A Marriage Ceremony Homily
I would like to begin this afternoon by reading a familiar passage from the Holy Scriptures which describes a beautiful image of all that love accomplishes.
1 Corinthians 13
If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.
So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
Part of the gift humans were given at creation is the ability to Love. Love has been twisted by humanity’s broken nature into a mere shadow of what it is supposed to look like. So much of the world’s interaction with one another is a commodities-based love, conditional and wrong.
“Do you look the right way?”
“What can you do for me?”
“I will love you if I get something out of it…”
The love Paul describes in this passage is the other-worldly love that God first demonstrated to us and now that we are part of his Kingdom on Earth through Jesus we are able to be a part of redeeming love and displaying these characteristics in our lives.
The society around us tells us that we should think our happiness depends on not needing one another. All of life ends up being a pursuit to distance ourselves from others and loneliness is a result of that thinking. Marriage is a sacred “No!” to that system of life. A joining of two individuals in Holy Matrimony to no longer try to manage it alone but to lean on one another in all things.
This marriage commitment is a very weighty vow indeed. This is a life-long “Yes” that you are extending to one another. Love can endure when you give yourself away fully to the other person. Loving God and Loving others, especially your spouse, is what we were made for… live in that.
