blip : Blogging Linear Interstellar Points :

Title: Face to Face
Date: March 7th, 2009
Text: I Corinthians 13
Event: Marriage of Josh Newman and Kelley Schultz
Place: Children’s Memorial Park, Tucson AZ

In an old-fashioned wedding, one of the most dramatic moments was when the bride removed her veil. Her face would be hidden for much of the ceremony, until the moment when her veil would be pulled back, and she and her husband could look at each other face to face.

To look at one another face to face, without flinching, without running away, without hiding, without deception—that is the nature of marriage. Josh and Kelley, today you enter into the joy of looking at each other for the rest of your lives—lovingly, faithfully, and honestly.

In many ways, love is something that sneaks up on you at the beginning—like a thief in the night, or a surprise birthday party. You didn’t plan for it. You didn’t expect this love to happen; you weren’t looking for it. It just happened; no warning; no anticipation. Love just happened; it caught you off guard; you were unprepared.

And you found out that love doesn’t wait for you to be ready. Love doesn’t play by your rules. Love disrupts your plans and gives you something much better, something much deeper, more profound, something you couldn’t imagine, an unexpected joy, love gives someone who takes your breath away—a lover, someone to love, and someone to love you.

But like I said, this is only the beginning. Hopefully you have learned in your relationship that love is a gift. It wasn’t something you made up. You didn’t create it. It didn’t belong to you beforehand. In many ways, your love came from somewhere else; your love just showed up out of the blue.

Love is like an electric shock that runs through your veins, a life-giving current that has changed everything in your life. Your love came as a surprise, a gift that you might not have even deserved… but there it is: love. Here you are, Kelley and Josh, gifts of love, captured by love.

You see, love is a gift that takes possession of you. Usually we think of gifts as something someone gives you and then you own it, you can use it when you want, and put it on the shelf where you are done—like a new bicycle. But marriage is a gift of love that is entirely different.

In marriage you give each other a gift that neither of you can own by your self. It’s not like you can take each other’s hand, put a ring on it, say you are mine, and turn around a put each other on a shelf to use when you want. That’s not it at all.

Instead, you are about to participate in an exchange of gifts where you give your self to one another, and discover a love that reaches down into your very depths, a love that you never knew was there, a love has slept in the dark recesses of your being…until now.

Kelley, your love for Josh has awakened a love hidden in his depths. And Josh, your love for Kelley has awakened a secret love within her being. Each of you has awakened deep mysteries in each other, a hidden love—feelings and forces that you never knew were there.

That’s why you can’t own this gift of love. In fact, you don’t even know what you have. You are at the edge of a mystery. You can see the shape of something, but can’t quite make out exactly what it looks like. You are only now starting to see through a dim mirror, as John O’Hair just read about in I Corinthians. Things are still fuzzy. The love you have evades your grasp. You can’t quite get a handle on it. And you definitely don’t own it.

But it is there. You can’t deny it. You can’t stop it. This love is washing over you today and setting you on a journey that you can’t control. Love is a gift that has taken possession of you, both of you. But you don’t possess it; love possesses you. You think you know what you are doing; but you don’t.

This pilgrimage of love that we call marriage isn’t like the bicycle trip you took last year. For that trip you had a map, you figured out where you were going ahead of time, you wrote down some directions, and started down the route.

That’s not how marriage works. You may think you know what you are doing, but you don’t. You may think you know where you are going, but you don’t. You don’t possess your love; instead, you are possessed by love. Marriage is how you give yourself to the love that has awakened in your depths.

When you look at each other, you catch a glimpse of light, of life, of love. But it’s only a glimpse—a flash of light, of flash of love—that you can see through a darkened glass. And that glimpse has beckoned unto you, that glimpse of love has called out to you. And so you let go of everything you had and set off on a wandering path. In marriage, the only map you have is the vows you make to one another, where you say, I will never leave you nor forsake you.

You see, marriage is a wandering pilgrimage into the depths of love. The only compass you have is your vows, so take them seriously, they are your guide. They are much more trustworthy than your feelings. Your vows show you how to grow in love, how to grow into that great mystery that has possessed your life, how to follow that glimpse of light that has brought you face to face. Love has brought you together. Love has turned you to look at one another.

As I Corinthians says, For now you see in a mirror, dimly, but soon you will see face to face. Now you know only in part; but soon you will know fully, even as you have been fully known.

That is what marriage is all about. It is a way of life where you come to discover yourself as a new person—you are mirrors to one another. When you look at one another, face to face, you see things in yourself that you’ve never seen before.

That’s the gift of love. The love you share will give birth to new life, abundant life, true life. And I’m not talking about children, while those are nice gifts as well. Instead, the love you have for one another is the fertile soil from which your new life can grow.

Bound together in love, the two of you discover a new person—a power of life that flows through you and makes all things new, a force that renews your soul, a deep well that overflows with water in the desert, a light that shines in the midst of darkness.

This is the mystery that we call God. Marriage is just another way for us to discover the God who loves us. Josh and Kelley, God is in the love that flows between you, that engulfs you, that possesses you. God is love—the gift of love that you didn’t expect, the gift of love that you didn’t know you wanted. But God is a gift that comes anyway—whether we asked for it or not, whether we were waiting for it or not. All of a sudden, we find ourselves engulfed in a new reality, the overflow of divine love.

Josh and Kelley, today you stand at the edge of this mystery, the mystery of love, a love that never ends. This love is so mysterious, so unexpected, so graceful, that we can’t help but call it God. As you spend the rest of your life learning what love means, trying to get a handle on what love is all about, rest assured that you are already possessed by love. Love has found you. Love knows you by name. And this Love, your love, shall never fail; for it comes from that deep mystery we call God.
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The first two paragraphs above are taken from a wedding sermon by Rowan Williams: “Unveiled Faces.” It’s in Ray of Darkness (1995). And I’d guess that the rest of my thoughts came from Sebastian Moore, The Inner Loneliness (1982). I read it a few years ago and it keeps coming back to me.