Review of the Walt Wangerin DVD Segment

Here's the text of a review article submitted to the St. Paul's congregational newsletter:

“How to Keep Christ at the Center of a Marriage”
By Walter Wangerin Jr.
© 2006 Augsburg Fortress
Minneapolis, Minn.

Review by Don Harting

This 20-minute teaching segment is the third of seven recorded lessons in The Lutheran Course on Marriage. This is the curriculum we followed during the marriage retreat in February.

I found this to be the strangest, but also the most powerful and memorable, of the segments we watched. I had heard of Walt Wangerin before, but never seen a picture of him. He appears intense on camera. His gray hair is shaved close to his head, his shiny face appears gaunt, his eyes gaze straight at the lens, and he speaks passionately.

In some ways I was a little turned off by his intensity and wordiness (sorry I’m an editor), but the message he was trying to convey is so central to our Christian faith, and to long-term success in marriage, that it cannot be ignored. Wangerin emphasizes the importance of forgiveness in marriage, and how faith in Jesus expands our capacity to forgive.

“I don’t know when it will happen,” he says, “but in all my experience as a pastor and a writer and a friend and a father and a grandfather, I’ve seen it happen that one spouse will sin against the other spouse in a hundred, thousand different ways, may not even know he is doing it, but sin against the other spouse beyond the other spouse’s ability to forgive. . . . By ourselves, on our own—without an infusion of the Holy Spirit—we are able to forgive, but we can forgive only so much. . . . If nothing happens and that sin continues, then comes the deterioration. Just like Adam and Eve, we put on clothes, we begin to hide ourselves from our spouse. . . . Or we try to ignore those things that are brutal. . . . This is where our Christian faith makes our marriage peculiar, my dear friends. More important than any other characteristic of a marriage is the capacity to forgive the sin that shall surely come.”

Wangerin goes on to prescribe a five-step process for us to follow as we forgive our spouses. In brief, they are 1) Realize your sinfulness 2) State the sin and its consequences 3) Declare forgiveness 4) Show that love continues 5) Renew the covenant.
He then shares a moving example, taken from his own marriage to Ruthanne.

This DVD segment gives The Lutheran Course on Marriage power and value to local congregations. I can see how it would encourage and empower couples to renew and revitalize fragile marriages, benefiting not just the spouses but also their kids. It’s another reason why I’m excited about this course, and how it could benefit St. Paul’s even more if we offer it again.