“I Will”—1 Cor. 13, wedding sermon for Ben Berg & Renee Boelter, June ‘15

                                                                             

                                                                          

1.                        Dear friends in Christ, especially Ben and Renee.  What a beautiful day! It’s a day full of beauty. The beautiful summer weather outside is lovely as can be. The church is decorated beautifully. Your attendants are beautiful. And you, Renee, are beautiful. Gee, Ben, even you’re looking good.

2.                        But what’s most beautiful is not something to see, but something to be heard. In just a moment, you’ll speak the most beautiful words of love to one another that can be imagined. You’ll commit yourselves, wholeheartedly, unreservedly, to God and to one another. You will speak the words of a beautiful covenant with each other—the covenant of marriage. Lifelong promises. Incredible promises. Beautiful promises. And those Beautiful Promises Are Summed Up in Two Little Words: “I Will.”

3.                        Will you live in holy marriage according to the Word of God? Will you comfort, honor, respect, and keep each other until death? Those two words—“I will”—sum up that beautiful commitment.  Some are cynical of those words and that commitment. “Impossible.” “Just wait until reality hits.” And so on.  And they are the biggest two words imaginable. How do fallible, sinful people commit themselves to such things? Shouldn’t you just promise to try?  No, that “I will” is what today is all about.

4.                        They are words for the future. You are defining your life hereafter. With those words, Ben, Renee becomes your future. And Renee, with your “I will,” Ben becomes your future.  They are words of commitment: “I will be this way. I will do these things.” You affirm that every new day will be another day in which you are committed to comforting, honoring, respecting, keeping, and loving according to the Word of God.  They are words of forgiveness. Because they focus always on the future, they forget the past, where there may be failures to love as God teaches us to love.

5.                        But these words, “I will,” are one more thing. One more beautiful thing.  Because they are spoken to and in the presence of God, the words “I will” are words of prayer. Nothing else is more beautiful or more important to know about today. You speak to God, and as you speak to one another, you speak before God. Your chief witness today is God. The chief officiant is God. All that we do is done in prayer, especially your beautiful, godly promises. Without that fact, the cynics are probably right. The promises are too much for any of us sinful people.

6.                        But with the God who has shown himself to us in Jesus Christ, these promises are completely beautiful and totally right.  1 Jn 4:7–12 says, “⁷Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. ⁸Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. ⁹In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. ¹⁰In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. ¹¹Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. ¹²No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.”  Here we learn that all love comes from God.  That word propitiation is a big word that means Jesus dying on the cross has paid for all our sins. “In this is love” (v 10)! God, who is love, is the only one who enables our love to exist or to continue.

7.                        These words of prayer put you continually under God’s guidance as you speak them today and as you reaffirm them throughout your life. As the reading from 1 Corinthians reminded us—God defines love. And he will be with you daily to keep the love that is patient, kind, and not envious, boastful, or proud alive in your marriage.

8.                        Finally, these words of prayer remind you that it is God’s forgiveness for both of you in Christ Jesus—forgiveness he earned on the cross—that will enable you to forgive and forget, moving on again and again from the past to each new day in which you say again, “I will be faithful to you. I will love you. I will be your husband. Your wife. Until death separates us.”  May God sustain you in this love—his own love—until life’s end. Amen.