Marriage Enrichment for Lent

There's a marriage enrichment weekend going on at Oak Hill this weekend where I believe men are being told to listen to their wives, and so on. Obviously I was far too busy blogging to attend.

Here are a couple of marriage enrichment tips:

• make sure the wife has an extremely lucrative skill that can be put to good use from home while being pregnant and looking after the kids
• jobs for the kids (chimney sweeps etc.)
• pay the wife a salary for all the stuff she does at home so that she's tax deductable (the C of E provides a guide booklet on this for clergy)

As its lent, I thought people might enjoy this excerpt from a wedding sermon preached in Lent by Revd Dr Peter Leithart:

During the forty days of Lent, Christians have traditionally meditated on the isolation, betrayal, passion, and death of Jesus. The liturgical colors of Lent are subdued, and fasting is the rule. This somber season might seem an inappropriate setting for a wedding, but in fact it is not. Marital love is all about imitating Christ in His self-giving, the very act we are remembering during Lent. Marital love is about the daily practice of Lent - not the practice of self-affliction and fasting, but the practice of self-giving love. More importantly, Lent is a good time for a wedding because Lent is never the end of the story; it is always, every year, followed by Easter - the greatest example of an event that cannot be adequately explained by what went before, the Event of events, the Surprise of surprises.

Josh and Abby, I urge you to devote yourselves to practicing Lent throughout your marriage - that is, to devote yourselves to mutual self-giving. And when you do, you can expect the Easter sun to rise again and again. The surprise of love which has overtaken you will be followed by the surprise of love returned. You are embarking on a voyage of self-sacrfice and self-giving. You cannot know where the voyage will lead; you cannot know the depths of self-sacrifice that may be required of you. But you can embark in faith, confident in God's promise that every embarking becomes a journey home, that everyone who gives his life gains his life, that every Lent is followed by Easter, and that for every death, God, the Ever-Living and Eternally Loving God, promises the surprise of resurrection.

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

A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons (Moscow, Canon Press, 2006), ch 7, Surprising Love (texts from Song of Songs 1, 2, 8), p52