Beth and I wrote our own wedding vows. Watching our daughter get married last month brought back memories of our own wedding and the events around it. One story my wife often tells is how we presented our handcrafted vows to the pastor who would perform our wedding. He was a substitute, a retired minister called in just a couple weeks before, because the senior pastor at Beth’s church had moved away.
Rev. Fouth wanted to meet with us beforehand, to get to know us and go over the service. Unfortunately our appointment was in the middle of a St. Louis Cardinals baseball game and his attention was divided between our nuptials and whoever was up to bat on the television in the next room. We handed him our vows and he began to skim through them. Suddenly his head snapped up to focus on us completely, the Cardinals forgotten for a moment. “You’re promising to be each other’s friends?” he asked. Then he continued, “You’re not going to be friends. You’re going to be husband and wife!”
I’ll give poor old Rev. Fouth, who after the wedding confided to my mother that he would much rather do funerals than weddings, the benefit of the doubt. I think he probably meant to say that the closeness and intimacy of marriage goes far beyond mere friendship. But Beth and I would still maintain that friendship is a pretty good thing to have in a home, and the book of Proverbs agrees.
Each week this summer I’ve struggled a little with finding a unifying theme for a chapter of Proverbs and giving an appropriate title to a sermon about that chapter. On a prior run through I had reserved the title “Good Friends” for chapter 19. However, I found myself desperately wanting that title now for chapter 17. So I’m using it now. Then in a couple weeks I’ll jump slightly out the “Good…” framework I’ve been using for these titles and take another run at the theme of friendship from a different direction. Another look at chapter 19 revealed that its references to friendship might be more aptly gathered under the title “Bad Friends.”
The problem, of course, is that every chapter of Proverbs, except 1-9 and 31, resists all attempts to find single unifying themes. These collections of wise sayings are grouped together in much smaller units, and transitions between verses are often by word association rather than by conceptual similarity. Yet there is still some profit in the mental exercise and gymnastics needed to weave two or three dozen disparate proverbs together. Perhaps the very mental effort needed to develop those connections, requiring one to carefully consider the individual proverbs and how they might relate to larger life concerns and theological ideas, is a form of grasping at the wisdom Proverbs means to offer.
In any case, Proverbs 17 calls up for me thoughts of friends and family, and the combination of friendship and family life which is a true blessing. The well-known verse 17, “A friend loves at all times, and [siblings] are born to share adversity,” explicitly makes that connection between family life and friendship and invites us to see the similarities in the love that is shared and to pursue holding them together in our own relationships.
There are also several warnings against strife in this chapter. Conflict is the bane of both friendship and family life. Verses 9 and 14 each offer ways to subvert and turn away from conflict before it gets a foothold, with forgiveness and forbearance of what might appear as insult and with sincere effort not to let quarrels begin.
Verse 1 begins the chapter with one of the frequent “better than” proverbs, “Better is a dry morsel with quiet than a house full of feasting and strife.” That appreciation of the “quiet” which people at peace with each other enjoy is echoed in the last two verses of the chapter, 27 and 28, by an appreciation of the quiet silence of the person who knows when not to speak. And that also is a mark of a true friend and loving family, who know when not to say words that hurt or bring up old wounds or tread on sensitive places in the hearts of others. As we’re told there, such quietness is real wisdom and good friendship.