Freedom to Marry
August 24, 2003
Cathedral Church of St. Paul , Boston,
and Broadcast on WCRB 102.5 FM
Two men I know fairly well were both recently elected bishops in the Episcopal Church. In both cases the news that they had been elected struck me as good news; they are both capable, compassionate, enormously faithful people who do not take themselves too seriously, but care deeply about the church.
I went to seminary with one of the men, he’s been a friend for a long time. I know the other through church work, we’ve done some projects together, and I would say that while we aren’t close friends, we both like and respect each other.
Both of the men are a lot like me, at least superficially: middle-aged, white men, like the overwhelming majority of the other bishops in the Episcopal Church. Both of these men, like me, have grown children, both have been priests for a long time, over twenty-five years.
As in all cases, whenever someone is elected a bishop in the Episcopal Church, a majority of the other dioceses have to give their approval, their consent. Usually this happens diocese by diocese, by a vote of each diocesan standing committee, but in the case of my two friends, because their elections occurred within a certain time frame relative to our General Convention, this consent process happens at the convention itself, by votes of the two governing bodies, the House of Deputies, which is made up of equal numbers of laity and clergy, and the House of Bishops.
Both men received the necessary approval, and now both men can be consecrated bishops in their respected dioceses.
The process was interesting to me because of their contrasting experiences. One of the men received virtually no attention whatsoever while the other was at the center of an incredible media blitz.
My friend George Councell, recently elected Bishop of New Jersey, was never mentioned in anything I read or saw in the press about the convention, nor was his wife Ruth or their daughter Sarah, yet New Jersey is one of the largest dioceses with quite a tumultuous recent history. George has his work cut out for him.
On the other hand, Gene Robinson was elected bishop of a fairly small diocese in apparently good shape, there are no problems waiting for him. But he got all kinds of publicity, worldwide, as did his children and his partner, Mark Andrew. I read about him in the Boston Globe, the New York Times, the Boston Herald. I heard stories about him on NPR and the BBC. I saw features about him on local and national television.
The Episcopal Church hasn’t gotten this much attention since Barbara Harris was elected bishop, and of course that’s not a coincidence. Both Gene and Barbara are like Charles Lindbergh—the first—she being the first woman bishop in the Anglican Communion, he being the first openly acknowledged gay man to become a bishop.
That’s why Gene Robinson is on the front page of the New York Times and George Councell is never mentioned at all. George has a wife, Gene has a partner. George is attracted to women, Gene is attracted to men.
It’s that simple, and that profound.
Virtually no one cares that George can now be consecrated a bishop, and virtually everyone cares that Gene can now be consecrated a bishop. Some are rejoicing about this, others are deeply disturbed, and there are probably a lot of people who aren’t sure exactly what to think or feel. Is the church moving ahead, or losing its head? Are we faithfully following God, or are we building and worshipping our own version of the Golden Calf? What about the Bible, and our long faith tradition, aren’t we suddenly just ignoring them, setting them aside? And perhaps most significantly, where is Christ in all this?
This whole experience feels God-given to me, a significant movement of the Holy Spirit in our church. I don’t simply mean that electing a gay man as a bishop is the work of the Holy Spirit, but that this whole process has been the movement of the Spirit: where it happened, how it happened, when it happened, and all the questions and issues it has raised. The fact that the approval process occurred at our General Convention, which only happens every three years seems significant to me because this meant it happened at a time when all the Episcopal Church leaders, lay and ordained, were together in one place. This has made it easier for the media to report on it, which meant that far more people have been given a chance to think about their faith, what matters to them, what they believe and why they believe it, not just Episcopalians but even people outside our church.
In the gospel lesson we heard that Jesus’s words about Him being the bread of life upsets many followers, who found his words intolerable, and so many leave. He then asks the Twelve, do you want to leave as well? They affirm their devotion, although Peter in a typically pragmatic way says, if we left, who would we go to?
But the question is important for us all; are these new developments in our church hard, upsetting events that come from God, and so we need to stay the course, as best we can, or are they distractions, or worse, things which interfere with our relationship with God, undercutting our faith? Are we moving closer to God, or farther from God?
I’d like to address some of what I see as significant faith issues that the election and approval of a gay man as bishop have raised. I do not want to tell you what to believe, I do not want to try to convince you that Gene Robinson’s election is a good thing or a bad thing, but I do want to lift up some of the questions, address some of the faith issues.
First, most obviously, there is the issue of scripture, which we take very seriously in the Episcopal Church. When we read lessons in a church service, the reader often concludes the reading by saying, “The Word of the Lord,” and we believe that.
Reading the Bible it seems clear that scripture is against the practice of homosexuality, it condemns it. For example, it states in Leviticus, “If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination.” (Lev. 20:13) That seems pretty clear, and so people who oppose a gay man becoming bishop have legitimate grounds for their opposition. But I wonder, are these people as vehemently opposed to eating clam chowder, or lobsters, or oysters on the half shell? Doing these things is also an abomination, according to Leviticus ( 11:10 ) It is also prohibited in Leviticus for a man to trim his beard or cut his sideburns. I could go on—eating cheeseburgers, or bacon; no Fenway Franks if you go to ballpark to see the Red Sox.
It is also clear in Leviticus what the appropriate punishment is for a man to lie with another male as with a woman: death by stoning. I haven’t heard anyone calling for that, I wonder why? Even people who claim to read the Bible literally and try to follow it seem to back off from this commandment, they make some allowance for changing times, different context.
But that’s the Old Testament, you might say. Christians live under a new law, we have a new understanding; the love of God as revealed in Jesus Christ. While it is true that Jesus never addresses homosexuality himself (at least there is no mention of it in any of the gospels), Paul seems to reject it in the Epistles. Even if we don’t follow all the law of Hebrew Scripture, aren’t we bound by New Testament claims?
Fair enough, although I would expect people who cite the New Testament prohibitions against homosexuality in the epistles would also take seriously the gospels and so would be willing to drink arsenic or lye and also be ready to put their hand in a box of angry rattlesnakes and stir them around, provoking them, because according to the verses at the end of the Gospel of Mark, Jesus tells his disciples that doing these things are signs given to those who believe in him, that they will be able to do them and not be harmed.
My point is that none of us takes the Bible at face value, accepting all that it seems to dictate or command, even as we affirm it as the Word of God. Everyone interprets it. Everyone chooses some passages to emphasize and other passages to dismiss or ignore. Everyone fits scripture into their understanding of their faith. Everyone.
Invoking Holy Scripture as the sole reason to oppose a gay man becoming bishop is to exercise a selective, subjective judgment; it is to choose parts of scripture that fit your own values and ignore the other parts that don’t fit, and so says more about us as and our values than about God.
But what about tradition? Hasn’t the church always rejected and condemned homosexuality? Doesn’t our tradition reinforce and strengthen the scriptural prohibition, making homosexuality different than snake-handling, for example, which has not been such a consistent and widespread element of our faith?
Again, fair enough. Tradition is an important part of what informs our faith, it is something we use to help us understand and interpret scripture, and Christian tradition has been pretty consistently prohibitive of homosexual practice. Those who cite tradition as why they believe ordaining a gay man problematic have a valid point.
What they fail to mention, in my experience, is that for thousands of years, slavery was a part of Christian tradition, and before that, a part of Jewish tradition. The practice of slavery is also supported by scripture, both Old Testament and New Testament.
There are extensive rules and law in Leviticus about the treatment of slaves, and so people naturally believed that slavery was a part of God’s plan. God’s laws and commandments prohibited any number of things that other cultures commonly practiced and so the fact that slavery was not prohibited but regulated was an indication to people that God must approve of slavery, otherwise it would be prohibitied. People understood that the story of the Tower of Babel was a story about God dispersing humanity into different races and tribes, with different languages, different abilities and gifts. They imagined that some people were destined by God to dominate and rule others, this was both a reflection of the natural order but also the divine order.
This understanding is not just confined to the Hebrew Scriptures. The Epistle to Titus commands slaves to be submissive to their masters, and in doing so they “adorn the doctrine of God our Savior”. In the Epistle to Philemon Paul sends the runaway slave Onesimus, whom Paul has gotten to know and to love, back to his master. Unlike Huck Finn, Paul does not help the slave escape.
It all seemed clear to people; slavery was a part of God’s plan, a part of the natural order, supported by scripture and very much a part of the faith tradition, and so, not surprisingly, in our country in the 19 th century abolitionists were often denounced from church pulpits as agents of Satan, of opposing God’s clear will and plan for the world, as clearly outlined in scripture and supported by thousands and thousands of years of tradition.
But slowly, unmistakably, an idea began to take hold, that no matter what the Bible or tradition dictated, it was not God’s will for humans to own other humans, to buy and sell other humans like a pig or a chicken or a goat. People imagined that no matter what the Bible or our tradition said it was time for something new, a new understanding of society, of who we were as people of God, all of us, even if this meant contradicting scripture and tradition.
And in this they were being faithful, I think we would all agree. They were actually living out a larger Biblical truth, that God is always doing new things, bringing us to new places, confounding us with new possibilities.
God heard the cry of the people of Israel , captives in Egypt , and delivered an entire people from their captivity, bringing them to freedom in a new land. This had never happened before. We must remember that because this had never happened before, there must have been some who weren’t sure, who stayed behind, unwilling to take this risk. They preferred what they had always known, as hard as it was, to the risk of venturing into the unknown with this untested leader Moses.
God fed the people in the wilderness with manna, which no one had ever seen before. The name Manna is actually Hebrew for “What is it?”
Jesus told his followers that he was the Bread of Life, he would give them eternal life, and this was a hard saying for them to accept, because it was unprecedented. People knew about prophets, about teachers, even about revolutionaries who promised to overthrow the oppressive Roman authorities, but Jesus claims about bringing eternal life were new, and most people did not understand this, were not willing to accept this.
Scripture and tradition work well as maps that help us navigate where we have already been, but they are not always good guides for new places. Scripture and tradition help us see where we have already been, but not always where we need to go.
Jesus talked about being the Bread of Life, and it calls to mind some experiences with food. In the city of Boston, at the end of the 19 th century, it was not uncommon for hired help to have written in their contract limits the number of times they could be served lobster for meals each week, usually no more than three times, as lobster was plentiful and cheap, a food spurned by the wealthy and foisted off on the poor. Of course now the opposite is true: the most expensive, the most impressive item on the menu in a seafood restaurant is lobster.
This echoes a personal experience I had, growing up in the panhandle of Florida , when I would go fishing. I often caught catfish, which was great, because they were so sweet, such good eating, but whenever I would fish with other kids who would see me keeping the catfish, they would express their disdain and disgust, in terms I always found shocking. “That’s nigger food,” they would tell me, “why are you keeping that?”
Now if you go to that area, virtually all seafood restaurants serve catfish now, and there is even one that specializes in catfish, it’s what they’re known for. I’m struck by both examples of food that was considered unfit, unpalatable, but now is prized, valued, and I think of these as significant metaphors for the way we change in our faith, grow in our understanding. Christ is at the heart of our faith, and Christ was always surprising his followers. Always. Giving them new things to nurture and surprise them, feed them in new ways, and as we face into this new thing in our church we need to remember that.
I’m not suggesting that something new, something unprecedented, is automatically good, but new things are also not automatically bad, something we have to reject or condemn because we’ve never done it. The important faith question is not what have we always done, but where do we think God might be leading us now?
There is no question that consecrating an openly gay man as bishop has not been done before, and so of course it is big news. The question for us is not if it’s been done before, but if God is calling us to do it now.
Amen.
