Tis Also a Gay Thing, Love!
(Rutgers,
September 5th, 1999; 23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A)
Leviticus 18:19–23 (OT, p. 116; non-lectionary);
Romans 13:8–10 (NT, p. 169)
Our
First Lesson, from Leviticus, is a section from the law codes
of Ancient Israel, dating back more than 2500 years.
ends with the words: "Love is
the fulfilling of the law."
This
juxtaposition of texts on law and love triggered in my mind
these past few days a number of connections to contemporary issues
in the church and led me to search through the writings of
various theologians for greater understanding.
Several
weeks ago the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America
made headlines when at its national meeting in Denver
it voted 69% to 29% (with 2% abstaining)
to establish full communion with the Episcopal Church,
that is, to share fully with Episcopalians in celebrating
the sacrament of the Lord's Supper
and in utilizing the ministries of each other's clergy.
Some
reporters were surprised that so many as 29% of the delegates
voted against such an "altogether nice thing"
as sharing clergy and communion with Episcopalians,
but for those who voted against it the main issue was this:
the new agreement between the denominations requires
that Lutherans move toward giving their bishops
far more power than they now have,
becoming more like the Episcopal Church
in issues of authority within the church.
Following
the vote, a number of journalists interviewed
Professor Martin Marty, a Lutheran and also one of the foremost
historians of Protestant Christianity in America.
They asked Marty to comment on the long, heated debate
that had taken place among his fellow Lutherans
before the final vote was taken.
Marty
replied something like this, as it was recounted to me:
These days, there're only two topics that stir up fiery debate
among mainline Protestants.
One of the two was the subject of today's debate, authority—
who is it in the church that has the final say
on matters of theology, governance, and money.
The other one's an even hotter topic, sex—
who can have it, and with whom, and when.
Thank goodness we didn't get into that one today!
Well,
the hot topic Martin Marty was glad his fellow Lutherans
didn't get into a couple of weeks ago in Denver is pretty much
the one I'm going to get into with you here at Rutgers today—
for my topic is "Sex and Love," + specifically "Gay Sex +
Love,"
a topic that has been embroiling us Presbyterians
for over two decades now—
and it's been my fate and fortune to live through
the heat of each and every one of those 24 years.
Rutgers
is a More Light Presbyterian Church,
which means, for those of you who are visitors among us,
that our congregation welcomes gay men and lesbian women
both as members of our church and as ordained leaders of it
and that we celebrate as a Christian ceremony
services of holy union for gay or lesbian couples.
Because
the views of More Light churches are so controversial
within the Presbyterian denomination
and because they are the subject of such heated debate
year after year at our denomination's national meetings,
I believe it essential for me to address from the pulpit
at least once a year the theological reasons for our stance.
Many
in our denomination hold that according to God's natural law
love between two gay men or two lesbian women is not part of
God's order of creation and that according to God's moral law
sex between gay men or lesbian women is sinful.
But we in More Light congregations affirm the contrary;
we affirm that love between gay men or lesbian women is
as much a part of God's creation as is heterosexual love
and that sex between gays or lesbians can be as moral.
For we affirm that "'tis also a gay thing, love!"
First,
let me address the issue of natural law, the question of
whether homosexuality is part of God's order of creation.
Some Christian denominations insist
that the principal God-given purpose of love + sex is procreation
+ that because homosexual love + sex doesn't fulfill this purpose
it must therefore, of necessity, be unnatural.
Interestingly,
the Presbyterian denomination does not understand
procreation to be the principal God-given purpose of love and sex.
Instead, we, like most other mainline Protestants, have for
centuries understood that the principal God-given purpose of
love and sex is a fullness of communion in body and spirit
between two persons.
Believe
it or not, we owe the origins of this Protestant viewpoint
to none other than the early Puritans, and to the Quakers as well.
For it was they among Christians who first
clearly taught that it is communion between two persons,
and not procreation, that is the primary purpose
for human love and sexual expression.
And
so today, the theology espoused by this congregation holds
that, in the natural order of things, humans' innate sexuality
"is God's ingenious way of calling us into communion with
others through our need to reach out + touch + embrace—
emotionally, intellectually, physically." (Nelson, p. 105)
At
this point, let me add into our ongoing discussion of natural law some
reflections on the second issue, that of moral law,
the question of whether homosexual expression accords
with God's will for humankind.
As
we are taught in the New Testament, God is love (I John 4:8);
and we humans, we who have been created in the divine image—
we have been created for love,
for love of God and for love of other persons.
For
us humans—
we whom God has created with bodies and with sexuality—
for us humans, sex is a God-given language of love,
a God-given medium through which two persons can
express and experience a fullness of love and communion,
of physical and psychological and spiritual intimacy.
According
to the Christian theology we espouse,
sexual passion is not something God intends for us to keep
separate
from the love made known to us and embodied in Jesus.
Rather sexual passion is something God intends for us to use
as a language of love, as a means for expressing
the love made known in Christ.
The
contemporary Christian thinker and worker
Marjory Zoet Bankson puts it this way (p. 8):
"We who believe that Jesus embodied God in time and space
see a man who loved his own body
and the physical bodies of others,
He healed and touched and fed and held
the bodies of men, women and children.
"Church tradition has tried to separate [sexual love
from Christian love]
But that mind game only works
when we separate body and spirit;
[when we] deny the incarnation of God in Jesus;
[when we] overlook the physical
aspect of all love[,
+] prefer mechanical neutrality to erotic humanity."
We
Christians ought not to be trying to separate body from spirit
as if they are somehow alien, foreign, to each other.
No, as the ancient Israelites understood
and as the Old Testament teaches, God has designed
our body + spirit to stand together
as one integrated, harmonious whole.
The
quality of love given by God to humankind blends
passion and desire on the one hand
with mutuality and self-giving on the other.
Each part of the blend needs the other
for its perfection in fulfillment.
Passion and desire without mutuality and self-giving becomes
self-centered and possessive and ultimately self-destructive;
it is passion without mutuality, desire without self-giving,
that lies at the heart of sexual exploitation.
And mutuality and self-giving without passion and desire
is no doubt a good,
but it's a good that nonetheless falls short
of the fullness of love;
for self-giving without passion, mutuality without desire,
defines simple friendship
rather than committed partnership.
So
God is love, and we humans are made for love,
for love of God and for love of other persons;
and God has given each of us the gift of sexuality
that we might experience and express the fullness of love
through complete bodily + spiritual communion with another.
But
what of gays and lesbians, you may be asking?
Is God's gift to them of sexuality a lesser gift,
or perhaps no gift at all?
Does not the moral law in the Book of Leviticus say:
"You shall not lay with a male as with a woman;
it is an abomination"?
Well,
yes indeed the law in the Book of Leviticus does say that,
but we Presbyterians have affirmed for more than 70 years
that in reading and using the Bible
we must take seriously the historical context of the writers
and we must be open to revelations of God's truth
coming to us from other disciplines of inquiry,
like the social and biological sciences.
And
here's one of the truths that we need to understand
about the historical context of the writers of Leviticus and the
writers of every other book in the Bible, a truth uncovered for us
by discoveries in the social and biological sciences: namely,
no one in the ancient world shared our modern understanding
that homosexuality is a sexual orientation to which,
in every culture, a regular percentage of persons are,
at birth, by nature, either predisposed or predetermined.
In
other words no ancient writer understood what we can understand:
that homosexuality is as much a part of God's created order for
humankind as is heterosexuality; that homosexuality may be
a rarer feature of nature than heterosexuality,
but that, contrary to what the biblical writers supposed,
homosexual acts expressive of a homosexual orientation
are in fact natural, and not unnatural; that
homosexual acts expressive of mutuality and self-giving as
well as passion and desire can be every bit as moral, every
bit as expressive of the primary purpose of sexuality—
fullness of communion in body + spirit between persons
—as can heterosexual acts of love.
God
is love.
As the theologian Norman Pittenger has argued,
God is the Cosmic Lover,
ceaselessly and unfailingly in action as love, as was most
clearly made manifest to us in God's incarnation in Jesus.
God's
abiding purpose for humankind, God's will for humankind, is
that we, in response to God's actions of love,
should fulfill God's intention for us to be embodiments of love.
To that end, God has given us our embodied sexuality to be
the physiological and psychological base for our capacity to love.
It is our sexuality that offers us the possibility of expressing
and sharing a full communion of body + spirit with another.
I,
along with Pittenger, Nelson, and other theologians, profess to you
this morning that the human capacity for actualizing embodied love,
composed of passion, desire, mutuality, and self-giving,
is available equally to heterosexual Christians and to gay and
lesbian Christians. In the goodness
of both God's natural law
and God's moral law, there is no double standard.
I
and the Session, the governing body of this church, affirm today
that a full acceptance of homosexuality and of
its responsible sexual expression in loving, committed relationships
is consistent with what the apostle Paul meant
when he says in this morning's Second Lesson (Romans 13:10):
"Love is the fulfilling of the law."
This
is not the majority viewpoint in Christianity, but it is ours.
And, as James Nelson has said (p. 199),
"There are times when we must challenge specific moral traditions
of our heritage in the light of new empirical knowledge,
new experience, and God's on-going revelation.
Our ancestors-in-faith did not know what we now know about
homosexuality as a psychosexual orientation, nor can we
blame them for being persons of their own historical time."
Yet,
because of what we now know
and because of our theology and our beliefs,
which we hold to be fully Christian,
we here at Rutgers shall continue to celebrate
holy unions between gay couples and lesbian couples,
all the while giving thanks to God that,
despite conservative pressures to the contrary,
our denomination, unlike the United Methodist Church,
still does not prohibit our doing so.
The
presbytery to our north, in Westchester and Rockland counties,
Hudson River Presbytery, recently affirmed, by a vote of 75%,
"the freedom of any session to allow its ministers to perform
ceremonies of holy union between persons of the same gender."
Because of that vote, the presbytery has been challenged
by one of its member congregations to defend its position
in an ecclesiastical trial to be held before the Permanent
Judicial Commission of the Synod of the Northeast.
We pray that God's sustaining presence may be with
our sister presbytery during their ordeal.
And we pray that through our denomination's
ongoing debates about sex
we may all somehow learn much more about love.
In
the meantime, we give thanks to God daily that there is still room
in our denomination for churches like ours to affirm:
"'Tis indeed also a gay thing, love!"
Let
us pray:
Creator
God, You have loved us into being
and called us to lives of love.
Help
each of us to integrate the body and spirit You have given us
and to combine passion + desire with mutuality + self-giving,
to the end that our sexuality may express Your love.
In the name of Christ, we pray. Amen.
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