Marilyn and John’s wedding
Text: Ephesians 4,5
Mawage.
Mawage is what bwings us togevah, too-day.
Mawage, that bwessed event,
That dweam wiffin a dweam
I threatened them that I would start this way; so there you have it, nothing else to fear, right? 
For those of you who don’t recognize them, these are the classic lines delivered by the bishop in the 1987 movie The Princess Bride. The movie is a twisted comedy about a story within a story. Essentially it’s the classic fairy tale about how Westley saves his dear princess Buttercup from the evil king Humperdink. In the story they find true love (Wove, t-woo, wove), conquer all evil, and—What happens in the end?—of course, they live happily ever after.
It had to end somewhere, like so many other movies it ends with a wedding. Lets face it, movies about getting to the point of wanting marriage are much more fun than movies about actually being in a marriage.
Our culture is fascinated by this fairy tale about weddings, the story of the always-handsome prince William who marries the always-beautiful Kate. That story begins when the couple first met and the climax is the magical wedding at the end.
In case you didn’t know, I want to tell you, that fairy tale is not the story we are living out this morning. You are not going to see a giant scrolly “The End” floating up in the air – though we might see Marilyn and John canoeing off into the sunset at some point.
This is not the story about how a woman finds the man who will sweep her off her feet and rescue her from singleness, or about the man who gets the girl in the end. (And, anyway, it’s not entirely clear to me who’s getting who in this case.)
It’s not a story about two people who can only find true fulfillment if they have a life partner, a soul mate! (Though I do believe they have found that.) Both Marilyn and John have led very full and complex lives, a lot has happened up to this point and this is only the next wonderful episode filled with grace.
It might have similar elements, but this is not a fairy tale. This is an entirely different kind of love story, one that goes beyond these two people. This is a story of faith.
On the surface, based on pure circumstance, the marriage we are blessing in this worship service is a simple act of faith on Marilyn and John’s part. In an age where cohabitation and divorce are considered “normal,” where the institution of marriage is really no longer very “necessary,” two people — one who has already been married and carries the enduring pain of divorce and another who has lived quite comfortably as a single person for many years — are deliberately going out of their way to enter into a marriage.
But it’s more than that. They are making a point of taking on this covenant in the context of the church, in the middle of a worship service. (And by church I don’t necessarily mean people who come to church, but people who are committed to being part of God’s story, as revealed in Jesus Christ.) Covenant makes it a story of faith because covenant implies that God is an essential part of the deal, this is not just between the two of them. And we, people of faith gathered here this morning are part of the much deeper story of faith that grounds and enables John and Marilyn’s desire for covenant.
We need each other and God’s grace to aspire to the life God has called us to – especially in our relationships. (These are our theological presuppositions, and we can’t go any further, if we don’t know our theological presuppositions.)
Like those lovely Matryoshka Russian nesting dolls, each one looking very much like the other, each one engulfed by a larger one, this marriage nests within a much deeper story, as does this church. We are all here as part of the story of God’s faithfulness and persistent desire for covenant since creation. The oft quoted Ephesians 2:8-10 says it well (I’m paraphrasing): “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing: it is the gift of God… for we are God’s work of art, created in Christ for good works, which God prepared to be our way of life.”
I wonder if we really understand this? Faith, not as mental or emotional or theological assent on our part, but as being swept off our feet by God’s grace and caught up in God’s wisdom. Our part is to try to grasp the breadth, the length, the height, and the depths of God’s Wisdom. And to, along with all God’s people, commune with the love of Christ, which is beyond all human conception, so that [we] might be filled with the fullness of God. (Eph 3.18,19 paraphrase) It’s a tall ord
er, I can’t always aspire to it, I can’t always believe it or feel it, but what a story to be part of!
I should tell you that my assigned scripture “passage” for this sermon is Ephesians! Just so you understand, John just happens to know the entire book of Ephesians inside out, in Greek, and can tell it to you by heart and Marilyn is not far behind.
Ephesians, read it through sometime. It is essentially about God’s initiative to mend and transform the world, to bring light into darkness, to bring peace for insiders and outsiders (whoever they are defined at the time), to kill enmity, to transform humanity, to create unity, and to struggle against the evil in our world, and to do all this —in the words of Tom Yoder Neufeld – “in the trenches of everyday existence.”1
Well, I’d say marriage is definitely one of those trenches of everyday existence! But the challenge extends to all people of faith it is not limited to a certain marital status.
OK, so I have all of Ephesians I could talk about, so naturally, I was drawn to Ephesians 5:21-33, often known as one of the “The Household Codes.” You know, the part in the Bible where wives are told to submit to their husbands and the husbands to love their wives? Really?
Should a feisty divorced woman preacher tackle this one on the occasion of her friends’ wedding? Well, OK, I won’t tackle it, but I’ll invite you to revisit it just a bit with me because it compares the life of the church with marriage. I find that intriguing on the occasion of my friends’ wedding.
It’s a tough text, there are layers and layers of culture, patriarchy, biblical interpretation and controversial theology that we bring to a reading, the same author reminds us that: “Nothing is gained by obscuring the evident difficulties of this text.”2 OK, let’s not obscure it, let’s not pretend that this text in Ephesians about women submitting to men and slaves submitting to masters hasn’t caused a lot of pain, especially for women and oppressed people. But can we park all this for now? Try to listen to it in a fresh way? Cut to the chase?
[read text from The Inclusive Bible]
What’s going on here is that we’re being told – in the context of a whole bunch of ways we are being asked to imitate God – that Christ’s wisdom consists of submission, not domination. It’s as simple and as tremendously complicated and paradoxical and difficult as that: “Self-giving … for the sake of helping to create, redeem, and sustain love that furthers abundant life.”3 Or as we heard earlier in Ephesians, this is part of the goal of being filled with the fullness of God.
See how that works for all the layers of the story? God extends grace to God’s people (instead of abandoning them), Jesus yields to the cross (instead of blasting the powers of the day to pieces), and in the case of our relationships (including marriage) we voluntarily yield to God’s ways and to each other. This wisdom, because it is wisdom, is found in other religions too including Buddhism and Islam (which derives from Arabic words meaning to surrender, to submit and to be complete). Such a ubiquitous spiritual concept as yieldedness can’t easily be put aside as irrelevant.
The pattern of the big nesting doll-story that houses all the other little look-alike dolls is: when tempted to dominate be willing to yield to one another and you will be a light in the darkness, you will be imitators of God, filled with the Spirit.
Let’s face it, that’s easier said than done. Even our most committed relationships don’t always turn out to be filled with light at all times. There are shadows and gray places, and sometimes mutual yielding looks a lot like breaking up for the sake of peace. Also, because of power dynamics wisdom and light might mean standing up and ensuring no one (including you) is getting crushed.
Living God’s way takes hope and vision. God’s story in us is always a work in progress, and it requires the body of Christ, empowered by God’s Spirit and it requires grace – not judgment – towards ourselves and towards others. It’s not a test, it’s a way of life.
One of my favourite memories with Marilyn and John is at trip we took together to North Carolina. It is another nesting doll story of mutual yielding in the context of friendship. Much of that trip was trying to figure out how to negotiate the inherent introvert-extrovert tensions (John sometimes had to demand silence in the car), the differences in how we read and fold maps (if I recall, my GPS got voted down immediately), what time we’d get going in the morning (Marilyn sometimes had to demand that John and I wake up way earlier than our bodies thought reasonable), and we’d negotiate where we were going to go next, where to stop to eat, etc, etc. Yes, you heard the word demand, we tolerated things politely for a bit but eventually we let the others know what we needed. The whole experience was an object lesson in yielding to each other while not losing ourselves; it was frustrating at times and it was wonderful overall. We learned a lot by speaking the truth in love and by giving in, we saw and did a lot of things we wouldn’t have done or imagined on our own.
Getting married in today’s context, being the church in today’s context requires living our relationships in a different way, it requires faith and imagination, but God is faithful. This is a story of faith. This is an entirely different kind of love story that goes beyond these two people. This is not a fairy tale.
This wedding is not an ending, it is the beginning of the next chapter. Of course I do extend our sincere hope for a wonderful “ever after,” but – Lord, willing! – there are still a lot more remarkable stories to unfold for you.
My wish for you today is: May God bless you beyond what we can ask or imagine!
1 Believers Church Bible Commentary, Ephesians, by Thomas Yoder Neufeld.
2 ibid
3 Gill-Austern, Brita. “Love Understood as Self-Sacrifice and Self-Denial: What does it do to Women?” In: Through the Eyes of Women, ed. Stevenson Moessner, Jeanne. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 1996