Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church
May 20, 2007
Easter 7 and the Blessing of the Marriage of Barbara Timms and Daryl Schlick
The Rev. Melissa Skelton
John 17:20-26
Jesus prayed for his disciples, and then he said. "I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. Father, I desire that those also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory, which you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world.
"Righteous Father, the world does not know you, but I know you; and these know that you have sent me. I made your name known to them, and I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them."
From a Wendell Berry poem entitled “To the Holy Spirit.”
O Thou, far off and here, whole and broken,
Who in necessity and in bounty wait,
Whose truth is light and dark, mute though spoken,
By Thy wide grace show me Thy narrow gate.
I’ve been fascinated for a long time with why people cry at weddings. And so years ago when I first started officiating at weddings, I began to ask people who were watching others getting married what their own wedding tears were all about.
Predictably, some said that their tears were tears of joy. Others said that their tears were tears of relief or emotional release. Some devastatingly honest people said that their tears had to do with thinking their friend or relative who was getting married was making a mistake. Others said their tears came from nostalgia or longing as they remembered their own wedding vows. Finally, some people described their tears as coming from a desire for the kind of togetherness that they believed marriage is all about.
After hearing all these reasons, I thought, “Yes, these all make sense.” But I also kept thinking, “There’s something more here, something we haven’t named yet that the tears are about. What could that something more be?”
And so after pondering this for a while, what I came to was this: Our tears at weddings come in part from standing in the presence of a great and paradoxical mystery and the feeling of hope and fear, of awe and dread that this mystery inspires in us. The particular mystery that marriage allows us to glimpse is the mystery of intentionally narrowing our lives—that is, choosing one other person above all others—as a way to discover an abundant life. And so we choke up as we see two people try to do this because in a sense this is what we are asked to do over and over in our lives: choose a path, give ourselves to it in all its seeming narrowness, feeling the discomfort and the joy of it, the light and dark of it, as a way to receive the richness and glory that our lives are meant to be.
This, of course, is what Jesus is on the cusp of in our Gospel reading for today, a reading that comes at the end of the 17th chapter of John. He has just finished his last meal and his last prayer with the disciples and tells them to be one with each other as he and God are one in his walk down his own narrow path of glory. For him, it will be a dark, solitary and difficult path, the path leading to his passion and death.
But, of course, today is also the Sunday after the Ascension and before the Feast of Pentecost. And so it no just about the narrow path that Jesus is walking but about awaiting the Holy Spirit through whom we are empowered to do these things.
Not exactly the kind of context and readings many would have chosen for the wedding, but it is what we’ve been given as we joyfully celebrate Barbara and Daryl’s exchange of their marriage vows.
A few weeks ago Bob and I attended a couples enrichment weekend called “Passionate Marriage.” Now don’t get the wrong impression: it was less about hearts and flowers and silk sheets than it was a kind of boot camp covering all aspects of couples’ relationships. At the core of its approach was what I would call the paradoxical nature of the narrow path that couples choose to walk and the potential joy that can be found in walking that path.
The thesis of the workshop was that marriage or committed partnership is a tough, people-growing process, a crucible within which two people need to tolerate the discomfort of holding onto themselves while staying connected to someone else who is important to them. If a couple can do this and continue to do this, the presenters said, they could in fact find a kind of deep humanity in themselves and a continuing and abiding attraction and connection to each other.
And so, Barbara and Daryl, today, you’re making the decision to walk this kind of narrow path—one in which you’re not asked to give up who you are but are asked to hold on to who you are while at the same time experiencing the joy and the discomfort of staying connected to someone who is not you, who is not like you. How will it be possible for you to walk this difficult and joyful path? How is it possible for any of us to do this in our marriages and, for that matter, in any of our committed relationships?
The key, it seems to me, is a kind of quiet bravery that might be called perseverance, a kind of stability of life with each other that allows for the unfolding mystery, the flowering of the life of paradox that can only occur over time and within the rhythms of patient day to day living. This, I believe, is a gift of the Holy Spirit, whose truth as Wendell Berry says is “light and dark” and whose wide grace shows us and, I would say, gives us the strength to enter our lives by the narrow gate and discover abundant life there.. This fortunately is a gift and a capacity the two of you know a great deal about, something the two of you have taught many of us here in this congregation.
And so before we witness and bless your vows, I leave you with a part of another Wendell Berry poem called The Country of Marriage that describes that country’s light and dark as well as the paradoxical nature of the narrow path you are and will be walking together. It could be a poem about the narrow path that is the spiritual life—and there are some who may want to listen to it that way. Today it is a poem for how you are choosing to live your spiritual lives: life together being who you are and being close to one who is both familiar and forever unknown, forever mysterious to you.
In the poem, Berry is addressing his wife.
Sometimes our life reminds me
of a forest in which there is a graceful clearing
and in that opening a house,
an orchard and garden,
comfortable shades, and flowers
red and yellow in the sun, a pattern
made in the light for the light to return to.
The forest is mostly dark, its ways
to be made anew day after day, the dark
richer than the light and more blessed,
provided we stay brave
enough to keep on going in…..
Our bond is no little economy based on the exchange
of my love and work for yours, so much for so much
of an expendable fund. We don’t know what its limits are—
that puts it in the dark. We are more together
than we know, how else could we keep on discovering
we are more together than we thought?
You are the known way leading always to the unknown,
and you are the known place to which the unknown is always
leading me back.
Works Cited or Consulted
“To the Holy Spirit” in Wendell Berry’s Collected Poems
For the complete text of the poem “The Country of Marriage” go to the website of the Poetry Foundation
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=178176
