For Justin & Megan
A Wedding Homily
It gives me such pleasure to be with you today. Justin, having had the honor of baptizing you, and seeing your trajectory towards God. And Megan, you’ve courageously persevered through so much. And I’ve just flat-out enjoyed our time together.
So what I have to say today I say with great optimism, because I see that I’ve only arrived late on the scene, into a project that God has been working on, for a long time.
In the Lord, I want to give you three commands today. If you would devote yourselves to these, I’m very confident that you will do well - more than that, you’ll flourish.
First, you must - you must ENJOY each other. This is why God brought you together: because He loves you, and He wants to be generous to you, through your enjoyment of the other. I know this because this is what God did with the first marriage. He put Adam and Eve together and built a garden for them. And in that Garden there were only two no’s - don’t stop listening to God, and don’t eat of that tree. But everything else - all the thousands of other pleasures in that Garden - God said YES to.
And so today, He is setting you in your own Garden. And you too have two NO’s, which we’ve discussed. But for every one of His no’s, He lays before you now hundreds of yes’s . . . The enjoyment of small talk on the patio, as the delta breeze blows in on a warm summer night . . . The sweet pleasure of reading to each other in bed on a lazy Sunday afternoon . . . The fun of finding out if the couch and the kitchen work just as well as the bed.
So I hereby command you to simply enjoy each other. That’s one of the ways you can glorify God in your marriage.
Secondly, you must carry your own weight, and bear your own burdens. This may seem surprising, given what we’re doing today. But in Galatians 5 and 6, the Bible puts this notion of bearing our own burdens right next to being useful in helping others escape their own trials and temptations.
The reason for this is that those who carry their own burdens know the weight of temptation, and how hard trials can be, because they see it through to the end. And so it is those who carry their own burdens who are able to be gentle and patient with others who struggle. The more you see how much forgiveness you have needed in your failures, the more forgiving and forebearing you will be with the failures of the other. The more you carry your own burdens, ironically, the more useful you will be in helping the other carry theirs.
So there will be a temptation in the near future, to look to the other person to do for you the things that God calls you to do. Don’t give in to this temptation. Out of love for the other, attend even more to your own growth.
And lastly, remember that the promises you make today, they’re not for the happy times. The happy times will take care of themselves. No, it’s for the hard times that you make these solemn vows today. They’re your backbone, to stand firm, and keep dancing, especially when it’s hard.
And when you do, you will be like your God, who is a promising, vowing God. Who says to us, I will never leave you nor forsake you. Yet we need only to look to Him to know that it takes sacrifice to keep our promises. For in order to keep His promise, He had to give up His only Son to the cross.
So you will never be more like God than when you forgive, and keep your vows, through sacrifice. But we also know from Christ that on the other side of the sacrifice comes glory. Your sacrifices will lead to glory to God, and new pleasures for you.
So as I said at the beginning, I have great optimism about you two. Because, though life can be hard sometimes, it’s clearly God working in you. And He has built a Garden for you, too. So enjoy His generous gifts to you; carry your own burdens; and look to Him as your template, in keeping your promises. Do this, and you will do very, very well.
Amen.