In just over two hours time a couple will stand here at the chancel steps and make their wedding vows. Just like Mike and Brenda, who are celebrating their golden wedding anniversary, did 50 years ago. The chancel steps are a place of promise. They will promise to love one another, comfort one another, honour and protect one another and forsake all others as long as they both shall live.
They will then, as many other couples have said to each other, that they will have and hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, they will love and cherish each other till death do them part according to God’s Holy law and in the presence of God they make the vow.
When they exchange rings they will make further promises, giving the rings as a sign of their marriage, they will promise to honour each other with their bodies, promise all that they have they will give to each other and all that they have they will share with one another within the love of God, Father Son and Holy Spirit.
I am privileged to stand in front of them as they make these promises and vows. I can see the love in their eyes, the strength of feeling they have for one another and the genuine desire to make theirs a lifelong marriage.
But when they stand here, they are in love, they have not developed that deep well of love that comes with knowing someone intimately in all their moods, joys and disappointments.
Many years ago a school master told his pupils, “You will think I am old fashioned, but my advice to you is never to think that it is sufficient reason to marry someone, just because you are in love with them”. Years later many of those pupils realized with regret that by disregarding his words they had caused a great deal of hurt to a great number of people.
When a marriage breaks down it is not just the couple who suffer pain. If there are children they too worry about their parents, and there are grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins who are all sucked into the maelstrom: not forgetting friends who are not sure where they stand and if they offer support to one are seen as an “enemy” to the other.
Jesus said that the whole of the law was based on two commandments, to love God and to love your neighbour. We begin our services Sunday by Sunday recalling those words.
Unloving behaviour wounds the Father’s loving heart and that by definition is sin. God hates it when his children hurt each other. St. Paul writes “Love does no wrong to a neighbour, therefore love is the fulfilling of the law. He implies that the rest of the law and even the Ten Commandments are simply guidelines to the areas we have to choose between loving and unloving behaviour.
The apostles meeting in Jerusalem about AD 48 decided that the law of Moses was part of the Jewish culture and was not to be imposed on non-Jewish Christians. Remember the laws had been given to a nomadic pastoral society and to apply it to the socially stratified cities of the Roman Empire required, as Jesus has shown, a considerable effort of reinterpretation.
That process continues today. Remember until the early part of the last century women were seen as the property of men ……I can’t see many women here agreeing to that rule any more and neither should they.
We all need guidelines. Yet we must not demand from others what God expects from us, because we do not know their circumstances. We must respect anyone who bases their life on love and leave it to God to decide whether the way they applied it was sinful or not.
This afternoon as the couple make their vows and promises we can pray that the love they have for one another will deepen. Their love needs to grow and develop for it is the only love that will enable them to stand firm together in a world which will change and alter. A growing love makes things possible, it can take on anything, where as a static love can only deal with the joys and the problems of one day.
As we must pray that their love is not just special to them, but that it will also be special to everyone they meet, we hope that it will point to the wonderful mystery of God’s love for us all.
AMEN
Rev’d Edwina Wallace