Monday, June 28
A wedding in Chicago…
My family and I traveled north to Chicago this past weekend for the wedding of my dear friend Tim Sutherland. I was privileged and honored to be a part of the wonderful wedding celebration for Tim and Cindy.It was a great wedding…most incredible music that I’ve ever experienced at a wedding. Unbelievable band played two songs of worship and some Don Henley, Brandi Carlile, and amazingly, ‘Honestly’ by Stryper, (yes, ‘Stryper).
We also incorporated the use of a ‘chuppah’ in the wedding (pronounced ‘hoopah’).
The background on the chuppah is this:
In the book of Exodus, God came to His people and committed to them to travel with them wherever they would go in a cloud of smoke and fire. He is the God who is with His people. The Hebrew word for the presence of God is ‘shekinah’.
To symbolically represent this coming together, for thousands of years in wedding ceremonies, God’s people would take a prayer shawl and fasten the four corners to four poles and then hold it over the couple to illustrate this presence of God, Shekinah, that hovers over the couple, protecting them and journeying with them through their story.
Using a chuppah in a ceremony represents, among other things that “A marriage is a sacred, holy thing. And the presence of God, Shekinah, rest upon it.”
And because we live in a world that constantly tries to pull marriage and family out from under the Chuppah…Tim & Cindy wanted to use the chuppah in their ceremony. It was pretty stinking cool.
Mark Nelson at 10:13 PM 0comments