Japhia
and I were at a wedding last night – the celebration of the marriage of
Samantha McEneny and Ian Hansen, and I’m sure you can imagine what a good time
it was. A lot of thought and planning
went into the whole thing – the ceremony, the party after, the order of the
dances, the speeches, the choice of DJ and master of ceremonies, the
photographer and the venue and the menu and the music and dresses and tuxes and
flowers and everything else you can imagine … because of course, everyone –
especially the bride and groom and their parents, but everyone really – wants
it to go well, and be a good wedding.
But
really, what can make a wedding not good?
How much needs to go wrong, for a wedding One really to be a bad
wedding?
One
wedding I did some years ago now had only the groom, me, the church organist
and two guests – the only invited guests, waiting anxiously and awkwardly in
the church for almost an hour beyond the scheduled time, before the bride and
her parents finally arrived. The reason
– which we all could see as soon as she walked up the aisle, was that, being
poor, the bride had rented a wedding dress and when she tried to put it on that
day, it was too small, wouldn’t do up no matter what they tried, and in the end
they had to tie the back together with string.
Was that a bad wedding? No, in
its own way it was a perfect wedding and a very blessed and happy start to
their marriage.
I
remember another wedding that we went ahead with just a day after the bride’s
father died of a heart attack. It was
their wish to do that, and in the end it was a very deeply meaningful wedding –
not bad, but deeply good in a way that none of us would ever have predicted.
I’ve
been at weddings where brides had their veil ripped off their head because
someone was standing on the end of it as they began to walk away, where the
couple couldn’t speak their vows at all because one was crying and the other
was laughing from anxiety and nervousness, where so many of the invited guests
were taking pictures during the ceremony – in the old days of click-and-whirr
cameras, that you couldn’t hear the vows.
I’ve been the minister at a wedding where trying to lead the guests in
saying the Lord’s Prayer, I forgot some of the words.
None
of those, though, were bad weddings because none of those kinds of things are
enough to take away the meaning of what is being done and what is being
celebrated. And even the outcome of the
marriage doesn’t make it bad. Japhia and
I are both divorced and remarried – and neither one of us would say that our
first weddings were bad weddings. They
were good weddings that we do not regret, because we entered into those
marriages freely, from and for love as we knew it, with every good intent we
were capable of. And isn’t that what
it’s about – what weddings and marriage and life and the world and God are all
about?
The
only wedding I’ve been part of that I think of as “bad” was one where in
talking with the couple I knew I had misgivings and deep questions about their
relationship, that I didn’t know how – or didn’t have the courage, to express
to them. So we went ahead with their
wedding, and within months the bride showed up one day at the church where I
was working, explaining how bad things were, and could she please get an
annulment.
That
was a bad wedding.
But
most of what we worry about and fuss over, as though it makes all the
difference in the world, just isn’t a problem because it’s not, in the end,
what really counts or really matters.
What matters is the relationship itself, the free choice of both persons
to enter into it, and their willingness to live in it and work at it no matter
what may come – whether it be good or bad fortune, happiness or unhappiness
over the years, and even their own and their partner’s failure and sin along the
way.
It’s
interesting that when Isaiah wants to speak a word of encouragement to the
people when they are thoroughly disappointed and discouraged by the state of
their land and their lives, Isaiah reminds them that God is like a marriage
partner to them, and God – being God and not human, will stay and live out the
promise of relationship with them. There
was failure and judgement and even a sense of separation and divorce by God over
the years, but Isaiah says no – don’t worry – God is God and not us – so
we shall no more be
termed “Forsaken”,
and our land shall no
more be called “Desolate” ;
but we shall be
called “My Delight Is in You”,
and our land
“Married”;
for the Lord delights in us,
and our land shall be
married to God.
That’s good news – better
news than we often deserve, better news than we can sometimes understand.
And from that and the
wonderful story of Jesus attending and rescuing a wedding party that almost
became a dry affair after only three of the usual six days of hearty celebrating,
there are three lessons about God and God’s relationship with us and all the
world that I want to draw attention to.
One is that God
really has wed God’s self to the world.
God has not only called the world – all the cosmos, into being, and not
only sustains it in its life from day to day and eon to eon. But God also has committed for the world and
all the cosmos to be where God is. As
Father Richard Rohr puts it in the passage that’s printed as a pondering in the
bulletin this week, God is not “out there” to be found in some kind of
perfection beyond this world that we live in and know as our own. Rather, this is where God chooses to be,
where God comes to us, where God is known and felt, where God’s good purpose is
worked out – in the daily, yearly, lifelong thing we call ordinary living in
the world as it is.
The world is not
perfect – at least not in the way we sometimes use that word to describe how we
think something should be. But the world
is, and it’s in the world as it is, that God is.
Which leads to a
second thing – that if something is worth doing in the world, it’s worth doing
even imperfectly, just as we are able, in the hope and the faith that it
somehow is caught up and transformed by God, like ordinary water at a wedding
feast, into the finest of wine. Because
really is any wedding made bad just because it’s not perfect in all its
parts? Is any act of love bad because
not done perfectly? Is any word of
compassion, any gesture of justice, any attempt at confession and forgiveness,
any inkling of peace, any glimpse of truth and reconciliation bad because it’s
not perfect or maybe as whole and complete as we think it should be? One thing the Gospel story tells us is that
nothing happens in this world – and I really mean nothing, that cannot be
turned to and into something good.
But then there is a
third thing – and this is that none of this happens by magic. When the people of Israel were discouraged
and tempted to throw in the towel, it took the prophet remembering the goodness
and faithfulness of God and speaking words of encouragement to the people, to
help them hang in there and not give up.
And at the wedding in
Cana when it seemed that suddenly what was a good party was going to go dry, it
took Mary noticing it and saying something about it, it took the servants
filling the large pots with ordinary water at Jesus’ direction (even though it
probably seemed kind of stupid to them), and it took them then ladling some out
to take it to the steward of the feast for tasting (even though they might have
thought they’d be fired doing something so silly) – for the miracle to
happen. It took all these people doing
what they could and what they were told, as ordinary and even foolish as it
was, for the ordinary, imperfect stuff of life to become a sign and an
experience of the kingdom of God in our midst.
I wonder if maybe one
thing the Bible may be trying to tell us, is that life is a feast and a party –
or at least it’s meant to be. And that
when we all do our parts – as ordinary and imperfect as they are, and even as
foolish as they may seem – when we all do our parts, then Jesus and God and
God’s people really are – or at least can be, the real life of the party.
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