Wedding Sermon, August 20

You know what the Lord requires of you in your marriage. You heard Genesis 2 and Ephesians 5 just moments ago, and you have often heard them often before. You have listened repeatedly as the biblical teaching on marriage has been explained at length, and you have observed Christian families living together. You know that in your marriage you are called to humility, gentleness, patience, forbearance, and love. You are being knit together today in and by the Spirit, the Divine Matchmaker, and you know that you must be diligent to preserve this unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. That is how you walk worthy of the calling to which you have been called.

Of course, from this day on you will begin to know these things in a way that you haven?t known them before. There?s a kind of knowledge that comes only in doing, with marriage as in so many areas of life. You are about to begin the doing. And, from this day on, you will be practicing and working out these things in specific ways and circumstances. Andrew, you are promising to love and cherish Anneke ?Enot some ?woman in general.?E Anneke, you are taking an oath to love and respect Andrew, not some capital-M ?Man.?E You will be living as husband and wife in specific circumstances, which may involve unforeseen wealth or poverty, success or failure, sickness or health, or some rewarding combination of all of these. There is no generic marriage ?Eonly this man and this woman made one flesh.

But to ensure that your marriage will flourish, it is not enough to know positively what marriage should be. Adam knew he was one flesh with his wife, but he was unprepared for the serpent?s assault on his bride. So too, it?s important to understand the kinds of threats you face, threats that conspire to make you forget what you know, or, failing that, to seduce you from doing what you know to be right. In Eden, Satan took the form of a talking serpent; you need to know what forms he is likely to take when he comes to threaten your Eden.

We live in an age of sexual liberation, and this liberation is basically an attempt to break the constraints that marriage, family, and community place on sexual life. By the terms of this liberation, every desire is equal to every other, and the boundaries of tolerable sexual and marital behavior have expanded dramatically. As Wendell Berry says, ?Divorce on an epidemic scale is all right; child abandonment by one parent or another is all right . . . promiscuity is all right; adultery is all right. Promiscuity among teenagers is pretty much all right, for ?that?s the way it is?E abortion as birth control is all right; the prostitution of sex in advertisements and public entertainment is all right.?E Only at the distant margins does our culture attempt to set up a few arbitrary limits on sexual freedom: Child molestation, particularly by priests, sexual violence, sexual harassment, unwanted pregnancy and venereal diseases ?Ethese are not all right. But, the efforts to leash in sexual liberation are futile: ?Trying to draw the line where we are trying to draw it,?EBerry writes, ?between carelessness and brutality, is like insisting that falling is flying ?Euntil you hit the ground ?Eand then trying to outlaw hitting the ground.?E

If sexual liberation were an isolated feature of contemporary life, it would not be too difficult to resist. We could all be like Joseph, flee youthful lusts, and be done with it. But sexual liberation is part of a much larger pattern that involves the deterioration of communities. Sexual liberation destroys communities because it destroys trust. All the advertisements, movies, TV shows, books, and magazines that encourage sexual freedom constitute a complex assault, and in some cases a conscious assault, not only on marital faithfulness but on community trust. How can you befriend your neighbor when he might be hitting on your wife?

But the impact goes in the other direction as well: Fragmented and weak communities weaken marriages, and in ways obvious and subtle our world is at war with community, or, to be concrete, the world is at war with the communion that is the Christian church. As you both well know, the attacks on the church take intellectual form in heresy and militant atheism. But the subtle threats are equally dangerous, and are deeply engraved in the physical arrangements, patterns, and structures of our lives. How can a church be a vibrant community when the members live an hour away from each other and from the church, when the members see each other for only an hour a week? What kind of community can develop when you never pass your neighbors on the sidewalk, but only on the street, when you are both comfortably encased in a sound-proof, air-conditioned bubble of glass and steel? How much help will friends be to your marriage if you are able to squeeze out time to speak to them only a few times a year, on the handful of evenings you are not working late at the office?

So there is a vicious circle: Modern life weakens the church, which undermines marriages, which in turn further undermines the church. This means that whatever threatens the trust, forbearance, unity, peace, compassion, forgiveness, and love of a Christian community threatens your marriage too. Your vigilance to preserve your marriage must extend beyond the walls of your own home. If you want your marriage to flourish, you must also be diligent not only to maintain unity with each other, but to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace with other believers, and make conscious choices to ensure that this is practically possible. It is not enough to be ready when the serpent comes knocking at the door, because he has the capability to launch his darts from long range.

But there is also a benevolent circle: In a healthy Christian community, a family is never alone, but woven into a larger network of trust, mutual help, and loving sacrifice. In a healthy community, friends, neighbors, fellow church members, and extended families all assist in helping a married couple stay faithful to their marriage vows. And healthy marriages, in turn, strengthen the church. Marriage joins a man and woman to each other and also binds them to the wider community, both past and future. Marriage is the intersection where past generations of your separate families cross and mingle, and marriage joins you to the generations to come. And so, healthy churches help marriages flourish, and flourishing marriages make for healthy churches.

This benevolent circle does not come about without effort. It never has. Already in the first century, the Ephesians had to be diligent to preserve the unity and peace of the church, and you must be no less diligent. This is the conclusion of the matter: Cultivate the unity and peace of your marriage for the sake of the Christian community, and cultivate the unity and peace of the church for the sake of your marriage. And do all this with your whole heart, to the glory of God, the Father of your Lord, Jesus Christ.