"For you are great; you do wondrous things; and you alone are God."

• Psalm 86:10

Today is a wonder.

Two people...with all the complexity, history, and hope they carry, have chosen each other. They will stand before God and a gathered community and make promises that human beings have no business keeping on their own. That is not an insult. It is the whole point. A wedding is, at its heart, an act of holy audacity, the declaration that love is stronger than uncertainty, that covenant is deeper than feeling, that God's faithfulness underneath it all makes this possible.

The psalmist does not come to God with confidence. He comes broken, poor, in misery, lifting his soul like an offering he isn't sure is worth much. And yet he comes. And the word he clings to - the word that holds everything together - is this: great is your love. The Hebrew underneath that word is hesed - the covenantal, unfailing, loyal love of God. It is not a feeling. It is a commitment. It is the kind of love that shows up in the wilderness.

That matters today, because you are not just celebrating a romance. You are entering a covenant.

The Apostle Paul, writing to Rome, describes baptism as a kind of dying. You go under the water as one person. You come up as someone new, someone who now belongs not to yourself alone, but to Christ, and through Christ, to each other and to the world.

Marriage carries the same logic.

"So we too might walk in newness of life" (Romans 6:4).

Something dies today, something good, actually. The singular self. The unattached "I." The life you planned for one. And from that small death rises something neither of you could have built alone: a "we" that bears witness to the self-giving love of God. Paul says that when we are united with Christ in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. On a wedding day, that resurrection imagery is not abstract. It is flesh and blood, standing at an altar, choosing each other.

You are not just getting married. You are rising to new life.

Jesus does not make discipleship sound easy, and he does not pretend that love is painless. "Those who find their life will lose it," he says, "and those who lose their life for my sake will find it" (Matthew 10:39).

This is the paradox written into the center of every marriage vow.

You will lose something. You will lose the luxury of always putting yourself first. You will lose the uncomplicated selfishness of deciding alone. You will lose the easy comfort of never having to be truly known. And in that losing, in that daily, ordinary, sometimes difficult dying to self, you will find a life larger and richer than anything you could have assembled from your individual parts.

This is not a warning. It is a promise. The cross is not the end of the story; it is the shape of the story. And the shape of the story is resurrection.

There is one more word from today's readings that deserves a place at a wedding table.

Hagar is in the wilderness. The water is gone. She sets her son under a bush and walks away because she cannot bear to watch him die. It is one of the most desolate moments in all of Scripture.

And then: "God heard the voice of the boy where he is" (Genesis 21:17). Not where Hagar wished he was. Not where the story seemed to be heading. Where he actually was. God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water she had not seen before.

There will be wilderness seasons in a marriage. Every honest couple will tell you that. Seasons of distance, of grief, of exhaustion, of drought. The devotional task on those days is not to perform happiness but to trust the promise: God is with you, right where you are. And God has a habit of opening our eyes to wells we somehow missed.

A Prayer for the Day

Gracious God,you who do wondrous things and whose love knows no end -today we give thanks for the wonder standing before us.

May these two walk in newness of life, united with each other as they are united with you. May they be brave enough to lose themselves in loveand wise enough to trust what will be found. May they be faithful in the ordinary days,gentle in the wilderness seasons,and quick to remember that your hesed, your great, stubborn, covenantal love, runs deeper than any drought.

Be with them today, Lord. And be with them on every ordinary day that follows. Amen.

Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible.

Lectionary: Proper 7, Year A - Fourth Sunday after Pentecost (June 21, 2026)