Hi Friends,
And, by “friends” I do mean it. I think of you all as a community, a congregation within a congregation. Therefore, I wanted to share an otherwise personal moment for me. David (AKA: “The Minion”) got married today to a woman perfect for him and for whom I have nothing but respect and joy. I’m grateful that God has finally provided someone as interested in antique sewing machines as my wife.
My relationship with David extends nearly the length of my ministry in Virginia, which is the bulk of the total. He has seen me mature, nearly die, and get older. I have watched him flourish. Ministry leaves behind few tangible effects. Thus far, he is one. Whatever else, he does preach like me. He had no other choice.
I simply do not understand colleagues who tell me they cannot befriend people in their congregation. I have friends, like David, I would never have befriended were it not for something called church.
In the spirit of community, here is the wedding sermon I offered based on one of the many texts (seminary students!) they wanted in their service. By offered, I mean…this is what the manuscript said a few days before the wedding… There have been more than a few already, but this wedding hit me hard in the feelings wheel.
John 17:1–11, 17–23
In God’s good humor, I have had the privilege of serving as David’s pastor since he was six years old— that started twenty-one years ago. David has been a friend for a shorter but still considerable time. I trust him now to be a colleague, and my wife and I look forward to our friendship with Emma. Which is to say, not only do I know David quite well, he unfortunately knows me too. He also knows the wife to whom I am a husband and the sons for whom I am a father. Ergo, more so than anyone else whose marriage I have celebrated, David knows that I have absolutely no advice to offer two sinners about to say “I do” to one another. Even if David did not so know me, Ali is here and she would laugh me out of the room if I attempted to assume the posture of wisdom-dispenser.
Thankfully, Emma is also too theologically sophisticated to expect a preacher to hand over the kind of advice you can tape to the refrigerator.
Be patient.
Choose kindness.
Never go to bed angry.
Communicate your feelings.
I have heard all of it. I have tried all of it. My therapist can tell you how maladroit I am at that last one.
The slogan I typically trot out at weddings comes from my mentor Stanley Hauerwas:
“The ability to love your enemy is often the necessary precondition to loving your spouse.”
It’s funny and it’s true, but it’s still advice. Such slogans, no doubt, offer sound counsel. The challenge today, however, is not that I lack strong advice. The challenge is structural, and it not only gets at the difficulty of relationships, it strikes at the very mystery of the Three Person’d God in whose name we have gathered.
Since you two are about to make promises you cannot— strictly speaking— keep, you deserve to hear the truth about why you two cannot possibly keep the promises you are about to pledge one another.
Given that this my first occasion of marrying two verifiable theology nerds, I can— without fear or apology— cite Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. David and Emma have both spent enough time in dusty classrooms to know Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, or at least to have successfully avoided it. Permit me to make use of it now. If you didn’t get dressed up today for a little Hegel, then fake it and consider your pretense a gift to the bride and groom. Because Hegel, whatever his other liabilities, diagnosed the human situation with uncomfortable precision.
Here it is.
David, you are a subject.
That is not a compliment; it is a description. You know and will and address the world from inside your own irreducible first-person perspective.
Here’s the rub.
So does the person standing next to you.
Emma— you are a subject too.
Which means that the encounter that is supposed to be love— the face-to-face where love must happen if it is to happen at all— is structurally a standoff. Each of you is, for the other, simultaneously a subject who does the knowing and an object who gets known. And for Hegel, to be made the object of another’s knowing and willing is precisely the definition of and experience in slavery.
The will to possess and the will to give make mischief at their intersection, and the result, as Sartre eventually conceded, is that hell is other people— not crowds but exactly this face-to-face where love would occur if it could occur at all.
The obvious remedy is that each of you simply decide to let the other make you an object— to relinquish the will to dominate, to convert yourself from the inside out. Hegel recommends something like this mutual submission.
My teacher Robert Jenson said this is the same stuff as a bad pietist sermon:
“Only believe, which is all very well, but how does one do that without already believing?”
The act of self-conversion must itself be an act of the same dominating will it means to overcome. That is, you cannot lift yourself by your own collar. Neither can you decide to let another subject make you an object.
What’s worse, there is a further difficulty, one that arrives even before Hegel’s problem. To love is not to give something. To love is to give yourself. All the patience and kindness and constancy you may offer your beloved are but tokens. The only thing I actually have to give Ali, and the only thing she can can truly receive, is me.
David, what will wound Emma are not your absent roses.
It will be your absent mind, which their absence signifies.
But how do you give yourself, Emma, to David?
Here is the crux the ancient vows make plain.
You are going to die.
None of us is getting out of life alive, and therefore none of our promises can be truly unconditional, because they are all conditioned by death. The future is the one thing we cannot promise. And so we cannot truly give ourselves to another— not finally, not in the way the vows demand. The French philosophers who followed Nietzsche saw this without flinching and drew the obvious conclusion. To love is simply to die, and to call another to die, and eventually everyone obliges.
Leave the God who raises the dead out of the equation, and they are correct.
So here we are.
Hegel’s face-to-face makes love structurally impossible. Death makes the gift of self ultimately exhaustible. And the remedies on offer— pure self-abnegation, the abolition of distinct selfhood into some undifferentiated union, the postmodern celebration of eros as will-to-power dressed up in honest clothes— each only confirms the equation of love with death.
This is an honest account of the thicket into which you step today.
Stanley Hauerwas puts his finger on still another complication that deserves a hearing before we turn to the gospel.
He writes:
“We never know whom we marry. We just think we do. Or even if we first marry the right person, just give it a while and he or she will change. Marriage, being the enormous thing it is, means we are not the same person after we have entered it. The primary challenge of marriage is learning to love and care for the stranger to whom you find yourself married.”
This is true.
And it is clarifying.
Hauerwas is right to say it.
But notice what it still assumes: that marriage is constituted solely by the two of you. That the strangers in question are simply bride and groom— two subjects, face to face— discovering across the years how thoroughly they have misread each other. Which leaves us, once again, with Hegel’s problem and no way out of it. The stranger to whom you find yourself married is still the other whose otherness you posit for your own sake.
Thankfully, graciously, this is not the last word.
In the Gospel of John, at the end of his Farewell Discourse and just before his Passion, Jesus does a strange thing. He prays. Jesus prays to the Father, which is itself unremarkable except that he prays as the Son, from within a relation that is the original instance of the very problem identified by Hegel. The Father begets the Son. The Son is begotten by the Father. Each addresses the other as a subject. Each is for the other an object. And the question the religions of the world have almost universally answered with violence— with the son killing the father, the sibling killing the sibling, death at the heart of deity— the gospel answers otherwise.
Why are the Father and the Son not locked in Hegel’s mutual struggle for domination? Because there is a Third: the Spirit, whose scriptural role is precisely that he is freedom and love.
The Spirit intends the Father and the Son to love each other.
The Spirit frees the Father to let the Son go, which is what it means to beget without devouring, and so actually to love him.
The Spirit frees the Son from servility to the Father, and so actually to love him.
And the Spirit does not himself fall into the same face-to-face trap with either of them, because the Spirit exhausts himself entirely in the gift he gives.
The Holy Spirit is the love between the Father and the Son.
And nothing else at all.
There is no remainder of selfhood standing over against the ones he frees.
This is what Jesus prays from within when he says, “That they may be one, as we are one.” And then, impossibly, Jesus adds, “I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one.”
Jesus is not describing relationship wisdom. He is not offering a template for communication between lovers. He is announcing what is actually happening. That you— you two, you too— are being caught up into the life of a God who has already solved, from within himself, the problem that makes your love impossible.
And he does it through a Third.
“I do not ask on behalf of these alone,” Jesus prays, “but also on behalf of those who will believe through their word.” Which is to say, Christ’s prayer includes you two, standing here today, because the mission of the Son always arrives through a mediating chain of address— the apostle to the congregation, the congregation to its children, and so across the centuries until two seminary students in this room heard something that made them think eternity might be as plausible as Tuesday.
The Spirit who frees the Father and the Son to love each other is the same Spirit who animates Jesus’ risen body, the church. And in the church, every third party who reconciles two people locked in the face-to-face standoff does not do so in their own name, but in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
On the occasion of your marriage, we simply must be as arrogant as is the New Testament. The love of which Jesus speaks in John 17— that they may be one as we are one— is not an ideal toward which you are advised to aspire. It is a new commandment given to a new kind of community.
Its condition of possibility is not your romantic love.
It is certainly not your marital effort.
Its condition of possibility is the Third.
This is what Stanley Hauerwas’ slogan neglects. Your marriage is not constituted by two people each learning to love a stranger. Your marriage— Christian marriage— is constituted by three, and the Third is the one who does not fall into the face-to-face trap, for he exhausts himself entirely in the gift he gives. The stranger to whom you find yourself married across the years is not someone you must somehow, by heroic acts of attention, come to love again. The stranger is someone the Spirit already intends you to love, and goes on freeing you to love, as he freed the Father to love the Son across the infinite difference of the one who begets and the one who is begotten. Which means Hauerwas is right about the stranger, and right that you will marry one. He is simply wrong to leave the Spirit out of the arithmetic.
Let me make plain what is happening today.
David, Emma— you cannot love each other, not finally, not in the way these vows demand. But the Third can love through you two. The love you are pledging today is not yours to generate. It is the Spirit’s to give. What makes your marriage possible, then, is not that there are two of you. It is that there are three.
And this is why I am not here today to offer you advice. I am here— by Christ’s authority alone— to lay my hands upon you and give you what makes your love possible. The traditional vows retain a rude conclusion that no amount of romance or decoration can suppress, “Until we are parted by death.” The Future remains the one thing you two cannot promise one another. Which is why, the wedding liturgy begins with a remembrance of your baptism— the event in which you died, already, with Christ. The one in whom you died now says to you, “Because I live, you also will live.” Your future is his, and he gives it to you to give to each other. Only because his promise precedes you, can your promises to each other be pledged at all.
Just so, the love to which you are called goes further than patience and kindness, though your patience will often be in short supply and your kindness will prove intermittent. The love to which you are called is specified by the one who, on the night he was betrayed, broke bread with those he knew would betray him. Who said to them, in the midst of their betrayal, “I call you friends.” Who gave his life not for the good but for the ungodly, and thereby established— once, for all— the only standard by which Christian love is measured. As every married person here already knows, the ability to love your enemy is often the necessary condition for loving your spouse.
The way Love has loved you is nothing like the way you love even yourselves; nevertheless, the Love who lives with death behind him insists you can so love.
This claim is intelligible only if we are willing to be as arrogant as the New Testament requires, and say that the church is the body of the Risen Jesus and the temple of his Spirit. From this day forward, your marriage is an outpost of that body. Your relationship is constituted not by two people navigating the Hegelian face-off through heroic acts of mutual self-donation, but by three— and the Third is the one who exhausts himself in the gift he gives, who is nothing other than the love between the Father and the Son, who is now and will abide as the love between you.
Which means I have, after all, one piece of counsel.
Do not be afraid.
The story you will call us is not the story of two people slowly learning to love the stranger they discover inhabits their home. It is the story of two people who were caught up, in water and the Spirit, into a life that was already the answer to the problem before they knew there was a problem. Whatever the Author of your story has in store— and the way forward cannot be known, which is what makes this a beautiful risk and a leap of faith— hear what the Lord says so often in the scriptures, and what I say to you now on his authority alone.
Do not be afraid.
