I feel a certain amount of privilege whenever I’m invited to a wedding. Maybe I’m alone in this. My guess is I’m not. It’s a certain privilege to make the guest list. I don’t know how you go about deciding whether to attend the big event. With no disrespect meant to the bride and groom and their parents, when the invitation comes in the mail, I overly tend to reach for the Reply Card. Where’s the wedding taking place? Hmm. That could make for a nice long weekend. What about the reception? Where’s the party happening? What’s on the menu? What’s on tap? Oh and look, Jim and Suzy are getting married!
But here’s the thing—a small disclaimer for us all—no one actually gets invited to a wedding merely to see two people get married. The fact is, people get married every day and they do it with no flowers, no hors d’oeuvres, and very few people in attendance. If one just wants to get married, well, that’s easy. No, we get invited because two people want to be married, and that’s something all together different.
There are a thousand and one ways I suppose to say what it means to be married, but here’s another thing, I’ve discovered that it’s best not to. It’s best not to say what it means to be married. Now this isn’t to say that people won’t speak up anyway. But among those who offer us definitions and prescriptions for marriage, they are mostly critics and naysayers, and I would caution us against them. The truer voices, the wiser voices, if they dare to say anything at all about what it means to be married, might try to tell us about family.
“You can’t pick your family,” they say.
But you know you want to. You know that sometimes you want to take this one but not that one. And that’s what makes it such a good word for weddings, because weddings are one of those rare, beautiful moments when we realize we’ve been picked for the team. Granted, at weddings it’s not hard to see who’s been picked for the team, and why they’ve been picked: stunning brides and dashing grooms with not a hair out of place. But we know there’s always more than meets the eye, and when today becomes tomorrow…
To actually be married one must not be afraid to speak their disappointments. And then to remind the person on the other side of the bed, whose every hair is now out of place, why you picked them in the first place.
As an ordained minister, I do enough wedding ceremonies that I can no longer figure out what it’s worth to try and be original with my words. I’d like to be that priest who sang his own unexpected Leonard Cohen chorus from behind the altar. It sounded a bit like Hallelujah, and the bride and groom seemed pleased with the thought that marriage might be just that. But of course they sing Hallelujah at certain funerals as well and I’m pretty sure the priest knew this, though I’m not sure the bride and groom did.
Last month at a wedding I told a story about my son Rowan, all of 4, who apologized to his sister Lillian on behalf of another kid. Apparently, one of the girls at Lillian’s gymnastics class told her that her cartwheel looked stupid.
“We don’t use that word,” Rowan announced. Then turning to his sister he said, “I’m sorry.” I told Rowan that he didn’t have to apologize, that he hadn’t done anything to hurt his sister. He told me, “I know, but someone should say I’m sorry.”
At that same wedding I read a blurp from a New York Times op-ed column entitled, Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person. It sounded like a pretty original assertion to make at a wedding, and even if it wasn’t, it seemed like a point better worth considering now than later. With a self-promoting knack for pessimism, the columnist contends that, “The person who is best suited to us is not the person who shares our every taste (he or she doesn’t exist), but the person who can negotiate differences in taste intelligently—the person who is good at disagreement. Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate differences with generosity that is the true marker of the “not overly wrong” person. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it must not be its precondition.”[1]
Having said all this, I glanced at the bride and groom. I could tell they were listening and that made me feel good about my original material selection process. In a society where most marriages now go broke, I felt like I was digging up for them something they perhaps hadn’t seen before, something new they could try out.
“Tolerate differences with generosity; be good at disagreement; don’t overthink your compatibility right now; you will marry the wrong person.”
Yes, I could tell they were listening, though I also wondered what they had heard.
My own personal disclaimer to this topic is that I care so little about who should be allowed to get married. Even as a minister who has responsibilities to negotiate the differences of a whole congregation—to understand how and why one person, based on their reading of scripture and of the ways of God in the world, would so strongly oppose one type of marriage in their church, while another person, who just happens to attend the same church, so strongly supports it—I still care so little about who should be allowed to get married. It’s not that I don’t support people who wish to be married. I do. It’s that I’m tired of churches that want to spend precious time and energy handing out approval ratings for marriage. It is simply wasted work on the part of any church, and worse, an abuse of power that is contrary to gospel. Gay, straight, never married, divorced, it is precisely because I am a minister that I will give you an altar to stand on. It is precisely because I am a minister that I care about what marriage means to you personally and why you want it so badly, and why I am so sorry for the many times the church has failed to hear this part of your story before turning you out. Because your story could be the most beautiful story ever told by the church, about the church. To say yes to being in relationship with people who don’t agree with you around every turn, but who will take the turns with you even so. And yes to people who have determined that the only way to truly be loved is to love, and if you want to be understood you must first seek to understand. And yes to showing you a seat at the table and piece of communion before ever asking you to prove your deservingness, because if Jesus was right, all things will be made clear in the breaking of bread anyway. And yes to having serious discussions about fidelity and commitment to crosses, to the poor, to the stranger, to making space within and around ourselves daily for that which is strange and scary to us.
Like the joyful escapade of a father running forth to greet his prodigal son not because his son once was lost and now is found (for among the destitute the prodigal knew where he was all along), but because in this homecoming the father has been found again—the prodigal, no matter the type, brings back to his father the surprising, salvageable quality of his father’s own flesh and bone and the father cannot say no to it—I have heard this Yes spoken in church. But I hear it just as clearly, and sometimes more clearly, in homes and coffee shops and bars, sitting around the table with gay couples, and young couples, and old couples who once married now believe again, talking about marriage and what it means to them.
Back at the wedding the bride and groom recited their vows and exchanged rings as we paused to listen to the bride’s brother read what has to be the most unoriginal material selection for a wedding: a few verses from1 Corinthians 13, the Bible’s Love Chapter.
Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.
If words about love are meant to be lovely, these are among some of the loveliest. But to speak of love only in adjective hardly seems fair to a bride and groom, let alone to love. The fact is, the person who wrote of love in this way wasn’t even at a wedding. It’s more likely that Saint Paul was sitting at a bar necessarily drinking a beer as he tried to find the right message to send back to his friends in Corinth. One member of the community there has written to Paul voicing serious concern for what can only be called the loss of unity.
In this particular instance it is not the whole town that has splintered unity, but one particular group. They are not yet Christians. They are no longer truly Jews. (It all sounds a bit like a couple about to be married, doesn’t it?) Amongst themselves they are arguing over who is The Faithful. What do the faithful eat? What do they teach concerning the role of women and men in public places? In a time when a set of beliefs can get you burned at the stake, who has the right understanding of things to keep us safe? Can two groups of people with a different set of morals really judge each other fairly? As with most arguments, the issues are born at home but they play out everywhere.
Listen up, says Paul, in good time all things will be made clear, but there’s an order to things and you don’t have it. Doctrine, dogma, and rank-and-file leadership can’t build unity. If you want unity you must start and end with love.
Paul’s advice is to be sacramental, that is, to celebrate the mysterious. Don’t insist on what you know and on everyone having to agree with you. That will only leave you lonely in a crowded room. You must be willing to let your ignorance be, to leave the unknown well enough alone. Celebrate this. By doing so you are saying yes to the wisdom someone else can bring you later on. At the same time, if you have your own light to shine on the world, don’t flash it in someone’s face. Don’t blind them. With compassion, light up the earth around their feet to help them see where they are and that you are with them. For there are moments when it is not humanly possible to believe in love and also to believe in God. In such moments, choose love. For choosing God doesn’t always make us loving; not in the way that choosing to love will always make us to be like God.
With Paul, everything short of love is a cautionary tale, including weddings.
On sunny Saturdays in May we can speak vows that will make even the gods drop to their knees. We can say that we know the person standing in front of us and that we will love them forever. That if they said, go climb a mountain with me, we’d find them the highest mountain to climb. But none of this is love. It is poetic and eloquent and inspiring, and it all makes for a lovely wedding day, but it is not love.
Love is always what happens next.
When everything falls out of our hands. When we can’t plan for the future. When the clock runs out on our youthful abilities to talk a good game and we don’t have a clue what to do. When our beauty sags and the bank account goes for broke. So it goes in life. So it goes in marriage. There’s no real way to tell how it will go, where it will take you, or how long it will last. And yet, and yet, here’s the really good news—
You will always have faith, hope, and love. Precious little is in our control. Faith, hope, and love are. These we can give and give and give again.
It’s a good word for wedding days. Fortunately it’s also a good word for all the days that come after the wedding day—all those days when some are just trying to be married and all are trying to keep alive.
[1] Quote is at it appears on page SR1 of the New York Times, May 29, 2016.
PleaseGrace 