God Crashes the Wedding
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Was it only dumb luck in that wedding, out at the state park, when I happened to call thunder and lightning down out of the sky? Or was it a sign from God?
Things had started to fall apart the night prior, at the rehearsal. The bride arrived with the late-breaking idea that what the ceremony needed was some open flame. She wanted to walk with her groom in a circle around what sounded to me like a barbeque grill. The internet, she informed me, said ancient people did this kind of thing all the time. When it comes to wedding officiants, I’m of the school known as “not-so-finicky.” As long as they promise to hang in there? And seem to mean what they say? I can live with a lot. Heck, it’s their wedding. Still, the introduction of fire at this stage of the game did give me pause. It was hard to hold at bay visions of flaming tuxedos.
The groom, for his part, had arrived at the rehearsal already in some kind of a mood. So, when I accidentally lined up the groomsmen to my right, instead of my left, it did not go over well. You know how some people like to do their tantrums very quietly? And it’s kind of unnerving? Well, that was the groom. He muttered something about tradition. How groomsmen may not matter to some people, but for other people, groomsmen were important. Really important. The groomsmen all sheepishly shuffled to my other side.
In the ministry, I have found, authority comes when people have the vague sense that you know what you’re doing. This was not the case here. The bride couldn’t fathom that I hadn’t heard of the fire ritual that the ancients had delivered unto the internet. The groom eyed me with suspicion: if I didn’t know where groomsmen were supposed to stand, what else would I fumble? My feelings toward them were of equal good cheer.
The next day was overcast. This was Norris State Park, north of Knoxville. The park is built alongside Norris Lake, which itself is stopped up by Norris Dam, built in the ‘30s, when the Tennessee Valley Authority brought power to the region. The park has an outdoor amphitheater: a half-acre bowl in the earth, with stone benches stuck in it, leading down to a small stage. And so it began. The tinny boom-box prelude. I stepped onto the stage. Then the groomsmen and the groom, standing where grooms and groomsmen should stand. Then the bridesmaids, and then, at last, the bride. Behind us, the steady warmth of the sacred barbeque grill. I opened my book.
“Friends,” I began. “We gather this day in the presence of God.”
What happened next sounds like it’s out of the Bible, or else a cartoon. With the timing of an old stand-up comedian, right as I said, “in the presence of God,” the whole sky flickered white, like a black-and-white movie. There was a vast crack of thunder, which rumbled out into nothing, leaving us standing there.
“Be still,” says the forty-sixth Psalm, “And know that I am God.” Which is what happened. We were still.
Something shifted among us.
And yes, I will tell you it was a sign from God. To which you might say, “Whoa.” By which you might actually mean, “Are you nuts?” Because you’d want to tell me about the water droplets and ice chips up there in the clouds that bang around, building up static electricity. You’d want to say that, at some point, the charge gets too much to be contained, and so is released as lightning and thunder. Which might be loud, or majestic, or all sorts of things. But is not, even when it coincides with the words of a preacher, any old sign from God.
There are those, after every earthquake and hurricane, who scuttle out into the light to say that the victims deserved it. The way they figure, God controls everything, so if your house has been flattened, you probably had it coming. And I don’t mean that, either.
What I mean is this life leaves us open and fragile. Hang around long enough, and we’re going to get hurt. So, we arrange things to fake a degree of control. We build dams to hold back the water, and we call this power. We use certain words, certain ways, to hold back the icy torrent always rising within us. This is why it matters where the groomsmen will stand, or why we want our wedding day to have fire. It’s why we hold up a view of the universe that makes perfect sense: a God who controls everything, or no God at all. But then comes the heartbreak, the hurricane, or the moment of grace that defies explanation. And our ideas all fail, and our words fall to dust.
Maybe a sign is not the same as a message. Maybe it only comes as a simple reminder. That, no matter the occasion, we gather this day in the presence of God, in the vast whirl of creation whose nature is love. And that, when we set about to commit radical and scary acts—like saying we’ll be with some lovely knucklehead the rest of our days, or like having any hope at all, after all we have seen—we do well to be still. To pause. To see that our tiny lives unfurl as part of a larger life, from which we receive, and to which we greatly add. To remember that, in the trials to come, we can rely on more than our willpower. Sometimes, we forget. So, some lightning can help, and some thunder won’t hurt.
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Thank you for this beautiful piece. God? static electricity? What’s the difference?