To the End of the Line

A Wedding Homily

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

Brian, Meghan, congratulations. This is a blessed day. And we are all honored to have been made a part of it.

I intend to keep my remarks relatively brief—at least for a preacher—as I still maintain that the two of you could certainly teach all of us a lesson or two about  marriage. You know very well what you’re getting into, and you’re each going in with eyes and heart wide open. That right there is a sermon in and of itself.

The Lord truly does love a good wedding. According to John, that’s where His ministry begins: with Jesus miraculously providing 120 gallons of wine for the reception. It is no coincidence that wine, and by extension marriage, are symbols of joy in the Scriptures. Wine, like marriage, gladdens and strengthens the heart, even though wine, like marriage, always comes with a note of danger, a note of risk. We make ourselves vulnerable to those we love. We pour out our lives daily for the life of our beloved. And therein lies all true joy.

Little wonder then that the most pervasive metaphor used to speak of God’s love for His people throughout the Bible is that of marriage, of a wedding. For there is no closer covenant, no more intimate bond. Even the love we share with our children is a love designed to send them out on their own, to outgrow us—while the love of marriage, as Chesterton quipped, is a duel to the death, which no man of honor may refuse.

Marriage is the promise that, come what may, we will face life and death, weal and woe, joy and sorrow, together. I’m with you, as it were, to the end of the line. And that’s the difference between a covenant and a contract. A contract is an itemized agreement: I’ll do A, B, and C, while you do X, Y, and Z. But a covenant is an open-ended promise. It contains neither terms nor conditions. This of course is not a license for abuse, but a promise to love and trust and cherish, to speak truth, to hold each other accountable, and to forgive as often as we repent.

God’s love for His people is a covenant, is a marriage. He’s with us to the end of the line. He will not put up with deception or wickedness, and neither shall we with each other—love is not a force with which to trifle, after all—but our God will love us even unto death, even death on a Cross. We will fail at A, B, and C, but He will go infinitely beyond X, Y, and Z.

My point is that the love we share with one another, the love between husband and wife, is a beautiful reflection of the love that God pours out endlessly upon His people, upon all of humankind. This sort of love is not an emotion, or a passion, or any sort of fleeting fancy. Rather, it is the willful decision to pour oneself out in love—to give all that one has and all that one is—for the good of another, our beloved.

I am yours, and you are mine, entirely. We come to this altar bearing our very selves as gifts, the gift of bride to groom and of groom to bride. And in this sacrifice—for sacrifice indeed is what selfless self-giving is—of who we are poured out for the one we love, we most closely resemble the Lord of Love, who pours out Himself for us all.

Weddings are always a blessing. Marriage is a good and a godly thing. It humbles us, strengthens us, opens us, resurrects us.

May the love you share, and the life you forge together, stand as witness to the world of the love that God has for us all.

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