A deeper love that takes its pattern from God's love for the world and for us in his son Jesus Christ. A deeper love that is willing to lay down its life, if need be, to keep faith with God and with neighbor. A deeper love that is symbolized by that cross on the altar right now, as it reaches out its arms to you to unite you in a few minutes as husband and wife and then send you as a new family in service to the world. All of us have heard many times that love never fails. If it is romantic love, then all of us know, when we stop to consider it, that it simply isn't true.
Romantic love does fail sometimes.
And when that love creates a marriage, and when the fidelity inherent in that love finds embodiment in the fidelity of the husband and wife, then that marriage will endure, because all shortcomings and failures are more than covered by God's grace. Peter and Nancy, we celebrate this day your marriage to one another. We praise and thank God for giving both of you wonderful parents who have loved you and have modelled for you just the sort of fidelity I have described. We are grateful to God for bringing you together and for promising to be faithful to you forever. And we claim for you the promise that on every one of your anniversaries from now on, including your forty-first and well beyond, you will remember God and you will bless God, not only for giving you compatible personalities and romantic love, delightful as these are, but above all for giving you the staying power that is born from his love to be faithful to one another as husband and wife for the rest of your lives.