Love & Marriage (from Ingrid and Tony Black's wedding)

My brother got married in Denver, CO this past Saturday.  It was a great weekend with a ceremony that reflected Ingrid and Tony in a perfect way.  I had the privilege of performing the ceremony.  It was one of the greatest honors of my life and one of the most important responsibilities that I've had.

Below is the "Love & Marriage" message that I shared during the ceremony.  After the message, Ingrid and Tony exchanged vows and rings and then I pronounced them husband and wife and introduced them for the very first time as Ingrid and Tony Black.

W.H. Auden expressed it perfectly in one of his last books, A Certain World, where he wrote, “Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.”

What is the great difference between a romance and a marriage of which Auden speaks?  It’s the signing of that piece of paper, or walking through animal parts, or stomping on the glass, or jumping the broomstick, or whatever way a culture provides to make a solemn, public vow and commitment to which you are held accountable.

The commitment of marriage is what brings us here today.  Tony and Ingrid are both individuals who have made the decision to join their independent lives in order to create a brand new family unit.  They’re bringing into this marriage backgrounds, experiences and expectations.  Both come from families that value marriage.  Ingrid’s parents celebrated 30 years of marriage this past Monday.  Tony’s parents will celebrate 40 years of marriage next week.  (applause)

I’m sure both of these marriages have had ups and downs, failures and victories, heartache and elation and I am certain that both couples are composed of significantly different individuals today than they were on their own wedding days.  30 and 40 years later, the vows they made to one another have much deeper meaning and a sense of sincerity that could not possibly be realized when they said them decades ago.  Those promises made to each other have been put to the test and you have two wonderful examples of what a thriving marriage looks like.  But you’re not committing to replicating your parents’ marriages.  You’re forging your own path and creating your own story.

A wedding is not a declaration of present love but a mutually binding promise of future love.  A wedding is not a celebration of how loving you feel now – that can be safely assumed.  Rather, in a wedding you stand up before your family and friends and all the main institutions of society, and you promise to be loving, faithful and true to the other person in the future, regardless of internal feelings or external circumstances.  See, a successful marriage requires falling in love many times and always with the same person.

That might be somewhat misleading, though.  Falling in love sounds like it’s something that happens to you, that it’s out of your control.  Tony and Ingrid have communicated to me that they believe love is a choice, not simply a feeling.  Our emotions are not always under our control, but our actions are.  It is a mistake to think that you must feel love to give it.  If you stress the action of love over the feeling, you enhance and establish the feeling.   Our culture says that feelings of love are the basis for actions of love.  And of course that can be true.  But it is truer to say that actions of love can lead consistently to feelings of love.  Love between two people must not, in the end, be identified simply with emotion or merely with dutiful action.  Married love is a symbiotic, complex mixture of both.  Having said this, it is important to observe that of the two – emotion and action – it is the latter that we have the most control over.  It is the action of love that we can promise to maintain every day.  This is why marriage is not a 50/50 partnership agreement.  It is a 100%/100% commitment to each other.

Ingrid and Tony, marriage brings you into more intense proximity to one another than any other relationship can and will.  Therefore, very shortly once the two of you are married, you will begin to change in profound ways, and you can’t know ahead of time what those changes will be.  Ingrid, you don’t know, you can’t know, who Tony will actually be in the future until you two get there.   Tony, you’re marrying the totality of Ingrid, which means you are marrying the changes, not just the one, single, momentary version of Ingrid who walked down this aisle.  So, both of you will wake up every morning, sort of the same, but sort of new.  You’ll look at each other and introduce yourselves again and choose to love who you see.  You choose to love and that’s the only thing that will never change.

*Experts from The Meaning of Marriage by Timothy Keller were the basis for this message.  It doesn't matter if you're single or married, I strongly encourage you to read it.