Fr. Roger J. Landry
Mary Our Queen Catholic Church, Alpharetta, GA
Nuptial Mass of Colin O’Leary and Anna Celia Howard
May 16, 2020
Rev 21:1-6, Ps 33, Rom 12:1-2.9-18, Mt 21:24-29
To view the video from today’s wedding, please click below.
To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
The following text guided today’s homily:
Already Living The Words You Will Say
In just a few minutes, Colin and Cece, you will say to each other words you’ve waited your whole life to enunciate, that you take each other to be your spouse and promise to be faithful in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, to love and honor each other all the days of your life.
Many times couples make those vows looking ahead to the future, praying that they will have far more happy times than sad, much more wellness than illness.
But today you both are giving a great witness to the beauty of meaning of marriage, to your own human and Christian maturity, to your faith and your love for each other.
Your marriage is taking place today in the midst of a pandemic, involving the most serious global sickness the world has seen in 100 years, which has brought bad times for millions, including for engaged couples, whose plans for their weddings have been dramatically altered. Many have reluctantly decided to postpone their marriages. You haven’t — even though it means that far fewer people are able to be present today than you and all those who love you wanted; even though it means that the reception and the honeymoon you had intended will take place much later.
But your choice to get married today in the midst of worldwide sickness and tough times is a powerful testimony that what you’re about to say to each other, you really mean. That what you are promising to live all the days of your life, you are dramatically putting into practice from the first day of your spousal coexistence.
When we met for marriage preparation up in New York, and were speaking about what marriage is, you told me, Colin, “Marriage means joining together with Cece and God … and loving Cece through every twist, turn, and curveball that life throws our way.”
Life has thrown you a curve ball these last couple of months, and the two of you, with four hands on the bat, are crushing that pitch for a leadoff homerun. And all those in attendance here, and the multitudes watching on livestream, are cheering you on as you begin to round the bases of married life.
Building on the Rock
The Gospel you chose for your wedding is all about choices, in fact, about the most important choice of all.
Jesus gives us a small parable about two ways to build our life, whether on the foundation of rock or the foundation of sand.
In the Holy Land, at Jesus’ time, there were obviously not the types of heavy construction equipment we have today. Jesus, like St. Joseph, was a tekton, or a builder, which means far more than a carpenter, but everything from cabinetmaker, to construction worker, to architect. To build on craggy uneven rocks was challenging and time-consuming, involving lots of measurements, toilsome drilling with hands to lay even foundations and many other arduous tasks. The people who were not willing patiently to put in that work would turn to dry, flat creek beds at the bottom of valleys and choose instead to put something up fast right there. But when the seasonal rains would come, and the water flowing down from the hills would inundate the creeks, the flood would take the house, its possessions and sometimes its occupants and wash them away.
Jesus uses that image to talk about whether we are striving to build our life on him or on anything or anyone else. “Everyone who listens to these words of mine and acts on them,” he says, “will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and buffeted the house. But it did not collapse; it had been set solidly on rock.”
Today, in the midst of the a worldwide global storm, you are together building the house of your new life on the rock of faith in Christ the cornerstone; on the sturdy foundation of your awareness of the divine vocation to marriage he has given you with each other and from which you will not turn back even for a day; and on the word he gives you that a man shall leave father and mother and cling to his wife and the two shall become one flesh.
Prophetic Witness
What you are doing today together is an important prophetic witness, because entering into a sacramental marriage, even before the coronavirus, has become a courageous and counter-cultural act. So many are afraid of making a commitment — especially a commitment that is for better or worse, richer or poorer, sickness or health, all the days of one’s life.
Seeing so many relationships break down, many millennials today say they prefer to keep their options open. They refuse to entrust their future to another. They seek to receive some of the comfort and benefits that come from relationships that in many outward ways resemble marriage but without giving themselves totally to what God desires and true love entails. Many others are confused about what marriage is, with some thinking it’s just romantic symbolism, or a piece of paper, or a temporary union for as long as two shall love, or a husband-less or wife-less reality whose meaning can be defined or redefined by the parties themselves, or the popular culture, or the courts.
Today, Cece and Colin, in contrast to the spirit of the age, you are making a public profession about marriage, its nature and importance. You’re publicly proclaiming that you’re entering not into a contract but a covenant, a sacred commitment not just to each other but to God, consecrating your love in a special way within the love of the God who created you, brought you together, and who today is making a sacred commitment to you to accompany you in good times and bad, in poverty and prosperity, in fitness and frailty for as long as you live.
You’re openly declaring that you desire not just to make the other happy, but to be God’s instrument to help make the other holy. You’re avowing that the gift you ultimately want to give each other is not merely a beautiful ring, or the exchange of last name, or even the gift of yourself, however faithful, fruitful, free and total; but you’re overtly affirming that you are seeking to give Godto each other, to help the other grow in God’s image and likeness, to assist the other with you to build your life on the indestructible foundation of faith in Christ. You’re asserting that you want your bond truly to be a holy matrimony, one that will lead you, hand-in-hand, we pray, down the nave of a sanctuary more beautiful than this incredibly beautiful new Church dedicated to Mary Our Queen, for a Nuptial Banquet that will know no end.
The Bridegroom makes his dwelling with the human race
That eternal wedding feast is pointed to in the passage from the Book of Revelation you chose for our first reading. St. John in a vision of the new heaven and new earth sees the heavenly Jerusalem coming from God “prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.” You selected it, you told me Cece, because it shows the fulfillment of the spousal covenant foretold by the prophets Isaiah and Hosea and that, as the Catholic Church teaches, your marital covenant will become part of that great spousal bond between Christ the Bridegroom and his Bride the Church, not only here today and in the years ahead, but into eternity.
“By marrying Colin,” you told me, Cece, “I am committing first and foremost to helping him reach Heaven.” And Colin you are making that reciprocal commitment to Cece. And as you in the covenant of marriage commit yourselves to each other and together to Christ, he makes a commitment to you. St. John hears a voice saying, “Behold God’s dwelling is with the human race. He will dwell with them and they will be his people and God himself will always be with them.” This is referring not merely to the incarnation when God took on our nature and dwelled among us. This refers not just to the Holy Eucharist, in which God-with-us is still with us. But it refers to the way Christ the Bridegroom wants to accompany spouses all the days of their married life into eternity. He wants to help you learn to love each other as he has loved you. He wants to dwell in your home, as a domestic Church, and bless you like he blessed the couple in Cana of Galilee, turning the water of ordinary life into something quasi-sacramental. He says in today’s first reading, “I make all things new,” and he wants to give you, each day, a sense of renewal, as you live out in daily life with ever renewed fervor what you promise to each other today.
I rejoice that both of you have a devotion to St. John Paul II and have learned so much in preparation for this day by the great treasure he has left the Church in his teachings about the beauty of the vocation to marriage and family life. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that by God’s providence your marriage is taking place two days before his 100th birthday on May 18. In his Letter to Families, St. John Paul wrote that he desired to say to married couples and families “above all else” words that follow from the passage of the Book of Revelation we just heard. Those words are: “The Bridegroom is with you!” The Bridegroom wants to make his dwelling place with you.
And John Paul II specified, “This is howthe Bridegroom is with you! … He is the Good Shepherd. You know who he is, and you know his voice. You know where he is leading you, and how he strives to give you pastures where you can find life and find it in abundance. You know how he withstands the marauding wolves, and is ever ready to rescue his sheep: every husband and wife, every son and daughter, every member of your families. You know that he, as the Good Shepherd, is prepared to lay down his own life for his flock (cf. Jn 10:11). He leads you by paths that are not the steep and treacherous paths of many of today’s ideologies, and he repeats to today’s world the fullness of truth. … The disciples were fully conscious that Christ had made all things new. They knew that man had been made a ‘new creation’ … and endowed with the dignity of an adopted child of God. This was the beginning of the new People of God, the Church, the foreshadowing of new heavens and a new earth (cf. Rev 21:1).”
The Bridegroom, the Pope of the Family was saying, is with you as the Good Shepherd in all of these ways. And as the most famous Psalm says, with the Lord as your Shepherd, you will lack for nothing. You will have it all.
The Importance of Marriage for the Future of the World
St. John Paul II spent his priestly life and long papacy reminding us and all married couples of how important marriage and family are in God’s plans. What happens in a marriage is not just a love story between a man and a woman. It’s even more deeply a love story that happens between God and the human race. And it’s a crucial part of the Redemption. Just as sin entered the world through the family of Adam and Eve, so the Redemption happened by means of a family, the Holy Family. The loving and trusting obedience of Mary and Joseph reversed the distrusting disobedience of Eve and Adam. The Redeemer entered the world not as a solo Savior at 30 years old but the same way each of us did, as the tiniest child in a way so that, in redeeming the family, he might redeem the whole human family.
And he does that through the Sacrament of Marriage. As Christians have believed and taught from the first centuries, today you are not only receiving a Sacrament— a sign and means of intimate communion with God — but are becominga Sacrament, a visible sign pointing to the invisible reality of the Trinitiarian loving communion of persons. You have been called, chosen and commissioned by God to be not just a living reminder of the fruitful, faithful, indissoluble love of God for his people, and to reflect efficaciously in your own marriage Christ’s love for his bride the Church, but to preach that Gospel of human love in the divine plan, in words and body language, for as long as you both shall live. This is the witness of holy matrimony every Christian couple is called to give.
The salvation of the human race depends on married couples fulfilling that witness. “The future of humanity,” John Paul II used to insist, “passes by way of the family” and “the history of mankind, the history of salvation, passes by way of the family.” The family, he said, is “at the center of the great struggle between good and evil, between life and death, between love and all that is opposed to love. To the family is entrusted the task of striving, first and foremost, to unleash the forces of good, the source of which is found in Christ the Redeemer of man. Every family unit needs to make these forces their own so that …the family will be ‘strong with the strength of God.’”
Becoming Strong with God’s Strength
How does a family, how does your family, Cece and Colin, become strong with the strength of God?
In the second reading you chose from St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans, we learn how couples are to grow strong with that divine strength, the real power of Christ-like love. The apostle urges you, “Let love be sincere; hate what is evil, hold on to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; anticipate one another in showing honor.” He tells you to be zealous in serving the Lord, to persevere in prayer, to be generous in caring for others’ needs, to exercise hospitality, and to the extent possible to live at peace with all.
I am very happy that these virtues are already a part of your relationship.
Cece, during marriage preparation, you told me how sincere Colin’s love is, how affectionate and hospitable he is. His thoughtfulness, you said, “is one of his greatest qualities and the first thing I fell in love with. He remembers practically every detail of things I tell him. He is always in tune with what others need, and if he doesn’t understand something, he doesn’t rest until he does. In our relationship, if Colin struggles to understand something about me, he will research and pray about it for weeks until he feels that he is better able to meet my needs. He is quick to forgive and to seek forgiveness. I’ve learned, especially through his example, that the words ‘I’m sorry’ can never be overused. Colin is very affectionate and is good at saying words of affirmation. Most importantly, he shows me how he loves me by praying consistently for me and by very clearly and intentionally making me his top priority.”
Colin you told me about how you were likewise struck by Cece’s sincere love, concern for others, and zeal for God. “I knew she was the one,” you stated, “by her kindness, how she is with kids, and her empathetic heart. She always knows how to treat me with kindness and patience when I am sad or stressed. The characteristic that made me love her most, however, was her love of God and her complete trust in him. She has brought me closer to God and that is all I could have ever wished for. … I thank God every day for sending me such a beautiful woman.”
The greatest way God helps the love of spouses to become “strong with the strength of God” happens here at Mass. That’s why it’s so fitting that you are getting married in the context of a Nuptial Mass here in God’s house. The early Christians used to illustrate the reality between the Sacrament of Matrimony and the Sacrament of the Mass in their architecture, covering the altars with a canopy just like ancient beds were covered, to communicate that the altar is the marriage bed of the union between Christ the Bridegroom and his Bride, the Church. Catholics believe that it’s here on this altar that we, the Bride of Christ, in the supreme act of love, receive within ourselves, the body, blood, soul and divinity of Jesus, the divine Bridegroom, becoming one-flesh with him and being made capable of bearing fruit with him in acts of love.
This is the means by which Christ, who says, “Behold, I make all things new!,” regularly renews couples in their indissoluble one flesh union. This is the way husband and wife receive within Christ’s love and become more capable of loving each other with the love with which he first loved them. This is the channel Jesus provides to strengthen couples to continue in your courageous and even counter-cultural witness to the Sacrament of Marriage in its fullness. This is the means by which, as we heard at the beginning of the second reading, that together with Christ you offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God, your spiritual worship,” making your whole married life a commentary on the words of consecration, saying to each other, “This is my body, this is my blood, this is heart, my sweat, my tears, my joys, all I am and have, given out of love for you!”
The Big Step
Your family and friends, both here in Church around this marriage bed of the union of Christ and the Church, and watching by the hundreds on the live stream, join you in thanking God for the great blessings of this day, your marital vocation and your matrimonial mission.
Your great journey began on the steps leading to Colin’s backyard, at a shower for Margot and Jed five years ago. The proposal happened on that same step on December 22, 2018. Now together, at the foot of the sanctuary, you take this big lifetime step of marriage together, as Jesus, the Good Shepherd, grabs you lovingly by the hands and seeks to lead you all the days of your married life, through hills and valleys, sunny and stormy days, sickness and health, to the verdant pastures and overflowing feast of the New Jerusalem.
We thank God for inspiring you to build your life on him the Rock. We praise him for making his dwelling place among you. We glorify him for helping you to model your life on the sincere love with which he has filled you. The future of humanity passes by way of the family. It will pass by way of your family, Colin and Cece. As we thank you for saying yes to that saving call, we turn to God and ask him to bless you all the days of your married life. And through you and your Christ-like love for each other, we ask him to continue to bless us all and the whole world.
The readings for today’s Mass were:
A Reading from the Book of Revelation
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth. The former heaven and the former earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. I also saw the holy city, a new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, God’s dwelling is with the human race. He will dwell with them and they will be his people and God himself will always be with them [as their God]. He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and there shall be no more death or mourning, wailing or pain, [for] the old order has passed away.” The one who sat on the throne said, “Behold, I make all things new.” Then he said, “Write these words down, for they are trustworthy and true.” He said to me, “They are accomplished. I [am] the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give a gift from the spring of life-giving water.
Responsorial Psalm — The Earth is Full of the Goodness of the Lord
Rejoice, you just, in the LORD; praise from the upright is fitting. Give thanks to the LORD on the harp; on the ten-stringed lyre offer praise. Sing to God a new song; skillfully play with joyful chant. For the LORD’s word is true; all his works are trustworthy. The LORD loves justice and right and fills the earth with goodness. By the LORD’s word the heavens were made; by the breath of his mouth all their host. The waters of the sea were gathered as in a bowl; in cellars the deep was confined. Let all the earth fear the LORD; let all who dwell in the world show reverence. For he spoke, and it came to be, commanded, and it stood in place. The LORD foils the plan of nations, frustrates the designs of peoples. But the plan of the LORD stands forever, wise designs through all generations. Happy the nation whose God is the LORD, the people chosen as his very own. From heaven the LORD looks down and observes the whole human race, Surveying from the royal throne all who dwell on earth. The one who fashioned the hearts of them all knows all their works. A king is not saved by a mighty army, nor a warrior delivered by great strength. Useless is the horse for safety; its great strength, no sure escape. But the LORD’s eyes are upon the reverent, upon those who hope for his gracious help, Delivering them from death, keeping them alive in times of famine. Our soul waits for the LORD, who is our help and shield. For in God our hearts rejoice; in your holy name we trust. May your kindness, LORD, be upon us; we have put our hope in you.
A Reading from the Letter of St. Paul to the Romans
I urge you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God, your spiritual worship. Do not conform yourselves to this age but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and pleasing and perfect. Let love be sincere; hate what is evil, hold on to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; anticipate one another in showing honor. Do not grow slack in zeal, be fervent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, endure in affliction, persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the holy ones, exercise hospitality. Bless those who persecute [you], bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Have the same regard for one another; do not be haughty but associate with the lowly; do not be wise in your own estimation. Do not repay anyone evil for evil; be concerned for what is noble in the sight of all. If possible, on your part, live at peace with all.
A Reading from the Holy Gospel According to St. Matthew
Jesus said to them in reply, “I shall ask you one question, and if you answer it for me, then I shall tell you by what authority I do these things. Where was John’s baptism from? Was it of heavenly or of human origin?” They discussed this among themselves and said, “If we say ‘Of heavenly origin,’ he will say to us, ‘Then why did you not believe him?’ But if we say, ‘Of human origin,’ we fear the crowd, for they all regard John as a prophet.” So they said to Jesus in reply, “We do not know.” He himself said to them, “Neither shall I tell you by what authority I do these things. “What is your opinion? A man had two sons. He came to the first and said, ‘Son, go out and work in the vineyard today.’ He said in reply, ‘I will not,’ but afterwards he changed his mind and went.
