Marriage

Spring and summer bring many different things. It is the time of green grass and blooming flowers. Baseball is in full swing. Many of us look forward to the rest and respite of a holiday. This list would not be complete without a tip of the hat to weddings. Spring and summer are wedding season.

A wedding is like much anything else, where people are involved. Weddings can be fun, joyous celebrations. Weddings can be appropriately serious. Anxiety and stress can also be part of it. Ultimately, it is really the couple and their families that set the tone.

Expectations have a lot to do with it. Every person involved, bride, groom, parents of both and friends, comes to the occasion of a wedding with some expectation of what makes a “good” wedding. These expectations have shifted and developed through history.

For much of human history, couples married themselves. Before the Church became involved, families gathered to witness a couple making promises to each other. The Church did not become fully involved, until Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. It was then that clergy became responsible, in an official way, for the institution of marriage. Up to the 12th century, weddings took place on the steps of the church building. It was not until the 13th century, that priests presided, in a way we would recognize, over the marriage service. So, for the last 800 some odd years, marriage has been the sacramental “property” of the Church.

For roughly the last 450 years, Anglicans have had a prescribed form of the marriage service in the form of the BCP. The BCP more or less dictates the form that weddings take, just as it does Baptisms, Eucharists, Confirmations, and Burials. Ordination is a subject for another day. It is the BCP that provides the structure, the priest swears to uphold at ordination. Yet, the priest faces pressure, from those with expectations, which have little to do with the discipline of the Church.

The “wedding industry” has informed the expectations of many couples and their families. Brides have been told over and over that the wedding day is “her day”. The implication being that a bride should get what she wants. Unfortunately, a sentimental aesthetic, and not the sacramental and theological underpinning of the Church, drives many of the desires of the bride and groom. This leaves the parish priest to set parameters, which often make him or her seem uncooperative or rigid.

In my opinion, the “wedding industry” is partially responsible for the undoing of marriage. The “wedding industry” sells the perfect day from a particular perspective. The implication is that the wedding day must embody a certain romantic quality to be good. The backside of this sales job is that couples are lured into believing, this is what a marriage is about.

The Church seeks to uphold the idea that marriage is about commitment. In the marriage service, the couple, in their vows to one another, promises that their relationship hinges, not on romance, but on the kind of love that is a product of the will. The Church teaches that good and bad will come, but commitment endures. The hope is, in the Christian community of husband and wife, a couple will learn something about the way that God loves us, through their love of each other.


The Church is in the marriage business, not the wedding business. Weddings are joyous, life giving celebrations, when the couple is clear that the wedding is a means to an end. That end is the willed and committed love of one another, supported through the grace and love of God.