An Olive Grove Marriage

A wedding sermon for Matt Bock and Paige Wilbur
First Lutheran Church, Sioux Falls, SD
December 18, 2010

They shall be like a tree planted by water,
sending out its roots by the stream.
It shall not fear when heat comes,
and its leaves shall stay green;
in the year of drought it is not anxious,
and it does not cease to bear fruit. (Jeremiah 17:8)

If you take a drive along the two-lane roads of South Dakota, you’ll come to a gravel road every mile – at least East River where the landforms allow roads to follow the six-mile-by-six-mile grid established in homesteading days. West River the roads are a bit more scattershot, just like the people. But pretty much wherever you go between Luverne, Minnesota, and Newcastle, Wyoming, you will find stands of trees that weren’t there when the first folks from back East pushed their way across the prairies.

When they planted their own roots under this wide-open sky, they also planted trees: the cottonwoods that were native species, catalpa that grew quickly and made for good fence posts when you needed barbed-wire boundaries, and later elms and Russian olives. These stands of trees provided protection from the endless, crazy-making wind. When the blizzards would come (and they always would), these trees could mark the line between life and death as they sent the drifts around and past the tarpaper shacks and soddies, dugouts and barns.

When Jeremiah speaks God’s word in the passage just read, he knows the value of a strong, living tree. In fact, such a tree is so important that it becomes the metaphor for what a faithful relationship with God is like: a tree whose roots are sunk deep in the water, thriving, spreading out branches and (as Jesus says in the parable of the mustard seed) making a home for the birds.

Trees keep appearing in scripture. Jeremiah is just one of countless tree lovers and huggers and planters in God’s word, including the tale-teller who gives us the story of the Garden of Eden. In Genesis the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is the picture of our rebellion in the Fall. God set the tree apart, and our forebears in the Garden said, “Maybe God can’t be trusted. Maybe God’s holding something back. Maybe we ought to branch out and see to things ourselves by laying hold of some of that fruit.”

Now all this talk of trees is quite the goofy thing to focus on at a wedding. Shouldn’t we talk about that crazy little thing called love? Shouldn’t we concentrate on how beautiful you are, Paige, and how hunkaliciously cleaned-up you are, Matt? (Yes, I’ve seen Facebook postings of you on the Governor’s Hunt.) And we could focus on the flowers and the attendants’ dresses (will they ever wear them again?), and the wedding colors á la Brides magazine, and yet that wouldn’t reflect either your faith or your spirited and mature sense of what a marriage is.

It’s true — you’ll never be more beautiful or optimistic about life than today, but the gospel of our Lord just isn’t designed to speak to success and prosperity and glory. God’s word on this, your wedding day, comes to tell you who you are and whose you are, so that on some future day when this day is a warm memory, a photo album and a boxed wedding dress under the bed, and you have come to know the limits of your power and strength, this word about a planted and nourished tree comes to give you hope to cling to.

The gospel today is aimed at a future day when you will be undone by life – maybe by the big sorrows, but more likely by the mundane daily slog and the pressing temptation to center in on yourself and lose sight of the two become one. The tree of Jeremiah will be the ideal that you once had and the mirror to what you can’t find, what you can’t make happen on your own.

That will be the day when you must, must, must zero in on the tree of life, Christ’s cross and the mercy made real and given to you there. That is the tree that provides you true protection, because if you can’t create your own future or muster up a rich life together, your Lord does. What looks like a tree that is your own autonomous self in Jeremiah requires that you look more closely. The tree is only in the barest sense, you. There’s a seam there, where you have been joined to your Lord, for he makes you his own in your baptism, grafts both of you to himself, lets his nourishing sap flow into you. As Paul says, “The life I once had is now hid in Christ.”

That true life promised to you is the thing, the one thing, that surrounds and sustains your coming years, for what flows into you is his deep and abiding forgiveness. And where his forgiveness is present, your past missteps and mistakes and petty peccadilloes can no longer be the markers for who you are. Instead his mercy grants, only and ever, a new and eternal future.

When Christ grafts you to himself, he takes away your pride and ambition as operating principles in your marriage. Those things belong to a life that is no longer yours, and in their place the Lord has given you much more to share with each other. Paul calls them the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. So even before we ask God to bless you, he’s already accomplished it. It’s just like our Lord to know you so well that he provides exactly what you’ll need to grow in your marriage and into eternity. And when you turn toward one another with his same mercy and overflowing with these fruits, it will be a sure and certain sign of your grafting, of your identity as Christ’s people of the cross, a reminder again and again of who you are and whose you are.

In the end, when the last of those prairie groves dies out and the wind moves unhindered across the grasslands and dilapidated out-buildings, this last tree remains to bear you into the New Jerusalem where you will find a place in an eternal grove. Until then, Paige and Matt, spread out your branches, be fruitful, multiply (and I don’t mean your times tables), bask in the life that flows in you. You shall not be moved, because you belong to Christ, and him alone. Amen.