Your Future is Christ’s to Give One Another

A Wedding Homily

I’m down in St. Augustine, Florida to celebrate the wedding of Andrew and Gina. Here’s my homily for the passages they selected.

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Romans 12.9-16, 1 Corinthians 13.1-13

No doubt we all would like a partner who is patient and kind and humble, as slow to anger as he is shy to boast— I know my wife wishes she enjoyed such a spouse. Despite my best efforts, however, she has yet to discover such a husband. Just so, I have no advice to give you. What’s more, neither does any husband and wife here have any reliable advice.

To put the crux of the matter theologically, if love is grace, then there is no law to ensure it will perdure.

On the upside, this means I have just freed you from having to listen to your parents.

I am not here to offer you advice for the course ahead. I am here to speak for the Author of the story you will call “us.” I am here to speak for God.

As bold as that may sound, I can up the ante.

That Jesus lives so as to be able to speak through a sinner like me is the necessary condition for the two of you to make otherwise impossible promises to one another.

In the scripture passages, the apostle Paul describes the attributes of the covenant of which your vows incorporate you. “Rejoice in hope,” Paul exhorts the church in Rome, “be patient in suffering.” Likewise, the apostle commends to the Corinthians a love that “is not irritable or resentful.” Paul overwhelms us with adjectives that may obscure the straightforward teaching of scripture.

Namely—

To love is not to give something (kindness, patience, constancy, etc.).

To love is to give yourself.

All the other gifts and affections I may give to my beloved are really mere tokens of the only thing which I have to give and that is the gift of myself. It is not my absent patience that wounds but my absent mind— that is, my forgetting to give nothing less than myself.

To love is to be patient and kind.

But to be patient and kind is not to love.

To love is not to give something.

To love is to give yourself.

Indeed we have nothing to give except ourselves.

But just how can I promise another myself?

Here’s the rub that the ancient vows obtrusively make plain: I am going to die.

In fact, none of us is getting out of life alive; therefore, none of our promises can be truly unconditional precisely because they are all conditioned by death.

Whether you’re a believer or not, the brute fact is incontrovertible.

The future is the one thing we cannot promise.

Thus, we cannot truly give ourselves to another.

While the two of you have composed your own vows to bind your union, the rude conclusion to the traditional vows (“Until we are parted by death”) is nevertheless latent in Paul’s beloved song to Love. After all, as Andrew, who remains one of my brightest confirmation students, knows, the love of which Paul speaks in 1 Corinthians 13 is not a description of human love but Christ’s love— or rather, Christ himself.

“Faith, hope and love abide,” Paul writes, “but love never ends…”

Only Jesus, who was before creation and who was raised from the dead, is without beginning and end.  Jesus is the Name Paul names with love: “Jesus is patient, Jesus is kind, Jesus is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. Jesus does not insist on his own way.”

Jesus is the name for Love.

More to the point, Jesus is the world’s only true lover, for Christ’s gift of himself to you his beloved was not conquered by the grave. Jesus did not get out of life alive, yet he lives with death behind him. The wedding liturgy begins with a remembrance of your baptism, in which you died with Christ. And now I speak for God in reminding you that the one in whom you died promises to you, “Because I live, so shall you live.”

Hence, on this basis and only on this basis, you can love. Your future is Christ’s and he gifts it to you to give to each other. Because he promises, “I am the Resurrection and the Life,” you can promise to one another, “I do.”

Leave the God who raised Jesus from the dead out of the equation and to love is simply a means to eat, drink, and be merry before we die.

Because your future is his to give, because you too will live with death behind you, because you are in him by water and the Spirit, your love may go farther than patience and kindness (even though your patience will often be in short supply and your kindness will prove fleeting). Jesus promises exactly this when he says after washing his disciples’s feet, “A new command I give you.”

This is something different.

It’s not, “Love God and love your neighbor as yourself.”

It’s, “Love one another as I have loved you.”

Christ is the end of a love that need not go further than self-love as the standard. But the way Christ has loved us is nothing like the way we love. Love broke bread with those he knew would betray him with a kiss. Even in the midst of their betrayal, Love says to them, “I call you friends.” Love gave his life not for the good but for the ungodly. Love loved his enemies, and, as every married person here already knows, the ability to love your enemy is often the necessary condition to love your spouse.

The way Love has loved us is nothing like the way we love even ourselves.

Nevertheless!

The Love who lives with death behind him insists we can so love.

Such a claim is intelligible only to the extent we are willing to be as arrogant as the New Testament is when it proclaims 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 the people called church and therefore your relationship is constituted not by two people. There is a third person. Your love can do better than patience and kindness. You can love according to Christ’s new commandment because while you two today will give each other rings, I will give you what alone makes love possible.

Like I said, I don’t have any advice for the two of you except perhaps the warning that there are days before you where simply scrubbing the toilet will strike you as heroic work (at least that’s what my wife says).

I don’t have any advice.

But I can— by Christ’s authority alone— lay my hands upon you and bestow you with the Holy Spirit. His love is genuine because it’s always grace. And because his love is grace, his bond to you irrevocable.

The way forward from this day can never be known. That your future is unknowable is what makes this act a beautiful risk and a leap of faith. Whatever the Author of your story has in store for you, hear the good news.

The story you will call us is not the story of you two. From this day forward, in better and in worse, there will be always a third. The Holy Spirit who just is the love between the Father and the Son.

Therefore—

As the Lord says so often in scripture, I say to you: “Do not be afraid.”