Wedding Sermon – Adam Decker and Katherine Geeseman – John 4:5-30
Preached at the Episcopal Chapel of St. John the Divine in Champaign, IL
So, there is a danger in having your brother do your wedding. As I was thinking about what to say in this sermon, I had some trouble deciding whether I should make some sort of metaphor about music, or if maybe I could just get away with standing up here and telling embarrassing stories about Adam. I certainly know which of those two options I’d LIKE to take. But since I want my brother to talk to me again someday, I’m going to talk a little bit about the Finnish composer, Jean Sibelius.
As the principal bassoonist of the Seven Hills Symphony Orchestra—and yes, there’s a reason you haven’t heard of the orchestra. We’re not exactly what you’d call… good. But anyway—I recently had the opportunity for the second time in my life to get familiar with a symphony by Sibelius. He uses lots of stark, open harmonies, no doubt from the experience of living somewhere like Finland, where winter never seems to end. And yet, I find myself really liking his music. And its not just because I live in New England, where winter also never seems to end. I think it’s because he really gets the ideal of the romantic symphony. Without ever being explicit about the storyline—his symphonies don’t even have identifying names like the “Heroic” or “Pathetique” or “Italian”—Sibelius manages to take his listeners on a journey from the downbeat to the last chord.
The journey of the second symphony is an odd one. It begins in media res, in the middle of things—literally, the first note is on beat five of a six-beat measure, and is the start of a strange little melody that makes it sound like the strings have maybe been playing off-stage and decided to wander in right in the middle of the phrase. Musical shapes don’t seem to match up with bar lines; the conductor appears to have lost her mind since the music and the stick don’t seem to have anything to do with each other; and It takes a good thirty measures at least before you can figure out where the beat is. An astute listener might wonder if they’ve arrived late to the concert.
Which is to say, you’re taken off-guard by what’s going on, not unlike the woman at the well in today’s Gospel reading. In first-century Judea, guys didn’t just hang out at the village well, single men don’t talk to strange women unless they want something, Jews and Samaritans don’t get along, and so this Jesus guy who should by every social rule be busy looking at his shoes when this woman comes along, instead turns to her and says, “Give me a drink.” You can almost imagine her looking at him, then around to see who else he might be talking to. After a glance at her still-empty bucket—give him a drink of what?—she starts wondering just how to get herself out of the conversation before it’s even begun.
If Jesus is about to take her on a life-changing journey, he’d better hurry up, because SHE’S about to write him off as a little crazy, or demon-possessed, and turn and leave the way she came.
I’ve always felt there’s something a little off-putting about the beginning of OUR journey with God, too. In the Christian tradition, that journey begins with Baptism. I can still remember the massive, oak font at St. Luke’s in Shoemakersville where infant Adam was baptized, water poured over his head from this twenty-or-so foot tall structure. Maybe it wasn’t quite that big—I was a lot shorter at the age of four—but one way or another, the symbols and signs made it clear that something important was happening there. Katie was washed in the same water, the same Baptism by the same God with the same unrelenting love toward her, different congregation notwithstanding.
And why? Both had already been born for some time, had lived even the shortest portion of their lives on this earth. Did the Holy Spirit come upon them in that Baptism? But I know many people who don’t know anything about Churches or Baptisms or even God, and yet seem to me to be filled with that Spirit of Love. Were they being cleansed from sin? But what real sin stains the soul of an infant? Perhaps it was the beginning of a new relationship with God, an act of God’s love toward these little children, the first whisper of a promise to hold him and her fast in love no matter what may come. Yes, I think so, and yet, it’s an awkward beginning, a beginning in the middle of things.
The first movement of Sibelius 2 is just as awkward, defying every rule the music theoreticians can come up with. (I suppose, then, those of us who had to suffer through music theory can take some comfort in our professors’ DIScomfort.) The tempo seems to fluctuate wildly, even as the conductor beats the baton evenly every measure. Tone colors and melodies wander in, gather force, and then seem to disappear leaving the listener wondering what they should be listening to. And strangest of all, harmonic cadences are nowhere to be found—certainly not at the end of a musical phrase where they belong. The end of each section is already the beginning of the next, as the composer draws and cajoles the listener onward, ever onward, leading… where?
She doesn’t know. Nor does the woman at the well, standing there politely listening to this man who says the strangest things. “If you knew who I was,” he says, “you’d ask me for a drink.” But I don’t know who you are, and you don’t even have a bucket to get water with. “Living water,” he says, “water that moves, that flows, that’s fresh and sweet,” but we only have this ancient, stale well from our ancestor Jacob. “If you drank that water, you’d never be thirsty again,” which would certainly be convenient. But it doesn’t seem to make any sense.
And then he hits a key, something that seems to draw everything into focus. “Where is your husband,” he asks, a question that seems to come out of nowhere, but might make sense if we remember: Single man, talking to a stranger woman out on the streets, something you just don’t do. But now we’re getting at what he wants, or at least what she’s guessed he wanted all along, so she answers, “I have no husband.” But Jesus already knows that, knows her, knows her life and her situation and her whole being, all the good and all the bad. He knows her, and instead of judging her, he reveals himself to her in power and in love. This is not just a prophet; this is the Messiah, the promised one. And now—for her at least, if not for us—everything seems to make sense.
They journeys that Katie and Adam have been on haven’t always been clear in either their path or destination. Being raised by superhero single mothers after fathers passed away takes its own variety of skills not easy to build. Time off from their education—to work in apartment maintenance or data entry—built conviction and depth of character. Frustration with a field of expertise that requires not only natural talent and the dedication and hard work to develop it, but also sometimes the right connections or just plain luck of being in the right place at the right time still present insurmountable obstacles that they leapt over with grace. Throughout it all, the waters of Baptism continued to well up in each of them, urging them on to each new thing, always calling them forward. And then, suddenly, somehow these two people fall in love and everything just clicks, things seem to make more sense. Not everything, surely; not perfectly; but life together just somehow seems inevitable because life apart doesn’t seem quite right. And Adam, and Katie: I’ve done a number of weddings now and it’s not every couple I can say that about, believe me.
There’s something about the journey you’ve taken to get here, the journey on which God has walked along with you, that’s made you who you are, that’s made you fit like this. And the most exciting part is, that journey has really only just begun.
The height of Sibelius’ symphony comes close to the end of the fourth movement. He’s been noodling around all along with this rising three-note pattern that just never seems to go anywhere. Then just when you think this melody is just going to rattle around murkily forever, like an echo bouncing of the fijords, cold, stark, empty: Suddenly (and rather conveniently for preaching at this particular wedding) the low strings plant us firmly on solid ground with a pedal point on B-flat, and the trumpets burst in with this brilliant, shining melody—the same three notes as ever, but joined by the fourth in the scale, and it’s like the sun has burst out through the clouds in a celebration of everything good and joyful and worthwhile, the whole cosmos is singing!
And what’s remarkable to me about this: Alone the musical figure is just four notes in an ascending scale. Use that as your theme in a music theory exercise, and your professor might suggest aiming instead for a career in Biology. But after the journey Sibelius has taken us on, the shape of the melody and the rustling development of the movements that came before, it is the epitome of beauty, the revelation of the divine.
If Jesus had just wandered into town and said, “Hey, I’m the Messiah,” people would have laughed at him or ignored him. Instead, he carries this nameless woman on a journey of the revelation of God’s presence, and she becomes the first herald of the good news to anyone outside the Jewish context. The living water Jesus has given her overflows inside her soul, and she cannot help but tell others. She runs and says to the people, “Come and see a man who told me everything I ever did!” And the whole town gathers to see the Messiah come in their midst.
And so with you. I’m not one of those people who thinks God has some overriding plan and keeps shoving us around until we fit in the holes he’s carved out for us. Instead, I think God uses our choices—sometimes good, sometimes bad—and helps to cultivate good things from them. Adam and Katie, the next step on your journey together is a good and exciting one. And the wellspring of living water in each of you spills over into all of us gathered here and everyone you meet. In your marriage, you are setting out on a new journey. You have this wonderful new godly calling, rooted in your Baptism: To reveal love to the world.
For the letter from John says: No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us… For God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.” May your love always be a sign of God’s love to the whole world, wherever your journey together takes you. Amen.