A Wedding Sermon

It’s been a while since I posted a sermon, so here’s the sermon I preached yesterday at the wedding of two of the Janet Clarke Hall alumni. I made it through the service without crying, but got weepy when I was thanked in the speeches and had to be comforted by the groom’s mother. Plus, they gave me a beautiful teapot! The reading was 1 Corinthians 13:1-13.

In April Steve and Katherine sent me a card for my birthday. Among other things it said, “Have a nice year – we know what the highlight will be!” The next time I saw them I said how nice it was that they’d remembered that I was going to be ordained this year. But I do have to say that presiding at this wedding is undoubtedly going to make it into one of the top two places on my list of reasons that 2008 was memorable.

This is a wonderful day, a day of great joy and celebration. I first met Katherine and Steve in 2002, although at that point I only knew Steve as the voice on the other end of the phone in 4d’s room. They’ve both grown and changed a lot in the past six and a half years, and during that time they made the exciting and courageous decision that they want to spend the rest of their lives with each other. As someone who knows them both and loves them both, I’m happy and proud to be involved in this service.

I’m happy and proud not just because I know Steve and Katherine well, not just because I’m looking forward to a lifetime of fabulous meals in their home – although I’m very much looking forward to that – but because I’m a minister in the church of God, and the church always gets excited when people get married. The church knows that God is love; that affirmation is at the very heart of our faith, and so whenever people love each other we believe that God is part of their love. This should be both a great reassurance and a great challenge to Katherine and Steve as they begin their married life.

The challenge first. The love that is of God, the love that today’s scripture reading describes, is demanding. The love outlined in this Bible passage is agape, charity, the love between God and humanity, the love we see first and fully in God. It’s an appropriate passage to be read at a wedding because in marriage a couple are invited, encouraged, to love each other as God loves us all. This reading describes what that love is like: patient; kind; not envious, boastful or arrogant or rude; not insisting on its own way; not irritable or resentful. It tells us that love never begins with the question: “What’s in it for me?” Instead love starts by asking: “What is best for you? What do you need?” Love’s nature is to seek not its own needs, but the needs of others. And this love enables us to bear and endure whatever life may bring us.

This love is the power of God, the gift of God, poured out into the very depths of our being. This description of love is also a description of God. Hence the reassurance. As Katherine and Steve begin their married life together, they don’t do it alone. There are people whose job it is to support and encourage them as they seek to live out their love for each other.

Firstly, there are all of us, their friends and family, gathered here. We will promise later in this service to bless and support them in their lives together. That’s the part that we play in the ceremony today, and it’s a role we will continue to play for the rest of Katherine and Steve’s lives. They aren’t the only people making vows here today; the rest of us will make promises too.

Secondly, there’s the church. Steve and Katherine’s wedding certificate will say that they were married according to the rites of the Uniting Church in Australia, which means that the church is also implicated in this relationship. The church has a duty to support and encourage Katherine and Steve in their marriage, and to uphold them in any and every way that it can.

Thirdly, and most importantly, there’s God. “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them,”[1] the writer of the first letter of John tells us. Today, we ask for God’s blessing on the marriage of Steve and Katherine, in the sure and certain knowledge that the God who is love will bless them as they make their promises to each other. As they make their vows and declare their love, they are not doing it alone. They are doing it in the presence of us all and in the presence of God. Just as we will support them in their marriage, God will support them, too. Saint Michael Leunig writes that there are only two feelings, two languages, two activities, two motives, two procedures, two frameworks, two results – love and fear. Steve and Katherine have chosen love over fear, and the God of love will bless their choice. Amen.

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[1] 1 John 4:16.