A lot has happened in your lives before this day and indeed before you met and chose to stand here this day, before God and guests to make your vows and promises. Some of it has been happy but some of it has been sad. Some are memories you hope never to forget and others are ones you wish you could forget and never remember. Every man and woman who comes to be married lives in the same way. We are here today before the altar of God to help you make sure that this day is a memory to be cherished and never a choice to be regretted.
To do that, we have invented all sorts of rituals and ideas. From brides in white to grooms in tuxes to rings on fingers. We try to make the wedding an occasion instead of what it is – a new life in which who you are together is more important than who you are alone. How does this happen? It happens not simply by what you do but what God does for you.
Weddings are filled with sentiment and romantic images but marriages are made in the workshop of real life. It is the tension between what we dream and how we live. What happens on this day often seems far removed from what happens in daily life. Weddings are filled with laughter and celebration but life as husband and wife is work, hard work. To assist you through this work, God has supplied you with a gift stronger even than love. It is forgiveness.
Andy and Danielle, you are not taking a soulmate and neither of you is a perfect person for the other nor will you walk on clouds from this day forward. By choosing to be married you are taking up a cross that you will carry the rest of your lives.
Marriage is a cross not because it is bad or because it is a pain. Just the opposite. Marriage is part of God’s order and creation. He created from His goodness for our good. He created man for woman and woman for man. He established marriage so that as a dance, if you will. A dance not simply of love but of service, as our Lord came not to be served but to serve and to give His life as a ransom for many. It is a tune in which the harmony is as important as the melody so that even though the man and the woman live in different bodies, they are joined in one flesh until as a single being they work for the other, putting the good of the other before themselves and finding this their happy purpose and calling for as long as they both shall live.
Marriage is perfect, a perfect order created by a perfect God. But sin has roughed up the edges of each of us and of life as a whole. So marriage is sort of like a smooth space into which our jagged edges and sharp lines must fit. Though we are supposed to be one flesh, we have conflicting wills and desires. We get angry. Bitter words accompany that anger. We have a memory which refuses to recall our failings but which cannot forget the failings of others. We fight to win and we presume that bending is weakness and losing is shame. It does not help that the world around us encourages the very things that pull us apart and dismisses the very thing that pulls us together.
This is why marriage is a cross. We daily battle against our self-centered wills only concerned with self-interest. We daily battle against bruised egos and hurt feelings. We daily worry that maybe we are giving more than we are getting from our partner or that in order to be happy we must get what we want. Unless we abide in Christ, marriage will always have a scorecard and we will chart its success by wins, losses, and ties. But in Christ we have the power of forgiveness so sustain us as His own children and to sustain us as husband and wife live out the vows and promises made today.
No one deserves to be forgiven. That is the power of the cross. Our Lord takes upon His innocence our guilt and He does so not because there is anything in it for Him except us. He does not forgive those who prove they are sorry enough never to sin again nor does He forgive those who will make up for their sins. He forgives the sins of every sinner who cries out to Him for mercy. That is how Christ abides in us. We come with dirty hands, minds, and hearts and He cleanses them by forgiveness. But we keep coming back here because we keep getting dirty what He has made clean. It is not an occasional thing but weekly rhythm. It is not about the friendliness of the church or the pastor or the people. It is about our need to be made clean and His gift of absolution through Word and Sacrament.
Forgiveness is what we learn from Him. None of us would be forgiving unless we were confronted with a love that loves not in words but in suffering, not in sentiment but in pain, not in theory but in death. That is why the cross is the center of the Church and the center of the Christian home. Christ abides in us to forgive. We abide in Christ forgiving one another as we have been forgiven.
While this is true on every level in every relationship, it is most profoundly true in marriage. As the wounds of Jesus have taken on all our sin and its death so that we might be whole, so do we in His name forgive the sins of each other so that we may be whole. In this way, the cross is the most profound counselor for any couple going through trial and trouble; for any family in conflict and dispute. We forgive as He has forgiven us and in so doing we are made whole again, restored by the power of His blood once for all shed but every day bestowing upon us the fruitful effects of that blood once shed.
The day will come when the butterflies of this moment will pass, when all that is new becomes familiar and predictable, when the cost of love becomes your willingness to forgive and to ask each other for forgiveness. The world will tell you your marriage is over and it is time to find someone who new and a new relationship to fill you with surprise. Don’t listen to them. Christ does not discard you when you come to Him with the same tired sins and predictable prayers. Do not let go of each other but in Christ abide and through Christ abide together. Learn that the power of love is forgiveness and this is much more profound and much more powerful than fairy tales which never come true and dreams which never are real.
The greater love of Jesus is displayed for the world to see in a cross where the debt of our sin was paid. Christ has given you this powerful love. You did not choose to be loved by Him but He has chosen to love you. And now today, you choose to love each other as He has loved you so that this forgiveness may bear great fruit in your lives. And there is no greater fruit than endurance through the costly seasons of life through forgiveness and unity in every season of life.
In the Holy Name of Jesus. Amen.
1 comment:
Amen.
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