Just back from Aberdeen where I was conducting a marriage ceremony for a family I've known for many a year. The groom was 10 years old last time I saw him before he emigrated to Australia (16 years ago). Came back to Scotland to get married though – Australia doesn't have a University founded in 1495, nor a University chapel with oak carving older than the Reformation!
I still think a Christian marriage service bears witness to a way of living that at its best is a demanding critique of our throwaway, serial relationship, obsessively individualist culture. Faithfulness gives love its discipline and its joy; covenant promises have no inbuilt guarantee they won't be broken, but they are a clear and public statement of intent to which each is accountable.
Amongst the extraordinary privileges of being a minister, is being invited to turn water into wine, to take the hopes and desires and loves of two people, and through their promised faithfulness and incredible courage of trust in each other, produce that intoxicating joy of knowing, against all the odds and to their endless surpise, not only that they are loved – but that they say so in public, and bear witness to their intention to live the rest of their lives cherishing and exploring the mystery that is this other person who out of all other possibilities, said yes to them, on that day, and in front of all the people who matter most in their lives. I never cease to wonder at the sheer crazy hopefulness that informs that kind of risk taking – and thank God that still, there are those like John and Julie, who do so.
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