Homily for Radiate Love Marriage Summit
Mass for Special Needs and Occasions: for Chastity
September 26, 2025; Cathedral of Christ the Light, Oakland
Readings: Rom 12:1-2.9-18; Ps 112 (111); Jn 15:12-17
Introduction
This Radiate Love Marriage Summit we celebrate today, as it turns out, occurs at a rather tense and, it would seem, pivotal moment in the history of our country. I’m sure we are all still reeling at the assassination of Charlie Kirk, who did so much to promote a more civil engagement of citizens who have disagreements on the issues of our time. He and his now widow Erika understood what the fix is to the uncivility so characteristic of our times, and which she so compellingly summed up in the speech she gave at the memorial service for her late husband. I’m sure many of you heard it.
God’s Plan
First, she gave an exhortation to men: “[E]mbrace true manhood. Be strong and courageous for your families. Love your wives and lead them. Love your children and protect them. Be the spiritual head of your home, but please be a leader worth following. Your wife is not your servant. Your wife is not your employee. Your wife is not your slave. She is your helper, you are not rivals. You are one flesh working together for the glory of God.” And then she turned to women with this: “Women, I have a challenge for you too. Be virtuous. Our strength is found in God’s design for our role. We are the guardians. We are the encouragers. We are the preservers. Guard your heart, everything you do flows from it. And if you’re a mother, please recognize that is the single most important ministry you have.”
In other words, men and women are different! Yes, we need to explicitly affirm this reality, as the culture in which we are living seeks to erase all differences. But what is really going on here, when we drill down to the deepest levels of God’s plan in creating us?
Erika used the word “helper”: the wife is the husband’s helper. This is the word used in reference to Eve in the second chapter of the Book of Genesis, when God creates the woman from the Adam’s rib: “The Lord God said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him’” (Gen 2:18). Right before this we read in Genesis chapter 1 that God wanted to make His human creation in His own image and likeness. We know from what God has revealed to us about His inner life, that God is a communion of Persons: everything the Father is and has He gives to the Son and the Son to the Father, and their mutual love sends forth the Holy Spirit to draw us into the communion of their love. So, for God’s human creation to be in His image, God had to make His human creation to be a life-giving communion of persons.
God’s Image
Therefore, God takes a rib from Adam’s side to create the woman. “Adam” here, a’dam in Hebrew, means “man” in the corporate sense of humanity as a whole. Literally, God takes a’dam’s side from him, He divides His human creation in half so that the two halves can come back together in a comprehensive and complementary union that gives life. It is the one flesh life-giving communion of husband and wife in the covenant of marriage that is the image of God.
Whenever any society rejects God from its public life, it leads to the society’s demise. We see this all throughout history, from antiquity to current times. We can think of the ancient people of Israel: despite the warnings of their prophets they continued to worship the false gods of their pagan neighbors because they envied their wealth and political and military might, and so they ended up with their kingdom destroyed, their capital city (Jerusalem) sacked and pillaged, and they themselves exiled to foreign countries. A more recent example is the Marxist regimes of the twentieth century: they embraced an explicitly atheistic ideology and they, too, eventually crumbled.
What we have to be aware of in our own country is that this marginalizing of God from public life is happening – yes, in some more explicit ways – but most alarmingly by the destruction of marriage. By wiping out the basic idea of marriage as the life-long and life-giving one-flesh communion of man and woman in a covenantal relationship, the image of God is wiped out from the face of the earth. What does it mean, though, to embrace this plan of God and live it out in the concrete circumstances of our lives? It is nothing less than living out St. Paul’s command to us in his Letter to the Romans: “offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God, your spiritual worship.”
When St. Paul speaks of “body” here, he is not referring simply to flesh and bone, but to the totality of our person. It is our body that incarnates, makes physically present, the totality of our person. Thus, in offering their bodies to each other in marriage, a couple offers the totality of their persons to each other. The Church even has a classic phrase that in recent times has been disparaged and practically dropped out of usage because of a misunderstanding of what it means: in marriage the man and woman give to each other the “right to the body” (ius in corpus). This does not mean merely the right to engage in the marital embrace, although certainly it includes that; rather, it means what that embrace signifies, which is the very point of marriage: the complete gift of self to the other, in a communion that is faithful, fruitful and permanent. In other words, like the love of God.
Servant and Friend
Is this not precisely what our Lord commands us in the excerpt from his address to his apostles the night before he died, which we just heard proclaimed from the Gospel of St. John: “This is my commandment: love one another as I love you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends”?
Our Lord goes on to tell them that he no longer calls them slaves (or servants), but friends, because he has told them everything he heard from his Father. In a certain sense, however, a friend still retains a characteristic of servanthood. After all, if you have a friend whom you really love, don’t you want to serve that person, to go out of your way to do kind things for that person, to make that person happy? Isn’t your greatest happiness to make your friend happy? Love prompts us to do nothing less. This most certainly, then, applies to our relationship with the Lord. After all, we call him “Lord,” which means we are his servants. And we speak about “serving the Lord.”
St. Paul speaks about the offering of our bodies as our “spiritual worship.” And what do we call the ritual by which we worship? A service! A worship service. We serve God by worshiping Him in church, worthily, reverently and with dignity, precisely so that we can worthily and reverently serve Him in every aspect of our lies beyond the walls of the church building – most especially in living our vocations faithfully and well.
Head and Heart
This applies to all of us, for we all live our vocations through our bodies: that is how we communicate and can come into relationships with others. It is demonstrated most especially, though, in the vocation of marriage. And this is one point in Erika’s speech where I would take a little bit different tack: married couples are, indeed, servants to each other, they live their lives in service to the other and to the children they bring into the world, laying down their lives for each other. (And I’m sure she would agree with me on this; she was clearly using the word “servant” in a different sense, more like “slave” or “subservient.”) They do so, though, in an equal and complementary way, the man exercising the role of Christian headship and the woman in fostering the communion of the family through her motherhood. Erika told the men to “love their wives.” “Husbands, love your wives”: this is precisely what St. Paul tells husbands in his Letter to the Ephesians (chapter 5). And he holds them to the highest possible standard: “love your wives as Christ loves the Church.”
That is the love to which Christ himself calls us: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” The husband is to lay down his life for his wife and his family, no longer living for himself and what he enjoys doing. This is because the man represents the Christ principle in the covenant: Christ is the bridegroom and head of his Body the Church, and he needs human agents to make present and work his loving plan for us. Only a man can be a bridegroom, and he exercises his headship in the family by this complete outpouring of himself so that others may have life in abundance.
The woman, on the other hand, represents the principle of the Church, for only a woman can be a bride. And a mother. The Church, too, is our mother, the Church gives birth to us, a birth to new and eternal life through the waters of baptism; and the Church continues to nourish us with the saving grace of the sacraments and with the teaching entrusted to her by her bridegroom. We might say, then, that the husband is the head of the family, and the woman is the heart: the two complement each other and serve as a check on the other – that is, if it’s all head or all heart, things will go off the rails! And without both in good functioning order, a body is dead!
Conclusion
Yes, living this plan of God is the recipe for a rightly-ordered and flourishing society, and the fix for so many social ills which we are facing in our time. But it is much more than that. It is the revelation of the life that God seeks with us: to be brought into that life-giving communion of His Trinitarian love, where we are refashioned perfectly into His image and likeness – His plan for us from the beginning. This has all been accomplished for us by God’s Son, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, the bridegroom and head of his Church.
How appropriate, then, that this very verse from St. Paul, Romans 12:1, is inscribed on the first step leading up to the sanctuary in this Cathedral, right at the foot of the altar: “offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God.” It is Christ who does that for us right here at the altar, renewing the sacrifice of his person, the gift of the totality of himself to us, so that we may communicate of his Body and Blood. May we serve as faithful members of that Body, each of us in accordance with our own vocation and station in life, and follow him all the way to the cross, and through the cross to the glory of heaven. To him be all praise and glory, now and ever and forever. Amen.
