We Always Marry The Wrong Person
"The primary challenge of marriage is learning how to love and care for the stranger to whom you find yourself married." - Stanley Hauerwas
Isaiah 62.4
You shall no more be termed Forsaken, and your land shall no more be termed Desolate, but you shall be called My Delight Is In Her and your land Married, for the Lord delights in you, and your land shall be married.
Marriage is a mystery.
However, I am an “expert.” I am an expert because I am a pastor and I’m supposed to be an expert in these types of matters.
Similarly, when a family has a baby and they don’t know quite what to do when the baby becomes a toddler and starts talking back, the family might bring the child to church in hopes that someone like me will teach them how to behave properly. Or when a family loses someone they love, they might have a funeral at a church in hopes that someone like me can use words to make sense out of such a terrible loss. Or when a couple is ready to “take the next step,” they might call someone like me to offer premarital counseling before they cross into marital bliss.
And yet, nothing in my seminary education properly prepared me for children’s ministries, funerals, or weddings (including pre-marital counseling). I had to figure them out while I was figuring them out.
Because all of those things (life, death, and marriage) are some of the most profound mysteries we will ever encounter.
Honestly, it never ceases to amaze me that people get married at all. And I am a happily married person. But to look another person in the eye and promise to love and cherish them knowing that we don’t know what they’re going to be like tomorrow or in ten years time is a wild proposition.
Which is why I say these words at every single wedding: "We always marry the wrong person.”
As an aside, it’s always a bit fun to hear the muffled gasp from the gathered people when I deliver that line.
But it’s true! None of us really know the person we marry, we only think we do. We are mysteries to one another and even to ourselves. At the very heart of what it means to be human is to change which means, in marriage, we make a promise knowing full and well that we don’t know who we’re marrying.
As Stanley Hauerwas says, “The primary challenge of marriage is learning how to love and care for the stranger to whom you find yourself married.”
Perhaps that’s why, in the marriage liturgy, the entire gathered congregation also makes a covenant to support the couple in their marriage: We all need all the help we can get.
Marriage cannot simply be about living our best lives in sync all the time. Because some of the most important moments in any marriage take place when anxieties, fears, longings, and even terrors are present. That’s why sickness and death are part of the vows. In the end, there are few things more divine that being able to say to someone, “I am at my worst,” all while knowing that it won’t make them run for the hills.
In marriage we see the best of our partners, but we also see the worst. And we do well to know that for as much as things can get better, they can also get worse. But, oddly enough, it can feel like grace.
It’s a parable - knowing that someone is there for you, even when you don’t deserve it.
Just as Jesus’ sacrificial love gives us the example of the love between two people, so too marriage teaches us about who God is.
For, love and mercy and forgiveness are the only way a marriage can work. It’s similar to how the church is God’s parable for the world, a people who know what it means to live under grace, rather than judgment. Without the church, the world cannot know there is an alternative to the world. And, without marriage predicated on grace, the world cannot know the power of the Gospel.
This is why marriage is such good news. It’s an adventure!
It’s no wonder that, among all the things Jesus compares the kingdom to in his many parables, the thing he compares it to most is a wedding feast!
Yeah - we're all just trying to figure it out! Thanks for sharing!