Sermon for Ivy and Emily’s Wedding
July 9, 2022
As a priest, I have the great joy of being a part of wedding ceremonies. Emily and Ivy have chosen to be married in the church. Why get married at all? Why not just live together? And why get married in a church? Because Emily and Ivy are women of faith and God is an integral part of their lives. In a few moments they will say their vows in the presence of all of us and in the presence of God. As a part of being married in the church, Ivy and Emily went through a course with me. I got to hear about how they met, fell in love, and how their lives have been changed through their love for one another. I also heard about their relationship with God and the church. I was very moved by their stories of love.
But what is love? Love is a very common word. We use it in many different ways. We say, “I love you,” to the person we care about most in the world, but we also say, “I love chocolate.” Certainly, we don’t love our significant other the same way that we love chocolate. Yet, we have no better words to express ourselves. So, what is love, really?
As we hear in 1 Corinthians 13, love is patient, kind, and forgiving among many other things. Love means being all these things and notice that it is not about a feeling. Most people, when thinking about love, think about the emotion – the romance of falling in love and the desire to share every moment, and learn everything about this other person. We think of the kind of love we see in movies that usually end with a wedding.
But love is far more than an emotion. Emotions are fleeting. They are here one moment and gone the next. Anyone who has been married longer than a day knows that the feeling of love comes and goes. Marriage is not easy because true love is more than a feeling; it’s a choice. It is a covenant-a promise to self-sacrifice.
If you want your marriage to be strong and to last, you must choose every day to love the other. If you choose to do this, your marriage will be one of the most fulfilling, rewarding, and fruitful parts of your entire life.
The perfect example of love is found in Jesus, who sacrificed everything and humbled himself by taking on the form of a man, coming down from heaven to earth to die for us. He chose to give up his life so that all who believe in him could have life. Jesus’ sacrifice was out of his great love for us. There is no greater love than to lay down your life for another. In the same way my hope is that you, Ivy and Emily, would lay down your lives for one another–giving of yourself to the other in the same way that Jesus gave his life for you.
Ivy, each day choose to love Emily by putting her desires ahead of your own. Emily, each day choose to love Ivy by putting her desires ahead of your own. This feeling of your wedding day will fade in time, and in those moments, you both must choose to love. You must choose to uphold the promises and the covenant that you make today.
When you continue to choose this kind of love, your marriage will be an example to others. Marriage in the church is about love for each other but also about how that love extends to other people. It reminds others of the promises that they made. It reminds others to self-sacrifice. It will mirror the love that God through Jesus has for us. So, Emily and Ivy, on this your wedding day, thank you for choosing love and for the reminder to all of us to choose love. Amen.