Wedding Picture: Part II

February 15, 2026
Wedding Picture: Part II
Sermon Audio

CENTRAL TEXT: Genesis 2:18-25

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.

CALL TO WORSHIP: Psalm 91:1, 2

LEADER:  He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High
will abide in the shadow of the Almighty.

ALL: I will say to the LORD, “My refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust.”

PRAYER/SCRIPTURE READING/CONFESSION OF FAITH:    John 2:1-11

LEADER: On the third day there was a wedding at Cana in Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. 2 Jesus also was invited to the wedding with his disciples. 3 When the wine ran out, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.” 4 And Jesus said to her, “Woman, what does this have to do with me? My hour has not yet come.” 5 His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.”

John 2:6   Now there were six stone water jars there for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons. 7 Jesus said to the servants, “Fill the jars with water.” And they filled them up to the brim. 8 And he said to them, “Now draw some out and take it to the master of the feast.” So they took it. 9 When the master of the feast tasted the water now become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the master of the feast called the bridegroom 10 and said to him, “Everyone serves the good wine first, and when people have drunk freely, then the poor wine. But you have kept the good wine until now.” 11 This, the first of his signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory. And his disciples believed in him.

CELEBRATION OF THE LORD’S SUPPER: 

CONFESSION OF SIN:

LEADER:  Let us confess our sin to the Lord.

ALL: We, each of us, are made in your image. In and by Your Son we are Your Beloved. How much is contained in that! How easily we lose sight of that! In our blindness how terribly we treat one another. Forgive us our blindness and the damage we do stumbling about. Help us see again–your Son, and the love which forgives, humbles, and strengthens us to love anyone, especially those closest to us.

ASSURANCE OF PARDON: Colossians 1:15-20

LEADER:      He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. 16 For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. 17 And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. 18 And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. 19 For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, 20 and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.

ALL: Thanks be to God!

BENEDICTION: Jude 20, 21

LEADER: But you, beloved, building yourselves up in your most holy faith and praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life.

Illustrations:

Feb 15, 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, and everyone must discover himself to be his neighbour’s neighbour. 
- Henri Blocher
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. 
- Henri Blocher
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. 
- Bari Weiss, “The Great Unraveling”
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.
He thought of his own clumsy importunity. And the thought would not go away. Inch by inch all the lout and clown and clod-hopper in him was revealed to his own reluctant inspection; the coarse, male boor. . .blundering, sauntering, stumping in where great lovers, knights and poets, would have feared to tread. . . .An image of Jane's skin, so smooth, so white (or so he now imagined it) that a child's kiss might make a mark on it, floated before him. How had he dared? Her driven snow, her music, her sacrosanctity, the very style of all her movements. And dared, too, with no sense of daring, nonchalantly, in careless stupidity! The very thoughts that crossed her face from moment to moment, all of them beyond his reach, made. . . a hedge about her which such as he should never have had the temerity to pass. Yes, yes – of course it was she who had allowed him to pass it: perhaps in luckless, misunderstanding pity. And he had taken . . . advantage of that noble error in her judgement; had behaved as if he were native to that fenced garden and even its natural possessor. 
- C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength.
Here is the erotic wisdom that feminism has forgotten and egalitarianism eliminates: men, we want you to dare. We desire for you to approach us with daring, with the sense that you are doing something courageous and momentous. We love the daring within you, the lover’s kiss that is a risk, a command, an expression of authority. We want to submit to your daring, to grant you the thing you risk for (we want to do this because you’ve taken a risk). This cannot be accomplished under conditions of equality, nor within an erotic cosmology that privileges mere consent, for then there is no risk. Mark’s shamefacedness is a fitting response, but it is only fitting if Jane remains, in a real sense, above him before she submits to him. Love is always aristocratic. But it isn’t always clear who is mistress or who is master.
Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town to another due,
Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov'd fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me. 
- John Donne, Holy Sonnets: “Batter my heart, three-person'd God”

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