Weddings

 Nineteenth Thursday after Pentecost

Prayer and Spirituality Day

Weddings

Over the course of a good many years I have asked a number of pastors the following question: Which would you rather do, a wedding or a funeral. The response has been overwhelming in favor of funeral. Only one pastor said he would rather do a wedding. This might seem shocking to laity. Weddings are happy. Funerals are sad. Right?

 

Here's the difference from a pastor's point of view. A funeral is a time when a pastor can do something and be something meaningful for the bereaved. Both the service and the sermon give the pastor an opportunity to help bereaved people remember the good things in the life of the person they loved and to help move the bereaved forward into life without their loved one. 

 

At a wedding the pastor might as well be a robot. The pastor is purely functional. The best thing he or she can do is say the service and get out of the way so that the reception, which is really a party, can begin. I have done some weddings in which I was asked to give a sermon. Most of what I say seems rather trite. The couple aren't listening that well, anyway. The bride can't wait to get the reception started. The groom can't wait to get the whole thing over. 

 

Have you ever seen the movie 27 Dresses?  It's about a female wedding planner, who loves her job and keeps all the bridesmaids dresses she has worn over the years. Her foil is a male cynical wedding newspaper reporter, who does his job well but hates it, because he hates weddings. I'm not quite that bad, but close. I have liked doing weddings of my family members and of close friends, weddings where I would have been invited, even if I weren't the pastor. I have also liked the two Jewish-Christian weddings I've done, where I wore a yarmulke as well as an alb and stole and where I read the Jewish liturgy in Hebrew under a chupa, as well as the Methodist liturgy in English. 

In the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches weddings are a sacrament. For Protestants they are not. Only Baptism and Communion are sacraments. I think the Protestants got this one right. Nowhere in the Bible do we find a wedding ceremony. Jesus is present for a wedding feast at Cana of Galilee (John 2)  but neither he nor anyone else performs a wedding ceremony. The purpose is the party. When the wine runs out, Jesus miraculously makes more. The book of Tobit in the Apocrypha has a big wedding feast at the end, but again no ceremony, just a feast. Mary and Joseph get married but we read of no ceremony. Other weddings in the Bible are essentially the making of legal agreements between the father of the bride an the father of the groom.

It was a few hundred years after the New Testament that Christians first started having weddings in churches. Now the trend in our more secular society is to have "Destination Weddings." They have a lot of them here where I am now in the Outer Banks. 

Every pastor has wedding horror stories. Outdoor weddings are especially problematic. I did a beach wedding during a slight break in the rain on a stormy day. The ocean was roaring so loudly that no one further away than ten feet could hear what I saying. 

 

I had one outdoor wedding in Greensboro on the day of a terrible storm that downed hundreds of trees and made many streets impassible. The park where the wedding was supposed to be looked like a war zone. The city closed it. We moved the wedding to the Chapel at Christ UMC, but the power was out. The wedding was at 6:00. It was almost completely dark by the end of the wedding.

I had two weddings where the alcohol had started flowing long before the wedding. In both cases at least the bride and the groom were sober. In one of those weddings, outdoors under a big tent ,there were the family dogs. While I was reading the ceremony, my service book in one hand, my other hand holding the wedding rings, the dog started sniffing my crotch. I tried unsuccessfully to knee him away. Then the bride hit him a couple of times with her bouquet. I never skipped a beat in reading the ceremony. The drunken audience thought it was all a part of the fun. 

I've had weddings where bridesmaids and groomsmen appeared badly hungover from the night before. I had a wedding when one of the bridesmaids was badly drunk and had to be held upright by another bridesmaid. 

I've never had any total disaster wedding, like the bride or groom deciding not to go through with it at the last second or an old boyfriend yelling objection during the ceremony (a la The Graduate). I did once have an objecting father walk out just as the ceremony began. 

 

I was not there, but a wedding was held in my church sanctuary during which about 20 of the couple's cats were present. There were no litter boxes. The custodian was furious. We made a no animals rule after that. We had another wedding where I was not present that was officiated by a minister of another denomination. The subject of his wedding sermon was that all wives needed to be subordinate and obedient to their husbands. This is not Methodist doctrine. He also had an altar call at the end.

 

I was not there, but I heard about a wedding during which a groomsman threw up on the bride's dress. That has to be the worst of all. 

I love marriage and highly recommend it. I'm just not too keen on weddings. 

Now is the time for hate mail. I hope to hear objections from you who are offended. I am open to being converted on this issue (like the guy in 27 Dresses). Just try it.

Faithfully,

Christian