Thinking about marriage?

... a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife... Genesis 2:24

So they are no longer two, but one... Matthew 19: 6

Marriage should be honoured by all... Hebrews 11:4

It took me a little by surprise at first. He was a young Romanian who had been worshipping with us, along with his fiancée, for two or three years. “We’ve decided to get married, and we wondered if we could have the wedding here, and if you would be happy to conduct it.” No problem there, of course - my privilege. But then the next bit: “We were wondering if we could have the ceremony on a Sunday morning as part of the usual service.”

Ah. This was, as the Americans say, “something else”.

Financial considerations were only partly behind the idea: true, the couple had little money, and this was certainly an inexpensive way of going about things. But much more than that, they were very much part of our community, and given that most of their family would not be able to travel from Romania, they felt it would be good to get married among their church family here, plus of course as many of their compatriots as possible who lived in Britain.

Well, my initial hesitation soon evaporated, not least after a chat with the leadership of the church. Why not! It would be a great witness for Christian marriage (not to mention that I would have a tailor-made children’s talk - I mean, what better visual aid could you want than a real wedding?).

So we went ahead. And it was indeed one of the happiest and most inspiring services I can remember. Yes, we had to make a few adjustments to the usual format: the bride, in her special dress, came in as per tradition; there was a meaty sermon on the joys and responsibilities of marriage; and the legal parts had to be fitted in, of course.  

But it was a great event: refreshing, unpretentious, joyful, challenging, somehow wonderfully authentic. People went away buzzing. Those who had turned up unaware of what was going on were at first bemused, then delighted. (Oh, and it turned out too that there was a nearby hotel run by Romanian friends who happily hosted the reception as a gift.)

It all left me with one very big question running in my mind: why can’t this be the norm? Or something like it, anyway. You don’t need me to remind you of the huge amounts of money - many, many thousands of pounds - routinely spent on weddings in this country. There are times it all seems not just vulgarly extravagant, but verging on the obscene. Of course the day should be special. Of course there’s a place for dressing up. Of course some significant expense needs to be gone into. But isn’t it massively out of proportion? - a lot of stress and worry for nearly everyone concerned, and often a very flat feeling at the end?

The Bible lays a great stress on marriage - a gift of God to the human race. But the emphasis is always on the marriage, never on the wedding. Isn’t this significant? The historians can tell us a bit about how weddings were conducted in the ancient world, in both Jewish and Gentile circles; but the Bible tells us next to nothing. This suggests, surely, that at bottom it just doesn’t matter. So why do we make so much of it?

Isn’t it ironic that the more marriage is devalued in our society ("who cares about a bit of paper?"), the more focus there is on the public display? And isn’t it sad to hear young people who have started to live together explaining that they “can’t afford to get married”? Many of us will know couples, now elderly, who got married on a shoe-string as the second world war approached; they didn’t know if they would ever be able to do so otherwise. I doubt if their joy and sense of occasion was any less.

Perhaps it’s time that we who follow Jesus made it our business to set a new trend for our society?

God our Father, thank you for the wonderful gift of marriage. Help those of us who are married to delight in it, as husbands and wives, and may your blessing be upon our homes and families. Help us too to show our cynical and materialistic world its true value. Amen.