Permit me to begin by saying how very pleased and honored I am to be with you this afternoon, indeed how honored I feel to be in your presence. 50 years or more of marriage! Of course, lots of people have been married 50 years, but to the same man, to the same woman! Extraordinary! I did a bit of math before the service and I estimate that, between you all, you represent over 5,000 years of marriage, 5,000 years of commitment, 5,000 years of working it out or working it through, 5,000 years of joys and sorrows and challenges, 5,000 years of sharing one another’s lives, your hopes and fears and possibilities. Please, stand up and let us congratulate you all and thank you all!

Do you realize what you have accomplished? Yes, for many of you, children conceived, nurtured and grown, grandchildren welcomed, mortgages paid, differences negotiated and differences tolerated, love shared, some sleepless nights and fervent prayer, hurdles cleared and tears shed. All of this, yes!

Do you realize what else you have accomplished? You have proven that there is truth and life and sustenance and real joy in the irrational. The irrational. For there is nothing rational about the relationships which we celebrate here today. You were not brought together by logic or through a process of orderly thinking. Most certainly, we may rest assured that none of you were brought together by computer dating! There are no computer matches here today, no IBM marriages, no Apple marriages!

Irrational? Yes! Think about it: If you were to stop and figure out just how many hours you spent together before you were married, that is, time spent truly together in spiritual, intellectual, emotional or physical union one with another and then place that figure, the number of hours, over the total number of hours of your total life experience up to the time you were engaged, reducing the two figures to a percentage, you soon realize that the resulting figure is shockingly small. But on the basis of this tiny, tiny portion of your own total life experience and your experience of the person who is now your spouse, on your wedding days, you all stood up before one another, God, family and friends and pledged your total persons to one another --- body, mind and spirit ---, in a uniquely exclusive relationship, with one another, until you are parted by death. That is an extraordinary, a unique commitment made on the basis of often very little data. I would submit that such a commitment is not a rational act. It is an undeniably irrational act. And yet, it was an action quite rightly taken with the utmost seriousness and with a very great deal of faith in the face of a mountain of risk.

Scholars tell us that the average American male now has five to seven occupational changes in a typical lifetime, five to seven separate and distinct careers during his adult life, exclusive of education and military service. A woman may think she is marrying a teacher, a plumber or an engineer, while in fact, she may be marrying all three --- and many more! And when one considers the radical changes in the roles of women in our society over the last 50 years, it is quite clear that the statistics for women changing vocations might well be a great deal higher than they are for men. Now, to be sure, what we do in our work-a-day lives is not really who we are, but it can make a whale of a difference in how we perceive ourselves and how we perceive one another in marriage, in our hopes and expectations. What we do from 9 to 5 or, more likely, from 7 a.m. until 6:30 p.m., Monday through Friday makes an enormous difference in how our lives are lived, one with another, in marriage. And now, as you here know better than any other group, we talk about our “retirement Careers”, that is, what vocation will we follow in retirement? Taking all these factors into account, the assumption that you here today knew very much about the person to whom you gave yourself in marriage in 1957 is presumptuous in the extreme. Most certainly the decision you made was irrational.

Could any of you ever have guessed the extent of change in our society, our economy, our culture, our work, our affluence, yes, could you have ever guessed the changes that would occur in our church between 1957 and 2007?
• A president assassinated, a second presidential assassination attempted; a presidential candidate assassinated, the murder of Martin Luther King, the end of the Korean War, with new wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and two in Iraq, Islamic revolutions, the attack of 9-11, a “War on Terror”;
• In the economy: recessions, terrible inflation, real estate booms and busts, the birth of the European Union and the Euro; globalization of just about everything, massive exportation of American jobs of every sort, the death of what we once called “Mother AEtna” and the ideal of corporate commitment, Warren Buffet, Chrysler Corporation bailed out once, then sold and bought again, the long slow slide of Detroit’s “Big Three”, the death of Ma Bell, the appearance of Volkswagens, Toyotas, and Subarus, the rise of China and the fall of France as a world power, then WalMart, Staples, Home Depot, Toys ‘r’ Us and, of course yes, MicroSoft;
• Technologically, you endured the advent of the personal computer, lap tops, I Pods, the Internet, cellular phones, camcorders, PDAs, cable TV, HD TV, CDs and DVDs;
• In politics, we remember “Guns and Butter”, a massive Civil Rights Movement, the contract with America, the Hostage Crisis, a Ronald Reagan, an impeachment process, a 27% presidential approval rating, seeing our own governor in jail, an end to Apartheid, Darfur;
• In the church, a new Prayer Book and Hymnal in the pews, Women as celebrants at our altars, lay ministry at last has a name and is celebrated, the Windsor Report, Katharine Jefferts Schori as our Presiding Bishop and, in Connecticut, a Suffragan Bishop-Elect with the Christian name of Laura ……………………… and the list goes on.

All that is but a very partial list of the changes you have endured, changes you have conquered --- more societal, economic, social, political, technological and ecclesiastical change in a fifty year period than the world has ever known. And that, my friends, has been the context of your marriages. For each and every one of you there have been plenty of excuses to bail out and move on, but you all persevered!

Yes, there was well nigh overwhelming change out there, in the world. But there were also all the changes, the adjustments, the renegotiations in your relationships, one with another. And there were the changes that happened within each of you individually, as husbands and wives, all those internal changes that require even more adjustment, communication, accommodation, understanding, listening, and serious negotiation in your marriages.

And then for most of you there were the children. Your children and you were buffeted by both the emergence of the drug culture and the sexual revolution. If your children were challenged by all that stuff, many of you agonized as they grew to adulthood. And now you watch them celebrate the same joys and suffer the same agonies with their children. And, perhaps, you now agonize anew with yet another generation of children.

My wife and I are not quite at our 50th anniversary. For us, this year is our 45th. But for all of us, none of that stuff was anticipated, none of it even dreamed of when we took our marriage vows. We didn’t know enough to even guess at even 1% of the change, the challenges each of us has endured. And yet, we all stood up there before God, family and friends and offered ourselves to one another unconditionally and accepted the other unconditionally. Nothing rational ‘bout that! But our marriages, our relationships, though changed, though matured, our relationships have endured.

What has made it possible for you all to be here today? It’s your hard work, your stick-to-itiveness, your acts of faith, your willingness to risk, and the Grace of God. We use that word Grace fairly loosely. But my understanding is that Grace is the “Love of God in Action”. It’s your love for one another coupled with God’s love-in-action in your lives, in your relationships, which has brought you here this afternoon, married to one another after fifty years, a half century. As you stood at the altar rail 50 years ago and made your commitment before God, so you return to the altar. Why? Because you know, deep down, that you need all the Love-of-God- in-action that you can access. You are here because you know that God matters in all this, this mystery of marriage, that the love of God is critical in the midst of this profound, irrational, wonderful, challenging, sustaining reality called marriage.

“Those whom God hath joined together, let no one put asunder.”