{Forty days in Lent, forty visits to church and chapel sanctuaries. Since Lent doesn’t include Sundays, I get tomorrow off! But today, here’s a church that plays a very special part in our (Jeff and Joan) life story.}

The photos I post in this series have an electronic/digital “timestamp” embedded in the file, if those pics were taken with a newer camera. Older photos such as this one have only memory as a timestamp. And I can stamp this one right down to the year, the date, and the hour. It’s our wedding. And that handsome sanctuary belongs to the Carmel Presbyterian Church, Glenside, Pennsylvania, Joan’s home church.

We couldn’t have asked for a lovelier setting for such a significant day, a day so long ago that the woman are wearing hats! There was a time that a church wedding was the typical occasion for the sharing of vows. These days, not so much. And not just because of the pandemic. With fewer people involved in church life, and certainly far fewer “young people,” churches aren’t overwhelmed with Saturday weddings as was the case in earlier generations. 

If couples are opting to be married at all, many are choosing gardens, parks, hotels, resorts, beaches…not churches. On the other hand, some couples for whom shared faith is a foundation of their relationship, feel quite at home making their promises in a church sanctuary, and within the context of a worship service.

Even when I was in “non-parish” ministry, couples would inquire about my presiding at their weddings. It didn’t matter to me if the wedding were on a river bank, under the old oak tree, in a living room, or in a hotel ballroom (or in a shopping center atrium — but that’s a different story!). Whatever the setting, I was glad to work with couples in premarital counseling and then design a worship service in which their vows would be spoken. That was the contract I made with them. No worship service? No Jeff for the wedding. No exceptions. You don’t want God involved in this? Get a justice of the peace or a ship’s captain.

Now I was very open to tinkering with the Presbyterian wedding service to tailor the ceremony to the couple’s own faith backgrounds and traditions. I’d officiated at the wedding of a Jew and a Unitarian, a Catholic and an “undecided.” Needless to add that the Catholic and the Jew weren’t particularly “active” in their faith practices, or I wouldn’t have been asked to work with them. But we labored hard on the vocabulary of the service to the point where I could be true to my own theology while showing openness to their beliefs. If I didn’t perceive God smiling on the whole process, I’d know I’d failed in our struggle to find common ground. (When I suggested to the Jewish woman that we use the prayer the Jewish rabbi Jesus taught his followers, she replied, “Oh, that’s a beautiful prayer; a friend taught it to me when I was a child. I’d like to use it.”) God smiled a lot.

Here’s where I admit, 21 days into this journey, that “sanctuary” is more than a big room in a church building. We create sanctuary wherever we make a holy space for worship. That river bank became a sanctuary, set apart for a time, for sacred vows of marriage. The ballroom of Chicago’s Drake Hotel became a sanctuary that Saturday afternoon. The botanical garden too. And under the old oak. There was a call to worship, prayers, music, promises said, and a benediction pronounced over the couple and the gathered family and friends who no doubt called God by many, many names…or none. Two became one, and we all became one in our blessing of their promises, hopes, and dreams.

Back to those big rooms. One church I served was in a tourist mecca of sorts. Out-of-towners would call the church and ask if they could be married in our beautiful setting. I’d explain that they probably had the wrong church. Ours wasn’t the storybook church they saw on the village website. “Oh, never mind then; do you have the number for the pretty church?” And sometimes when folks did have the right church, wherever I was installed, they’d want to “improve” on the sanctuary by loading it up with so many ferns one needed a pith helmet to find the pulpit. That’s if they hadn’t been successful in asking that the church’s liturgical furniture be moved “out of the way.” We won’t have room for the eight bridesmaids if that big font thing is there! Frankly, I wouldn’t budge. It’s a church, it’s our worship space, it’s my place. Get over it. (Doesn’t sound very welcoming or pastoral, huh? Pardon me for not wanting to be “used” or my church thought of as merely another pretty face.)

I may only have one or two more weddings in me. As an officiant, that is. My own personal marriage, the one that began in that worship space above, has celebrated its 53rd year. We couldn’t have “only just begun” in a more beautiful worship setting. But leading another couple into their vows? They’d have to be very special. And related to me! For them, I’d create a sanctuary anyplace, anytime.

Next in this series, an unfinished sanctuary. Rather permanently unfinished.