A Wedding Sermon

 

The Holy Marriage of Taylor Comfort and Anna DeTray

July 24, 2021

Chehalis, Washington

Text: Matt. 19:4-6

            Do you have any idea how countercultural you are at this moment?  Ironically doing the very thing people have been doing since the dawn of time, the very thing God designed us to do from the beginning, His institution, even before the fall into sin.  You’re getting married.  It’s like you’re hippies, or something, only reverse hippies, rebelling by doing the thing the hippies (or in our day, the postmoderns) rebel against doing.  You’re swimming against the tide.  Man and woman.  Making vows.  Pledging your faithfulness.  Forsaking all others.  To have and to hold from this day forward.  For better or for worse.  For richer or for poorer.  In sickness and in health.  To love and to cherish.  Until death parts you.  And you mean it.  It’s really weird.  

            But good for you.  This is how God designed us as human beings.  He designed us for marriage.  He designed marriage for us.  This that is happening here today, before God and these witnesses, this thing that is so countercultural, Holy Marriage, is God’s gift to you.  And you are God’s gift to one another.  “‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’  So they are no longer two but one flesh.  What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate” (Matt. 19:5-6; ESV). 

            It is God who joins you together as husband and wife this day, and He does this thing the way He always does His things, which is to say, by His Word.  He pronounces it.  He declares it.  Why would He do such a thing?  Why would He give such a gift?  Well, as long as we’re being rebellious and countercultural, we may as well get really funky and ask what the Scriptures have to say about it.  Marriage is by God’s design.  And according to the Scriptures, God has designed the gift of marriage to fulfill at least three purposes: 1. Companionship, 2. Procreation, and 3. Holy Sexuality.

            In the creation that was “very good” (Gen. 1:31), there was one deficiency, even before the fall into sin, as God Himself points out in Genesis Chapter 2.  “It is not good that the man should be alone” (2:18).  God created man to live in relationship, in communion.  And here was Adam, utterly alone, the only soul on earth.  But God knew just what He would do about it.  “I will make him a helper fit for him,” literally, corresponding to him.  And here we are making the revolutionary assertion that men and women are, in fact, different, physically, mentally, emotionally, in such a way that they complement one another.  They complete each other.  As a general rule, things work out best when they are in relationship to one another. 

            But things were so good in Eden, God had to make a special point of this to Adam, that there was an absence that needed to be filled.  Thus the parade of animals.  You remember this.  Adam names every living creature as God marches them past.  And it is not that Adam is naming them “Spot,” “Rover,” “Mr. Snuggles.”  What is he doing?  He is engaging in scientific classification.  He is studying them.  Remember, Adam is no caveman.  Pre-fall Adam is undoubtedly the greatest intellect who ever lived, operating with the unmarred image of God, the height of human reason and sophistication.  And as he carefully observes each living creature, he notices something important.  There is a Mr. Buffalo and a Mrs. Buffalo, a Mr. Rhinoceros and a Mrs. Rhinoceros.  You get the point.  Each male has a counterpart corresponding to him, and vice versa.  And all at once, Adam ruffles his brow and scratches his head and says, “Wait a minute… Where’s mine?  I need that.  I am incomplete.”  Perhaps he even prayed, as single Christians should and do, “Gracious God, please grant to me a Christian spouse.” 

            And God puts Adam into a deep sleep, and from his side, God fashions a woman, Eve, and He brings her to the man.  And this is the first wedding, the first marriage.  God gets to define marriage, because He created it in the first place, for our good, according to His eternal design.  Adam was beside himself.  “This at last,” he says, as so many men do when they’ve met the love of their life, at last!  “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man” (Gen. 2:23).  And then we get the Words of Institution for Marriage, quoted by Jesus in our Holy Gospel: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast,” cling, cleave, “to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (v. 24). 

            So companionship.  Not just good friends, though certainly that.  But intimate relationship, communion.  And from that come the next two purposes, and they go together.  Procreation.  Let’s have no talk about “reproduction.”  We’re not on an assembly line, pushing out product.  Husbands and wives are given to be participants in God’s creative act.  “God blessed them.  And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth” (Gen. 1:28).  It is a blessing to have children, and every child, no matter the circumstances of conception and birth, is a gift from God.  We don’t know yet whether, or how prolifically, God will bless you with fruit and multiplication.  But I’m warning you, I pray He blesses you generously.  We need some more kids around here.  As far as I’m concerned, you can get started tonight.  But then, you know how that happens, right?

            Holy sexuality.  And we should think of it that way.  We’ve made sex into something dirty, unclean, unseemly, unfit for Christian sermons.  But we’ve done that by misusing and abusing what is one of God’s most precious gifts.  Because it is the bodily consummation of the companionship, the communion, for which God created marriage.  And it is the means by which God makes a marriage fruitful, so that the love between husband and wife flows out now creatively in the begetting and raising of children.  St. Paul sees this as really important, and he warns husbands and wives not to deprive one another of physical intimacy, except perhaps for a brief and agreed upon time to concentrate on prayer, but then immediately to come back together, so that we may avoid temptation and loss of self-control (1 Cor. 7:5).  But also because within the context of marriage, within the lifelong union of one man and one woman who have vowed themselves before God to one another in love and fidelity, sex is holy and God pleasing.  It is His gift to you.          

            So for these purposes God gave marriage to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, a perpetual estate for every generation to follow.  It was to be the ultimate expression of communion between a man and a woman, the living picture of man’s communion with God, and the reflection of the Communion of Persons within the God-head in the Tri-unity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  But you know what happened.  Sin.  Rejection of God.  The breaking of Communion.  The husband blaming his wife, and blaming God for his wife.  The wife blaming the serpent.  Humans blaming everyone but themselves.  And we, their children, the fruit of their union, born into their guilt, and taking after their rebellion.  That is why marriage is in the state it is in in our society these days.

            It is not good for our communion with God to be broken.  If God does not restore it, it leaves us alone, separated from God, separated from one another.  But through the rubble of Paradise lost, God preserved marriage.  He kept it for our good.  And by it He brought forth for Himself a people, a people who lived by a Promise: The Seed of the woman who would crush the serpent’s head (Gen. 3:15).  Through many generations of husbands and wives and children, God preached and preserved that Promise, until an angel came to a poor virgin girl in the town of Nazareth, Mary, who was betrothed to Joseph, now found to be with Child, God’s own Son.

            He would grow up, that Son, to be the faithful Husband Adam was not.  And to restore communion, He would give Himself up into the death of the cross for His beloved Bride, the Church, to present her to Himself in splendor, without spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; that is, sins forgiven, holy and blameless, righteous with the righteousness of her faithful Bridegroom.  God put Jesus into a deep sleep, the sleep of death.  And from His riven side, by water and blood, God formed for our Lord a Bride washed and redeemed.  And you belong to her.  Which is to say, you belong to Him, the fruit of this holy union, born anew in baptismal water, redeemed by His blood shed for you.

            Your marriage will not always reach the ideal of Eden.  In fact, it never will.  But as a Christian marriage, ordered by God’s Word and institution, it will always be a living picture, and icon of Christ and His holy Bride, the Church.  That is, your marriage is a countercultural confession to the world, and to one another, of the love of God in Christ that redeems sinners and makes us His own.  And your marriage is, and will always be, lived out in His grace, forgiveness for every failing, healing for all that is broken, His steadfastness always preserving you and your union.

            So let’s do it, let’s be countercultural and revolutionary.  Make your vows today, and mean them, and keep them.  Live as husband and wife according to God’s order.  Love one another.  Be faithful to each other.  Delight in one another.  Speak well of each other in the hearing of others.  Exult in your marriage.  Hold it in high esteem.  Have lots of kids, if God so wills, and raise them in the fear and admonition of the Lord.  Be the living picture of Christ and His Bride, the Church.  To live such a life is to live by faith.  And it is to live a rich and fulfilling life, all redeemed and sanctified by the Lord who here declares a new beginning.  In just a few moments, He will pronounce you husband and wife, and so you will be, for the Lord has spoken.  Thus you will leave father and mother, and cleave to one another, no longer two, but one flesh.  And what God here joins together, let no one separate.  God has designed you for this.  In the Name of the Father, and of the Son X, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.