Depthless
Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
Luke and Mara—congratulations. You’ve made it. All your hard work and preparations have paid off and have brought you now to the very moment of your wedding. And we are all here to celebrate: to celebrate the relationship that the two of you have shared; to celebrate the new life, the new home, that begins here today; and to reaffirm those bedrock truths of the basic goodness of marriage and its joys. It’s a beautiful day. And I’m glad we’re here for it.
Do you know what I’ve learned after two decades now of preaching at weddings? It’s that I’ve got the easiest part. So long as I don’t completely muck things up, no-one will much remember what all it is that I have to say today. Because it’s not about the preacher, is it? It’s about you, the two of you, together. You two are the sermon. You stand up here, before God and your families, pledging love, pledging fidelity, pledging your life to the one whom you love.
It doesn’t get any better than that. And honestly, I’m not just being sentimental.
Because really, sentimentality has little place in a marriage. Marriage is based on love, and love is not sentiment. Love is not an emotion. Loving someone is not the same thing as feeling in love with them. Rather, love is a choice, an act of the will, to put the good of another before our own. And that is hard. It takes work; it takes practice. It takes a selflessness that is no longer natural to our society.
To love one another is to give of ourselves, and that hurts. Love hurts. It always necessarily entails sacrifice, entails offering. But that’s what’s so great about it. That’s how you know that it’s real. See, if we go into marriage assuming that “this will be of benefit to me,” that my partner makes me feel good, that my partner meets my needs, and that that is in fact what marriage is for, then we’re going to be in for a rather rough road when things are no longer so easy—when marriage requires more work.
Love is not a static thing. It is fluid. We are always changing, every one of us: aging, growing, learning, evolving. And so we must adapt, both to changes in ourselves and to those in whom we love. This doesn’t mean we grow apart. To the contrary: we grow together. Marriage is a dance, whereby first one leads, then another, together in motion, together forming something strong and beautiful.
And it’s better this way. It’s better that we get to work at love, to learn from it, to be guided by it. Because if it wasn’t sometimes hard, if it didn’t involve both vulnerability and sacrifice from both parties, then it wouldn’t be love at all. It would just be infatuation. It would just be pleasure. And eventually that gets old. But love is ever dynamic, ever in motion, ever renewed; like a phoenix rising from the ashes. It can be comfortable too, certainly, but love never ceases to surprise.
No matter how long you love someone, you cannot exhaust the depths of their soul. There is always more than we know in any human being.
And there’s something deeply liberating about this, to know that life isn’t just about you; to know that you get to love someone no matter what, whatever the hardships, whatever the challenges, whatever the future may hold. Marriage is not a contract but an open-ended covenant: the promise of fidelity, the pledge of a relationship to weather every storm. And yes, it demands of us the life that we had, the ego that we had. But it makes us into so much more.
Our universe expands exponentially when we’re no longer the center of it.
Through the length and the breadth of the Scriptures, far and away the most prevalent and steadfast image of the relationship that God has with His people, that the Creator holds with the whole of Creation, is that of a marriage. Through all the joys and the sorrows, the victories and the defeats, the rebellions and the reconciliations, God is married to humanity and will not let us go. He gives to us all that He has, all that He is, and accepts us for all that we have, all that we are.
That’s what everything here is about, everything in this Church: the Word and the Sacraments, the liturgy and the prayers, it’s all about God and Man made one in Christ: one in His Spirit, one in His Body, one as His Bride. Loving us cost Jesus everything, and thereby He conquered the world. That’s how far God loves us: all the way to hell and back. Should we fly up to heaven, He’s there; should we fall down into hell, He is there. That’s love for you.
And that’s what the two of you are witnessing for all of us today. Your relationship, your marriage, your love reflects the love that God holds for us, the love that God pledges to us. It is a noble calling and a glorious exchange. Yet at the same time, it’s also pretty gritty. Marriage isn’t all roses and sweet cream in the gardens. Real love is rarely dramatic. Real love means watching somebody floss in front of you for the next 40 years.
It’s no coincidence that the people we love the most drive us the craziest. Indeed, it’s true what they say: the more you love someone, the more you want to kill them. But as Jesus Himself has shown us, death has no dominion over love. And thank God for that. Because all of this—love, marriage, family? It is death and resurrection every day. It’s so wonderful. It’s so awful. It’s so real.
So hold on to your hats, folks. And lets’ do this thing.
In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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