I am reading a portion of the text from 2 Corinthians 4.

We have this treasure in earthen vessels, so that the surpassing greatness of the power will be of God and not from ourselves; we are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not despairing; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying about in the body the dying of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body. For we who live are constantly being delivered over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh. So death works in us, but life in you.

May the Lord add the blessing of His Spirit to our meditation on His word.

“Music,” St. Augustine wrote, “is the science of moving well.”

For Augustine, music is everywhere there’s motion, everywhere there’s life. Our actions are musical, if we match movement to movement, and movement to setting. Speaking well is a kind of music, since speech expresses the motions of the soul. Augustine would have agreed with the lines that open the last act of the Merchant of Venice, when Lorenzo says,

                The man that hath no music in himself. . . 

                Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils; 

                The motions of his spirit are dull as night 

                And his affections dark as Erebus: 

                Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music. 

History is music: “The times are created and set in order and modified in imitation of eternity,” Augustine wrote, and this shades over into a comment on the celestial music of the spheres: “through the rhythmical succession of their times, the orbits unite terrestrial things subjected to the heavenly ones to the hymn, as it were, of the universe.”

Augustine perceives music everywhere because everything is created and orchestrated by the God who is music, who is “supreme measure, number, relation, harmony, unity, and equality.” He is the source of “all manifestations and embodiments of music in the world” (Begbie).

Augustine meant all this quite literally, since for him music is not organized sound but fundamentally a mathematical discipline. Augustine thought we should take delight in sound only as a means for raising our minds to unheard numerical beauties.

That’s not what we mean by music, but if we give Augustine’s theory a metaphorical stretch, we can affirm much of what he says. Creation “is a symphonic and rhythmic complication of diversity, of motion and rest, a song praising God” (David B. Hart). God orchestrates time through tension and struggle, through clashes and fractures, towards a final resolution beyond imagination (Begbie). By keeping in step with the Spirit, who is the music of God (Jordan), we move well, so our lives are musical. And all this is so because the Creator is “the true, primordial, archetypal music” (Hart), an infinite fugue (Jenson).

And, of course, given our setting, I want to say that marriage, your marriage, is, or ought to be, musical. Our marriages work when we move in harmony, move in proportion, move with proper measure. The art of marriage is a musical art. Much could be said about this, but let me highlight three points.

First, your marriage is the harmonization of two formerly independent musical lines. Scripture talks about marriage as a one-flesh relationship between a man and a woman. Adam was whole, then God put him into death-sleep, tore him in two, and built Eve. When Adam woke up to find a bride, God told him that he was supposed to become one again with the woman made from his rib. We can tell the story musically: God began composing the life of Adam, then introduced a second theme, and told Adam and Eve they were to join their separate melodies into a complex polyphony.

Scripture also teaches us that the man is the head of his wife as Christ is the head of His church, and that the wife is to submit to her husband as to the Lord. If this offends, it’s because we’re tone deaf. In a fugue, the first voice doesn’t reduce the other lines to dispensable embellishments. A single melody is naked and alone, and it’s not good to be alone. A second voice follows the first, step by step, but in following the first it enriches it immeasurably, and is enriched by it.

Each of you is a living melody, sung out by the Creator of heaven and earth. But each of you will achieve your full beauty, each of your melodies will move well, if you move in concert with one other. Each of your melodies will gain its clarity and strength in union with the other, and together in union with Christ, because a c(h)ord of three strands is not easily broken.

Second, every marriage pulses between loss and recovery, departure and return, death and renewal, tension and resolution. In 2 Corinthians 4, Paul describes the Christian life as a new creation. The God who spoke light into existence speaks again to shine the light of God’s glory in Christ into our hearts. The passage ends on the same note: Whoever is in Christ, behold a new creation!

As Paul describes the life of the new creation, it takes a paradoxical turn, for when we live as new creatures we display not just the rising but the dying of Jesus. It’s only in the combination of these two movements, the polyphonic intertwining of the dying melody of the outer man and the rising melody of the inner man, that Paul’s life is a manifestation of the power of God in an earthen vessel.

We want to simplify everything, including marriage. Many of us, like the Corinthians, would like our lives and our marriages to be bouncy jingles from beginning to end. Some of us act as if the Christian life is a dirge that sings perpetual crucifixion. Paul wants neither of these. He knows that the song of Jesus follows a double rhythm – afflicted yet not crushed, perplexed yet not despairing, persecuted yet not forsaken, struck down yet not destroyed, carrying the dying of Jesus in our body so that the life of Jesus might be manifested.

Your life together will follow this rhythm, whether you want it to or not. But there is also a commandment here, a commandment to die for the sake of the other. This sounds ominous, but music reminds us that beauty is the product of this kind of dying. Music depends on death. “Tones give way to tones. Music is constantly dying, giving way. The next tone in a plainsong melody can only come if the last one is not sung” (Begbie). If there is no death, if one tone doesn’t’ yield its place to the next, there is no music, only noise. In the music of your marriage, you must die constantly to yourselves, yield to one another, if you want to show that the “surpassing greatness of the power [is] of God and not from yourselves.”

Finally, the music of your marriage does not exist for yourselves but for others. Paul’s reflections on sharing the death and life of Jesus are part of a defense of his ministry. The Corinthians challenged his apostolic credentials, and Paul is at pains not only to defend the truth of his gospel, but his own status as an apostle. The two are tied inseparably together. Paul insists that his ministry, not only his message, announces Jesus’ death and resurrection. His pours out his life to bring life to the church: As he says, “death works in us, but life in you.”

Your marriage doesn’t exist for its own sake any more than you yourselves do. You, and your marriage, are not your own; you, and your marriage, have been bought with a price. Your marriage can only be a Christian marriage if it is caught up in the sweep of God’s saving action in the world, only if it becomes a movement in the symphony of God’s work of saving the nations. You should delight in the harmonies of your life together, but not only that. You’re getting married so that by yielding to the Spirit, the song of Jesus’ dying and rising might echo and re-echo to everyone within earshot of your home.

This is a season of song. There are more songs in the infancy narratives of Luke than anywhere else in the New Testament, and we have thousands of seasonal hymns over the 2000 years since the incarnation. You’re getting married in this season of song, and this service itself has been filled with song. Our confident hope for you, Ty and Jenny, is that this will set the trajectory of your entire marriage: Trusting our Lord, we’re confident that He will join your voices into one, that He will enable you to yield daily to one another, that Jesus will sing Himself through your marriage to everyone around you, that your marriage will display the musical art of moving well. Our prayer is that you will know the wonder of a life orchestrated by a divine Composer who has arranged your lives, and will arrange your life together, into an utterly unique symphony.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Let us pray.

Almighty God, our Father, we praise you for your goodness to us in sending Your Son to be our Husband, and that He has died and risen to rescue His bride. And we give you thanks for this icon of the gospel in marriage. Fill them with your Spirit, that they may live together in harmony and love, keeping in step with the Spirit, so that their life together may be a song of praise to you. We pray in the name of our Chief Cantor, Jesus our Lord, who lives and reigns with You and with the Holy Spirit, ever one God, unto ages of ages. Amen.