I was visiting some time ago with several retired pastors. They were discussing the features of their work that they missed in their retirement, and there was a good deal of difference of opinion. But on one matter, they were of the same mind: None of them missed conducting weddings.

            This will surprise some of you. I remember a young woman, as she planned her own wedding, saying how much she envied members of the clergy, because they were able to be part of so many weddings; “It must be terribly exciting,” she said. On reflection, I realize that this is one of the reasons many clergy don’t like weddings -- because the brides, and the parents and friends of the bride feel it’s so exciting. This means that the planning, the rehearsal, and the wedding itself are fraught with peril. The pastor knows that there are any number of places where something can go wrong, and that he or she is likely to be right in the middle of the trouble

            One pastor, for example, tells of such a wedding. In that church, there was a custom for the officiating clergy to introduce the couple to the congregation at the conclusion of the wedding ceremony, right before the recessional march. Normally, the pastor would say something like, “It gives me great pleasure to present, for the first time, Mr. and Mrs. Joe Doe” (using of course, the groom’s actual name). But in this particular case, the bride was not planning to take her husband’s last name. So it was decided that the pastor would say, “It gives me great pleasure to present, for the first time as husband and wife, Joe Doe and Jane Smith.”

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