I have four sisters. This past weekend, the fourth and youngest of them got married.
Instead of doing the traditional wedding, where you invite every Tom, Dick and Harry that you've met over the last twenty years and treat them to a night of dining, dancing, and drinking on your dime, my sister wanted to do something smaller and more intimate. She rented a large lake house outside of Charlotte and invited the immediate families on both sides down for the weekend. The wedding would be Saturday afternoon.
Everyone arrived on Thursday or Friday, we spent the day on the lake Friday, Friday night we BBQ'd and hung out at the house, Saturday we golfed (the guys) or lunched (the girls), and Saturday afternoon we had the wedding in the backyard. Afterwards, we had a catered dinner on the back patio overlooking the lake. The party went into the night, and then everyone went home on Sunday.
Aside from it being a great weekend, it also reminded me what really matters about a wedding, and why we do them in the first place.
The first reason, of course, is that marriage is a visible reminder to us of Christ's relationship with the church. It reminds us of the covenant that God makes with us, through Christ, that he is going to love us because he loves us, not based on the deservedness of the beloved, but simply because he has decided he will love us. It is unbreakable; it is unending. Marriage reminds us of this.
When we have a marriage ceremony, this is what we are commemorating. This solemn service is a reminder of the enormity of the commitment of marriage. It symbolizes far more than we typically think; more of us would do well to take it seriously.
The second reason we have a wedding, however, is so that the vows that we make are done in the presence of witnesses. If it were just about the solemn reminder of what we are doing, the ceremony could be done in my office. I could put the fear of God into the couple. Or, perhaps a judge, with black robe, hidden behind a large wooden desk, raised up so that the poor couple is put into a submissive position by design. Yet it's about more than the reminder; it's about the witnesses. And these witnesses to the vows aren't just witnesses, they are people who, ideally, will actually hold the couple accountable to the vows that they have seen them make. They will remind them of what they said they would do; they will help them keep those vows when life is difficult. They will be there for them, supporting them, so that when life or marriage gets hard, there are other people to lean on.
Whittle down the multitude of people at any given wedding to the handful of people who will actually take their "witnessing" seriously; who, when the hard part of the vows (the worse, the poorer, the sickness) becomes the reality of the vows, will actually be there to make sure that the having/holding and loving/cherishing will actually be maintained until death does the couple part; you might find that it's not much more than the immediate family anyway.
Well-intentioned people want to celebrate with the couple getting married. They are genuinely joyful at the celebration the couple is experiencing; genuinely desiring to honor them and help them on in their marriage and in their life. But life is long. Memories fade. "Witnesses" forget what they saw. There are only so many commitments we can be a party to witnessing before it is beyond our ability to hold them all up when the difficulties come.
It's fun to have huge parties, but sometimes it can overshadow what it is that we are actually witnessing, and why we are even there to begin with. It was nice to know that as I looked at the faces of the people witnessing this couples vow, they were going to be with the couple long after the party ended...