Song of Songs 2:16a: “My beloved is mine, and I am his”; 6:3a: “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine”; 7:10: “I am my beloved’s and his desire is for me.”
Let us pray
Almighty God, our Father: You dwell in an eternal fellowship of love with your Son and Spirit, and in Your grace You have created and redeemed us so that we might share in that communion. Before the foundation of the world, You chose us in the Beloved, and made us your own that You might also become ours. We pray that You would fill Ryan and Courtney you’re your Spirit, so that they might live together manifesting Your life, which is Your love. For the sake of Jesus Christ, Your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and with the Holy Spirit, ever one God, unto ages of ages. Amen.
“How are you feeling today?” someone might have asked you. How can you answer? Happy? Excited? Overjoyed? Nervous? None of the normal words is big enough to express the magnitude of this day. You reach for something bigger, and you’re tempted to try something faux-German like “Uber-happy” or faux-Greek like “Hyper-excited.”
The emotion of this day is best captured, I submit, by the word “ecstatic.” That’s big enough to get at the joy and delight of your wedding, and, more importantly, it highlights deeper dimensions of what’s happening today, and what you’re committing yourselves to for the unforeseeable future.
Etymologically, the word “ecstasy” means “to stand outside,” and that’s what the English derivative meant for centuries. When Ophelia laments that Hamlet’s “unmatch’d form and feature of blown youth [is] blasted with ecstasy,” she’s not worried that he’s too happy but that he’s mad. He’s “beside himself.” We don’t have to be insane to experience this. “I can’t believe this is happening to me,” we sometimes say. “I feel like I’m standing to the side watching myself.” That’s ecstasy. In the ecstatic moments of life, you can’t hold yourself within your own body; you feel you are both yourself, and not yourself. With so many weddings, it’s easy to get confused about which one you’re attending, but when you realize with a shock that we’re now halfway through your wedding, you’ve had an “ecstatic” experience.
That experience may be comparatively rare, but ecstasy – standing outside yourself – is not. Ecstasy is the human condition, the condition of all creatures. We are vapor, most vaporous vapor. We have no life in ourselves, no resources of our own, nothing that is not gift. “In Him we live and move and have our being,” Paul tells the skeptical philosophers on Mars Hill. In Scripture, this is often described in terms of breathing. Living things are breathing things. The flood destroyed “all flesh in which is the breath of life.” Conversely, death is breathlessness: When the patriarchs died, they “breathed their last,” and when Israel carried out the ban against the Canaanites, they were to leave nothing that breathed. “My life is but breath,” Job says, and if that’s true, then life is not our own but comes from elsewhere. From the moment Yahweh formed Adam from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils, human life has been outside humans. We all live ecstatically, on “borrowed breath” (David Kelsey).
The life of redemption is, if anything, more radically ecstatic. Through His death, Jesus abolished death and brought life and immortality to light. He died for all, that they who live might live for the One who died. On nearly every page of Paul’s letters, he reminds us that we live not in ourselves but “in Christ.” “I have been crucified with Christ,” Paul says in his most elaborate statement of this reality, “and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me, and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and delivered Himself up for me.” As creatures, we live on borrowed breath; as redeemed creatures, we live through Another’s death (Kelsey).
When you say “I do” in a few moments, you’ll be committing yourselves to life-long ecstasy. Ryan, you’ll no longer be simply Ryan; from this day on, you have to learn to live as Ryan-and-Courtney; Courtney, you’ll no longer be yourself, but will be standing outside yourself, living your life in Ryan’s life as he lives his in yours. That’s what being in love is: The excitement of falling in love is learning to identify yourself not just with yourself but with your beloved; it’s grafting your beloved into your own identity. Falling in love is like meeting Jesus: “It is no longer I who live, but another lives in me.” Human existence is ecstatic, redeemed existence is ecstatic, and in marriage, that living icon of creation and redemption, you’re committing yourself to being beside yourself til death do you part.
Ecstasy is the normal state of man because ecstasy characterizes the eternal life of the God in whose image we are made. The Father does not desire to stand alone as God; He doesn’t want to possess His divinity for Himself alone. Out of love, He eternally begets His Eternal Son as an “expression of the [His] ecstatic love” (Mark McIntosh, and the following paragraphs), and that same love produces “the eternal filial response of the Son towards the Father.” The Father is Father because of “his eternal desire to pour out the divine life for the Other-in-God (the Son),” and the Son is Son insofar as He “desires eternally to speak forth the Father’s giving life.” Son and Father both say, with equal totality and intensity, “I am my beloved’s, and He is mine.” Father and Son are each beside themselves with love. Such is the ecstasy of God.
This God, this ecstatic Trinity, chooses to be more ecstatic still. The Father stands outside Himself in the Son, and the Son in the Father, but together they stand outside themselves in creating and sustaining a world that is other than both. The Father eternally speaks His Word, but He chooses to speak His Word not only as Word but as world. For His part, the Son desires His love for the Father to resound not only in the enclosure of perfect divine communion but “from within all creatures.” Father and Son make a world they don’t need, in order to take up this world into their mutual love. The world becomes part of the “love language” of Father and Son (David Field). Creation too is an expression of God’s ecstasy.
But this God, this ecstatic Trinity, chooses to be more ecstatic still. The world doesn’t cease to be the mutual love-gift of Father and Son simply because sin and death enter: In defiance of sin and death, the Father is determined to express His love in the creation, and the Son is still determined that creation will respond to His Father in obedience, faith, and love. In the perfect obedience of the Son, the Son’s love for the Father resounds more richly than ever, for in the incarnate Son “the Word speaks even in the final silence of the cross.” In the incarnation, the Father sends the Son to stand outside God as man, and in His life, death, and resurrection, the incarnate Son renews creation, so that creation can stand outside itself, in God.
All this is done through the Spirit, who is the Love, the very ecstasy of God. “Beguiled” by the Spirit, the Father eternally begets an eternal Word and in the Spirit the eternal Word vocalizes eternal praise. The Spirit is the living breath who energizes the Word by which the Father creates the world, and the Spirit gives life to the creatures through whose praise the Word sings to His beloved Father. In the fullness of time, the Spirit drove the Son into the wilderness of the world, drove Him to the cross, rescued Him from the grave, and now is the Love that is the presence of Jesus, the breath by which we live. Through His Spirit, the incarnate Son stands outside Himself, orchestrating creation, tuning it to praise the Father.
Two days from now is the Fourth Sunday of Advent, the last Sunday in the season celebrating the coming of the Son. Advent discloses the God who is abounding love, whose love abounds even in creation, abounds even to sinful humanity, the God of Love who has determined that, no matter how much the world, the flesh, and the devil try to derail it, His work will stand and His love triumph. Though a cross stand in the way, this God, this God of Advent, this ecstatic Trinity, determines that through the Spirit creation will yet be a gift of love from the Father to Son, and from the Son to the Father. Our prayer is that your Advent wedding will be an annual, a constant reminder that together you serve a God who freely stands outside Himself to create and re-create us.
Advent is also a reminder of your responsibilities, privileges, and joys as husband and wife. The Uber-ecstasy you feel today won’t last forever, but if you are going to have a successful marriage, ecstasy must be the theme of your marriage from this day until you breathe your last, because ecstasy is the form of your life, and of your life together. You have died, your life is hid with Christ in God; you no longer live but Christ lives in you. As those who are centered in Christ, you’re called to a marital love that mimics God’s ecstasy, a love that breaks open the enclosure of self-possession; you’re called to embody what Solomon describes in a chiasm of mutual possession – I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine; my beloved is mine, and I am his; I am my beloved’s, and his desire is for me –; you’re called to a mutual possession that depends wholly on your continuous ecstatic dispossession. Our confident prayer is that God will grant you grace to live out the ecstasy of the living God, to lose the life that is not really yours to begin with, so that you may find it not in yourself but in God in each other.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Let us pray .
Almighty God, Father, Son, and Spirit: From all eternity You have lived in perfect delight and love, and in Your sovereign freedom You created a world to share in that love. Though we rebelled and turned from You, You did not abandon us, but in Your love You, Father, sent Your Son to take flesh, to bring us into communion with You through Your Spirit, and to cause praise and glory to spring up before all nations. As Ryan and Courtney begin their marriage today, fill them with Your Spirit, that Your love might bind them to Yourself and to one another, until they breathe their last. We pray this for the glory and sake of Jesus Christ, our Husband and Lord. Amen.
