Steadfast Love

Wedding Homily for Jelly Jiang and Young Qiu

Rom. 8:38-39; Ps. 57:7-10; Mt. 26:26-30

St. Aidan’s, San Francisco, July 25, 2026

The Rev’d Cameron Partridge

https://vimeo.com/1213734170?fl=pl&fe=sh

Dear friends: loved ones of Jelly and Young, people of St. Aidan’s: it is such a joy to be with you all today to celebrate the marriage of Young Qiu and Jelly Jiang. For those of you I have not yet met, I am Cameron Partridge and I am the rector of St. Aidan’s. Thanks to my colleague Don Fox who connected with Young at a community event several years ago, Young started coming to St. Aidan’s and became a part of this congregation. It was my honor to baptize him on the Feast of Pentecost in 2024, a little over two years ago. Meanwhile, along the way we got to meet Young’s beloved Jelly Jiang. Sometimes she would join us from China via Zoom. It has always been a joy to see her in person when she is in town. About a year ago we did a special blessing for Jelly and Young as they prepared for Jelly’s move to Colorado after she was accepted into a Master’s program in Music Therapy.

One of the joys of being a priest is supporting couples as they prepare for marriage. Usually, a couple lets me know that they have become engaged and ask if I am able to officiate their wedding – sometimes, as in this case, in collaboration with a colleague. I have a series of pastoral conversations with the couple both to plan their wedding and to prepare for their new life together. What I wish were much more common is what Young and Jelly asked me to do: to shape that series of conversations in a spirit of discernment. Rather than coming to me and saying, hooray, we’re engaged! they said basically, hooray! we are discerning whether God is calling us to marriage! Can you help us create sacred space to hear God’s call to us on this question?  All too often the wider world thinks that the idea of “calling” or “discernment” is somehow reserved for people considering religious life (joining a monastic community) or ordained life (becoming a deacon, priest, or bishop). But that understanding is much too narrow. God calls us not only into professions but into relationships, into wider patterns of life as human beings who are placed on this earth to follow Christ in ways that are unique to each of us and connected to all of us. Marriage is a vowed way of life – it is a vocation, and indeed a sacramental covenant – into which we can be called. Given that, why not intentionally discern it! Why not invite the Holy Spirit to make her presence known, to seek the prompting of that Spirit in the leading of love? This is what Jelly and Young have done together in preparation for this day. It was a privilege to be part of that conversation with them.

As you know, because we are here today, they discerned that they are in fact called to marriage. Hooray! They put together this service in a way that shares with us their love and their sense of God’s call in their lives. They have not only invited us to this worship service and to the luncheon afterward, but more deeply into their lives as they respond to God’s call. You might have noticed that music plays a significant part in this worship service – in the instrumental pieces played by Mina-Marie Jelinek and led by her together with our choir. This aspect of today’s service reflects how crucial music is key to Jelly and Young’s married vocation. This dimension influenced their choice of the particular gospel passage we heard (Matthew 26:26-30). (It is unusual enough that I will be surprised if I encounter it at another wedding!) The scene is the Gospel of Matthew’s version of the last supper the night before Jesus was arrested and would ultimately die at the hands of imperial Roman forces. He was gathered for the Passover meal with his followers, dear friends who were deeply devoted to Jesus and scared to lose him. Amid all their uncertainty and fear, they shared this sacred meal. Jesus broke, blessed, and shared bread and wine with them as an expression of his own bodily presence. No matter what else would happen, even as he understood and expressed that he would be separated from them, he also affirmed that on the other side of what was to come, they would once again share in that nourishment in the divine kingdom. As the Apostle Paul wrote in his letter to the community of Jesus followers in Rome – our first reading – nothing would finally be able to separate them from that sharing in God’s love (Romans 8:38-39).

After Jesus had said these things and had shared the bread and wine, they sang. You might be thinking, what? They sang? I thought the text said they went to the Mount of Olives. And yes, they did. But first, they sang. They sang the hymn – a particular hymn, likely what is known as the “Hallel,” a set of Psalms of praise associated with the word “Hallelujah” and sung during the Passover. This hymn likely concluded the meal, declaring, “God’s steadfast love endures forever” (Psalm 118:29).^[1] Their time together was an offering of steadfast love, musically framed. In the particular Psalm we shared this morning, music overflows from that steadfast love, intoning, “I will sing and make melody.” And then, in song, the Psalm continues, “Awake, my soul! Awake, O harp and lyre! I will awake the dawn” (Psalm 57:7-8). Music suffuses the response of the Psalmist to the call of God, and this morning we are invited to share in it. Young and Jelly have amplified that invitation. It is a call to join not only in support of their marriage, but in the breadth and length, the height and depth of the steadfast love that is the heart of God’s call to us all.

Thank you, Jelly and Young, for your steadfast love for one another and for the God who calls you now into a new life chapter. Thank you for sharing that call with us. Thank you for wrapping us all in love and nourishment, in song and in joy.

^[1] Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, The Jewish Annotated New Testament (London: Oxford University Press, Second Edition, 2017), 60, 48. Walter Brueggemann, William H. Bellinger, Jr., Psalms (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 507-509.