Right before they graduated from college two young men were out in the woods on a camping and fishing trip when they happened upon this particular brook where the trout all but jumped out of the water onto their hooks.  They had such a great time that they agreed to meet again in that same spot twenty years later and enjoy some more fishing.  Twenty years later they reunited and backpacked into the woods until they found a spot that looked very similar to the one where they had fished at the brook twenty years before.   One of them said, "This is the place!"  The other said, "No, I don't think so."  The first man then said, "Yes, this absolutely is the brook where we fished.   I recognize it by the clover growing on the other side."  To which the second replied, "Silly, you can't tell a brook by its clover."

No one ever looks better than they do the day they stand at the altar to exchange the vows of marriage.  Yet, twenty years later, looking back on the pictures of that day, most have learned that you can't tell a groom by his tux or a bride by her veil.  Beneath all that beauty and handsomeness is what 1 Peter 3:4 refers to as "the hidden person of the heart."  (NASV)  It is that hidden person that has become, for better or worse, as the vows say, the more visible and the outward appearance that has increasingly faded into insignificance. 

All who marry come to the altar carrying invisible baggage.  Invisible because it is stored away in the deep recesses of the heart and mind.  Like a trunk in the attic, that baggage stores away for us all the pictures of the past, all the experiences and emotional mementos, values we've been given or learned and the memories of joy and sadness that make up that part of us that dominates how we relate to others, especially in marriage.  What kind of marriage two people will have will be, in the larger part, determined by what is in that trunk the day they get married and how willing and capable they are of managing its contents.

Our ability to manipulate and alter our outward appearance begins to fail quickly the day we step away from the altar.  I've often joked that if two people could spend just one night together before they got married and see what the other looks like without the benefit of an early morning shower or makeup or a good hairdo, fewer people would get married.  Unfortunately, too many seem to try that these days anyway.  And, despite statistics that indicate that those who live together before marriage are much more likely to divorce, we have positive proof that love really is blind.  I heard the story once of a young groom who asked the preacher, on the day of the wedding, what he charged for his services.  The preacher said, "Pay me according to the beauty of your bride."  When the wedding was over the preacher was a little dismayed when the groom handed him only two dollars.  So, the preacher lifted the veil of the bride, gently lowered it and gave the young man a dollar back in change.

But, no joke, romance blinds us in fearful ways leaving us oblivious at the most crucial moment of human commitment to the fact that true beauty, or ugliness, is a matter of the inner self.  Those who pass through the years with a happy and meaningful marriage relationship do so because they know they are packing baggage when they say "I do" and have exercised great skill in how they unpack it with the person they promised to love forever.

If the astronomical divorce statistics tell us anything, however, they tell us that too many don't know they are packing baggage at the altar.  Just as significantly, they don't know that the beautiful physical specimen standing next to them is packing, too.  They really do believe that what they see is what they get when, in fact, it may be what they can't see that gets them.

My first sermon in this five-part series on the family entitled, "The Family That Stays Together," is based on the assumption that a great deal of the task of staying together until death does part us has to do with how the marriage gets birthed and the fact that marital birth is most prominently affected by the baggage two people are carrying the day they say "I do."

Without question, what destroys most marriages is what two people do in that marriage because of the baggage they brought to the altar the day they started.  How they handle that baggage will determine their success or failure in fulfilling the marriage contract.  So, what do we do about that baggage?

Perhaps the best way to build an answer to that question is to do so around the significance of one simple word, responsibility.  First, don't accept responsibility for what others packed in your baggage.  Perhaps the most significant part of what most of us are carrying in our emotional and spiritual baggage was put there by someone else.  Likely, most of them either thought they were doing us a favor or were totally unaware of what they were asking us to carry the rest of our lives.  Nonetheless, what others packed in your baggage is not your responsibility.

Just before I graduated from college I went backpacking with a college buddy in the Jila wilderness of western New Mexico.  The night before we set out we spent hours packing our backpacks.  Our only mistake was that we let his mother help us pack.  Like most good mothers, she was overly concerned that we might get off out in the wilderness without something essential.  However, when she finished, my backpack weighed exactly seventy-five pounds!  The next day, as we set out on a five-mile hike, I had to stop every quarter mile and rest because of what some else put in my pack that made it so heavy.

Some of what is in our baggage is simply genetic.  The cover story of a recent Newsweek ("Shaped by Life in the Womb," Newsweek, 9/27/99)  reports that many researchers how suspect that many diseases that were once thought to be the result of poor lifestyle choices may have actually been programmed into a person's physiology prior to birth.  So, too, with marital birth, I believe, on levels spiritual and emotional.

When I was in Houston this past week I spent the night with a long-lost cousin and her husband.  We've decided that we need to try to put together some of the pieces of our family puzzle.  That work can get heavy at times.  So, I appreciated the comic relief I got when she informed me that some of my genes that came from the shallower end of the pool.  My maternal grandmother's maiden name was Barrow.  I knew that long ago.  What I didn't know until Monday night is that was one of my distant cousins was Clyde Barrow of Bonnie and Clyde fame.  Even though I've never struggled with any secret urges to rob a bank that little tidbit of information was a sobering reminder that all of us have flawed blood in our veins.  And, we are not responsible for one drop of it.

There are spiritual and emotional "genes" in us, too.  The moral and emotional influence of those who raised us is packed away in our baggage.  From the way our parents loved each other or failed to love each other to the way they loved or failed to love us, the baggage we carry to altar of marriage is chocked full of the power of those experiences in our lives.  Most graphically, those who were raised by alcoholic or abusive parents can tell you how difficult it can be to manage that pain well into their own adult years.  And, how, sometimes, they find relationships in marriage impossible to negotiate for reasons they cannot explain.  If your parents abused you in any way it was not your fault.  If your parents divorced, it was not your fault.  Parents do not often appreciate the fact that, when they toss a stone of sin into the family pond, the ripples can affect whole generations for decades.  What was not your fault can still cause you great pain throughout life.

Here is the tricky part.  While we are not responsible for what others did to us or what others gave to us we are responsible for what we do about what other did that hurt us.  We can never use anyone else's failures as an excuse for our own.  And, you may discover, strangely enough, that the only way you are able to stop taking responsibility for what was not your fault is to forgive those who did hurt you.  The scripture we have read this morning calls us to forgiveness.  Someone, somewhere, must break the cycle of hurt and destruction.  That is what Christ did on the cross for us and what we are called to do in all of our relationships.

Please be aware that, in the way you deal or don't deal with the way others influenced you, you are packing your own bags for the future as well.  Nothing can traumatize a marriage more quickly than unresolved pain, guilt and anger from the past.  Perhaps that is sermon for another day.

Suffice it to say that, in every choice we make now, whether good or bad, we are packing our own bags for the future.  If we are not careful we may discover that, just as happens every time I take a trip, we have ended up hauling around a lot of very burdensome baggage that weighs us down unnecessarily.  I always overpack.  By the way, may I give a simple tip for packing I have learned the hard way?  Good choices always weigh less on down the road than bad ones.

Which leads to the second principle for dealing with the baggage we bring to the altar.  Regardless of how your bags got packed and who did the packing, one of the most significant tasks of marriage is learning how to unpack them in responsible and loving ways.  A very strange phenomenon takes place on your honeymoon.  Actually, I guess many could say that's true in more ways than one.  But, the one to which I am referring is the way we unpack our bags.

Beyond the fact that, for the first time in your life, someone else's clothes hang in the same closet and someone else's shoes clutter the floor, you get to discover the joy of two unpacking their expectations and values under the same roof.

None of us come to the altar perfect people.  But, in Christ, we can come to the altar empowered by His Spirit to behave in ways that honor Him and our mates that we would not naturally be capable of producing.  While I suppose there are any number of ways of delineating the truth of Colossians 3, our scriptural guide for the morning, these two stand out.

Work hard at doing the right thing for the right reason.  "Whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus."  What this means, quite simply, is that, building and maintaining meaningful relationships is the by-product of our own spiritual growth.

Jesus promised the woman at the well that, in relationship with Him, she could have well of water that issued in life.  To the extent that our own hearts are empty, we will use people to kill that pain and fill that emptiness.  To the extent that our hearts are continually renewed in a deeply personally relationship with God in Christ, we will be more capable of giving and loving.

Let me rush to say that you may have to get some help with that.  In James, the scripture calls on us to exercise confession of personal weakness as instrument of spiritual healing.  In the community of faith, through professional healthcare providers, prayer partners or deeply mature friends, we ought to involve others in the task of developing the "hidden person of the heart" to as great a level of health and maturity as possible.  One of the most painful things I ever heard someone tell me, years ago, was that, in a moment of terrible personal struggle, I could probably benefit from some professional counseling.  One of the best things I ever did was take his advice and get it.

Second, and last, work hard at integrity.  The scripture actually says, "above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony."  It is almost as if the scripture is saying that we should take what most people think of as exclusively an inner quality of the heart, love, and actually wear it outside.  I use the word integrity on purpose.

Whatever else integrity is, integrity is the quality of one who has made what is on the outside and what is on the inside the very same thing.  True hypocrisy is being one person on the inside while trying to prove to everyone that we are actually someone else.  The scripture says, work hard at integrity.  Make who you are outside and who you are inside one and the same.

All over town children are busy deciding who they want to "be" this Halloween.  The older I get the easier I find it to just simply go as myself.  It can be scary in the truest sense.  But, there is great deal of freedom and peace that comes with knowing that, when others, especially my wife, look at me and listen to me, they know that they can judge the book by its cover.  That what they see is what they get.