Homily: Marriage of Pierson Payne & Grace Neill
29 December 2018
I began thinking about this homily many months ago.
I have to tell you it’s a lot earlier than I usually do for normal Sunday sermons.
My intention was to present Grace & Pierson with a charge that they might take with them as the begin their married life together. I wanted it to be right. I wanted it to be lovely and powerful. For I really like these two people.
When I was in graduate school at Notre Dame, Bernard Cooke was regarded by some as an important theologian. He died in 2013 having made a huge contribution to the way in which we talk about God and God’s relationship to the Church, about the sacraments and how a sacramental view of the world is at the heart of what it means to be Church. When I first encountered him it was in the context of his understanding that all human life is essentially sacramental – i.e. human beings by nature reveal and make manifest God’s presence. And in addition he argued that human beings are essentially communal. We live in communities and the revelation of Grace is found in community.
A natural conclusion of his position was his argument in the early 80’s that it was the sacrament of Marriage that is perhaps the most important and helpful sacrament for understanding who God is in relationship to us, God’s people.
That may seem like more than you wanted to know about Bernard Cooke, but I include it here because his thinking is related to the insight that came to me as I prepared for Grace & Pierson’s wedding.
The 3 of us talked about the Scripture we would read today.
We spent some time talking about it. Pierson & Grace had some conversation and, I think, some prayer about it as well. I am not going to even scratch the surface on the riches of what might be said about these three passages they came up with – the 3 passages we have just heard. But the first ah hah moment for me was related to the first reading: Song of Songs.
As I meditated on the first reading, it seemed to provide a grounding for what it means to love– which is the subject of the 2nd reading.
That in turn provides a marvelously full background for the Gospel reading from Mark where we hear Jesus rebuke his disciples who had been judgmental and overly legalistic in their thinking:
“Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.”
Song of Songs
The Song of Songs is a piece of the Bible like no other piece. It doesn’t talk about God at all. It is poetry. It is evocative and sensual poetry. It reads something like a drama and some editions print it that way. In its original form it is even what some would call erotic. The discussion about its place in scripture among religious thinkers, Jewish and Christian alike, goes back thousands of years.
The broadest argument supporting its presence in the Bible is that it is a metaphorical dramatic account of the love between God and God’s Chosen People, between Christ and the Soul, or Christ and the Church.
In our first reading, then, this wonderful, lyrical love poetry.
Arise, my love, my fair one,
and come away;
for now the winter is past,
the rain is over and gone.
The flowers appear on the earth;
the time of singing has come,
and the voice of the turtledove
is heard in our land.
That love poetry is what helps us to understand who and what God is to us. It’s not that when we somehow insert God into the secular love poetry that it is sanitized or sanctified. It is rather that the love poetry itself helps us to know God.
Marriage, family, father/mother, care of children – these things have been with us from the very beginning. It is that love that enables us to know God and the Covenant God has made with us. It is the primordial relationship of love that allows us to know who and what our Redeemer is.
What Bernard Cooke’s reflections on the sacramentality of our life of faith helped me to see was that we act to reveal God even in the midst of the stuff of life – life that is often ambiguous, confused, messy, incomplete and inadequate.
Grace and Pierson will have opportunity aplenty to experience their own inadequacies and their own messiness. The grace of the sacramental revelation of God is all around them at all times.
A proverb often quoted and well-known puts it this way: God draws straight with our crooked lines.
I first heard that proverb from an avante-garde, renegade Benedictine monk. The fact that he wasn’t very successful at leading a religious life doesn’t take away from the power of his poetry to reveal God. I see the truth of that proverb lived out in the lives of countless persons I have come to know over the years. It is the stuff that makes marriage a perfect vehicle for revealing to the world the love of God.
What we do here, today, it turns out is really important.
We are sending these two wonderful human beings into the world to bear the image of God’s love. It is their life as a community, lived as a “kind of school” of love, that is sacramental and will reveal in their own personal, sometimes messy, sometimes ambiguous way, who and what God is.
My Charge to you both, Pierson and Grace is this:
Paul has given us a bold evocative description of what it means to love one another. It is as good a charge as any human could write.
As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, … And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.
As you do that, imperfectly and by fits and starts, you will do no less than help the world to see God. It is a glorious thing. And we give thanks with all our hearts.
“It is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs.”
