I'm officiating a wedding ceremony tomorrow. Weird week, this past week was. Two of the staples of pastoral ministry happened/are happening this week. A wedding and a funeral.
Weddings are pretty much the exact opposite of funerals. At funerals, a life has come to an end. At weddings, a life is just beginning as two become one. At funerals, I feel like people hang on my every word because they're dealing with some of the toughest questions of their lives. At weddings, people just want you to get to the vows, even though what I say during the charge at a wedding ceremony is really deep stuff. At funerals, the primary emotion is sadness. At weddings, the primary emotion is joy. Both are emotionally draining.
It would be cool for Jesus to show up like He did at Cana and turn water into wine, or for my friends in recovery or fundamentalism, Coca-Cola. That's never happened to me, and I don't think that miracle had nearly as much to do with the wedding as it did the submissive spirit of the Messiah, but it would be cool. But I think there's an even deeper miracle that happens at a wedding: two becoming one.
It's hard to picture, and as believers, we put God into that equation and suddenly it's a beautiful trinity: husband, wife, Jesus. I think most of the marital difficulties that I counsel couples about has to do with a lack/misunderstanding/misusage/absence of intimacy. Two becoming one is not nearly as much about sex as it is about intimacy. And lack of intimacy in marriage, particularly emotional and spiritual, can reap devastating consequences.
But for those few moments in time, that first few hours when a couple is protected by the presence of their family, friends, pastor, one another and the magic that a wedding day brings, the intimacy is complete -- even before sex comes into the picture. And it's because God has shown up and made two become one.
There's a lot of pictures of the church in the Bible, but my favorite is the church as the Bride of Christ and the intimacy we are able to have with the Lover of our Soul, not because we loved Him, but because He first loved us.
"In this is the love of Christ demonstrated, that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us."
There are many times when I’m thinking about things that I say to myself, “I wonder what the folks at Cornerstone would think of this”. That’s the reason for this blog. Blogs are safe places. They lay no claim to truth and are certainly not absolute. I reserve the right to disagree with anything I write in here. These are thoughts in progress as are your thoughts and reactions to these thoughts.
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