Bound in Love

I have known Josephine since she was about three years old, and so I know, Mason, how lucky you are to be able to take her as your wife. Even among the Winbornes, who are all awesome in their own right, Josephine is a particularly beautiful person.

It doesn’t take one very long, Josephine, to see why you wanted Mason as your husband. He has many of the characteristics of the young man Tobias that we heard about in the first reading from the Old Testament. Mason, like Tobias, is a man seeking to do what is true and good and holy. That is really what every wise Christian woman wants in her husband.

Both of you were determined to have your wedding be a Catholic wedding, in which you place Christ at the center of your relationship. Because the decision to have the wedding ceremony here at the Driving Club was already set when we started marriage prep, we had to get special permission from the Archbishop. He asked that we make every effort to ensure that this wedding ceremony be Catholic even if it is celebrated outside a church. So we have a little altar with candles here, as you would find in any Catholic Church. And we have placed on that altar a crucifix, a cross with the body of Jesus Christ hanging from it.

Jesus on the Cross is important to Catholics because it reminds us of how much God loves us. He loves us so much that he sent his only begotten son to die on the Cross to the end that all that believe in him should not perish but have everlasting life. And so whenever we look at Jesus on the Cross, we should be reminded of how much we are loved.

It is also a reminder of how much we should love. Jesus loved us enough to die for us on the Cross. Mary, his mother, loved him enough to stay with him to the bitter end, at the foot of the Cross, even when all the others had run away. That determination to remain in his love is one of the reasons why Mary is held in such great honor by Catholics.

The determination to remain in love with each other is one of the promises that you are about to make. You cannot by your own will power maintain the happy emotion we call love. Love is so much more than just that emotion. Love is a choice. Love is the choice that something good happen to the other without any comparison to what happens to me. The highest form of love is the self-sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross. He gave his very life for all of us here today. None of us deserves it, but all of us are offered it.

While you cannot completely control the emotions, you do have control over your choices. You have chosen each other without any kind of external pressure. So you come here freely. The free choice that you each make is important because marriage depends on freedom. It is mutual submission, which is only authentic if done in freedom. In freedom, you are both choosing to submit to each other and to the will of God.

You are choosing to hold nothing back in your commitment to each other. Authentic Christian marriage is marked by that kind of total commitment. It is a total commitment to fidelity, and a total commitment to trusting God in every decision that you will face together for the rest of your lives.

This kind of total commitment is very hard to do. And that is why we are so blessed by God that in the sacrament of holy matrimony we are assured that each of you receives sanctifying grace: to strengthen you and give you the power to live out the promises you are about to make.

In the gospel reading, Jesus promises that if we remain in his love, then our joy will be complete. And in the marriage sacrament, he gives you his own holiness so that you can remain in his love and receive the fullness of joy.

If you remain in his love by staying close to him through the sacramental life of going to mass and confession, and if you maintain a prayer life and a life in the Scriptures, you will be full of joy. You will know things to be true that others can only wish for. Your joy will be complete because you will have peace, true peace — the peace that passes human understanding. The world desperately wants joy, and it wants peace, but it gets distracted and deceived such that it ends up sad and at odds with itself.

If you have this kind of peace, then you will look strange to the world. You will be how Simeon described Jesus at the Presentation: a sign of contradiction to the world. And this will be your mission as a Christian married couple. You and every other faithful Christian couple are supposed to go out into the world filled with the joyful knowledge of Jesus Christ and evangelize just by how you live your life. You hardly have to speak about Jesus; but you must always proclaim him by how you love each other, your children, and your neighbors.

This is your vocation. God has called you, and he calls all married couples, to share his good news by how they love each other and love their neighbors. When people see how you are gentle with each other, how you are patient with each other, how you take time to be with each other, to speak to each other, to put down your cell phones and connect with each other, they’re going to be amazed. Some will hate it, but most want it, and they may even ask, “how do you guys do this?” And that’s when you can tell them, “because I know and love Jesus and I know he loves me too.”

The vocation of holy matrimony is how we change the world. It is why marriage is under such attack by the ruler of the world. Your life of free, total, fruitful, faithful marriage can be the Bible that other people read. You have a great commission here. None of us who are married has the strength to live out that commission by our own merits. That’s why we always run back to our heavenly father and his obedient son to be renewed and refreshed in his house of prayer. But then we get back out there and we love each other in a radical way to change the world.

Mason and Josephine, if you’re ready to change the world, then come up here and get married.