Summer months are the most common for weddings. There aren’t many happening in this parish this year, but I’m sure many of you are attending a wedding or two somewhere.

For some time now, there has been a trend to personalize weddings. Brides and grooms write their own vows. They pick out a color scheme that can be used in the dresses, tuxes, and decorations. In wedding bulletins the couples often tell the history of their friendships with each bridesmaid and groomsman. I heard of a couple who had their dog carry their rings up the aisle. I even read a suggestion on a wedding website that couples ask their best friend to buy an online ordination certificate just so that he can perform the ceremony for them.

I’m not sure where this trend got started, but I suppose it has something to do with our culture’s distrust of tradition. Too often, we assume that in order for something to be real and authentic, it needs to be new and spontaneous. We suspect that rituals and traditions don’t speak to our current situation or that they stifle our individual personalities.

(I suppose this trend also has something to do with the proliferation of wedding magazines and related businesses. You can personalize your wedding with etched candles, for a small price. You can rent an old-fashioned photo booth so that all your guests can have their picture taken, for a bigger price. Businesses make a lot of money off of couples who want to personalize their wedding.)

It’s unfortunate that brides and grooms invest so much time, money, and worry into having a good wedding, and it’s a shame that personalizing has become the standard for a good wedding. Brides and grooms want their wedding to be unique, as if to say their relationship will be different from all other relationships that have gone before. Writing one’s own wedding vows is especially tricky, because there’s a temptation for brides and grooms to think that they can define the terms of their own marriage, that they don’t need traditions and conventions to tell them how to live and love each other.

The trouble with these ideas is that none of us invented marriage. Of course people and relationships are each unique, but marriage itself is an institution that was established by God. Marriage is sometimes referred to as an estate, which means it’s a public status, a way of life whose boundaries and expectations are already set up. In a similar way, a doctor has to follow common conventions and legal protocol; he can’t decide to do his own thing, experimenting with potions and voodoo, or else he’ll lose his license.

My wife and I don’t have to invent the terms and boundaries of our marriage. We can listen to God’s word, and there we will find the terms and boundaries. In God’s word we hear that our commitment to each other must last as long as we are both alive, and that we forsake romantic entanglements with anyone else. In God’s word we hear that our commitment means mutual forgiveness and service to one another. We hear that if God blesses us with children, then we must care for them, discipline them, and raise them to fear and love the Lord. We hear that we must care for one another, even in sickness and poverty.

A marriage vow does not promise perfection. It does not promise uninterrupted affection. It does not promise that we will always be happy with one another. But it does promise that when perfection, affection, and happiness escape us, that we will continue to be faithful to and care for one another.

A bride and groom don’t need to write their own vows in order for their wedding to be personal and their marriage to be unique. They speak the same vows that countless others have spoken before them, and yet those same words will encompass all the personal experiences and circumstances they will face together. Their marriage will be unique, not because they have a creative color scheme at their wedding, but because the Lord will send them various friends and unique circumstances—some positive and enriching, others negative and trying. If he is willing, the Lord will also send them children, each of whom will be unique, with different personalities and interests.

More than personalized and unique, I daresay brides and grooms want their marriages to be happy and filled with love. The best way to have such a marriage is to pray to the Lord, listen to what the he says, and trust him. He will care for husbands and wives. He will strengthen them when they are weak. He will bless them out of his great store of love and mercy.

                                                                       Pastor Paul Koch