I've been thinking again lately of Bonhoeffer's "Wedding Semon" written for his friend, Eberhard Bethge, and preserved in his Letters and Papers from Prison. In it, Bonhoeffer observes at one point:
"Marriage is more than your love for each other. It has a higher dignity and power, for it is God's holy ordinance, through which He wills to perpetuate the human race till the end of time. In your love you see only your two selves in the world, but in marriage you are a link in the chain of the generations, which God causes to come and to pass away to His glory, and calls into His kingdom. In your love, you see only the heaven of your own happiness, but in marriage you are placed at a post of responsability towards the world and mankind. Your love is your own private possession, but marriage is more than something personal -- it is a status, an office. Just as it is the crown, and not merely the will to rule, that makes the king, so it is marriage, and not merely your love for each other, that joins you together in the sight of God and man."
And I'm struck in this quote by the contrast of a Christian marriage with that of a cultural one.
Too often the marriage ceremony, ritual and life of the church is for us. And, as a consequence, it's often dry, uninspired and lacking spontaneous joy. But it's worse than that: It's inhospitable. The cultural marriage doesn't give itself away to welcome others. A cultural marriage is for us, not for the world. But it's not supposed to be that way. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer has said elsewhere in Letters and Papers, "The church is the church only when it exists for others".
What would this look like in a Christian marriage, then? Would a Christian marriage be "our day"?
As strange as it was, this is precisely why Kendra and I were insistent that our wedding be a celebration of Christian communion.
In that way, it echoed Jesus' parable from Matthew 22.1-14.
The Kingdom is full of odd and unexpected people. If our weddings are limited to personal affairs (such as they are in American culture), it's hard to see them mirroring this Kingdom and its priorities.
Americans so prize personal liberty and choice. So these grand events become our events. They're small, private affairs in ways that limit who's in and who's out.
If God is the eccentric host who'd rather live it up -- even if it means pulling in folks from skid row -- than keep things just for the country-club crowd, shouldn't we?
So what would it mean if we gave our weddings away for the life of the world, rather than keeping them just for us?