A Wedding Homily Based on a Reading from "The Princess Bride"
Without insulting the revelatory power of
Scripture, I would like to confess that I think this might be the best wedding
reading ever. It’s funny and playful; I can playback that moment in my mind
when Buttercup, completely missing the point of the moment, asks Westley to
clarify the ratio of love and sand and they get lost in the semantics.
And while it’s definitely humorous, it’s also
painfully enlightening into the challenges we experience everyday when trying
to communicate our love for one another.
How often we too get distracted by life’s
semantics, that space between what was said and what was heard.
How often we too get lost in the details of household
chores and upcoming expenses and balancing obligations.
How often we too we risk allowing the noise
of life to drown out that bigger message, “I Love You.”
For if it’s true that love isn’t a “feeling”
but a way of being that we express through actions…then, as we witness in the
dialogue between Buttercup and Westley, it quickly becomes very complicated. Marriage
is filled with, what I will from now on refer to as, “Princess Bride” moments. Moments
like coming home late from work to a messy home and a very awake, very
chocolately toddler only to discover how excited your partner is that they made
you brownies. These are the moments where we think we are communicating our
love in word or action and somehow, we just miss the mark. And we get off
track.
The challenge then is not loving each other, but communicating
that in a way that accurately represents that love to the other person. Like a
husband who, seeing his wife step into the shower is suddenly convicted to tell
her how happy he is that they are growing old together. Context is everything,
Paul.
Often we can laugh about our love mishaps,
because we know we are trying, because we both know we equally want to love and
to be loved…and somehow that makes bridges of translation over all that other
in-between stuff that threatens to get us off track.
And there is lots of stuff.
And this stuff
piles up.
And someday, not because of anything you have done right or wrong,
you will experience a day or days or a week or weeks when the challenge is less
about communicating that love and more about remembering that it is there. Like Buttercup’s tangent, time can also
distract us from the I Love You’s and you’ll just wonder; you will wonder what
are we doing? How did we get here? How can we go on?
It might sound impossible, or it might sound
all too real, but it will happen one day and I want you to know that it’s okay.
Because if you think that it’s okay, you won’t panic and give up. Because if
you know it’s okay, you’ll also know you’re not alone. Because if you have
faith that it’s okay, you won’t believe that you’ve failed but you’ll be brave
and walk on…together. If you live as if it’s okay to doubt and to struggle,
you’ll live as if it’s okay to shout out “I LOVE YOU” even when you aren’t
sure…because you do….and you will today and forever. See love never dies,
sometimes it just gets buried and you’ll have to search and fight and struggle
to find it but I promise you it’s there. You have been given a gift, this love,
and while it’s yours to tend and to honor, it was created and given to you by a
God who IS love. Today you accept the gift. Today you make a leap of faith that
even when the gift doesn’t feel like a gift…you’re going to trust that it is.
In different ways, spelled forward and
backward, in different languages, at different times, in different places,
today you shout out, Always I Love You.
