Wedding Picture: Part I

February 8, 2026
Wedding Picture: Part I
Sermon Audio

CENTRAL TEXT: Genesis 2:18-25

Gen. 2:18   Then the LORD God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” 19 Now out of the ground the LORD God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. 20 The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him. 21 So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. 22 And the rib that the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. 23 Then the man said,

“This at last is bone of my bones

and flesh of my flesh;

she shall be called Woman,

because she was taken out of Man.”

Gen. 2:24   Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. 25 And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. 

CALL TO WORSHIP:  Psalm 103:1-2, 11-14

LEADER:  Bless the LORD, O my soul,

and all that is within me,

bless his holy name!

Bless the LORD, O my soul,

and forget not all his benefits,

ALL:  For as high as the heavens are above the earth,

so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him;

as far as the east is from the west,

so far does he remove our transgressions from us.

LEADER:  As a father shows compassion to his children,

so the LORD shows compassion to those who fear him.

ALL:  For he knows our frame;

he remembers that we are dust.

PRAYER/SCRIPTURE READING/CONFESSION OF FAITH:  Matthew 18:1-6

LEADER: At that time the disciples came to Jesus, saying, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” 2 And calling to him a child, he put him in the midst of them 3 and said, “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. 4 Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. 5   “Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me, 6 but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.

The Word of the Lord

ALL: Thanks be to God!

BENEDICTION: 

LEADER: Then I heard what seemed to be the voice of a great multitude, like the roar of many waters and like the sound of mighty peals of thunder, crying out,

“Hallelujah!

For the Lord our God

the Almighty reigns.

7 Let us rejoice and exult

and give him the glory,

for the marriage of the Lamb has come,

and his Bride has made herself ready;

8 it was granted her to clothe herself

with fine linen, bright and pure”— 

 for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints.

Rev. 19:9   And the angel said to me, “Write this: Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.” And he said to me, “These are the true words of God.” 

ALL: Amen!

RELATED SCRIPTURES:

  • Song of Solomon
  • Matthew 19:3-9
  • Ephesians 5:22-33
  • Revelation 21-22

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS: 

  1. What marriage do you know, whether you are single or married,  that has offered you what seems like a sound and solid model of what marriage can be?
  2. What from the sermon was new as it pertained to what we take from the man’s poetic praise at the first sight of the woman–that here was someone like him, not him, but also of/from him?
  3. Why would communion with the Lord be critical to the life of a marriage, including (and especially!)  the ordering of husbands and wives? How would humble communion with the Lord guard against either domination or passivity in a husband?

Illustrations:

Feb 8, 2026

QUOTES:

I guess the question is, do these stories convince us of a lie? Or do they resonate with something deep inside of us that’s profoundly true? That we can't express any other way…except storytelling. 
- Fr Jud in Wake up Dead Man
. . .human life attains its full realization only in community. No man is an island, an everyone must discover himself to be his neighbour’s neighbour. 
God did not make woman out of his head to rule over him, nor out of his feet to be trampled upon by him, but out of his side to be equal with him, under his arm to be protected, and near his heart to be beloved. 
- Matthew Henry
Still less is gender an imaginative extension of sex. Our ancestors did not make mountains masculine because they projected male characteristics into them. The real process is the reverse. Gender is a reality, and a more fundamental reality than sex. Sex is, in fact, merely the adaptation to organic life of a fundamental polarity which divides all created beings. Female sex is simply one of the things that have feminine gender; there are many others, and Masculine and Feminine meet us on planes of reality where male and female would be simply meaningless. Masculine is not attenuated male, nor feminine attenuated female. On the contrary the male and female of organic creatures are rather faint and blurred reflections of masculine and feminine. Their reproductive functions, their differences in strength and size, partly exhibit, but partly also confuse and misrepresent, the real polarity. 
- C.S. Lewis, Perelandra
Without trust, there is no love!  
- “The narcoleptic Argentinian” in Moulin Rouge
It is as others that the man and the woman are made for each other, and the man must accept this otherness in order for the emptiness of his solitude be filled. 
There are many reasons why a marriage falls apart. It is very likely that a marriage based on friendship and mutuality is something of the norm. Husbands and wives often feel like domestic coworkers and not lovers. Much of the time these marriages last. But sometimes the lack of tenderness grows into resentment, and that was the case for my first marriage. My husband began to want a submissive wife in an effort to realize his own masculinity. He demanded that I surrender to him. The more he did so, the further away from submissive I became. It enraged him.
- 
Marilyn Simon
So they lov’d, as love in twain / Had the essence but in one; / Two distincts, division none: / Number there in love was slain. 
- William Shakespeare, “The Phoenix and the Turtle” (HT: Marilyn Simon)
When men [are intimate] with women, they fall into the woman. She is the thing that they desire, or sometimes fear, but in any event she is the end point, the place where they are going. She is the destination. It is gay men who. . ..fall through their partners back into themselves, over and over again. . . . like falling through a reflection back into my desire, into the thing that defines me, myself. 
- Douglas Murray, a gay-identifying man, in his book The Madness of Crowds
[There] are people who I still regard as my opponents on any number of issues that are extremely important to me, but who see clearly that the fight of the moment, the fight that allows for us to have those disagreements in the first place, is the fight for liberalism.  One of those people is Robby George. Robby is among the most important Catholic intellectuals of our era. He is a Princeton professor, a lover of great wine, a wonderful writer, a total gentleman, and one of the most articulate opponents of gay marriage in the country. . . .Robby might not want to go to a gay wedding. But I love that at least for now I still live in an America where he and I can sit together, over good food on a dark night in the middle of a pandemic and talk about what is broken and how we might join together to fix it. That act is the whole point of the American experiment. 
Jane said, “I always thought it was in their souls that people were equal.” “You were mistaken,” [Ransom] said gravely.  “That is the last place where they are equal. Equality before the law, equality of incomes – that is very well. Equality guards life; it doesn’t make it. It is medicine, not food. You might as well try warming yourself with a blue-book.”“But surely in marriage . . . ?”“Worse and worse,” said the Director. “Courtship knows nothing of it; nor does fruition. What has free companionship to do with that? Those who are enjoying something, or suffering something together, are companions. Those who enjoy or suffer one another, are not. Do you not know how bashful friendship is? Friends – comrades – do not look at each other. Friendship would be ashamed…” “I thought,” said Jane and stopped. “I see,” said the Director. “It is not your fault. They never warned you. No one has ever told you that obedience – humility – is an erotic necessity. You are putting equality just where it ought not to be.  
- C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength
What is above and beyond all things is so masculine that we are all feminine in relation to it. 
- C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength.
Supposing one were a thing after all – a thing designed and invented by Someone Else and valued for qualities quite different from what one had decided to regard as one's true self? 
- C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength.

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