Holy Baptism is the sacrament by which one becomes a Christian, a member of the Body Christ, a partner with Christ in the world, and an inheritor of the Kingdom of God. It is the primary sacrament of initiation into the Christian Church.
The marriage of two people is a holy union. It begins with your desire to form a lasting, lifelong partnership with another person in God’s love, and continues throughout your lives as an unfolding process of intentional living and growing together. In a marriage, each of you as an individual and together as a couple, gradually transform and mature in God’s presence and image. A wedding, then, is a sacred ritual that acknowledges and celebrates your desire to enter a lifelong relationship.
The liturgy for the dead is an Easter liturgy. It finds all its meaning in the resurrection. Because Jesus was raised from the dead, we, too, shall be raised. The liturgy, therefore, is characterized by joy, in the certainty that “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8) This joy, however, does not make human grief un-Christian. The very love we have for each other in Christ brings deep sorrow when we are parted by death. Jesus himself wept at the grave of his friend. So, while we rejoice that the one we love has entered into the nearer presence of our Lord, we join in sorrow and sympathy with those who mourn.