Let It Burn

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A Wedding Homily

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

We often get love backward. Marriage—thank God—sets us right.

See, as a people, we tend to treat love as though it were oil or gold, something rare and mysterious, hidden out there in the world somewhere, that we have to hunt down, dig up, and hoard. It’s for us, you see, a precious rarity that we have to suck out of others in order to be happy. “How, oh, how,” we ask, “can we ever find true love?” Such is the picture we gather from advertisements, Hollywood, and society at large.

But this is exactly backward. Love isn’t like diamonds or gold. It’s not something you take from the world and keep for your own. Love is something you give. And only by giving does it grow and spread, filling all the world around it, like a virus, like a fire.

And that’s why marriage sets us right. Marriage shows us what true love is. It’s not a sentiment. It’s not a passion. Love is not the same as feeling in love. Love is a choice, an act of will, the promise to put the good of another before our own. To love is to give of oneself for our beloved—and that hurts. Love hurts. But that’s perhaps the best thing about it. That’s how you know it’s real.

Laurine and John, gathered here this afternoon before the altar of our God, you are Christ’s witnesses to the world. Your love for one another, and the covenant you here profess, proclaim to us all that marriage is sacramental and sacrificial. It is sacramental because the love shared between husband and wife is a physical reminder of the love that God has for His people, that Christ has for His Church. It is a covenant, that I will be yours and you will be mine, come what may! It is the promise that here at last is flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone, the missing half of me who makes me human, makes me whole.

And it is sacrificial because from this moment on, you do not live for yourselves, but you live for one another. John, you are called to love and protect and care for Laurine, placing her needs before your own. Laurine, you are called to love and protect and care for John, placing his needs before your own. And that’s hard. It takes a great deal of humility and patience and forgiveness, every day. True love is flossing beside the same person for the next 50 years. True love is admitting that the more you love someone, the more you want to kill them.

But to live this way—to live wholly for another, and for the family you will raise together—is to become so much more than you ever were before, so much more than you ever dreamed you could become. Together, you will be stronger and wiser and live more fully and more selflessly than you ever could have apart. You will force each other to grow, constantly, every day. You will be more than John and Laurine. You will be a home.

See, a lot of people think that love will keep their marriage together. They think the passion of youth will burn brightly through all the years of work and boredom and compromise. It won’t. But if you do it right—and I very much believe that you will—your marriage will hold your love together. You will each give of yourselves. You will each put the other first in your heart. And the flame of your love will grow. It will mature like a fine wine.

In a world constantly striving to distract us with entertainments and commodities and ephemeral diversions, this is what’s real. This is what’s true. This love, this marriage. It is the North Star that guides us home. It is the refreshing breath of reality amidst all that is flimsy and fake.

And someday, decades from now, when you are old and grey, and your children are grown and have children of their own, and you think that you know your spouse better than they know themselves—you will still surprise each other. You will still grow together. And you will look out on the things you’ve done, the people you’ve loved, the community of which you’ve been a part, and you will realize, “We did that. The love we shared did that. The life we’ve lived did that. And the legacy of our love will echo down through the generations long after we are gone.”

Today is the day that everything changes. Today is the day that you lay down your individual lives and pick up your new life together. Today is the beginning of it all. Your love is a holy fire. Let it go, and let it burn.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.