The Wedding of Spencer and Meaghan Breen
Text: 1 Corinthians 12:31-13:13 & 1 John 4:7-12
Grace, mercy, and peace be to you from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
What is love?
Is it a feeling? Or the butterflies in your stomach?
Is it doing the laundry? Paying the bills? Changing diapers, or even taking out the trash?
We might make arguments that love could be any of these, but that last action has stayed with me for the past couple of months.
Taking out the trash.
When I asked Meaghan and Spencer to perform an exercise to determine who would have particular responsibilities in their new home, Spencer was listed as the “Trash Panda.”
At first, I had no idea what a trash panda was. But after asking the question with a bit of trepidation, I learned from these two that it was slang for the one who would take out the trash.
But a trash panda is also another way of saying raccoon.
But here’s the thing about these creatures: they don’t actually take out the trash; they go through it. These beasts are scavengers and what does a scavenger do? They feast on scraps that are rotting, dead, and without life.
In a way, I believe this can define all of us, don’t you?
We heard in the first reading to the Corinthians,
Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.
But humans are not patient. They are envious and arrogant, insisting on their own way and becoming irritable and resentful at the first sign of a disagreement. They keep a record of wrongs and are not interested in the truth but rather their truth.
This is a summary of your first argument, isn’t it? It’s those moments when everything seems to have been tossed into the trash, where true love and life no longer exist.
And this is the story of humankind.
Look back to the Garden of Eden. God created man in His image. He provided the man, Adam, a wife and helpmate named Eve. Having sinned by disobeying God’s command by taking of the forbidden tree, God confronts the two love birds and what happens,
The man said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.” Then the LORD God said to the woman, “What is this that you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.” (Genesis 3:12-13)
In a way, these two, Adam and Eve, look and sound like children, don’t they? They lack maturity.
Yet, marriage requires maturity. It calls you to know and understand love.
So, the Apostle Paul wrote, “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Is this you? Are you capable of this? I mean, I feel like everyone here has had an argument or disagreement with someone in their lifetime, and when this happens, I have to believe the inner trash panda came out in all of you. You began digging into the trash can of despair and recalling all the times the toilet seat was left up or the number of times Amazon dropped off another package on the front step.
I’m not sure these are the times when “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
No, rather, this Scripture verse is a definition of Jesus.
It’s for this reason He was sent by His Father to take upon Himself your flesh, the flesh of Adam and Eve, the dying and rotting flesh of man.
In fact, St. John wrote in the second reading this evening, “In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” (1 John 4:10)
To understand love is to realize that love does not begin with one man or one woman; it does not start with you; if it did, we’d be in trouble. It begins with God.
This is most clearly seen in the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ upon the cross. In this way, He became the propitiation for your sins, meaning He was truly faithful to His Father, even to death upon a cross, where He did not count the cost but sacrificed Himself for you to forgive you.
This is how you are to understand love, to look to the cross of Jesus and see your Savior.
In fact, when there is trash in your lives that needs to be removed, the moments of envy, irritability, or resentfulness toward one another, return to this cross of Jesus, Spencer, and Meaghan, confess your sins, and then forgive one another as Christ forgives you.
Because forgiveness is the foundation of your marriage, it will permit you to begin learning to sacrifice yourselves for one another.
So as you strive to love one another in this beautiful gift of marriage, go to church, have babies, baptize them, raise them in the Christian faith, teaching them how to look to Jesus, confess their sins, and forgive those who sin against them.
Because this is how one takes out the trash of life, this is how “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, [and] endures all things.”
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
Rev. Noah J. Rogness
