Wedding Sermon from the Prison Cell

Wedding Sermon from the Prison Cell

Eph. 1:12 “—so that we … might live for the praise of his glory.”

A couple is entitled to welcome and celebrate their wedding day with a feeling of incomparable triumph. When all the difficulties, impediments, obstacles, doubts, and hesitations have not been brushed aside, but honestly faced and worked through—and it is certainly good if not everything goes all too smoothly—then both have indeed won the decisive triumph of their life. By saying yes to each other, they have freely decided to give their whole life a new direction. They have in joyful certainty defied all the doubts and reservations that life raises against any permanent bond between two people, and by their own action and responsibility conquered a new land for their life. Every wedding must in some way resound with the jubilation that human beings can do such great things; that they have been given such unimaginable freedom and power to take the helm of their lives in their own hands. The happiness of the couple must include the sense that the children of this earth are properly proud of the privilege to be masters of their own destiny. It is not good to speak here all too quickly and submissively of God’s will and guidance. It is first of all, simply and unmistakably, your thoroughly human will that is at work and celebrates its triumph here. The path upon which you embark is first of all very much the path you have chosen yourselves. What you have done and do is first and foremost not something pious but something thoroughly of this world. This is why you yourselves and you alone carry the responsibility for it, a responsibility that no one can take from you. More precisely, you, Eberhard, have been given the entire responsibility for the success of your undertaking, with all the happiness that such a responsibility entails; and you, Renate, will help your husband and make it easy for him to bear this responsibility and in doing so will find your own happiness. It would be an escape into false piety if today you did not have the courage to say: it is our will, it is our love, it is our path. “Iron and steel they may decay, but our love will ever stay.” You long to find in each other the earthly bliss that consists, in the words of the medieval song, in comforting each other in body and soul. This longing is proper both in human and in God’s eyes.

Certainly you two have every reason, if anyone ever did, to look back with extraordinary gratitude on your life thus far. The joys and beautiful things in life have practically been heaped upon you. You have succeeded in everything. The love and friendship of those around you have fallen into your lap. Your paths have for the most part been straightened before you embarked on them. In each life situation you were able to feel sheltered by your families and friends. Everyone only wished for your best. Finally, you were allowed to find each other, and today you have been led to the goal of your desires. As you know yourselves, no one is able to create and choose such a life by oneself; rather to some it is given and to others it is denied. And that is just what we mean by God’s guidance. Therefore, as jubilant as you are today to have arrived at the destination of your own will and own way, so will you in equal measure be grateful for God’s will and God’s way that has led you here; and as confidently as you today assume the responsibility for what you are doing, just as confidently you may, and will, lay it in God’s hands.
Today God gives his yes to your yes, God’s will consents to yours, and God grants you and affirms your triumph and jubilation and pride. But in so doing, God is also making you instruments of his will and plans for you and for other people. Indeed, in unfathomable generosity God speaks his yes to your yes. But in so doing, God does something entirely new: from your own love—God creates holy matrimony.

God is the founder of your marriage. Marriage is more than your love for each other. It has a higher dignity and power, for it is God’s holy institution through which God wishes to preserve humanity until the end of time. In your love you see only each other in the world; in marriage you are a link in the chain of generations that God, for the sake of God’s glory, allows to rise and fade away, and calls into God’s kingdom. In your love you see only the heaven of your own happiness; in marriage you are placed and given responsibility within the world and the human community. Your love belongs only to you personally; marriage is something beyond the personal, an estate [ein Stand], an office. Just as it takes a crown to make a king and not just his will to reign, so it takes marriage and not just your love for each other to make you a married couple both in human and in God’s eyes. Just as you first gave the ring to each other and now receive it once again from the hand of the minister, so your love comes from you, and your marriage comes from above, from God. As God is higher than human beings, so the sacredness, the rights, and the promise of marriage are higher than human beings, so much greater is the holiness, warrant, and promise of marriage than the holiness, warrant, and promise of love. It is not your love that upholds marriage, but from now on it is marriage that upholds your love.

God makes your marriage indissoluble. “What God has joined together, let no one separate.” In marriage you are joined together by God; it is not something you do, but it is God who does it. Do not confuse God with your love for each other. God makes your marriage indissoluble and protects it from any internal or external danger. God wills to be the guarantor of its permanence. To know that no power in the world, no temptation, no human weakness can separate what God has joined together is an abiding source of joy; indeed, those who know it may say with confidence: what God has joined together, no one can separate. Free from all the anxiety that is always inherent in love, you may now with certainty and full of confidence say to each other: we can never lose each other; through God’s will we belong to each other until death.

God establishes an order, within which you are able to live together in marriage. “Wives, be subject to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord. Husbands, love your wives” (Col. 3). With your marriage, you establish a home. This requires an order, and this order is so important that it is established by God himself, since without it everything would be in disarray. In everything you are free to establish your home, but in one thing you are bound: the wife is to be subject to her husband, and the husband is to love his wife. Thus God gives to husband and wife the honor that belongs to each of them. It is the wife’s honor to serve the husband, to be his helpmate, as the creation story puts it. Likewise, it is the husband’s honor to sincerely love his wife. He “leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife”; he “loves her like his own flesh.” A wife who seeks to rule over her husband dishonors herself and her husband, just as a husband who lacks in love for his wife dishonors himself and his wife. Both despise the honor of God that is to rest on marriage. Times and conditions are unhealthy when the wife’s ambition is to be like the husband, and when the husband considers the wife merely a toy of his freedom and desire for power. It is the beginning of the disintegration and decay of all the orders of human life when the wife’s service is considered a demotion, indeed, an affront to her honor, and when the undivided love of a husband for his wife is considered weakness or even stupidity. The place to which God has assigned the wife is the home of the husband. While most people today have forgotten what a home can mean, for others of us it has become especially clear in our own time. In the midst of the world, the home is a realm of its own, a fortress amid the storms of time, a refuge, indeed, a sanctuary. It is not built on the shaky ground of the changing courses of public and private life, but it rests in God, which means that God has given it its own meaning and value, its own nature and right, its own purpose and dignity. It is established by God in the world—despite what may happen there—as a place of peace, quietness, joy, love, purity, discipline, reverence, obedience, tradition, and, in all of these, happiness. It is the wife’s vocation and happiness to build this world within the world for the husband and to be active there. Blessed is she if she recognizes the greatness and richness of this her vocation and task. The realm of the wife is not what is new but what endures, not what changes but what remains constant, not what is loud but what is silent, not words but action, not giving orders but persuading, not desiring but possessing—and all this infused with and sustained by the love for her husband. Proverbs says, “The heart of her husband trusts in her, and he will have no lack of food. She does him good, and not harm, all the days of her life. She seeks wool and flax, and works with willing hands. She rises while it is still night and provides food for her household and for her servant-girls.… She opens her hand to the poor, and reaches out her hands to the needy.… Strength and dignity are her clothing, and she laughs at the time to come. Her sons rise up and call her happy; her husband too, and he praises her: ‘Many women have done excellently, but you surpass them all.’ ” The happiness that a husband finds in a proper wife, or one who is “virtuous” and “wise,” to use biblical terms, is praised in the Bible again and again as the greatest earthly happiness altogether—it “is far more precious than pearls.” “A virtuous wife is the crown of her husband.” However, the Bible is equally clear about the misfortune that befalls the husband and the entire home through a perverse, “foolish” wife.

If the husband is now called the head of the wife, even with the special addition “just as Christ is the head of the church,” then our earthly conditions are imbued with a divine radiance, which we are to recognize and honor. The honor that is here assigned to the husband consists not in his personal skills and capabilities but in the office given to him by his marriage. His wife ought to see him as being clothed in this honor. For himself, however, this honor entails the highest responsibility. As the head he bears the responsibility for his wife, for the marriage and the home. His task is to care for and protect the family members; he represents the home in the world; he supports and comforts the family members; he is the master of the home who exhorts, punishes, helps, comforts, and stands before God on behalf of his home. It is good, because it is divinely ordered when the wife honors the husband in his office, and when the husband really exercises his office. “Wise” are those husbands and wives who understand and keep God’s order; “foolish” are those who think they can replace it with another order based on their own will and intellect.

God has endowed marriage with a blessing and with a burden. The blessing is the promise of offspring. God allows human beings to participate in God’s unending work of creation. It is nevertheless always none other than God who blesses a marriage with children. “Children are a gift from the Lord” (Ps. 127:3), and we ought to recognize them as such. It is from God that parents receive their children, and it is to God that they in turn ought to lead them. This is why parents have divine authority over their children. Luther speaks of God investing parents with a “golden chain,” and keeping the fourth commandment has the special scriptural promise of a long life on earth. However, because human beings live on earth, and for as long as they do, God has given them a reminder that this earth stands under the curse of sin and is not the ultimate reality. Over the destiny of wife and husband lies the dark shadow of a word of divine wrath; it is weighed down by a divine burden, which they must bear. The wife is to give birth to her children in pain, and the husband, in caring for his family, is to reap many thistles and thorns and must work by the sweat of his brow. This burden is meant to lead husband and wife to call upon God and to remind them of their eternal destiny in God’s kingdom. The earthly community is but a first beginning of the eternal community, the earthly home an image of the eternal home, the earthly family a reflection of God’s fatherhood over all human beings, who are children before him.

God gives you Christ as the foundation of your marriage. “Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God” (Rom. 15). In a word: live with each other in the forgiveness of your sins without which no human community, let alone a marriage, can last. Do not antagonize each other by insisting on being right, do not judge and condemn each other, do not feel superior over each other, never blame each other, but accept each other as you are, and forgive each other daily and sincerely. You are establishing a pastor’s home. Your home is to spread a radiance and strength into many other homes. The life a pastor’s wife takes on is a life of special sacrifice. Many things that are related to his office the husband must bear alone. For it is he who exercises the office, and the office is, for the sake of God, confidential. All the greater must be his love for his wife; all the more must he allow her to participate in everything in which he can let her participate. Likewise, the pastor’s wife will do all the more to ease his bearing of the office, to be a support and helpmate to him. But how can both of them as fallible human beings live in the community of Christ and do their part unless they each constantly pray and receive forgiveness, unless each helps the other to live as a Christian? Here very much depends on the right beginning and daily practice. From the first day of your marriage to the last, let this hold true: accept each other … to the praise of God.

Thus you have heard God’s word for your marriage. Thank him for it. Thank God for having led you thus far and pray that he may establish, strengthen, sanctify, and keep your marriage, so that in your marriage you “might live for the praise of his glory.” Amen.

—Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Volume 8: Letters and Papers from Prison copyright © 2009 Augsburg Fortress.