The Little Friar

1.  Apples and Oranges Similar to the Copernican Revolution, when we came to recognize that the earth revolves around the sun, humanity has only just come to recognize sexual orientation as a durable and intrinsic feature of human sexuality.  That is, sexual orientation is not a choice and it's not amenable to change. Consequently, when the biblical authors, in both the Old and New Testaments, observed sexual activity they could only explain what they were seeing through the only lens they had, that of disordered and excessive sexual desire.  That was the only reasonable explanation, in the eyes of the biblical writers, for why men would desire sex with men.  Or women with women.  What was being condemned in the Bible was this excessive and disordered sexual desire, desires deemed, given the science of the time, as being "contrary to nature". We're in a very different situation today with our modern understanding of sexual orientation.  When a teenage ...

For some reason, my wife's going to the next Luke Bryan concert if a couple of weeks seems to be a growing issue with some folks. Namely, they can't understand why I don't mind her going with an ex-boyfriend, among a group of other friends.  In fact, I think it's a good idea.  So they voice their concern about such things.  (Why am I not going?  Well, as an Autistic man, going to a concert would be a physically painful thing.  I'll go, but only when none of her friends can go.) I really don't mind she's going with friends.  In fact, I encourage her to go precisely because I love her.  "Love", to quote St Paul , "believes the best".  This kind of love isn't -- as some may believe me in this situation -- a kind of foolish gullibility.  This kind of love also isn't the sort that hedges its bets by guarding against the possibility of being taken advantage of.  I love her in a way that "believes all the best", so susp...

Kendra and I have known one another for nearly ten years.  Of that time, we've been married nearly two years.  We've had challenging moments to our relationship -- as does any relationship (and especially one that has someone who is on the Autism spectrum) -- but I've learned more about myself in the process.  And so has Kendra.  I suppose these eight reasons are really more an ode to the respect and understanding, care and commitment, that make our love possible than it is an ode to her.  That said, the eight reasons being married to my wife rocks: 1.  She knows my moods better than I do. As an autistic man, trust me when I say, sometimes I'm clueless about how others feel -- even myself.  But Kendra can detect my moods from a mile away.  And she seems to know exactly what I need.  Whether it's a hug or a few minutes of quiet away from the loud crowd -- I take comfort knowing that Kendra is the one person I trust enough to care for me...

I've resisted saying anything about what I think about yesterday's decision from the Supreme Court about gay marriage. 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 hi...

I've been rereading Alexander Schmemann's classic For the Life of the World today, one of the best books on sacramental theology I've ever read. I came across this quote this afternoon: A marriage which does not constantly crucify its own selfishness and self-sufficiency, which does not "die to itself" that it may point beyond itself, is not a Christian marriage. The real sin of marriage today is not adultery or lack of "adjustment" or "mental cruelty." It is the idolization of the family itself, the refusal to understand marriage as directed toward the Kingdom of God. This is expressed in the sentiment that one would "do anything" for his family, even steal. The family has here ceased to be for the glory of God; it has ceased to be a sacramental entrance into his presence. It is not the lack of respect for the family, it is the idolization of the family that breaks the modern family so easily, making divorce its almost na...

I have a confession to make.  I read Fifty Shades of Grey when it was released.  I did so precisely because it was so popular.  I've read my share of trashy novels, but the luster of hot literary lust lost its appeal as I grew older.  I read it only because the female friends I have were reading it and talking about it.  I found I was able to participate in conversations about redemptive sex precisely because I'd taken the novel seriously. That said, I thought the novel was horrible.  It was so poorly written, with little literary variety and value.  Its imagery was cold, the writing was poor and the plot was predictable.  Aware as I was of so many other books -- remember, I've read my share of trashy novels -- I just couldn't bring myself to read the second or third books in the series.  But I have read the first book. And I'm still not going to see the movie -- precisely because I know what's in the book. I've never really said any...

Several conversations, of late, have circled around what I think about Christian marriage -- particularly in relation to divorce.  In order to know what what's dying, I maintain, you have to know what's been living.  Sadly, this just simply isn't true for lots of Christians.  Having inherited some really sloppy philosophical commitments from Medieval Aristotelianism, we have a bad ontology of love and marriage.  But I don't intend to wax academic here.  Instead, I want to offer a reflection on what Christian marriage actually is. That said, this is a fine place to offer an article I submitted earlier this week for a publication. Let me know what you think. I've placed the article beneath the break.

Johann Christoph Arnold's Sex, God & Marriage is a beautiful book, filled with pastoral wisdom for the Church.  As a pastor, I regularly search for those texts that might be used in marriage counseling with couples, in pre-martial counseling, and with teens and pre-teens in the Church.  Sex, God & Marriage meets all those needs, and more. In a world dominated by broken relationships and loneliness, Arnold offers a biblical vision of community, of wholeness, of sexuality, and of marriage.  He provides pastoral insight into biblical traditions of purity and vulnerability.  And his wisdom addresses so many questions -- from sexual temptation to homosexuality, from how to answer the question of whether or not to marry to parenting, from divorce to remarriage. He also has a pastoral wisdom about sensitive issues that often go unaddressed in other texts that I've used in the past -- particularly things like the perverseness of sex even within a marriage....

I've been thinking about this for a long time recently.  Because, to be honest, so few of we pastors ever deal with the real tragedies to our selves and our relationships (and even our marriages) that pornography creates.   So, let me go on the record and be clear:   Porn is bad .   I say this not because I'm a prude or a kill-joy.  I say this because the research backs me up, my counseling experience confirms the research, and I've seen too many wives ask me with tears in their eyes, "Why does he watch this, when I'm just in the next room?  Does this mean he'll be cheating on me now?" This post is my attempt to set out, once and for all, why we Christians don't watch porn.  And some book resources to work toward healing.   What is porn , first? The Greek word  porneia  (πορνεία) means "sexual immorality".  It's the word from which we get our concept of  porn.   Pornography is the depiction of "sexual immorality".  Im...

I've been thinking again lately of Bonhoeffer's "Wedding Semon" written for his friend, Eberhard Bethge, and preserved in his Letters and Papers from Prison .  In it, Bonhoeffer observes at one point: " Marriage is more than your love for each other.  It has a higher dignity and power, for it is God's holy ordinance, through which He wills to perpetuate the human race till the end of time.  In your love you see only your two selves in the world, but in marriage you are a link in the chain of the generations, which God causes to come and to pass away to His glory, and calls into His kingdom.  In your love, you see only the heaven of your own happiness, but in marriage you are placed at a post of responsability towards the world and mankind.  Your love is your own private possession, but marriage is more than something personal -- it is a status, an office.  Just as it is the crown, and not merely the will to rule, that makes the king, so it is marriage, and ...

" God makes your marriage indissoluble. 'What therefore God has joined together, let no man put asunder' (Matthew 19.6).  God joins you together in marriage; it is His act, not yours.  Do not confound your love for one another with God.  God makes your marriage indissoluble, and protects it from every danger that may threaten it from within and without; He wills to be the guarantor of its indissolubility.  It is a blessed thing to know that no power on earth, no temptation, no human frailty can dissolve what God holds together; indeed, anyone who knows that may say confidently:  What God has joined together, can no man put asunder.  Free from all anxiety that is always a characteristic of love, you can now say to each other with complete and confident assurance:  We can never lose each other now; by the will of God we belong to each other till death" -- Bonhoeffer, "Wedding Sermon", Letters and Papers from Prison

For some years, I've slowly been getting out of the marriage business. I'm bound by church law -- and by conscience, if I'm completely honest -- to have "due counsel" with both parties of a couple.  And I've found, over those years, that most folks only want that counsel when there's a financial incentive:  My home state (Tennessee) offers a discount on the price of the license if you go through with only a minimum (which is to say modicum ) of counseling.  But the older I get, the more determined I become:  I'd like to see the church stop its custom of benignly validating the institution of marriage .  The investment of marriage with a pseudo-religious quality has long diminished the witness of the Church:  The state authorizes a legal union, and then calls upon the Church to bless this union with a thin veneer of religiosity.  Here, as elsewhere, the Church proves itself to be the state's faithful servant:  "Sure, we'll vali...

One of the pastoral tasks I'm called upon to perform on behalf of the Church, with a certain degree of regularity, are weddings.  And, inevitably, since I'm a minister, that means preaching  at weddings.  That act leaves open a question:  What to say? Here are a few notes for a "general" sermon on marriage.  1.  Why  get married in a church when you can do it at a fashionable hotel, an atmospheric castle, or a sunny beach abroad? 2.  Because the rumor of "God" persists, even in our post-Christian culture.   While celebrity is now regarded as a career option, wealth a vocation, and cosmetic surgery the fountain of youth, nevertheless, in the wake of this ubiquitous cultural banality, some silly people will go on asking, "Is that it?" -- and sense that no, it isn't, sense that there's something more, often because in times of great joy or deep trauma -- at the birth of a child (or grandchild) perhaps, so outrageously loved, or after a dreadfu...

I was asked recently to participate in a panel discussion on homosexuality.  So in an effort to put together some thoughts, here are a few scribbles that form the beginnings of notes for that presentation.  1.  To talk about "homosexuality", we first need to get "sexuality" right.   A.  Galatians 3.28:   Baptism , not gender (and certainly not genitalia), is the starting point for reflecting on sexuality.  Our identity "in Christ" comes first.  B.   Sin -- no matter of what variety -- is only experienced as tragedy  before grace.  Grace precedes judgment; grace precedes sin (Romans 5.1-11).  As baptism cleanses us from sin, we -- all of us , all  of us -- are transformed from isolation and loneliness to friends with God and with one another (Romans 5.12-21, 6.1-11; cf Jn 15.15). C.  Intimacy and friendship lie at our core.  Sexuality, for Christians, is an expression of that friendship with God and one another (...

Several years ago, I wrote an article on the theology of marriage, sex and family (it can be found via a tabbed link on the blog front page).  A friend asked me to revisit those 9.5 theses and articulate them in the way I'd formulate them now.   I've been thinking and writing about the theology of marriage and sex for so long, that obviously my ideas should blossom and grow.  This is an accounting of any growth.  1.   Marriage is Christological before it is "natural" .  Marriage, Edward Schillebeeckx writes, is "reality secular by origin"; yet, as he continues, it "has acquired a deeper  meaning in the order of salvation in which we live".  Because creation is in and for Christ, and because the apocalyptic shockwaves of the resurrection of Christ radiate both backwards and forwards, marriage must finally be understood Christologically.  Although Jesus relativised marriage (e.g. Luke 18.29/Matthew 19.12), and although in the consummation there...