Sacrificial Joy

 

A Wedding Homily

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

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

Love is weird. It’s never quite the thing that we expected it to be. We tend to think that love is an emotion, but it’s not. Love has never been the same as feeling in love. We imagine that it’s passion, but it isn’t. No matter how attractive we might find someone, it’s behavior, over the long run, that either quenches or fuels desire.

Oftentimes you’ve heard it said, even from this pulpit, that love is a choice: the decision, every day, to put the good of our beloved first and foremost in our lives; thus to love one another as we love ourselves. And this is most certainly true. “Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone. It has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.” Yet even this, I think, falls short of the deeper reality.

Because love isn’t simply something that we’re called to do. It’s who we’re made to be.

I mean that literally. No man is an island, after all. There is no individual human being. From the moments of our earliest awareness, we have no understanding of the world, let alone a sense of self, until we encounter an other. You can see this in the wonder of a newborn who suddenly discovers the face of her father, of her mother, and realizes, “Oh, this isn’t me. Wait, there’s a me now?”

Our instinct is to reach out, to connect, to be human in relationship. It begins with our family, of course. The more we learn of them, the more we learn about ourselves. Then we stumble upon friendship, and our universe expands. “Friendship is born,” wrote C.S. Lewis, “at the moment when one person says to another, ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one.’”

After family and friends, we then explore romantic love. And, oh, this is the kicker. Suddenly we find ourselves drawn to creatures who are decidedly not family, not old friends, but explicitly very different from ourselves. We are attracted less to like and more to opposite, to find someone who complements the very areas that we lack—because we’re searching now for our other half. Together we may then become a family of our own, a fruitful love. And so the cycle begins anew.

Despite their varying flavors and intensities, all of these relationships are built at root on love. They all operate as love. In each case, I give away a vital piece of myself, a piece of who I am, by placing it into you. That is the sacrifice of love. And in return, you then pour that piece of myself back into me, so that I may know myself anew, through you, for the very first time. That is the joy of love.

And so it goes, giving ourselves to one another, and returning the gift that is given, in what amounts to a continual death and resurrection: crucifying the self, that it might rise in glorified form. That’s why love hurts. Love always hurts. But love is always worth it in the end. For indeed, my love, there is no me without you.

God Himself is love. The Father forever pouring out His Being into His Son; the Son forever pouring forth His Consciousness into His Father; with the exchange of love between them as their Life and Breath and Spirit; such that all Three are One: this is the Christian understanding of the Trinity. God is love. He makes all things in love, sustains all things in love, redeems all things in love. And we, whom He made in His image, are called to live His love as well.

Through the length and breadth of the Scriptures, the most common image we find, for the love that God holds for Creation, that Yahweh holds for Israel, that Christ holds for His Church, is that of a wedding. It is the glorious exchange of God giving to us everything He has, everything He is, and in return taking upon Himself everything we have, everything we are. And I for one find comfort in that it’s a rocky marriage.

Seriously, the Bible comes across as half a ballad. In Jesus, God gives everything away for love of us, makes Himself vulnerable for love of us; and in return we murder Him, in the worst way we know how. You’d think that would be the end of it. Yet even death cannot kill the undying love of God. Three days later, and up He arises, healing, forgiving, renewing, redeeming, and bringing us to life.

Such is the duality of marriage. For indeed, this afternoon you two are sacrament and sermon. You are the symbol and embodiment of God’s love unto humankind. Alleluia. But you already know, don’t you, that it won’t be all roses and sweetcream in the gardens? Real love is hard. It takes patience, forgiveness, sacrifice, and eating rather a lot of crow. Real love means waking up and watching the same person floss beside you in the bathroom mirror for the next 40-odd years or so.

The person whom you love the most is the one to whom, of necessity, you are also the most vulnerable. And they will hurt you, whether they mean to or not. It’s true what they say: the more you love someone, the more you want to kill them. But that’s what’s so great about it. That’s how you know that it’s real.

We will spend whatever time we have upon this earth learning to give ourselves away for love, so that we rise immortal: a little death every evening, a resurrection every morning; until that day we rise in Christ to never die again. From this moment on, your teacher and fellow-student, your partner in crime, your joint pilgrim along the Way that winds from death to life, is your husband, is your wife.

You will learn to love each other in ways you cannot imagine now. You will be the love of God for one another, and together the love of God for all the world. And if that all seems a bit too smooth, just wait ‘til your kids come along. That’s when things really ratchet up to 11.

This family you form today is love made flesh. It is a microcosm of the Church, and a sign to the world of the love God holds for all of His Creation. This will be the hardest thing that you have ever done. And it absolutely will be worth it.

Deep breath now. Here we go.

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