This pastoral passage was written for 27th June 2025
On Sunday Keith and I celebrate our New Zealand wedding anniversary. This was a celebration with all our family and friends who could not come to our wedding in Yangon 6 months earlier. It had most of the elements of a traditional Kiwi wedding.
Our wedding in Myanmar was quite different. In my Mizo culture as with many cultures in Asia, the Middle East and Africa there is a dowry. When Keith first heard about this, he was a little apprehensive. He had grown up in Asia where the bride’s family often went into huge debt paying the groom’s family so that their daughter could be married.
But in my Mizo culture it is the other way round. A few days before our wedding in Yangon we had the dowry ceremony where many of my relatives and Wendy and the de Jongs crowded into my small apartment in Yangon. During this ceremony, Keith paid the “bride price” or dowry to my mother. It was a significant amount which showed that he really valued me, and it gave me dignity. But instead of keeping the money, my mother divided it up and put it into lots of different envelopes and distributed it amongst my family who were present and also sent it to all the other close relatives in Myanmar and India.
By the time it was divided, each family only received a relatively small amount, but that didn’t matter. It showed that the groom was able to provide, and it cemented a covenant relationship not just between Keith and I but also between our two families.
2 years later when we visited our close relatives in a remote part of Myanmar (many who I had never met) we were welcomed with open arms. They had a feast for us, and Keith was given a new Mizo name – Zo Hmangaiha (the one who loves a Mizo lady).
In Scripture, there is a lot of imagery of Christ as the bridegroom and we the church are his bride. The bride price that Keith paid, while significant is nothing compared to the price Christ paid. For Christ, it cost everything, coming to earth as a humble servant and dying an isolated and humiliating death, he paid the ultimate price. It shows how much he values us. He has taken our sin and given us dignity. We are precious in his sight. In doing this, he restored the covenant relationship that he established with Abraham so long ago. Not only has our broken relationship with God been restored, but we also have a new family – the church, where we are welcomed with open arms.
I love the verses in Revelation 21:2–3
I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God.