It’s September, the month Lorraine and I got married.

We’ve been married for a lot of years, but not so many that I’ve forgotten the stress of not being married and planning our wedding. I remember it well. We had a weekly meeting to go over all of the nuts and bolts of our wedding plan.

The way we invite people to weddings has totally changed. We had engraved invitations sent out by mail with little reply cards enclosed so people could say if they were coming.

Some might remember this response to a question with another albeit sarcastic question, “What do you want—an engraved invitation?” This is a rejoinder that has lost its meaning, I’m afraid.

So now would be the right time to tell you that our engraved invitation had a typo in it. It wasn’t either of our names. Most people might not notice or even know that it was wrong. But as two people working in communications, this was embarrassing to say the least.

When Lorraine saw it, she said to me, “We can’t get married.” There wasn’t time to correct the mistake, so her answer was simple. No wedding.

From my way of thinking, we had two choices, mail the invitations out and live with it. Or don’t mail them and opt for a smaller venue. Not getting married was not one of the two options before us.

We mailed them out. People were gracious. We got married.

Most of the time now invitations are predictably electronic. We recently got a nicely designed announcement of a relative’s wedding. It’s on our refrigerator, and it directs us to the website where we can reply and also see their wedding registry. We are excited for them.

I have no idea how much their wedding is going to cost, but I know it will be a lot.

One New York City couple featured in Brides magazine had an invitation list of 350 people. They would get married in a big cathedral, ride around the city in a double decker bus, stopping for photo ops at various landmarks, eat steak and lobster dinner in One Trade Center. The cost was about $150,000.

News agencies picked up the story, and the couple explained that they needed to figure out a way to winnow the guest from 350 to 60, the number of people who would fit on the double decker bus. “It was stressful,” the groom told the reporter. “We had to figure out a way for them to choose us, because we can’t choose them.”

So, this couple’s wedding invitation asked each invitee to purchase a ticket to the wedding day for $333 apiece. Problem solved: their guest list fell from 350 people invited to 60 who paid up. Everyone could fit on the bus.

A wedding between a man and a woman can be fraught--tensions with relatives or about-to-be relatives, disagreements between the bride and groom, more bills than necessary, awkwardnesses of where to seat different people, weather, food, flowers, the list could go on and on.

The day comes and something new is born. The church witnesses the wonder: two become one. But there is more.

God’s invitation needs no whittling down. His invitation is extravagant, probably reckless from a mere human perspective. It’s a head-crushing invitation. This invitation can drown an army in a river, close the mouths of ravenous lions, keep people alive in the hottest of furnace fires. It’s a man impaled on a spike he fashioned for his enemy. It’s the hated brother who all but died rescuing the ones who threw him into a pit to die. It’s oasis in drought. It’s wine where water belongs. Its words engraved on hearts, a message written on bloodied hands and the side of the groom himself. It’s the proclaiming of love above all else. It’s the bride blushing with the realization that the groom longs for her. From betrayed to betrothed, she turns to him and says the words from the Last Supper with a new meaning, “Is it I?” (Mark 14:19)

Oil lamps filled in anticipation. Yes. Come.

Coming to the pagan jungles of Manhattan to the prisons of North Korea to the apartment churches hiding from electronic surveillance in China to the Christian widow in the Middle East who lives with her son and daughter-in-law who want her out of the apartment she gave them when her husband died, out because she believes in Jesus--all of them turning to Jesus with the blushing, humble shy beauty of a maiden who senses a love never before cast her way, looking into his eager eyes, she marvels, “Is it I?”

The Marriage Supper of the Lamb
Then I heard what seemed to be the voice of a great multitude, like the roar of many waters and like the sound of mighty peals of thunder, crying out,

“Hallelujah!
For the Lord our God
    the Almighty reigns.
Let us rejoice and exult
    and give him the glory,
for the marriage of the Lamb has come,
    and his Bride has made herself ready;
it was granted her to clothe herself
    with fine linen, bright and pure”—

for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints.

And the angel said to me, “Write this: Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.” And he said to me, “These are the true words of God.”
(Revelation 19:6-9)