That's because I don't have a desire to promote bad theology.
Most of we Christians have allowed our culture to set the terms of this discussion. And I've been refusing to participate in the dialogue precisely for that reason. But too many folks have been demanding that I'm missing a pastoral opportunity by that refusal. So let me lay out my problems here, in hopes that we Christians can recast the way we talk about our practices, like marriage, on more positive footing, rather than simply reacting to the terms already created by our culture.
In his memoir Denial: My Twenty-Five Years Without a Soul,
the gay journalist Jonathan Rauch says that there once existed a
frightened young man tortured with the certainty that there was no place
in the world for the love he experienced. That man was Rauch, and there
was no home for him -- none, that is, until he and his fellow Americans
decided he had the right to marry. "They and he have found, at last, a
name for his soul. It is not monster or eunuch. Nor indeed homosexual. It is: husband".
When I read Rauch's book, that last sentence left a lump in my throat. That receiving the word husband
felt to Rauch like the relief of a negative biopsy -- "You're not sick or
twisted or crazy; you're just hindered from giving and receiving love,
and now the hindrance is removed" -- goes a long way toward explaining the
jubilation so many gay and lesbian people feel in the wake of the Obergefell v. Hodges SCOTUS ruling. Finally, their loves may be dignified not with the anemic moniker friend or partner or the clinical epithet disordered or the disdainful slur pervert but rather with the venerable, ordinary, immediately recognizable words husband or wife.
The problem here, though, is that our society is promoting a rather fickle understanding of what marriage and love are. CS Lewis rightly insisted that romantic love isn't strong enough to sustain a marriage relationship over time -- and he's right!
But here's the thing: We Christians are just as guilty, because we've promoted some thin notion of romance and relationships and sexuality that has a vaneer of religion without the depth of theological thinking about these things.
But here's the thing: We Christians are just as guilty, because we've promoted some thin notion of romance and relationships and sexuality that has a vaneer of religion without the depth of theological thinking about these things.
I'm not gay, but I watched all the enthusiasm yesterday and I got it. I understood. So many of my gay friends have known so much shame and loneliness that embracing same-sex marriage makes sense.
The problem here is that we've baptized Freud in a way most of us don't realize. If sex is the highest expression of who you are, then relationships defined by sex are the penultimate expression of our acceptance, a denial of the loneliness that is at the heart of the modern angst. Thing is, we Christians have never believed that sexuality or sex or marriage are the way out of loneliness. The answer to loneliness is not marriage, but rather the new-creation
community that God is calling into being in Christ, the Church marked by
mutual love, as it is led by the Spirit of Christ. With the incarnation, a world that seemed doomed to lovelessness is now loved by God (John 3.16).
What we Christians should do, then, is recapture a sense of the Church as that society of friends with God and others. That's our positive response. All this negative chatter I've seen -- that it's the end of the world, that God will now punish America -- isn't Christian, no matter what thin justification one might find in the New Testament. I'll have none of it.
My heart grieves today, but not because the Supreme Court made a legal decision about the nature of a social and legal institution in the United States. My heart grieves because the Church has missed, yet again, another opportunity to proclaim the Gospel.
Because of the Gospel -- even though I accept Justice Kennedy's legal argument of "marriage equality" -- I reject Justice Kennedy's conclusion about where we humans can find the end of our loneliness. The Gospel proclaims that marriage is transitory (Matthew 22.30), that
celibacy is an honorable good drawing us into relationship with others
(1 Corinthians 7.38), and that sacrificial love is open to anyone,
regardless of marital status (Galatians 3.28). According to the Gospel, I don't think our primary identity is as husband or wife but instead baptism is the name offered freely to any one of us -- regardless of gender or sexual orientation.
That is the Good News the Church is given to proclaim.
And we're missing this opportunity precisely because we're accepting the legal and social terms of our culture while neglecting that proclamation.