A
Wedding in the Family
a sermon preached by the Rev. Diane
Miller
at The First Religious Society in
on September 7, 2008
FIRST
SECOND
Building a wedding is a recipe for muddle—the bridal party, the families, the guests, the minister, the vows, the food. You’re attempting to make something beautiful out of unruly and unpredictable elements—the weather, the nuttier relatives, the rivalries, disorders, and dreams. Out of mostly old neurotic family and friends, you hope to create something harmonious. You do so as an act of faith, hoping that for a brief period of time, the love and commitment of two people will unite everyone; and it will sort of work. Even if the weather or personalities are worrisome, the breezes and water will flow through the structure of your wedding, will sanctify and change it, and it will hold. [p. 245-246]
And:
Everyone in the family was more joyful and excited and anxious as the wedding day approached. That’s what’s so touching about weddings: Two people fall in love, and decide to see if their love might stand up over time, if there might be enough grace and forgiveness and memory lapses to help the whole shebang hang together. Yet there is also much discomfort, and expense, and your hope is that on the big day, energy will run through the lightest elements and the heaviest, the brightest and the dullest, the funniest and the most annoying, and that the whole range will converge in a ring of celebration. [P. 248]
From the essay “Flower Girl” in Plan B: Further
Thoughts on Faith by Anne Lamott,
SERMON – “A Wedding in the Family”
This past July I had an experience many of you have already enjoyed – I witnessed my offspring’s wedding. In my case, I was the mother of the groom. The older of my two sons was married.
When I came to this congregation as your interim minister
in 2001, my son Graham had just enlisted in the Air Force. He spent six
years serving his country working on avionics. Most of
that time he was stationed in
So this past July they were wed in the Roman Catholic
Church where Cori was christened, in
Because it was a Roman Catholic Church, I didn’t have any religious role in the ceremony. That was fine with me. Long ago I told my sons that I didn’t want to be standing between them and their beloved when they got married. It is, after all, a very intimate place to be, when two people in love, filled with intense emotions, exchange vows and rings and embrace for their first wedded kiss. I never thought it would make sense for Mom to be in charge of such a moment.
I know this officiating role well, having presided at the nuptials for hundreds of couples over the last three decades. I’ve seen their smiles and adoring looks. I’ve noted the tears, the hyperventilating, the running noses. I’ve heard tender nothings exchanged, and also once a loud burst of profanity when the ring dropped and rolled across the floor. I’ve watched their eyes roll back just before they faint away. I’ve wiped away my own emotional tears when the palpable love and joy spill over to everyone present, as the congregations feels the couple’s happiness and remembers the enduring loves and hopes of their own lives.
What I had never done, however, was to sit in the front pew as the mother of the groom, feeling the tremendous joy of seeing my child, now a man, taking the sacred and holy vows of commitment to love and to cherish. He and Cori together are creating a family of their own, full of hopes and dreams and stories and the muddle of day to day living.
Up until July, I thought I knew pretty much everything I was ever going to learn about weddings. Yet I had missed something very important, very obvious. For hundreds of weddings, my attention was on the couple, when I should have noticed far more closely the parents. Those parents, who sat patiently through the rehearsals, who stood quietly in the wings until they were seated, who didn’t have much to say. Now I know why. They were choked up. They were mute with joy. They were holding back tears or crazy laughter. Because they were seeing their grown baby in a key rite of passage to of adulthood. The years between first seeing that little girl or boy and then seeing them at the altar – the years condense. They collapse. They compress right over the heart. For me at least, the miracle experience of holding a newborn life in my arms, and the joy of seeing that young man at the altar, crunched together all the years of parenting.
In the Roman Catholic Church, the wedding ceremony began at the back of the church, before the procession. The four parents stood with the bride and groom and their attendants in the Narthex, beside a pool of water, and, echoing the ritual of baptism, we parents dipped our hands in the water and touched our children with a sign of blessing on their forehead. The young man before me was once again the infant I blessed at his Child Dedication twenty six years before. The ritual clanged the two ceremonies, UU and Catholic, together. The priest asked the ritual question: Do you parents affirm that you bless your son’s entry into holy matrimony? I was unable to speak. Like all those strangely quiet parents I’d met over the years, I was only able to nod my response. When the pronouncement came at the conclusion of the wedding, my joy poured out as tears.
Weddings at their core have in common the elements of love and commitment, carried in hope and joy. Church ceremonies have the additional elements of faith and tradition. It is amazing how each ceremony manages to have its unique variations. Each one is a combination of families and friends, of planned choices and spontaneous events that can never be completely anticipated or duplicated.
In the August issue of The New Yorker there was a cartoon. The setting is a formal minister’s study. The young and cheerful couple is sitting on the love seat, with the clergyman behind his desk. The caption has the groom saying, “We’d like you to leave out the poorer, sickness, and death parts—they’re a little dark.”
Yes, for all the joy and celebration, for all the flowers and the smiles, weddings are a little dark, bringing up sickness, and death right there in the midst of those happy vows. The phrase “for richer, for poorer” probably reminds many that they are going to be substantially poorer after paying for the expensive receptions and honeymoons that have become the norm.
In our Unitarian Universalist tradition, people are free to write their own vows, and create the ceremony, since we do not have a fixed, required, ritual. Sometimes people do edit out the unpleasant parts, which leaves them with a ceremony that is vacuous, frivolous, and ungrounded in the realities of life. That’s my opinion. I do my best to guide people to some of the texts and traditions that have stood the test of time.
Weddings are full of sadness. Some family members have died or cannot be present. Some people, and I am one of them, are reminded by the exchange of vows of the ideals and hopes with which they entered into marriage, and the sorrow when their marriage did not hold together for a lifetime. At my son’s wedding, I spent time with one of his uncles. Because he is terminally ill, I hugged him goodbye for the last time. My parents were unable to attend due to illness. We brought with us the reality of sickness and death, whether it was in the vows or not. As William Blake wrote:
Joy and woe are woven fine
clothing for the soul divine.
In June, shortly before I left
I had the privilege of participating with several
parishioners as they were legally married. On the first morning that
licenses were issued in
At one point a stretch limo pulled up and an African
American man in a fancy tuxedo and long dreadlocks got out. He looked at
the cheerful crowd and shouted, with a touch of amazement in his voice, “I’m
getting MARRIED today!” We were so happy for him. Two of my
parishioners arrived to get their license, many years after they had stood
privately on the shore of the Lake on the
Our congregations have honored the religious celebration
of marriage for same sex couples to marry for decades, and we have been among the
strongest advocates for marriage as a civil right, a legal option.
Because wedding ceremonies are often a religious service with the civil
marriage blended together, this has been a confusing public issue for some
people. Clergy are empowered to sign the civil license, though in all but
the two states of
As your minister, now that same sex couples are no longer
denied a license,I will sign
Why do people have church weddings at all? I have asked this question while putting together a brochure about getting married at FRS. Increasingly, couples choose to have a wedding without any of the elements of religious ritual – a secular ceremony, or a party, or they skip the festivities entirely and cut straight to the honeymoon. There are many choices and people are free to make them.
Many people feel that a church wedding or having a minister officiate is a way of acknowledging that marriage is more than a personal partnership. It is a family event, a community celebration, a sacred commitment, a ritual that is done before God. The church has an important role in the rituals of our lives: welcoming the birth of a child, coming of age, marriage, milestones, and the grieving the end of a life. I don’t know how many such ceremonies have taken place here over the past 250 years, but I imagine it is a long list. The outward form has surely changed a great deal from the 18th century to now, but at the heart of the ritual is a radical willingness to trust another person with love, that complex, challenging, and enduring emotion. It is a leap of faith to pledge a lifetime of love with another human being. It is an expression of trust to commit to the ongoing effort to go beyond feeling love, to live it and practice it.
The poet, Ranier Maria Rilke, wrote, "For one human to truly love another is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks - the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation."
A wedding is, like all milestones, an ending and a beginning. Fulfilling its hope will be challenging, though surely helped by love, generosity and forgiveness. Ogden Nash put some useful wisdom in this verse:
To keep your marriage brimming,
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever
you're wrong, admit it;
Whenever
you're right, shut up.
The Choir anthem began –
Love
makes a bridge
from heart to heart, and hand to hand.
Love finds a way,
when laws are blind, and freedom banned.
And concluded with this verse:
Love
makes a bridge
that winds may shake, yet not destroy.
Love carries faith
through life and death, to endless joy.