When Two Are Wed: Marriage and Gay Unions
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13:1 Though I speak with the tongues
of men and of angels, and have not love, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.
13:2 And though I have the gift of prophecy, and
understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I
could remove mountains, and have not love, I am
nothing.
13:3 And though I
bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and
though I give my body to be burned, and have not love, it profiteth me nothing.
13:4 Love suffereth long, and is kind; love envieth not; love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, 13:5 Doth not behave
itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily
provoked, thinketh no evil; 13:6
Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth
in the truth;
Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all
things.
13:8 Love never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail;
whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it
shall vanish away.
13:9 For we know
in part, and we prophesy in part.
13:11 When I was a child, I spake as a child, I
understood as a child,
I thought as a child:
but when I became a man, I put
away childish things.
I John 4
7Dear friends, let us love
one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born
of God and knows God. 8Whoever does not love does not know God,
because God is love… 12No one has ever seen God; but if we love one
another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us… 16God is love. Whoever lives in
love lives in God, and God in him. 17In
this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the
day of judgment, because in this world we are like him. 18There is
no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with
punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love… 20If
anyone says, "I love God," yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For
anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom
he has not seen. 21And he has given us this command: Whoever loves
God must also love his brother.
Should gay
men and lesbian women be allowed to marry?
It is a question that is really two: The first concerning the religious
nature of such a prospect, a theological issue; and, secondly, concerning the
legal nature of marriage itself, a civil and civic issue. To get to both these destinations one must
walk through history!
While
serving my first congregation in the 1980’s I was the only clergyman to
officiate at union services for gay men and lesbian women in the
I officiated
at services of union for between gay men and lesbian women, uncertain as to
whether or not I believed this to be a right for a religious clergyman to
do. I did it because sometimes
determining whether something is of ultimate concern and an authentic
expression of the spirit, requires trying it out. So, I did for a year.
One
particular service in 1986 was like no other I had ever done. My then five-year old daughter went with me
and observed the events, before, during, and after the service. In the car home I decided that her experience
might help me discern whether or not the service could be considered by our
religious tradition to be an authentic expression of the sacred. So, I asked her what she experienced.
A full 350
years before that service another event took place that as much as any event
shaped our common religious tradition.
In 1629 the few Europeans who huddled together for safety in the area we
now call Salem, Massachusetts, having survived the voyage across a treacherous
Atlantic Ocean, freely consented to an agreement that became, and still is to this
day, the covenant of the congregation, the Unitarian Church of Salem, of which
our covenant is a variation: “We covenant with the Lord, and one with
another, and do bind ourselves in the presence of God, to walk together in all
His ways, according as He is pleased to reveal Himself unto us, in His blessed
word of truth.”
Two things
resulted from that
With our theological tradition identified let us
attend to the issue at hand.
Those who suggest there is some “natural” basis for marriage or conceive it as an
absolute and unchanging institution, disregard history and the fluctuations of
time and culture. To primitive human
being, living in tribes across the earth, monogamy was no more a part of
heterosexual relationships than was marriage.
Women bore the children of the leading males of the tribe, a practice
whose vestiges can still be seen today in religious cults. The idea of marriage was conceived sometime
between the evolution of human society from tribe to
city-states. In ancient
Ancient Jewish marriage
differed still. Although before the
Babylonian Exile of 587 BCE marriage was completely secular, it was the
strength of family life and the sanctification of private property that in part
distinguished the Jews from their neighbors.
Marriage insured that property could be handed down to inheritors, but
it also meant that since wives were property, the man might have many wives but
the wife only one husband! When the
Jewish Paul wrote his observations on love to a community of Jews following the
example of Jesus, it was not meant to be a commentary on romantic love or
marriage as it is used today. Rather, it
was a guide to govern relationships between members of the same house church
while they waited for what they believed to be the end of the earth. To the earliest Christians marriage was
devalued as a “ridiculous means of continuing the race” (The Story of
Civilization, Will and Ariel Durant, vol. III, p 598) until that end time.
A thousand years later
both the state and the church recognized a consummated union accompanied by a
verbal pledge, as a marriage. However,
in the 12th century the Christian Church added a new ingredient: the
need for a religious service to recognize the promise between a man and women
as sacred. Marriage was then raised to a
sacrament, a status it had not held before.
And in 16th century
When our country was
formed two new ideas of marriage were formed with it. Marriage, like the new country itself, came
to be understood as a union born of free consent. No longer would marriages be arranged by
tradition any more than the country would be governed by it. Both would be a union created by free
choice. It was thus that in our country
human rights, and in our marriages the freedom of human love, was “invented”
and started to become central to each.
Free consent by both parties to the promises and agreements of marriage
introduced a loyalty of affection into the covenant, a love that was not an expected
part of marriage in previous generations.
But, legal marriage in
our country originally took a form shaped predominantly by the Protestant,
European, white Christianity of its forbears.
And it has always contained a paradoxical character, symbolized today by
the fact that in the land of the separation of church and state a clergyman
performing marriage signs the legal license!
Like the struggle to expand human rights that has been our country’s
history, so also has it been necessary for us to expand our understandings of
marriage, and the meaning of union and free choice, covenant and love. Revelation is not sealed inside of past
history.
Legal marriage has
determined the racial shape of our country.
For much of our history it has been illegal for Asians and whites to
marry in the west. The same can be said
for non-Christian Native Americans and Anglos. Even after slavery was abolished
African-Americans could not legally marry each other in the majority of states,
not just in the south. And of course,
slaves themselves did not possess civil rights during slavery and so could not
legally marry. By 1967 a full 16 states
still considered marriage across color lines void or even criminal. “Prohibiting divergent marriage has been as
important in public policy as sustaining the chosen model.” (Public Vows, Nancy
Cott, 4)
Still, over time the “chosen model” has changed.
Thus, marriage is one
entrance into certain civil rights. “The
governmental apparatus in the
Should gay men and
lesbian women be allowed to marry? Our
tradition proclaims that revelation is not sealed, but does that not mean that
any and every change should be supported.
No. Our tradition eschewed
determinism, even in the form of historical inevitability, when we left
Calvinism in the later 18th century.
We have to think these things through from the perspective of what our
tradition has affirmed as sacred.
Marriages, and the civil rights associated with it, both involve a
covenant. Marriage is the covenant
between two people, while our country’s civil rights represent a covenant
between the individual and the nation, what Dr. King called the “promissory
note” the country at its inception wrote to each one of its members. Our religious tradition affirms that freedom
and love are not solitary qualities of human existence, but are sacred because
they flow from covenants, from relationships.
And relationships, covenants between two parties, are sacred and express
love to the extent that they embody free consent. They can yield a just model of human
belonging and fellowship.
Thus, I would not
support polygamous relationships because the covenant that yields freedom,
love, and justice flows from the agreement between two parties: two people, an
individual and a church, an individual and a nation, an individual and God. I would not support intimate relationships
between an adult and a child, because covenants that yield love flow from
relationships of free consent, and a child cannot give fully free consent. Any civil government that recognizes covenant
and consent as central to freedom, love, and justice cannot make legal
relationships that are destructive of these things.
But the covenant between
a man and a man, or between a woman and a woman: Can it be a bond and a
promise, a covenant freely entered into by adults, that a country such as ours
should not only recognize legally, but support culturally as one example of the
expression and creation of deep affection that yields societal good? Well, after that holy union service between
two women in 1986, as I was driving home, I asked our then five-year old
daughter what she experienced in the events before, during, and after the
service. She thought as long and hard as
a five-year old could think, and delivered a short and prophet proclamation to
her Dad, who sometimes succumbs to the fear of new revelation and to the
uncertainty of God’s great purposes, a father who so often lacks faith that he
chose as his calling a profession where others would thing he possesses
it! She said, “I saw Love.”
It was thus that I saw
it as religiously appropriate not only to officiate and bless the union of a
man and a man, and a woman and a woman, but support its civil legality as
well. It is thus that what
For now we see through a glass,
darkly; but then face
to face:
now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. And now abideth faith, hope, love, these
three; but the greatest of these is love.
AMEN.