A Wedding Homily for My Daughter

Song of Solomon 8:6-7

Colossians 3:12-17

1 John 4:9-12

                                                          

When Maren and her brothers were very young, one of their favorite activities was to play dress-up. Usually, Maren would dress as the Queen; Etienne would proclaim himself King; and toddler Alex was consistently cast in the role of servant. They had a drawer full of cast-off clothes and old Halloween costumes that they would carefully layer on themselves, piece after piece. It was as if the more they put on, the more elegant and grown-up they felt. I'll let you picture Maren in a tutu over a pair of sweatpants, a flowered pajama shirt covered by a batman cape tied around her neck, all complemented with huge adult shoes, gloves, a plastic purple tiara, and several long chains of beads that reached to her knees.

There was one article of clothing, however, that invariably caused a fight, because each child wanted to wear it. It was the beaded neckline torn from one of Granny's old mother-of-the-bride gowns. Something about that glistening, bejeweled scrap of chiffon was incomparable to any other item that I might offer in its place. Whoever wore that piece, somehow laid claim to happiness and love beyond measure; and those who didn't possess it were cast off into a sea of grief.          

Maren and Dan, as you begin your lives as a married couple, you're going to be layering on lots of dreams. Some of them, you will unpack from the suitcases of things that you bring with you from your childhood: you will put on words and silent expectations that your parents used to wear; you will try on scratchy hurts from your school days and the fondest hopes of your teen years. Some will fit your relationship well, and some will be most uncomfortable.

Our consumer culture will also offer you boxes of items to layer on yourselves: homes, cars, vacations, success, fitness and eternal youth, to name just a few. The world will give you boxes of busyness, along with heavy crates of the expectations of others. And you will be tempted to hang them around your necks like chains.

The bible readings that you chose for your wedding day offer you a different, counter-cultural kind of wardrobe, however. According to St. Paul, God is giving you the garments of compassion, kindness, humility, patience, forgiveness, and gratitude. In marriage, I especially encourage putting on forgiveness and gratitude, day after day without fail, from sunrise to sunset. That important combination will keep you warm in troubled times.

As for the other virtues, I'm not worried. Kindness, humility, patience--they are virtues that I have seen both Dan and Maren share, separately and in their life together.  I actually dug up an old school assignment that Maren did in fifth grade about her dreams for her adult future. There are some hilariously embarrassing bits that I will share later with Dan. But on the serious side, I smiled to see what Maren wrote when asked to describe her adult self: "I will be charitable, kind, and love the earth and everything that inhabits it. I will be extremely concerned with the needs of those who have less than I. I will always be the first one to jump up in the name of a cause …" Fifth-grade Maren knew herself pretty well. And she is blessed to have found a partner who shares her view of the world.

In all of the scripture readings, though, there is one garment that sparkles just like that piece of bejeweled chiffon that the children used to fight so hard for long ago. It is one that is beyond compare, one that indeed brings happiness beyond measure. Of course, that garment is love: The love that God has for all Creation; the love that pours itself out for the sake of the other; the give and take of love that binds humans together; the love that Christians see in Jesus' life and death.

The good news is that we don't need to fight over who gets to wear this beautiful love. It is a gift of God that is, in the poetic words we heard from the Song of Songs, as powerful as unquenchable fire and as inevitable as death. If you try to remove it, it pops up somewhere else. If you try to kill it, it roars up from the grave. Where then can we find this Love? The amazing thing is that you stand before us today, Maren and Dan, as living symbols of that great love. In the Episcopal wedding liturgy, we say that marriage "signifies to us the mystery of the union between Christ and his Church." That means that, in the strength, faithfulness, and joy of your love for each other, we can get a glimpse of the deep, eternal love that unites us with God in Jesus Christ.  What your love symbolizes is stronger than romance, more eternal than passion. It is God's presence, living in you, in your relationship, and in your relationship with us, your friends and family. As we just read, "no one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and God's love is perfected in us."

          Today, you are dressing in Love, for all to see. You sparkle with God's glory. And we all bask in Love's light. May the rest of your lives together be wrapped in that Love, and may you bring all those who journey with you into God's loving presence. Long ago, fifth-grade Maren concluded her essay on the future with a quote: "Do you want your dreams to come true? 'Give [and love] more than you are asked and you will receive more than you can dream.'" May it be so this day, and for every day of your lives together. Amen.

The Light that Holds Together the Most Broken of Things: A "Family Sermon" on Matthew 18:15-20

 Proper 18, Year A

Grant us, O Lord, to trust in you with all our hearts; for, as you always resist the proud who confide in their own strength, so you never forsake those who make their boast of your mercy; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Children, how's everyone getting along together this year at school? I hope you've made some new friends? Are there any annoying kids in your classes? When I was a teacher, I remember the first few days of school being filled with discussing what we used to call, "community guidelines" or "classroom rules." I bet that you could name some of them for me … Things like: listen respectfully, say you're sorry when you hurt someone, raise your hand, be kind…  After going over the rules, we would always have to talk about the consequences of not following the rules. I bet you know those, too. Things like: First, you get a warning. Then, you might have to stay after school, or get a call home to your parents. Do students and teachers still go over guidelines like this at the beginning of the year in your classrooms? My problem with those classroom rules was that the teachers always kind of pretended that the rules you discussed were your idea, when everyone really knew that these guidelines were there to make things fit the way the teachers wanted them. It just didn't seem like an honest exchange.

You might have noticed that Jesus has something to say in today's Gospel lesson about how to get along in community. Unfortunately, over the centuries, the Church has tended to interpret Jesus' words like classroom rules, meant to keep the leaders in charge. We need to look at Jesus' words more closely, so that we can see what he might really have been trying to say. While we're doing that, I'd like to invite the children among us to write or draw a picture of people at school treating each other in loving ways, and people treating each other not so well. We'll do something special with your work in a few minutes.

As they draw, it might help the children, and us, to look at our behavior through the lens of the new bestselling book, Radical Candor, by Kim Scott.^[1] This book describes some of the ways that we fail in dealing with one another in community. Sometimes we engage in "obnoxious aggression." That's the child who punches you on the playground, or the boss who shouts that the project you just spent all week doing is totally worthless. At the opposite pole, you have "manipulative insincerity." That's the teenager who cleans the kitchen before asking her mom if she can borrow the new car. Or the politician who tells you whatever you want to hear to get your vote, never intending to do any of it. Then there's my favorite—the one that we Christians really like to use. It's called "ruinous empathy." That's when you stick to polite affirming discussion because you're afraid of ruffling feathers. That's when we don't speak up when our friends are telling racist jokes. Or when we buy peace with others at the price of utter silence on anything of importance to our lives.

The right way to communicate, according to Scott, is through "radical candor," speaking the truth with love and forgiveness and real personal caring. This is not the "radical candor" of Donald Trump tweeting out in vulgar language exactly what he thinks of some woman's figure. This is the kind of radical candor that Jesus uses, when he tells the woman at the well that he knows and understands even the parts of her life that she has chosen to keep hidden from him. This is the kind of communication that Jesus asks for in our Gospel lesson. And, not surprisingly, it is the way in which Jesus, and God the Father, reach out today to us. We know what God does when we mess up, when we disappoint God, or when we turn away from God. We know that our ever-loving God comes after us, with the individual care and single-mindedness of a shepherd out searching for his one lost lamb. And God forgives us and rejoices in our renewed relationship with God when we are found. That’s what Jesus shows us in his life and death, and that’s the story that Jesus tells the disciples right before the passage in Matthew that we hear today.

All too often, we take today’s text on getting along in community as an easy formula to apply in order to shame backsliders and to prove that the majority interpretation of things is the correct one. These verses have justified many a real witch-hunt or excommunication throughout the history of the Church. We also tend to use it as a formula for getting what we want out of God in prayer: "Oh, there's two or three people gathered together praying for this thing, God, so you better make it happen!" But that’s not what Jesus is getting at in today's Gospel. Jesus is trying to show us a gentle and humble pattern for relating to one another. When Jesus gives us, as a community, the authority to bind and to loose, for example, it is not meant as a heady power trip for the Church. It's instead a caution that everything that goes on in our communities has deep and lasting consequences. Love of neighbor is not something that we can merely dabble at.

Adding on to Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase in The Message, I would modernize today's Gospel of "radical candor" by saying, “If a fellow believer hurts you, go and tell him in person—don’t send him a text. If he listens, you’ve made a friend. If he won’t listen, don’t huddle at coffee hour with your friends and complain and whisper about him. Go to see him again in person, but take one or two others along so that the presence of witnesses will keep everyone honest, and try again. If he still won’t listen, tell the church. If he won’t listen to the church, you’ll have to start over from scratch, confront him with the need for repentance, and offer again God’s forgiving love.” Remember, although Jesus says to treat the offender “as a Gentile and a tax collector,” we all know that Jesus himself never gave up on either one of those groups.

Personally, if I were editing Matthew's Gospel, I would turn this whole passage around to begin with the last verse: that where two or three are gathered together in Jesus’ name, Jesus is there among them. Whenever we gather, whether it is around the altar, in Sunday School, in Collins' Hall, or even in our favorite of all church gossiping places, the parking lot, Jesus is among us. Jesus, the one who cried from the Cross, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do,” he is with us, guiding us, taking our concerns seriously, holding us together, covering us with that "armor of light," that Paul writes about. Can you imagine an encouraging Jesus beside you as you risk sharing your views with someone who disagrees? Can you  imagine a protecting Jesus standing between you and the bully who's trying to shout you down? Can you imagine a forgiving Jesus holding you up as you forgive a bitter enemy? Children, I would like for you take your drawings, and surround the situations that you drew with the golden-yellow light of Christ. Fill in all of the cracks with light, the light of truth and love that can hold together the most broken of things. Give your work to your parents to help them through their week. The way that Jesus is asking us to relate to one another is far from easy, but we’re never doing the hard work of being a community on our own.

---

^[1] I am indebted for the discussion of this book to a chapel sermon by Dr. Susan Garrett at Louisville Presbyterian Seminary on September 8, 2017.