Genesis 2 and Mark 10: 2-14
James R. Gorman
October 8, 2000
Let the record show that in the 30th year of my marriage to Sally, our daughter was married to a fine young gentleman whom we
have deeply grown to love as our own son. I recommend getting married in years that end in zeros. It's easier to do the math. So,
Jim, how long have you been married? My mathematically challenged mind simply subtracts 1970 from the current year and there
you have it.
Erin and Rolando will have it even easier than us, unless they can't remember what year they are in, but that's a different kind of problem. In the year 2048 they will be able to say without hesitation that they have been married 48 years. The math is so simple. Everyone should get married in a year that ends with a zero.
My wife, Sally, is in Virginia visiting her cousin and Erin's Godparents, so I can say some relatively intimate things about these 30 years as they relate to the texts for this morning.
1970 was the year that the Beatles split up. David Letterman had just started a job as a television announcer in Indianapolis and Jay Leno hadn't even begun his stand up comedy routines, much less his TV career. Nixon had just ordered US troops into Cambodia, and just days before our wedding in May four students were killed by National Guardsmen at Kent State. Ronald Reagan was running for his second term as governor of California. It was the year, most significantly perhaps, that Vince Lombardi died, which reminds me that I should move on so that you Packer fans can get to your TV sets in time for the game. It is enough to say that it was a long time ago. It's a long time for a partnership to last.
Not many corporations have lasted as long as our marriage. We were married five years before Microsoft was even founded. So, I have some authority to speak about partnerships and relationships that last.
First, let me say that relationships cannot last without a community in which a married couple find their ballast. I felt that most deeply when I was able to look out in this place last June and see so many good friends who have loved us all these years. When we were too choked up to sing the hymns at Erin and Rolando's wedding, you sang for us. I can't tell you how important all that is for anyone who struggles to be faithful in unfaithful times.
In fact, just over half of the years of our marriage have been spent in this place, and this place and all its people have been good to us and helped us re-center our relationship when times were difficult. This has been for us the beloved community to which we have turned over and over again to remind us of all that is valuable and good and true about what it means to be alive in our time.
It is a community of memory and hopes. A community that worships God and which knows intimately what is sacred and holy. Covenantal relationships need a sense of the holy to make things work. Physical attraction, as important as that might be, is not enough to keep things together. It is interesting that the part of our country with the highest concentration of physical beauty is the same part of the country where we find the highest rate of marriage failure. The Hollywood ideals of romance are not enough.
Weddings are places where promises are made even though promises are among the hardest things to honor in our culture. We are created by God, male and female. In God's image we are created, male and female. For this reason a man shall leave his family and be joined to his wife and the two shall become one flesh. We are bone of each other's bone and flesh of each other's flesh. This is God's best intention for all creation. It is a cornerstone upon which all creation is anchored. The offering of vows at a marriage is a risky business upon which the whole future of the earth depends. It is also the paradigm by which all other promises should be measured.
Carl Sandburg has a touching reminiscence of his parents' wedding vows in his autobiographical novel, Always the Young Strangers. He writes:
Mama's wedding ring was never lost-was always on that finger as placed there with pledges years ago. It was a sign and seal of something that ran deep and held fast between the two of them. . . . How they happened to meet I heard only from my mother. . . . A smile spread over her face half-bashful and a bright light came to her blue eyes as she said, "I saw it was my chance." She was saying this at least twenty years after the wedding and there had been hard work always, tough luck at times, seven children of whom two had died on the same day-and she had not one regret that she had jumped at her "chance" when she saw it.
Vows are always given and received as a great risk. Who knows in their youth all things necessary to make such a commitment? Entering into a marriage is not the most logical of all our endeavors. It is a leap of faith as much as faith itself. You just take your chance and inasmuch as you are able you work at keeping the vows you've made. Will some fail? Of course they will. Tragically. Will some violate God's best intentions for Creation? Of course. But we trust in the everlasting mercy of an ever graceful God to forgive--if that were not the case, not many of us would make such promises in the first place. And we all understand when divorce happens to people we love. On the other hand, the possible failure of vows should never be an occasion for taking vows lightly, or to stop believing that such vows are possible.
Weddings are times for looking into the future, but they are also times for taking stock of the past. Children are suddenly adults. As the great Southern Baptist preacher, Carlyle Marney, has observed, "Yesterday she cut her first tooth, today she cut a molar, tommorrow you are ordering an upper plate for yourself."
There is grief in the passing of time. Weddings are times in which we are at once happy and sad. For us, last June our hearts were most broken because Rolando's parents could not enjoy this extraordinary moment with us. The idiocy of our two foreign policies made that impossible even after the good intervention of our Congressman, Tom Barrett. We hope we can make all that right in a trip to Cuba next year where we will try to re-enact those risky vows in Santa Clara.
Finally, marriage is about the future. Erin turned to Rolando and said, "Yo, Erin, te recibo at ti Rolando, desde hoy en adelante." From this day forward. The future is secured by promises made by those who have become one flesh.
What God has joined together let no one put asunder.