. | 19:02 | |
He says, "I don't see how Adam and Eve | 19:04 | |
made it for 900 years." | 19:05 | |
(congregation laughs) | 19:07 | |
How often she must have said to him, "You ate the apple." | 19:12 | |
And he would retort, "Well, you gave it to me." | 19:16 | |
(congregation laughs) | 19:19 | |
There's a very delightful little comedy | 19:22 | |
which exemplifies some of these clashes | 19:23 | |
in interest in modern life. | 19:27 | |
It's the movie entitled, "Genevieve." | 19:29 | |
I hope you've seen it, or that you may. | 19:32 | |
Genevieve is the name of an antiquated automobile, | 19:34 | |
vintage of about 1905. | 19:37 | |
And the story is that in England, once a year, | 19:40 | |
there was an old car excursion, | 19:47 | |
from a radius of about 15 miles, roundabout, | 19:50 | |
into the summer resort of Brighton. | 19:53 | |
We have a young married couple, and the young man | 19:59 | |
is extremely devoted to Genevieve, | 20:01 | |
and he just loves this annual excursion. | 20:04 | |
And his wife always goes with him to please him, | 20:06 | |
but she hates all of the emergencies that inevitably arise. | 20:09 | |
Well, an invitation comes to go to a party on the night | 20:15 | |
that they've set to go with Genevieve. | 20:18 | |
And she looks at it ruefully and crumbles it up, | 20:21 | |
and throws it in the wastebasket. | 20:23 | |
And he finds it there. | 20:25 | |
And he knows how much she'd rather go to the party. | 20:28 | |
So he calls up the hotel in Brighton, | 20:32 | |
and cancels the reservation. | 20:34 | |
But then she insists that she will go with him! | 20:37 | |
And they go and they get the Brighton, | 20:40 | |
and they don't have the reservation. | 20:41 | |
And so they go on from predicament to predicament, | 20:44 | |
alternately berating and embracing each other. | 20:47 | |
Well now, the tempo was a little faster than in real life, | 20:53 | |
but in real life there is this oscillation | 20:57 | |
of friction and reconciliation. | 21:01 | |
And if it's about comparatively trivial matters, | 21:06 | |
it may not be so disturbing, | 21:09 | |
but sometimes it's over questions of real moment. | 21:12 | |
Sometimes, it's genuinely tragic. | 21:18 | |
Take that story of Rebecca and Isaac | 21:23 | |
that it began in such idyllic fashion. | 21:26 | |
Twin boys were born to this couple, Jacob and Esau, | 21:31 | |
and the affections of the father | 21:35 | |
were fastened on Esau, the hunter, | 21:37 | |
and of the mother on Jacob, the home boy. | 21:41 | |
When Isaac was an old man and blind, | 21:47 | |
Rebecca connived with Jacob | 21:52 | |
to deceive the old man about the birthright. | 21:56 | |
Well, that's a clash on a low level, | 22:02 | |
but sometimes clashes occurred on a high level. | 22:06 | |
Here's the case of a couple, and each of them is an MD. | 22:11 | |
They have a child, the child is sick. | 22:16 | |
The father says that he can take care | 22:21 | |
of the case better than any other doctor. | 22:23 | |
The mother says that a doctor ought not to treat | 22:28 | |
a member of his own family. | 22:31 | |
In this case, the wife wins, | 22:37 | |
because she convinces her husband that she's right! | 22:40 | |
Now, that's the best basis on which clashes | 22:49 | |
of this kind can be resolved. | 22:51 | |
In little matters one can just give away out | 22:54 | |
of deference, and for the sake of harmony. | 22:57 | |
But if there's a fundamental difference of opinion, | 23:00 | |
the best solution is to thrash it out, | 23:02 | |
and to come to an agreement. | 23:05 | |
It can't always be done, to be sure, | 23:08 | |
and then one has to learn to live with a disagreement. | 23:12 | |
But every effort should be made | 23:16 | |
to talk it through and to arrive at a calm mind. | 23:20 | |
Now these clashes may spoil marriage. | 23:27 | |
And what began as an idyllic romance may end up | 23:32 | |
as a tired friendship, or perhaps a bickering partnership. | 23:36 | |
And one sometimes feels | 23:45 | |
that it's providential, | 23:50 | |
if death carries off one partner, | 23:53 | |
in the romantic period and prevents living on | 23:59 | |
into a haggling old age. | 24:04 | |
But it doesn't need to come out this way. | 24:09 | |
And one way to prevent it is to resolve to prevent it. | 24:14 | |
Elton Trueblood rightly says | 24:21 | |
that marriage is not a contract, | 24:23 | |
take it or leave it, try it out. | 24:25 | |
If we don't like it, dissolve it. It is a commitment! | 24:27 | |
And if there is a commitment, a resolve, | 24:33 | |
to resolve the clashes. | 24:40 | |
In most instances, it can be done. | 24:45 | |
There are certain rules that may be of help. | 24:53 | |
And one is, | 24:57 | |
not to try to work out a clash when tired. | 25:00 | |
If a difference of opinion occurs at bedtime, | 25:08 | |
it's wise by mutual agreement, | 25:12 | |
to defer the discussion until | 25:15 | |
the freshness of the morning. | 25:18 | |
And if people have come to know each other, | 25:24 | |
they're ready to take it. | 25:27 | |
If one says to the other, | 25:29 | |
"I'd rather drop it now, let's wait. | 25:30 | |
We'll take it up again." | 25:33 | |
Another help is to take breaks, | 25:39 | |
breaks singly and breaks together. | 25:42 | |
Anne Morrow Lindbergh has just come out with a book | 25:46 | |
in which she gives some very mature reflections | 25:49 | |
on the life of woman in this complex society. | 25:52 | |
She doesn't think we can eliminate the complexities | 25:56 | |
at least not most of them, | 25:58 | |
but she does think that we can ease the strains. | 26:00 | |
And she suggests periods of solitude, | 26:04 | |
preferably for a brief time anyway, every day. | 26:09 | |
But certainly periods during the year when | 26:13 | |
a wife can go off entirely by herself, | 26:16 | |
commune with the infinite, | 26:20 | |
restore the body by lying in the sunshine, | 26:22 | |
and looking on the stars. | 26:26 | |
And then it's a good thing for the married couple, | 26:30 | |
if they can arrange it, to go off together, | 26:32 | |
where they can just have time and leisureliness, | 26:38 | |
for hurry is one of the greatest enemies to understanding. | 26:43 | |
It helps to have morning devotions together. | 26:53 | |
My wife and I found it harder | 26:57 | |
to do this when our five children were home | 26:59 | |
than we do now, when they're all gone. | 27:03 | |
Incidentally, we're up to nine grandchildren, | 27:07 | |
and it doth not yet appear how many we shall be. | 27:10 | |
(congregation laughs) | 27:13 | |
Now, that the five children are gone, | 27:16 | |
it's rather easier to keep a schedule. | 27:20 | |
But we do find that a prayer and a song in the morning | 27:23 | |
cause the trivial and the important to sort of shake down, | 27:33 | |
and to take their proper places. | 27:38 | |
And all of this gives a tone to the day. | 27:41 | |
It is a venture. | 27:51 | |
The way maybe fraught with severe trials. | 27:54 | |
There may be clashes, | 28:01 | |
and strains, but it is a splendid venture. | 28:06 | |
There is no relationship of life | 28:13 | |
in which love is deeper and joy more profound. | 28:16 | |
Thomas Carlyle, every time he went past the spot | 28:29 | |
where he had last seen his wife alive would uncover. | 28:36 | |
Samuel Johnson, 30 years after his wife's death continued | 28:44 | |
to remember her in his prayers. | 28:51 | |
And as for the attachment of parents to children, | 28:57 | |
Jesus took this as the pattern of the very love of God. | 29:04 | |
He told a story about a prodigal son, | 29:09 | |
but it's really a story about a prodigal's father. | 29:11 | |
But when the boy came to himself and started home, we read, | 29:16 | |
"And while he was yet afar off, his father saw him." | 29:22 | |
It was not the boy who first saw the father, | 29:29 | |
but the old man whose eyes were dimming, | 29:33 | |
who first saw the son, for love opens the eyes. | 29:35 | |
And very revealing is the sequel, | 29:44 | |
when they were making merry over the boy who had returned, | 29:46 | |
and the elder brother hearing about it was sullen. | 29:49 | |
And the father went out to him, | 29:53 | |
and the boy complained saying, | 29:55 | |
"You never gave me a kid that I might make merry | 29:56 | |
with my friends, and when the witless brother comes who | 29:59 | |
has squandered thy living with harlots, | 30:03 | |
you kill for him the fatted calf." | 30:04 | |
And the father answered, "My son. | 30:08 | |
All that I have is yours. | 30:13 | |
But it was me to make merry, | 30:20 | |
for this thy brother was dead, and he is alive. | 30:23 | |
He was lost, and he is found." | 30:29 | |
And as for the love of a mother, | 30:37 | |
a friend of mine told me that his parents, | 30:40 | |
some 30 years previously, | 30:45 | |
had had a baby which died in infancy. | 30:48 | |
They moved away from that town. | 30:53 | |
And the father seemed to have forgotten all about it. | 30:56 | |
But the mother, whenever there was an opportunity, | 31:02 | |
would go back to visit a little grave. | 31:08 | |
It is a venture, it is a splendid venture | 31:20 | |
in which lie all that is richest in our lives. | 31:27 | |
Will you raise and engage in prayer? | 31:38 | |
Oh God, our heavenly Father, who has ordained | 31:49 | |
that the ongoing of life should be through | 31:54 | |
the union of lives. | 31:57 | |
Bless thou all those who have engaged upon this venture. | 32:00 | |
And grant onto them joy and peace, and triumph. | 32:06 | |
And now, may God's peace, which passes all understanding, | 32:15 | |
keep our hearts and thoughts | 32:20 | |
in the knowledge and love of Christ Jesus our Lord, | 32:23 | |
both now, and always. | 32:28 |