Go for seven

Homily

Nuptial Wedding Mass of Max McElroy and Madilynn Charles

Our Lady of Sorrows, KCMO

7 September 2024

Saturday of the 22nd Week in Ordinary Time

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AMDG

Go for seven.

Normally, when I say go for seven, people think of football. Madi - I know you've been watching more football, since you're about to marry a sports nut.  Maybe even you think that going for seven is a football metaphor.  It could be, and that could be a great homily about how to win championships, but I'm not going there.  Not even on a college football Saturday, not even in Kansas City, where Patrick, Travis and Taylor are treated like gods.

Believe it or not, going for seven is not about how many kids the church wants you to have either. Seven would be a great blessing, and if that's God's will, then go for it.  But that's not what I mean when I tell you to go for seven.

Go for the seven sorrows of Mary.  That's the seven to go for.

For whatever reason, Max and Madi, you have chosen to celebrate what could well be the happiest day of your life in a place dedicated to the sorrows of Mary.  An interesting choice, as was the idea for Jayhawks to get married in Missouri, but maybe life is just a little bit harder in misery, and here's a good place to celebrate Our Lady's Sorrows.  But what do these have to do with a wedding?

The sorrows of Mary have everything to do with happiness.  You know the Beatitudes - Blessed and happy are those who are weeping, for one day they shall laugh. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.  It is in the devotion and tradition of our faith to pray through the joys and sorrows of life together. Only as we cry together do we also laugh together. Only if we suffer and die together, will we truly live together.

Jesus took on our flesh so that He could feel with us and for us everything contained in the human experience.  The passions of his sacred heart are reflected in his closest and best disciple, our Blessed Mother, and in the affairs of her Immaculate Heart.  So we embrace with devotion the suffering of our Mother in this Church, knowing that the fullness of life and happiness lies on the other side of a shared experience of suffering and death.  Here we mark the seven sorrows of Mary - the prophecy that her heart would be laid open for our sake.  We feel her anguish as a refugee, as one who lost her son for a time, as one who stayed with him in his scourging, crucifixion and being captured by death.  We celebrate here that although Mary's heart was pure, it was not sanitized from the human experience.

This is precisely that shared experience of life as it really is that you pledge to each other today.  In good and evil, for better or worse, no matter what, we are playing for keeps until I have nothing left to give.  That is the passion of Jesus, and the passion of our Lady, played out in the story of your passion for each other.  

Go for seven,  If you embrace the seven sorrows of Mary, and only if, you can be confident that you will also share in her seven everlasting joys.  The joy of conceiving new life, sharing the news with family and friends, seeing the face of God in your newborn child and God willing, in your children's children.  Seeing your child find the meaning of their life through their faith, and living a story where they too defy all odds and come back from the dead.  Receiving this fulfillment of all your desire in the kingdom of heaven.  

Blessed are those who mourn, for one day they shall laugh.  Today we celebrate the joining of your two hearts, knowing that the hearts that bleed and break and burn together, also play, and dance and sing together.  

How do your hearts become one?  That's right - by going for seven.  When you call down the seven-fold gifts of the Holy Spirit upon each other shortly, you do something so powerful even the Pope can't do it.  You are ministers of the sacrament, the sign, the mystery of marriage, by which two people become one flesh.  Four gifts for your head - wisdom, understanding, knowledge and counsel - that you may see and think about human and divine things as God does.  Three for your heart, that you might live with courage, reverence and childlike wonder.  Go for seven, for the love that is the who spirit is creative, and makes the two of you a new reality!

Go for seven.  Thank you for allowing us to see God's desire to be with us and for us in a nuptial way, through the celebration of your sacrament in the context of this Mass.  I speak on behalf of all of us, we are so fortunate to support you and be inspired by you, as you go for seven!

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