Sermon: The Eighth Sunday after Trinity

Preacher:

Date:

Sunday 29th July 2012

Service:

Mattins

Readings:

Song of Songs 2

1 Peter 4.7-14

If you were to choose a passage from the Bible for a wedding, I wonder what you would choose and why. I wonder if either of today’s readings would feature in your choice.

The first reading from the Song of Songs is full of the most passionate, intense, intimate and yearning description of human love, love which lover and beloved share together. It’s also often seen as an allegory of the intense, passionate, intimate and yearning love of God for human beings - you and me - and also an allegory of that same love of Christ, the bridegroom, for his bride, the Church.

The first letter of Peter has the marvellous, deeply practical line, ‘Above all, maintain constant love for one another, for love covers a multitude of sins’ (1 Peter 4.8). Good sound advice for husband and wife, but the reading more widely conveys a deep urgency about the way in which we should live as human beings in community as ‘the end of all things is near’. The letter envisages persecution and martyrdom; the supreme act of witness to the love of God to the very end.

So it happens that this morning’s readings are two that some would say are pretty appropriate for a wedding but also going further into the knottiness of human existence and Christian discipleship. As it happens the couple I am marrying in September want to stick to the Bible but have noticed that there is precious little in the Bible that directly speaks about marriage, and so they have been challenged further as they ponder the readings. One thing they were emphatic about is that they did not want 1 Corinthians 13: ‘love is patient, kind etc’. They’re right; it’s not just for weddings since it is not primarily about marriage at all. Indeed it could be argued that it is very much more appropriate at a funeral, if not a baptism or confirmation: it speaks of things that abide, faith, hope and love, never conquered by death or even by human folly; and it suggests the art of Christian living day by day in the world, in all sorts of human relationships, nourished by the divine love of God, or in Charles Wesley’s words that ‘love divine, all loves excelling’.

So my asking you to think of choosing a reading for a wedding is a really a flawed question.  By doing so I am inviting eisegesis not exegesis; in other words to read into a text our own pre-suppositions and not reading out of the text what the text actually says. Every time we preach in this Cathedral it is not from a text we have chosen to suit our own purpose, but a text that has been chosen in another place at another time. It demands of the preacher and the hearer the exercise of being attentive to the living word of God, and trusting that the Spirit of God can ignite meaning in a passage that we have come to know all too well or seems obscure to us.

If we go to the Bible simply looking for what we want, then we start to diminish and domesticate God into a pet of our own if we only find in him what we want to find. The way of the Christian disciple, whether married or not, and let’s not forget being married is not the only way of adult discipleship, the way of the Christian disciple is one that takes us beyond our own preferences into God’s life. It takes us to a love that excels beyond any love we can conceive, and ultimately it is the way of the cross, precisely what the first letter of Peter points us to.

The Eastern Church speaks of different forms of martyrdom. They’re helpfully colour coded: white martyrdom is the witnessing to the love of Christ in marriage; red martyrdom is the shedding of one’s blood out of love for Christ; green martyrdom is the everyday witness to the love of Christ in the ordinary stuff of our existence.

It is into the ordinary existence that we are called to go witnesses as, a husband or wife, widow or widower, single person, faithful friend to live out the demanding yet fulfilling life of witness to the enduring love of Christ, ‘to the very end.’