The Promise of Something Old and Something New

Our daughter Sarah was married to our new son Brandon about a week ago.  From the guests to the community that helped pull it off to the weather to the bride and groom, it was a story book day.  It will take me a long time to process the beauty of it.

As father of the bride preparing for the wedding, I found I had duties.  I knew I had to give our daughter away of course.  (Mostly I knew that factoid from movies and T.V.)  I also was encouraged to prepare a toast.

From the way this was presented to me it seemed like I could probably wiggle out of this without too much fuss.  I decided that if I had something to say I'd say it.  Otherwise, I planned to just stand around and stare at the tops of my new, black, pretty awesome DC basketball shoes.

As happens occasionally, I woke up in the middle of the night and realized I had something to say.  I knew this because I was so overcome with the beauty of what I'd heard and seen in moments between sleeping and waking that I was sobbing uncontrollably, almost convulsing.  Over the last several years I've found that there are things that are so beautiful that no measured human response is possible.  When you encounter such things, they are so unique and outside the boundaries of daily activity you may not see them for what they are.  However, when you start to recognize them and what lies behind them, you tend to explode emotionally.

I was struck by the fact that Sarah and Brandon were going to make promises to each other in the presence of God and community.  The great good intention of those promises can only be fulfilled by the passing of time and circumstance.  And of course this place we live in is pretty broken and time and circumstance can be rough.  From their wedding vows it was clear that the intent was that the joy of the moment of promise would be fulfilled over time, in love.

This is pretty consistent with most weddings I've been to.  In the middle of the night though, just before I went over my emotional cliff a question hit me:  That's where the promise is going but where did it come from?  The first thing that occurred to me was that it descended in part from a nearly identical promise that Christy and I had made to each other and work to fulfill every day.  Obviously though, that was just a link in a chain of promises that stretches back before time and will exist until there are no longer people on earth.  And that I think was the point at which I started to lose it. 

The marriage promises we make to each other are links forged into a chain of time created in time before time and redeemed two thousand years ago.  This I think is the greatest point made by the inclusion of Christ's genealogy in the Bible.  The chain described there of the gracious and the loving, the rapists and the whores, the kings and barbarians are all given to us as a family portrait of the King and Redeemer of man.  It is a portrait that stretches across millennia back to the origin of man in time. It teaches us that even in the most broken of families the potential for redemption and love is staggering beyond imagination.

There's a scene in Genesis (3:21) that describes God making Adam and Eve's first clothes.  I've heard a couple people over the years comment on this.  One imagined God sitting on rock.  As he drew the needle and cut the skin He saw the future as a great now.  In that now, he saw the love of creation, mercy and redemption but he also saw the monstrous cost to both himself and to his children.  He saw a road of infinite promise, faith, persistence and love set against constant struggle, betrayal and lies.  I imagine a sigh escaping as thread joins skin to skin. 

He would remind generation after generation of this great reality through stories in the form of lives and parables lived out and retold over thousands of years.

And he'd give us a vignette that would be our entry point into time, our desperate pursuit and our life's mission.  It would be the thing through which he would deliver generation after generation of souls already spoken.  That vignette is marriage, both it's promise and it's realization.  It is marriage in it's love and passion but also marriage in it's struggle, effort and even betrayal.  It is the journey of becoming and redemption.  It is the journey to becoming one.

After the promises, the road stretches out before us.  Each step offers a choice of promise or betrayal; each step is a choice.  Persistence on that road offers one certain promise that supports all other possibility.  It offers the hope of ever deepening and expanding love that extends to the point of two becoming one.