Grace, mercy and peace be to you from God our Father, and from our Lord Jesus Christ.
Text (Proverbs 18:22):
He who finds a wife finds what is good and obtains favour from the LORD.
Prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Terry: today, you’ve found a wife.
Lauren: today, you’ve found a husband.
Yesterday and even this morning, when you found yourselves, you didn’t find there a husband or a wife. And now, you do: tomorrow you will and the next day and the next day after.
So what? Now what are we supposed to do?
Well, enjoy it – enjoy what is good and enjoy the favour of the Lord. As Proverbs says:
He who finds a wife finds what is good and obtains favour from the Lord. And likewise, she who finds a husband finds what is good and obtains favour from the Lord.
At the time of Jesus, there was a man who found a wife, and a woman who found a husband, and this discovery, this finding, this marriage was so good, that Jesus turned up, and when the wine was running out, he turned 6 stone jars of water into wine. What they found was so good, that he blessed them with too much wine, too much that they couldn’t even drink, heaping and showering on them almost too much blessing.
Because weddings are a blessing – they are a gift to everyone. They are a wonderful occasion for you, the couple. But they are also a blessing to everyone who is here. They are gift to everyone, a gift of a chance to celebrate, a gift of a chance to pull ourselves from our day to day lives, and to wish you happiness, and every joy, and every blessing. And every blessing from every person to you, the married couple, is doubled and tripled by God, in fact, it is added to ten times, twenty times, a hundred times.
Everyone who has ever travelled to a different country with a different culture and has the chance to go to a wedding always says what a great occasion it was, how wonderful it was, and all that sort of thing. A culture with weddings is a happy culture. A culture without weddings is a sad culture. That’s why every wedding is such a wonderful occasion because it is the building of a new culture, a new family, a new future, a new hope, and a new joy, a new happiness.
He who finds a wife finds what is good and obtains favour from the Lord.
Every wedding is a testimony that love is stronger than everything bad, and wrong, and corrupt in the world. Every wedding and every marriage is a testimony to the fact that “love never ends” as the reading today says. Because civilisations will rise and fall, but there will still be weddings and there will still be marriages, that’s because “love never ends.”
In fact, in the Christian understanding of marriage, love has always been at the centre of marriage. St Paul says in Ephesians: “Husbands love your wives, as Christ loved the church.” Now we might think that it is an obvious thing for husbands to love their wives and for wives to love their husbands. But marriage for some people has been for financial reasons, or cultural reasons, or for convenience reasons. The Christian church says, and God says, not “Husbands, put up with your wives”, or “to the right thing by your wife”, or “merge your bank account with your wife”, but “husbands love your wives”.
Now it could be easy for me in blessing your marriage to say to you, “listen, you fools, love each other, stay together, don’t get divorced, or else!” A wedding sermon could easily deteriotate into a pile of “Thou shall nots…” and whole heap of finger-wagging.
Now, in a few moments, you will make vows to each other ”…so long as you both shall live.”
But how can you promise to love a person in the future when you don’t know what the future holds? Are we really putting too much on your ability to make promises and on the power of your own promises when we begin a marriage like this?
What’s interesting about the vows is that you promise not just to love each other, but also to cherish each other. “Cherish” means that you promise to build love each day, that you continue to lay a foundation of love.
But at the same time, love can’t be forced, love can’t be commanded, love can’t be coerced. It can only be given. And love creates love. The giving of love creates the freedom to love in return.
But our little verse says: “He who finds a wife finds what is good, and obtains favour from the Lord.”
Favour from the Lord. The estate of marriage is one upon which God rests the hand of his blessing. Marriage is something which God shines the light of his face. God is the one who begins marriage, he is the one who loves you, in order that you can love one another.
Marriage is a holy calling. It’s a place where God has put you. It’s a deal that God himself has fixed up and arranged. You are no longer two but one flesh, and what God has joined together, let no one separate. No longer can you look at life anymore thinking only about yourself. Everything in your life will be shared: your home, your bed, your children – even the words of each other’s sentences. There’s no room anymore for independence. You’re not independent, and you never will be. Any-one who thinks they’re independent should look at their belly button and think again. For you, Terry, to think about yourself, means to think about Lauren. And for you, Lauren, to think about yourself, means to think about Terry. Because you are joined together as one flesh, marriage will bring about blessings which have to do with your flesh. Children are a blessing of your flesh, a house and home is a blessing for your flesh, work and money will be a blessing for the needs of your flesh, and the vows of marriage now are your flesh. St Paul says: “He who loves his wife loves himself.” And also, She who loves her husband loves herself.
And marriage calls you: “Husbands loves your wives as Christ loves the church.” Christ loves the church because he forgives it. And when he forgives it, he no longer sees the wrong in it. If there’s ever a day in your married life, where you think that the other one is less than perfect in your eyes, then remember that you have always been perfect in Jesus Christ’s eyes, because he forgives you.
He who finds a wife and she who finds a husband, always finds something which is good. It always finds something which will always be good. He who finds a wife finds what is good, even when for a while there is a struggle, even when there is a heavy cross to bear. Your husband is always good. Your wife is always good.
Whenever something is blessed by the church, it is always blessed with the cross. And it’s kind of ironic, because the cross is the sign of the most profound suffering the world has ever known. That’s because every blessing comes with suffering built into it. Blessing is never without suffering.
Your husband, your wife will always be good. But there will be suffering. But there will be blessing in the suffering. Anyone who wants to be blessed and doesn’t want suffering wants something that isn’t true, that isn’t human, that it’s real. A marriage without suffering is something that is beneath you, that is not worthy of you. Because love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. And life love has to bear, if love has to believe, if it has to hope, if it has to endure, then it has to be born out of suffering. And love never ends. Christ loved the world in the same way. All it took was to look at us with one glance, and he was captivated, and fixed his eyes to suffer and die for us, and rise from the dead. Christ looks as the world, and loves her, because he forgives her. He found what is good, in fact, something which is perfect – at least, in his eyes, even if we don’t think so or don’t feel it, and in the end, that really all that matters.
And so we say: He who finds a wife finds what is good, and obtains favour from the Lord.
May the Lord God our heavenly Father bless you with every gift, and may he bring all of us to the marriage feast, the marriage banquet in heaven, where we will eat and drink in the kingdom of God, at the wedding that which will never end. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment