Christian Friends

A meditation on Marriage Equality

A Meditation on Marriage Equality

Barb and I have been married since 1974. We met in 1970 during training for Peace Corps service, and we were assigned to different cities in Morocco. When I traveled to Meknes to visit her, I met Bert, who had completed his two years as a volunteer English teacher but chose to stay in country another year. Bert knew Arabic well, he knew how to bargain in the markets, and he introduced new volunteers to many aspects of the city and culture. Bert lived in a rooftop apartment in the old city, a small space that has always been my image of the Upper Room in Jerusalem. Bert became a friend.

Bert was a Catholic from Kansas, and he came to our Methodist wedding in Minnesota. We talked him into playing recorder at the wedding, along with another friend who played guitar. They played the old Shaker tune Simple Gifts (‘Tis a gift to be simple, ‘tis a gift to be free, ‘tis a gift to come down where you ought to be … ). A year later we were living in Salt Lake City. Bert had a summer internship there, so he lived in our spare room for a month. A few years later, we visited him in Seattle, where he took us to an evening service at the Cathedral. After Seattle, he worked a couple of years as a caretaker at a Catholic retreat center in central Washington. Later, we lost contact.

Bert was the first person I knew to be homosexual, and he was simultaneously the first homosexual Christian I knew. I have met many others since. Like most Christians I know, they hear the call of God somewhat imperfectly and respond somewhat imperfectly, but keep trying to hear and respond ever better, to become more like Jesus.

Our opportunity and our commission as parts of the universal Church is to welcome all those whom God has called. God meets us where we are and loves us as if we were where we should be. Can we do any less? Loving evangelism among homosexuals could bring a rich harvest. Proposition 8, however, pushes that community away from the church by emphasizing that They are not part of Us.

Good Questions
I am immersed in the Methodist approach to understanding God through Scripture, Tradition, Reason, and Experience. I am employed in a science agency of the federal government. My job is to help working scientists ask good questions, gather good data, and tell true stories about environmental water quality in the West. I worship God with a rather intellectual approach, while other faithful Christians come to God on different paths. Despite differences, I found the people and Spirit of God in every church I ever attended. We are one body in Christ.

More than 50 years ago, my childhood pastor explained the difference between science and religion in a sermon based on Genesis 1‐2. “In the beginning, God created …” answers a “Who?” question, he said. Rearranging those three letters to “How?” makes it a different question. Science and religion provide internally consistent ways to explore different aspects of reality. The essential question of science is “How does the world work?” Religion asks, “What should we do about it?” Science merely provides the context for the important issues of free will and our duty to God. “What does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with our God” (Micah 6:8).
We can get good answers—those that move us closer to truth and closer to God—only if we ask good questions. If we try to answer a religious question using scientific methods, we will almost certainly get a bad answer. Similarly, if we try to answer a science question using religious methods, we also will get a bad answer. As Thomas Pynchon, a 20th‐century cynic said, “If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.”

In my faith and in my work, I am searching for truth, the solid rock on which to build my house, my faith, and my life. Jesus said, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free” (John 8:32). Moses ben Maimon, the great Jewish thinker of the late 1100’s, said, “You must accept the truth from whatever source it comes.” I know more of God’s truth today than I did as a child or as a young man who sometimes strayed. My path back toward God started with small certainties, small pieces of truth that I could be sure of and use as the foundation for more.

Families
My elder brother worked as a hospital orderly for two years as an alternative service during the Viet Nam War. He was only the second person in my home town recognized by the draft board as a conscientious objector to war, and both were raised in one church. My younger brother was the most religious of us as a child. In 1968, he had completed two years at Illinois Wesleyan University when he decided not to continue for the fall term. With the draft looming, the Methodist bishop appointed him as lay pastor of two small, unserved rural churches in central Illinois.

Beginning a few weeks before he turned 20, he invested 2 years in pastoral care. Later, he completed his undergraduate education and one year in seminary. My elder brother, sister, and I had black hair, while my younger brother’s hair was
light brown. As children we teased, at once cruel and innocent, that he was the milkman’s son—not one of Us. He returned our attitude and by my teens, I hated him. In the fall of 1969, I had completed four years of college but, having changed schools and majors, I still had a year to go and an expired student deferment. I could not in honesty apply for conscientious objector status because I truly could imagine becoming angry enough at my brother to kill him. Ultimately, a history of substantial allergies made me medically unfit for military service and also nearly prevented me from serving in the Peace Corps. The distance between our residences in later years cooled my anger, but the tensions of an all‐family vacation at my parents’ 50th anniversary rekindled many old hurts, and fresh hurtful words spilled out. We were totally estranged for several years, but I clung to one solid truth. Biology and the milkman do not matter. This is my brother. He is part of me.

My parents organized the northern Illinois chapter of PFLAG—Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. They wept with other parents who could not understand what they had done wrong when they learned a child was not heterosexual. They wept with young people whose parents rejected them. They marched in gay pride parades in the 1970’s and visited young men dying of AIDS in the 1980’s. They told me of a woman who was in love with another woman, living together in unmarried faithful commitment. When the second woman became seriously ill, her parents were the legal next of kin and refused to allow any contact from the partner, either at the hospital or ultimately at the funeral. My parents helped console the young widow.

Their experience decades ago was the same as reported recently in Pediatrics (vol.123, no.1, January 2009, C. Ryan and others, Family rejection as a predictor of negative health outcomes …). Homosexual young adults whose families rejected them as teens are 8 times more likely to attempt suicide, compared to those from more accepting families. My parents spent 25 years trying to convince their church to welcome homosexual Christians, without success. My father began attending that church at age 12 in 1928, and my mother began in 1937. He died on All Saints Day in 2005, and the first time issues of sexual orientation were mentioned in a positive way from their church pulpit was at his funeral. My brothers are not Christians today in part because so many churches tell homosexuals that They are not part of Us.

Scripture
My pastor in Arizona often said we should read Scripture in large chunks, that over‐analysis of a single verse or word can easily mislead. The major themes of Scripture were familiar to me from thousands of lectionary readings and sermons long before I studied the Bible in depth. God calls every human being. God keeps on calling, even when we stray. God loves us and wants us to love in return. God knows Who we are, not merely What. The greatest commandment is to love God with all our heart and mind and soul and strength, and the second is to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. These major themes are true beyond any sexual orientation.
All Scripture is true and unchanging, but human understanding does change. My father’s sister heard God’s call to ministry in the 1920s, but the Methodist Church at that time read Scripture in a tradition that forbids ordination to women. She went to seminary with the Salvation Army instead and served God through that church for her whole life. Today, many Methodist clergy are women.
I am not God, so if I see apparent contradictions within Scripture, that merely confirms again that my human understanding is incomplete, and I need to study and pray more. Just as God continues to call me, I continue to have fresh opportunities to understand the application of Scripture to my present, changing reality.

For at least 150 years, most churches have read Scripture in a tradition that declares all homosexual acts are sinful. Many people conclude that all homosexuals choose to reject God, although why anyone would choose to suffer the widespread public hostility that homosexuality brings is beyond me. I presently understand two themes in the Bible that are relevant to this issue. First, abusive sexual relations are sinful. Second, we are called to worship only God, and God is not confined in one sex.

Scripture offers many examples that abusive sex is wrong. Think of David and Uriah’s wife (2 Samuel 11‐12), the threatened rapes at Lot’s door in Sodom (Genesis 19), the many Torah rules banning incest (for example, Leviticus 18:6‐18), or the protections for slave women (Exodus 21:7‐10). All Christians agree that abusive sex is wrong, but none of these cases involve two adults who love each other and freely commit to a shared life.

The second and greater theme is “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One” (Deuteronomy 6:4) and “You shall have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3). The Hebrews were surrounded by people who worshipped multiple gods and understood their gods as sexual beings. Museums are full of ancient sculptures—images of those gods— with enlarged breasts, hips, or penises. Remember the household gods that Rebecca stole from her father Laban when she and Isaac left Haran (Genesis 31). Sexual or fertility gods sometimes were worshipped through certain acts we would call prostitution. For example, Judah thought his daughter‐in‐law Tamar was a religious prostitute when she waited for him by the road (Genesis 38). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_prostitution for additional context. The Hebrews were warned repeatedly against many actions, including some sexual behaviors, that represented worship of other gods in the culture of that time. The ban on men lying with men at Leviticus 18:22 is part of this theme. If we worship the wrong gods, it shows in our actions. But the logic doesn’t always flow the other way.

Although apples and stop signs are both red, the fact that a stop sign is red doesn’t make it an apple. Similarly, the fact that worship of other gods 2,500 years ago was reflected in heterosexual and perhaps homosexual religious prostitution does not mean that all homosexual acts today are worship of other gods. Our society is drenched in sex worship, but almost all of it is heterosexual. Christians who are homosexual have chosen Christ to guide their lives.

We Are One In Christ
An equally compelling theme of Scripture is the unity of Christ’s church in its wonderful diversity. Paul repeatedly compared the many members of the human body to the unity of the church, most extensively in 1 Corinthians 12. “The eye cannot say to the hand ‘I have no need of you.’ ” That sentence was always a simple, unemotional truth to me, merely a milepost on the way to the greater idea that we as the church are the body of Christ. But when I saw the anguish the passage of Proposition 8 caused to people I know as committed Christians, I heard those words anew. Listen with your mind’s ear. Proposition 8 said, “We have no need of You, for You are not part of Us.” It was loud and clear and hateful.
And yet Paul wrote “In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, man nor woman” (Galatians 3:28). Those three pairs describe the most important Us versus Them divisions in the early church. The entire book of Romans declares those divisions insignificant once Christ has come. Does Romans 1:24‐27 really declare that homosexuality is the one Us versus Them that is more important than unity in Christ? My present tentative understanding of the passage is that opinions about homosexual behavior were a recognized difference between Jewish and Gentile Christians, but not one important enough to divide the church. It was a safe way to start the discussion of unity in Christ. Verse 26, the only one in Scripture that might seem to ban lesbian behavior, is a footnote—not a theme. (A large majority of the homosexual marriages in California in 2008 were between lesbians.)

Evangelism
The opportunity before us is to recognize how many homosexuals hear God’s call on their lives. Many were raised in Christian homes but were gradually or abruptly pushed out of the church as they discovered their sexual orientation. (Did you choose your own sexuality, or discover it?) Although their ears are sensitive to our Master’s voice, they could only attend church by staying in the closet or as token, identified Homosexuals. They could not walk very far in the Way because they could not explore the truth of their lives with other Christians. In my church, however, I have repeatedly heard homosexual Christians describe the joy they find in being unlabelled—just simple Christians sharing the journey with others. All we did was to remove roadblocks, and God has blessed us with a wave of people who want to be like Jesus. I have heard them pray and praise and witness and serve with at least as much passion for truth and the Spirit as any others.
During the era of colonialism, missionaries from Europe and the United States evangelized Africa and other parts of the world that did not know Christ. They provided education and health care, and they made converts. In most countries, however, the great growth of the church arrived only after Christians born and raised there, speaking the local language as their own, heard God’s call to ministry and became church leaders. God’s time has arrived for Africa.

God’s time also will arrive for homosexuals, and it could be near. Many individual churches and a few denominations explicitly welcome homosexuals who seek Christ, and organizations associated with all major denominations advocate for broader inclusion. Many homosexuals would be open to evangelism, but most churches and denominations push them away. Although I know two homosexual pastors who lead lively churches, a large harvest is waiting and there are few workers. If we make all seekers welcome in our churches, God will raise up from them more leaders who can tell Christ’s story in ways that homosexuals can hear.

Marriage
Paul recommends marriage only for those who cannot wait in celibacy until Christ comes again (1 Corinthians 7). In heterosexual marriages, the couple learns each other’s weaknesses but commit to love anyway. What an example of God’s love for us! While we were yet sinners… Marriage allows heterosexuals to experience the flavor of God’s family and grow as part of it. Marriage between homosexuals offers the same opportunity. If we who are heterosexual aren’t strong enough to be celibate, why should We insist that They live to that higher standard? Scripture calls us to put no unnecessary burden on our neighbors when they seek Christ (Romans 14:13). Refusing to tolerate marriage among all adult couples who are ready to make that commitment is an unnecessary burden on our neighbors.

As a pastor, you face several issues when a couple comes seeking marriage. Are they mature enough to take this step? Will the preparations and counseling help them grow as Christians and build a foundation for a Christian family? Will their public commitment before God and the church help strengthen them when times later become hard? Or do they only want pageantry, deaf to God’s Spirit? These questions apply for young couples, elders who remarry after a spouse dies, those who wish to marry after divorce. These questions—Who is this couple?— are far more important than What they are.

Some people object that homosexuality must be evil because even thinking about sexual activity between two men or two women is disgusting. That may be true for some, but a similar reaction is more widespread in thinking about sexual activity by our parents or our children. Yes, we know our parents had sex and our children have or will have had sex and homosexuals have sex, but to focus on the details of any of those acts is essentially pornographic. It’s not the activity, but rather the question “Can you imagine…?” that is inconsistent with a God‐focused life. Private sex acts between adults who love each other are simply not anyone else’s business. Asking about those acts does not draw us nearer to God. Any answer to the question is a bad answer, because it started with a bad question.

God Welcomed Me
In the end, then, I voted against Proposition 8 because it interferes with our charge to make disciples of all people. Like the father who ran to welcome his son as soon as the prodigal came into sight, God welcomed me as soon as I turned, tentatively, away from sin. God didn’t require that I be perfect at that moment. In the same way, I must welcome all those God has called into the Christian family, for They truly are part of Us. The question of marriage between any of our brothers and sisters who are willing to make that commitment is much less important. Beyond the Church, this secular political drama will continue. When the next stage arrives, I pray that these ideas will provide a useful perspective as you study and pray and respond as God calls you.