As Sharon and I were disembarking from a recent flight, we saw a couple ahead of us wearing T-shirts proclaiming, “We Still Do: June 19, 1971.” It didn’t take us long to figure out they were celebrating their fiftieth wedding anniversary. We’d done the same back on January 22 of this year, and we’re looking forward to some other events in that connection, a train ride 

West and some time on the Gulf with kids and grandkids.

Of course, the words ‘We still do,’ derive from the vow, ‘I do,’ uttered by the bride and groom in the ceremony as they answer traditionally the question of whether they will commit “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, until [they] are parted by death.” 

I remember a Sunday School party back in our seminary days. The host couple was just observing an anniversary, and one of them said something like, “We’re celebrating twenty years of happy marriage. We’ve been married twenty-five years, but only twenty were worth celebrating.” Gulp! And it wasn’t just a joke. Okay, then good for them. After all, they’d signed on “for better for worse.”

I’m happy to say that our fifty years have been good ones, since it’s been my good fortune to marry a woman of surpassing excellence, and one who meant “I do,” and not just “I hope so” or “If I continue to feel like it.” 

About the time Sharon and I got married, I read of a vow popular in California, best taken in a Nehru jacket, with flowers in your hair, on a cliff overlooking the Pacific at Big Sur, “. . . as long as love shall last.” And I don’t think they meant the 1 Corinthians 13 version of love, which “never fails.”

I have no idea how much satisfaction and plain old fun the couple on the plane had had in their time together. I do know that their T-shirt notice was an important testimony in a world that’s devaluing marital commitments (either shunning them in the first place or abandoning them once made).

Of course, evangelicals differ on whether there are “escape clauses” allowing for divorce and remarriage. Some say breakup’s only licit in the betrothal stage; others allow for dissolution on grounds of disappointment, focusing not upon sad history but upon the bright prospects for a new try. (Sometimes I liken it to channel surfing till you get the program you like.) I go with the “Erasmian” reading of Scripture, one that allows for a second marriage when a party is the victim of sexual infidelity or abandonment by an unbelieving spouse. (I get this from Matthew 5, Mark 10, and 1 Corinthians 7). Some add physical abuse and financial neglect on the part of the husband. (I’m inclined to urge separation rather than divorce for the first.) I found John and Paul Feinberg’s chapters on this matter in Ethics for a Brave New World helpful, and I’ve used this as a text in seminary ethics classes. More recently, I wrote up my understanding in the Spring 2020 issue of the journal of Mid-American Baptist Theological Seminary—the title “Therapeutic Marriage vs. Holy Matrimony.”

Whatever one’s take on this, we could all use a reminder that matrimony is a pledge to do—to hang in there—till the couple is “parted by death.” Maybe we should end our services with a Nike admonition to the couple, “Just do it.”