I HAD an interesting experience recently. I got to perform my mother-in-law’s wedding! That sort of thing just doesn’t happen every day (unless you’re Elizabeth Taylor’s son-in-law). A neat time. A neat lady marrying a neat guy.
I’ve always liked the fact that Jesus’ first miracle occurred not in a church, not in the midst of a religious assembly of priests and theologians, but at a wedding, a joyous gathering of good friends and family sharing life and love and joy.
Christ worked another miracle, you know, by choosing to work the first at a wedding. Wordlessly, he said clearly that in God’s mind there is no division between our worship and our work, our prayers and our play, that God cares about every part of our lives, not just the “religious.” Religion divorced from life is the sort we’d be better off without.
What Christ did at a wedding he can do in our lives. He turns water into wine. He makes the ordinary absolutely spectacular. He gives color to what is colorless, joy where there was despondence. He enjoys life with his friends and gives glory to God in the process.
The wedding that occasioned that first miracle was a joyous time. But I can’t imagine it being more so than last weekend’s event. No twenty-something couple could have possibly been more giddy than these two normally level-headed and sedate seventy-year-olds. The usual wedding “joy” was there in full force. But so was much more, not because of age but because of commitment.
This, I realized, is not a marriage that anyone is entering into with fingers crossed and breath held hoping against hope that it might work. It will work. No one has to wonder if immaturity or self-centeredness on either side will raise its ugly head and defeat this marriage. It will not. I’d bet the farm on it. Why? Because the quality of the lives and love of these two for all of their lives shows that they are truly united in their love for another, that they love their Lord even more than they love each other, and that by doing so they love others and themselves in the best way. Faith has never been something they mouth; it has been something they live.
And so we all gathered last Saturday, family and friends. And we witnessed a wonderful thing happening, a very good thing. As God once said, “It is not good for man to be alone,” we agreed. As the Father of us all once backed up, took a look at his finished creation, and pronounced, “It is good,” we beheld the love of two people we love, and we said, “This is good.”
And the water turned to wine once more.