Reflections on Marriage from the 1979 Book of Common Prayer Service

By Daniel Kreller

In my forty-four years of priestly ministry, I presided at many marriage ceremonies using the 1979 Book of Common Prayer service. In addition to presiding at ceremonies, I met with couples intending to marry, and with couples struggling in their marriage. In this book I use the Prayer Book service as a means to reflect on the meaning of marriage.

For example, most people feel that marriage should be defined by love. But just what is love? Other questions arise once one begins to reflect. Why is there marriage? What constitutes marriage? What is the purpose of it? Then, too, I have my own lived experience of marriage in which my wife and I were blessed with two children that informs my reflections.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Daniel Kreller
• Release date: Mar 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005617615

Daniel Kreller

The son of a Baptist minister, I was ordained in the Episcopal Church in 1977. I studied for the ministry at Princeton, General, and Union Seminaries. I served as a parish priest for 40 years. I have a particular interest in the healing ministry and the Jewish roots of Christianity. I am married and have a grown son and daughter.

Book preview

Reflections on

Marriage

from the 1979 Book of Common Prayer Service

The Rev. Daniel W. Kreller

Published by Daniel W. Kreller at Smashwords

Copyright 2021 Daniel W. Kreller

All rights reserved.

Table of Contents

Forward

The Celebration and Blessing of a Marriage

Introduction

The Examination

The Declaration of Consent

The Ministry of the Word

The Marriage

The Prayers

The Blessing of the Marriage

The Peace

At the Eucharist

About the author

Cover image

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Foreword

In the Declaration of Consent of the marriage service, the bride and groom are asked by the celebrant each in turn, Will you love him…Will you love her… The expectation is that the marriage relationship will be characterized by mutual love. In my forty years of active ministry as an ordained Episcopal priest, I served as the celebrant at many marriage ceremonies. In these ceremonies the love that the bride and the groom professed for each other seemed genuine. I would not have presided at the ceremony if I believed otherwise. Granted at such moments, not only the bride and the groom, but all who witness the exchange of their vows are flooded with the strong emotion we call love. But love is more than emotion. Love is also a behavior. It consists of positive words and deeds that convey the depth of emotion that is within us outward towards the other who is the focus of our affection. Consider, for example, God’s love for us. How do we know that God loves us? We know, because God acts lovingly towards us. In one of the more familiar verses of the Bible, Jesus confirmed this by saying, For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone that believes in him might not perish but have eternal life (John 3:16). Giving a gift is one of the ways we show love to another. If the gift we give is something particularly useful, or delightful, and enhances the well-being of the other, it is received as a true, thus beautiful, expression of the giver’s love. In the Christian understanding, God’s gift of his Son was an extraordinarily useful gift. Having fallen into sin, we stood under the just judgment of condemnation—the penalty for which is death. Not content to allow us to suffer the just judgment, however, God offered up his Son as a sacrifice for sin. By this sacrifice God transferred our sin and penalty to his Son, and conferred his Son’s righteousness upon us. The result of this transfer is that we live rather than die. Any that understand and receive this gift from God can only marvel at God’s love for us, and offer in return our undying thanks and praise. It was this gift that revealed the depth of God’s love for us. He exposed his heart to us through the gift.

Of course, to receive this gift from God one must acknowledge one’s need of the gift, thus, one’s own sinfulness. If one is confident of his or her own righteousness, he or she has no need of the righteousness that comes from God. Christians make the bold claim, expressed succinctly by the Apostle Paul that, …all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23). I will not try to convince the reader of the truth of that statement, but I shall offer my understanding of it. Glory refers to something that is weighty, not in terms of physical weight, but in terms of significance and importance. There is nothing more important than to be assured of the love of God for us, and, therefore, nothing is more-weighty than his offering his Son for us. That is why Christians speak of the glory of the cross. It is the very thing that reveals God’s love. Sin is the English translation of the Greek word hamartia. The word means to fail, or, as in archery, to miss the mark. So, what the Apostle was asserting is, that in comparison to the love God reveals in giving his Son, we all fall short of the weight of that love. God loves, more than we love. And yet, God commands us to love. For it is well understood that the two great commandments of the Scriptures are to love God and to love neighbor. Indeed, Jesus himself affirmed that the whole of the teachings of the Scriptures are summed up in these two commandments (see Matthew 22:40). Yet, if we honestly assess our observance of these commandments, or, perhaps ask others to asses our observance, we find our love often falls short. That is, we find that we are sinners, for we lack, or fail in love. The Book of Common Prayer acknowledges this in the confession of sin that is recited before the celebration of the Eucharist. It reads, Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbor as ourselves… (The Book of Common Prayer 1979, page 360). Yes, it may be our intent to love, but in practice our love often misses the mark. So it is, with those couples that exchange their vows on their wedding day. They state their intent to love one another, but will they be able to hit the mark and fulfill that intent through the length of their days? We have no expectation that they will be able without the help of God’s mercy and grace. That is why in the marriage service we pray so fervently on their behalf. When it comes to love, we all need the help of the One who is Love, the One who is its source and its ending.

As I noted, over the course of my ministry I presided as the celebrant at many marriage services. My duties also required me to meet with the couple before the ceremony to discuss marriage and their suitability for it. As to suitability, my role was to determine if there was any impediment to the marriage that would make their union illegal in the eyes of the civil authorities, or immoral in the eyes of church authorities. I discuss some such impediments in what follows in my comments on the service. Most times I could quickly resolve that issue. I spent more time discussing with the couple the nature of love. I did find that not only couples contemplating marriage, but people generally, have questions about love. What is love? is typically one of the most frequently asked questions on Google search, for example. It is understandable that confusion arises about what love is, especially for English speakers, since our language is not too precise. We use the one word, love, in a wide variety of contexts. For this reason, I developed a chart entitled, Ways of Loving, that I shared with people to help them understand how we give and receive love. I was inspired to do so by the book, The Five Love Languages, by Gary Chapman, a therapist, that in his practice counseled many couples. He found that, often enough, in expressing love to one another other the partners were missing the mark, like two people speaking different languages failing to communicate. He discerned five ways to give and receive love—acts of service, gift-giving, physical touch, quality time, and words of affirmation. We all give and receive love in these ways, but we all, also, have preferred ways of loving and being loved. Partners are better able to hit the mark of loving if they understand and honor these preferences. I included Chapman’s five languages on my chart, and added ways of loving described by other writers that addressed the subject of love. There were similarities between the writers, but also some differences. Another therapist, David Richo, also listed five ways of loving in his book, How to Be an Adult in Relationships. One word he cited was, Allowing. How important is that! In the marriage ceremony after asking each in turn, will you love the other, it asks will you honor one another. Honoring includes allowing the other to be other. Another writer, Diogenes Allen in his book, Love, made allowing a central focus by describing love as, the Otherness of Things. This is what we might call the Sabbath mentality in which we receive all things and people as they are, without desiring or seeking to fix or change them. Can we really say we are loving if we are always seeking to change something about the other? The notion of the Sabbath first appears in the first creation account of Genesis when God created all that exists over six days and, then, rested on the seventh day. These words are not included in that account but they capture the sense of affirmation the Sabbath entails, It’s good that you exist! These are the words that Joseph Pieper in his book, Faith, Hope, and Love, wrote when he tried to define love in its essence.

I raise this issue of the meaning of the word love to encourage the reader to ponder how he or she, would define it, especially as it relates to marriage. What follows are some of my musings on love. I use the Marriage Service from the 1979 Book of Common Prayer as a device to spur reflection. I grew fond of it over my years of ministry for its beautiful language and depth of meaning. The headings are in bold face type and the actual wording of the ceremony in italics.

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The Celebration and Blessing of a Marriage

Introduction

Dearly beloved:

The celebrant that presides over the marriage ceremony begins by addressing all who have gathered with the salutation, Dearly beloved. This is not merely a hospitable gesture for it has profound theological significance. It goes to the very heart of the Christian gospel. Christians believe that Jesus is the Divine Son of God. Twice the heavenly voice declared this to be so, once at the beginning of Jesus’s ministry when he was baptized by John in the Jordan river, and again just prior to his death when he was transfigured on the mountain in the presence of three of his apostles, Peter, James, and John. On that occasion, the cloud of God’s glory enveloped them and the voice of God declared, This is my Son, the beloved, listen to him! (Luke 9:35). John reported this experience in his own