A Wedding Sermon

(originally posted on the Synod Blog 28^th July 2011)

A sermon preached at the wedding of Mr James Anglesea and Miss Gemma Pope, St Andrew’s Church, Much Hadham, Hertfordshire, Saturday 23 July 2011

Prayer: Come Holy Spirit of God, pour into our hearts that most excellent gift of love, love in our thinking, love in our speaking, that thinking and speaking in love we may grow more like Jesus. Amen.

During the wedding rehearsal, the groom approached the Bishop with an unusual offer: "Look, I'll give you £1000 if you'll change the wedding vows. When you get to the part where I'm supposed to promise to 'love, honour and obey' and 'be faithful to her forever,' I'd appreciate it if you'd just leave that out." He passed the minister a £1000 cheque and walked away satisfied. On the day of the wedding, when it came time for the groom's vows, the Bishop looked the young man in the eye and said: "Will you promise to prostrate yourself before her, obey her every command and wish, serve her breakfast in bed every morning of your life, and swear eternally before God and your lovely wife that you will not ever even look at another woman, as long as you both shall live?" The groom gulped and looked around, and said in a tiny voice, "Yes," then leaned toward the Bishop and hissed: "I thought we had a deal." The Bishop put a £1000 cheque into the groom's hand and whispered: "She made me a better offer!”

Deal or no deal, offer or no offer - what Jamie and Gemma are offering to us on their wedding day is a picture, a model of truest love. Love for each. Love for God. Something more tangible than perhaps an offertory of love songs from Lady Gaga or the Black Eyed Peas new single; something more authentic and lasting than the offer of a glistening goal of a lottery number, a full page spread in Hello magazine, the fame of an x factor final. Something perhaps even more exciting than an offer of a stadium tour of Birmingham City’s football ground, something more thrilling than Wes Brown’s signing at The Stadium of Light, something more fragrant than Macey’s New York perfumery store. What they are offering us who have lived through 10 years of a Harry Potter culture that has somehow lost touch with God, is a God’s who is real, a God who loves us. God is not a repressive deity brandishing a red card. He is a God who is committed to the flourishing, well being and happiness of his people. Where do we find love? In the tiniest hazelnut, says Mother Julian: it exists because God loves it. In the entire sweep of the universe, says Dante, because it is ‘love that moves the sun and the other stars’. But today love has a human face in Jamie and Gemma. And to their young memories we bring our own to offer today: memories of those who have loved us into life, whose lives are interwoven with ours and made us what we are. 

For what Jamie and Gemma are offering us today is a picture, a glimpse of who God is and what he is like. The trick of course is to see and hear him. All we need to do is open our eyes to see his joy, to drink in his beauty, to smell the fragrance of love, listen to the profound silence of two people in love with all its exhilaration, magic and madness that that implies. Garth Brooks the American country music artist sums it up as Jamie sings in his heart to Gemma – “It was your song that made me sing It was your voice that gave me wings, it was your light that shines guiding my heart to find, the place where you belong” - and Gemma echoes a song from TakeThat – “Heh! Let me know you, you’re all that matters to me.” To which Jamie responds obediently and lovingly – “Heh! Let me love you, you can have it all, you can have it all.” The love of a new husband and wife is as close as we will get to understanding the love of God for one another and for humanity. For there is something sacred about the joy we feel at a wedding, as we sense the power of love to bathe human beings in its radiance and make gentle the life of this world.

Jamie and Gemma have said a very positive yes to each other, a very positive yes to life in all it diversity of colour and vibrancy; they have chosen love as a way of life. They give us hope. Jamie and Gemma - your families and friends are overjoyed to be here, to share in this, one of the happiest days of your lives. Dearest Gemma you look so beautiful - we warmly welcome you our new daughter-in-law to our family together with Rodney, Sue, Alex, Declan and Freddie.

But if Jamie and Gemma are offering us a picture of what human love is like, here comes the better offer, the better deal, the golden ball, the good news. God today has committed himself to Jamie and Gemma – for ever and for all time “and lo I am with you always to the end of time,” as St Matthew puts it at the end of his very Jewish gospel. That’s God’s part of the bargain, that’s what’s God’s is offering today as part of the deal, the cash prize. Jamie and Gemma in the months and years ahead you will be able to draw upon more than just your own strength, your own capacity to love - today you have opened yourselves up to a relationship of God's love, in the hope that when you face difficulties you will be able to offer one another more than simply your own individual words and feelings. When a couple get married in the sight of God, they become – in the church's language – ministers of the gospel to each other.

God’s agreement today is a pact, a deal, an offering worth more than a measly £1000, it is the good news that God considers every moment of Jamie and Gemma’s life worthwhile; that God is committed to their human joy and fulfilment and that he will not desert them even when they run away from him. When one person promises another to be faithful for the rest of their life, it is a sort of echo of God’s divine promise, his part of the bargain; and when Jamie and Gemma’s promises are explicitly anchored in an appeal to God's promise, God's faithfulness in offering new beginnings, it has a special force. It is not only that the promise becomes more powerful for Jamie and Gemma, the two persons most directly involved; it becomes a more eloquent sign to the rest of us. Here is a relationship which proclaims something profound and exhilarating about our humanity: a human being is worth spending a lifetime on, a lifetime of loving attention; and also a human being is capable of giving a lifetime's attention.

So before we complain too loudly about a world of disposable relationships, phone deals and short-term policies, a world of fracturing and insecure international bonds and the decline of trust, we should remember today that we have cause for thanksgiving – thanksgiving that God has made human beings capable, against all the odds, of reflecting his own completely costly and self-giving commitment to his world; that the gift of marriage makes this capacity visible in our world; and that, in the lives of Jamie and Gemma the couple with whom today we join in celebration, we see that bracing, renewing and hopeful vision of faithful generosity.

I pray that all of us present and sharing in your joy today, will do everything in our power to support and uphold you in your new life. And I pray that God will bless you in the way of life that you have chosen. Amen

Ray Anglesea is a self supporting minister working in St Andrew’s Dawson Street LEP, Crook and in the wider West Durham Methodist Circuit