A drug, broadly speaking, says Wikipedia, is any substance that, when absorbed into the body of a living organism, alters normal bodily function.
In pharmacology, Wikipedia says, a drug is "a chemical substance used in the treatment, cure, prevention, or diagnosis of disease or used to otherwise enhance physical or mental well-being."
Enhance physical or mental well-being. That sounds like what marriage is for. Marriage, then, could be seen as something like a drug. Strangely appropriate, especially at the wedding of two pharmacists, don’t you think?
Okay, marriage is not a chemical substance, but there’s chemistry involved. That’s what brought Michael and Chandel together.
Wikipedia goes on to say that drugs may be prescribed for a limited duration, or on a regular basis for chronic disorders.
A limited duration. Not so with marriage. God, the great healer, prescribed marriages to last forever. Things don’t always work out that way, but God’s hope and intention was for enhanced physical, mental, emotional and spiritual wellbeing in marriages.
Not that Chandel and Michael are suffering from a chronic disorder. Or are they?
Think about it. What has brought them and of us here this afternoon was a condition “characterized by abnormal heart rhythms, sweating, impaired brain function, incoherent speech patterns and loss of sleep, among other things.” (writes Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, Editor of NaturalNews.com). Sounds an awful lot like a disease, doesn’t it. Plato, the Greek philosopher, called love “a serious mental illness.”
They need something for that. The something is marriage, not to make the condition go away, but to make it better, richer, and forever. Marriage is designed to change the love they’ve fallen into—the romantic, hearts aflutter love—into the deeper, more intelligent, John 3:16 God-so-loved-the-world kind of love we heard about in the reading. What’s that love like?
Jesus is. Jesus is, because, as we heard, God is love and God showed us his love by sending Jesus, his Son, to pay all that we owe for our sins, so that we might live through him.
Jesus, the one who shows us God’s love, the Bible also says, is the Bridegroom. The church is called his Bride. Therefore there’s no better person before whom and in whose name there is to be wed. Neither is there a better place in which to be wed.
Back to some chemical talk. Up to now, Michael and Chandel have been rather like a mixture. The components of a mixture, in this case the happy couple, retain their characteristic properties and, Chandel and Michael might argue about this but, can be separated relatively easily.
What the God who is love is about to do, is perform the divine equivalent of a chemical reaction or process, which will turn them in something stronger, like a compound. A compound is different from a mixture. Its components are not as easily separated. The Bible calls what God is about to do, “making them one flesh.” God is about to take the mixture that is Chandel and Michael and, using the power of the love he is and that created the heavens and the earth, sent us Jesus and raised Jesus from the dead, to make them into an indissoluble compound—one flesh.
Michael and Chandel, since God so loves you and is about to make you so much more than just a mixture, so much more than just a couple; as the reading you chose said, you “ought to love one another” deeply, from the heart, and intelligently with your brain and your will. As you do that, God himself will live in you—and his love, so wonderfully shown to you in Jesus, will be made complete in you.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad :-)
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