Another bit of wedding advice

Listening to: GF Handel: The Messiah (Pinnock)

Weddings are often the highlights of my year, so although I didn't watch all the Royal Wedding I enjoyed watching some of the highlights (esp the cartwheeling verger).

The sermon was very brief, and understandably couldn't say very much, but I think Huw Edwards' brief final comment on the BBC was the best analysis it is likely to receive. He called it "advice".

The same summary could be given for many wedding sermons I have heard, from evangelicals as much as anyone else. Usually the advice is very thoughtful and helpful, and the the Bishop's was too.

He was realistic about the difficulties that face married couples, and the reasons not to build our security on your spouse. Nevertheless, he said this was "a day of hope".... why?

Firstly, because of the potential for them to be "what God meant each one to be".

Secondly, because they had made a "solemn decision that, whatever the difficulties, [they] are committed to the way of generous love".

Thirdly, because they have each other to change them into "their work of art".

What about the God of hope?

The Bishop briefly, but nicely, described "a generous God who so loved the world that he gave himself to us in the person of Jesus Christ". He encouraged William and Kate to live "in the Spirit of this generous God...following the example of Jesus Christ".

This is good but inadequate. In the Bishop's sermon God is the God of hope because of his example and what he enables, not for what he has achieved in our place and promises to achieve in us.

So it included no substitution and no promise, and because of that there was no Gospel.

Despite including so much that was good and true, without the good news, the advice was hopeless. Even the attractive 'promise' of his opening words by St Catherine of Siena threw the happy couple back on their own efforts to emulate the generous God: "Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire."

From that very moment, I was reminded of Oswald Bayer's quotation:

But whatever the new human being of the modern age is, that is what he or she must first become. The gospel of freedom, which is universally said to exist, puts the human being under the pressure to redeem himself at the very same time, and calls for him to achieve the potential that is by very nature his already. But if freedom is not promised and imparted, if instead it is characteristic of me from the outset, if I define myself in relation to it, then I am weighted down, in my individual and collective subjectivity, with having to fulfill the promise of what has been provided for me - not freed for freedom but at the same time " to freedom condemned" (Satre). It is not that I am able to be free, but that I have to free myself.

(italics original, pp.65-66, Oswald Bayer, Martin Luther's Theology: A Contemporary Interpretation)

So wedding preachers, please give us God's acts and promises as well as the advice, or you'll crush us all!