Glimpses of God - Day Four
I have said many times, I love weddings. It has been my privilege over the past twenty seven or so years to officate at hundreds of weddings and each one is a joy. It's not just the air of celebration, the joy, the babble of happy voices, but something more. In the teaching of the Church marriage is a sacrament, an event where the space between 'heaven and earth' is thinner, where the love of God is made visible. In human love we can glimpse something of Divine love.
I am humbled each time I officiate at a wedding by how those of us in ministry are invited into these intimate, though public, celebrations - sacred, joyful, blessed, spaces where people come together to uphold and support two people in forging a new life together. Often these celebrations come after times of struggle and hardship, of working out how to handle both the good and the bad together - as reflected in the wedding vows 'to have and to hold/from this day forward/for richer, for poorer/for better, for worse/in sickness and in health/for the rest of our lives.' Marriage is a recognition that life does not always go smoothly, in face it is often the very opposite of smooth, but that two people are going to seek to travel that road, whatever happens, together.
In that commitment, in that celebration, and above all in that love, I have been blessed with glimpses of God.
1 Corinthians 13
1 If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
4 Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant 5or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. 7It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
8 Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. 9For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; 10but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. 11When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. 12For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. 13And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.