What seems like decades ago, there use to be a popular song made famous by Frank Sinatra entitled “Love and Marriage.” The lyrics went something like this:
Love and marriage, love and marriage
Go together like a horse and carriage
This I tell you brother
You can't have one without the other.
Love and marriage, love and marriage
It's an institute you can't disparage
Ask the local gentry
And they will say it's elementary.
Try, try, try to separate them
It's an illusion
Try, try, try, and you will only come
To this conclusion.
Love and marriage, love and marriage
Go together like a horse and carriage
Dad was told by mother
You can't have one without the other.
Oh! If only love and marriage were such a simple matter! Life would be s-o-o-o much easier. But we human beings love to make life more complicated than it needs to be with our "improving" what is, and "remaking" what doesn't satisfy us.
It is because love and marriage within the Christian faith is both defining and free ranging, that I have used the following meditation, "A Meditation on 1 Corinthians 13" during weddings at which I have officiated.
This portion of 1 Corinthians is read at many weddings, and frequently at ceremonies such as this. It is done appropriately because Paul has recognized some fundamentals about love, no matter how it is understood. That is not to say that we should assume that Paul in these verses has in mind romantic love which is powered by yearning and infatuation with a marriage partner. Rather, the love celebrated in this text comes from God, claims us, and through us reaches out to others, not just to another person who we have chosen as a spouse. This love about which Paul has written, then, can never find its sole object in another single individual, but reaches out through and beyond that other person.
Yet, reaching out in love to another person enables you to extend your love beyond that one person. That is what marriage is about. God love us, and as we reach out in love to the one we choose as a spouse, that very same love kindles the greater love that God has already placed within us. In marriage, the couple united in love through marriage, are enabled to love others outside themselves with even greater love and compassion.
Thus it is quite appropriate to read this passages at services and celebrations where love is re-affirmed between two individuals, but never without the sense that the love between those two first originates outside of them, and that its goal can never be fully realized in it focus on only one another. True love, as Paul sees it, always begins with God, and always reaches beyond the self to others. The Pauline notion of love never stops on just one other person, no matter how special, but reaches out through the loved ones to God’s broken world, the world in which this couple have already begun and continue their life together. Amen.