Maddie and Joe Ferrici

Madeline Wernsman and Joe Ferrici Wedding 1 Corinthians 13 We gather with you today Joe and Maddy to celebrate a beginning. We start before God and before all us here to begin the celebration of your life together as husband and wife. Today you declare your love for each other before God and all these people. Today you commit all of yourselves to each other for all time. The reading you choose for today makes perfect sense. The reading is about love. Today is about love. The reading begins by saying if I have everything but no love. I have nothing. If I have love I have everything. If you find a nice house you have good jobs if you have 2.3 children but don’t have love. You have nothing. But if you continue living in an apartment one of you loses your job and you have 8 kids but have love, you have everything. If joe runs into burning buildings and saves 100s of people but has no love it means nothing. If Maddie brings 100’s of babies into the world but without love, it means nothing. If Joe and Maddie celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary together, but have no love, it means nothing. But if they have love, they have everything. We get this. We all understand the first part of the reading. If that was all there was we could all go to the bar right now and beginning the party. But there is a second part of the reading. And the kicker is Maddie and Joe you don’t get to define what love means, our families don’t get to tell you what love is. No, God tells us what love is. That is the second part of the reading. Many times a wedding is a time for married couples to recommit themselves to their love. Today is not just about Maddie and Joe, it is about Dino and Carol. It is about the love that Eileen shared with Gregg, Maddie and Joe’s grandparents and their love. All of you who are married have a special role here today. But as we all know love is not just about a man a woman. So I think that all of us have something to take away from this celebration. All of us have something to give to Maddie and Joe. I am just guessing here, but my guess is that the Ferrici family looks something like the Wernsman Keyes Family. I am guessing that all of your families look like our family. A place with a great deal of love and kindness, friendship and forgiveness. But also a place that is far from perfect. You might have people in your family that you don’t talk to but you talk about like my family. You might have need for healing like my family does. If your family is perfect you can go to the bar now, but for the rest of us, I invite you to pay close attention to the second part of the reading. Because the love that we are about to witness here is not just between Maddie and Joe, but it is something much larger. It is something that begins in God, and if it begins in God than it has no end either. What does Paul tell us that love is: “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in truth. It bears all things endures all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails.” Sounds tough, actually impossible, if we try to do it on our own. This love you set before yourselves today as your ideal is a love that can be achieved only as a gift from God. Such a love has its source in God before whom we gather today. A love that can and will shower down on you as you seek to live in God’s love. It is a passionate love, passion for each other, passion for life and a passion for God. I would leave you with an invitation to allow the love of God to create in your married life such a passion. A passion that gives you the courage to create a beautiful and God-filled marriage. A passion that allows you to bring the best of yourself to this marriage, creating a marriage giving life to you and to those around you. May your marriage also have within it a passion for God, the one who gives us the ability to love and to work at love. Stay close to God because God is the source of this power and love.