A Berkshire Belle

A sermon preached by Ray Anglesea at the wedding of Lucy Heath and Craig Rundle, All Saints Church, Binsfield, Berkshire, Friday 30^th August 2013 (Lucy is Ray Anglesea’s niece)

 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.

 

Lucy and Craig – congratulations to you both on your wedding day – your family and friends are overjoyed to be with you to share in your happiness; we bring into the circle of our delight, Craig’s mother, Colette, at home in Port Elizabeth, South Africa whom today we remember with love and affection. We have longed for this day, it is the highlight of our families social calendar, so much more so than this year of great British sporting victories from Mo Farrah’s double double, the new King Andy of Wimbeldon, to Chris Frome  - Le Roi Jaune, the Ashes Test to the Lion Irish Australian triumph -  even Madjeski goals at the back of the net for Reading. This is your day, you are together, you love each other dearly. Darling Lucy you look so beautiful, radiant and happy, a sparking jubilant D major day for fanfares and trumpets, a day for a crescendo of noblimente, a volce vivace, a prima bella cantabile. Today you have found an engineer who will carry your double-bass, today you have earned your vintage Girl guide proficiency badge for organising a wedding. Lucy you are Craig’s cyberspace star, he is your Shakespeare’s wandering bark, from the bard’s sonnet you are an ever fixed mark, you are his L prompt on his engineer’s screen, word perfect 5.1, he is your hard and floppy disc, your laser jet, you press return and he’ll be there. Do not delete this file. 

 

The story is told of a Minister who noticed the bride was in distress so asked what was wrong. She replied that she was awfully nervous and afraid she would not remember what to do. The Minister told her that she only needed to remember 3 things. First the aisle, because that is what you'll be walking down. Secondly, the altar because that is where you will eventually arrive. Finally, remember a hymn because that is a type of song we will sing during the service. While the bride was walking in step with the wedding march, family and friends of the groom were horrified to hear her repeating these 3 words...... Aisle, altar hymn (I'll alter him).

 

Words applied, misapplied, in context, out of context: the meaning of marriage begins in the giving of words – Lucy and Craig you have joined yourselves to one another in the giving of your word before God and amongst us as witnesses, an unconditional giving, joining yourselves to the unknown.  You may find lots of sound bites, prose and poetry about marriage; the internet is surprisingly a good place. Memorable words from the Bishop of London’s advice to a royal couple in 2011; Nicky Gumbel tweets are exceptional, particularly his 7 key words to a great relationship.  But today you have chosen to listen to words from an ancient letter written at Ephesus by St. John the Evangelist, the main themes of which are love and fellowship with God.  To quote that great 14^th century English mystic Julian of Norwich “Love is our meaning today” that love found in this beautiful wedding service which you both have put together. Love is the central word of our faith and the truth for which we live and die. To be alive is to be loved and to love. Not to love is to die. Lucy and Craig you have chosen to be married in the sight of a generous God who so loved the world that he gave himself to us in the person of Jesus Christ, his incarnate son who came to us and joined in a wedding party at Cana for, as we say in our Reformed Communion Service, because words weren’t enough. 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 Lucy and Craig. 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 who and what we are.

 

It is easy to be platitudinous about love, focus on good feelings and warm glow. We clergy are especially good at that. So it’s important to pay attention to how Jesus defines love, gives it shape and character. There is only one test of love, he says; and it is this: to be loyal to its covenant, to keep its truth with integrity, to be self-forgetting. How do we learn to love? Slowly and with difficulty, if you’re like me. But from time to time we glimpse life’s joyful mysteries; sometimes they take us by surprise and we catch our breath at the sheer wonder of them, particularly here today at your wedding service. Dear Lucy and Craig you have both undertaken to show us today what your life together will be….. a sacrament of the unity of love and truth in committed faithfulness. You both are going to be a sacrament for us, but even more powerfully and richly, you are going to be a sacrament to each other of astonishing, wonderful acceptance, compassion and involvement from which we all live and without which we should all starve in the prison of guilt and doubt. You have found your love in each other and offer it to each other. Hold on to it, safeguard it, grow into it and treasure one another for the rest of your lives. For this is how you will grow, this is how you will  become Christ-like, by giving your minds, bodies and spirits to each other, in moments of strain and hollowness, in moments of delight and generosity, for richer and poorer.

 

So Lucy and Craig are offering us today a picture, a glimpse of who God is and what he is like; a better picture perhaps than Joelene and Kenton of Archer’s fame, the poet Rodolphe and the seamtress Mimi, a Nanki-Poo and YumYum, a Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. The trick of course is to see this picture and hear him. God has no Phone but you can talk to him. He has no Facebook but he is still your friend. He does not do Twitter but you can still follow 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. 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. 

 

Lucy and Craig, with trust and awe and respect together with your gold rings you are setting off in your beautiful pea green boat on the great adventure of married life, it is going where the two of you – and marriage, time, life, history and the world will take it. You do not know the road, but you have committed your life to a way, with each other and with God. Who knows what marks you’ll leave behind, what music you will make, who will write the words of your life story.  Always remember - don’t look back - you are not going that way. I love the story told by Agatha Christie who married an archaeologist – “the more I get older,” she said “the more interested in me he becomes.” And the story from my neck of the woods, of four elderly Geordies enjoying a lunchtime pint in a Newcastle Scotswood road pub and discussing everything from Alan Pardew, football, the economy, to the weather, to how things used to be in the "good old days."  Eventually the conversation moved on to their wives. One bloke turned to the guy on his right and asked, 'Eh, Billy lad, aren't you and your lass celebrating your fiftieth wedding anniversary soon?'  'Sure, man, we are,' Billy replied.  'Well, are you gonna do anything special to celebrate, man?' another bloke asked.  Billy pondered this for a moment, then replied, 'For our twenty-fifth anniversary, I took Hazel to Sunderland. Maybe for our fiftieth, I'll go down there and get her back.'

 

It takes years to marry completely two hearts, even the most loving and well assorted. A happy wedlock is a long falling in love. So here are my words to you both, if I may – I have been married for 36 years, Lucy grandparents, great grandparents have over 200 years of marriage between the eight of them – I don’t have any secrets on how to keep a relationship like yours fresh. I want you to promise me, though, today, that you will always try and do three things. Always say to one another “I’m sorry;” and always say to each other “I forgive you” and always, please, always keep telling one another “I love you.” I pass it on to you both with hope and much affection.

My final word from my favourite Welsh poet and priest RS Thomas:- 

“Some ask the world and are diminished in the receiving of it.

You gave me only this small pool, that the more I drink from,
the more overflows me with sourceless light.”

Amen.

Genesis 2 v4-9, 15-24.

I John 4 v7-18