Rev. Irv Cummings
Old Cambridge Baptist Church
January 18, 2004
Second Sunday after Epiphany
Text: Genesis 2: 15—24

“I Will Make A Companion”

The story of the fifty-five hour marriage of Britney Spears and Jason Alexander, earlier this month, became a cliché in the gay community within days.

As commented on this past Sunday by Ellen Goodman, in The Boston Globe, early one morning after watching, The Chainsaw Massacre, Jason suggested, “Let’s do something wild and crazy. Let’s go get married just for the hell of it.” In not much time at all, the pair found themselves at a little wedding chapel with Britney in her baseball cap and jeans. Two days later, the vows were annulled, apparently by mutual consent. Sunday morning found Jason at home and a relative reported “He’s been through a great deal”.

But the fact remains, for fifty-five hours Britney and Jason were married, they were accorded all the 1,049 rights granted by the Constitution of the United States to partners in a marriage. One thousand forty nine. These rights include: rights and privileges in assumption of a spouse’s pension benefits, rights in bereavement leave, rights of partners in cases of immigration, medical decisions, rights concerning sick leave, the right to visit a partner in hospital and critical care, the right to social security survivor benefits, and a host of tax benefits.

If we go on to the rights endowed by states to married partners, the list snowballs: the automatic assumption of a deceased spouse’s pension, automatic inheritance, automatic bereavement leave, automatic rights regarding a deceased spouse’s burial, child custody laws, the right to a crime victim’s recovery benefits, divorce protections, domestic violence protection
exemption from property tax upon a partner’s death, immunity from being forced to testify against a spouse, insurance breaks, the right to make medical decisions on behalf of a partner, property rights, and the right to visit a partner’s children, and on and on.

Be assured, I will not recite the entire litany, but, be assured, as well, that the quest for these rights is not frivolous.

Same-sex spouses who have been together for decades are denied these rights that Britney and Jason were automatically and without question accorded during their fifty-five hour whim.

To be honest, I have hesitated for months in preaching this sermon. I am acutely aware that I am a member of this unprotected class. I am thus aware of not wanting to beat my own drum too loudly, on account of the possibility of being perceived as misusing this “bully pulpit.” (Well, maybe it isn’t such a “bully pulpit” on a long holiday weekend!)

But, Wednesday, a week ago, sitting with a handful of other supportive clergy, through three hours-worth of homophobic screed, I realized I cannot hold this back. I realized, as well, that for good or ill, the issues of Biblical interpretation that gather around the sexual minority community’s search for equal rights in our time are inescapable and they are the same set of issues that beset the church and it’s witness for justice (in its role for interlocutor for God) in every generation.

In Nurse’s Hall, on Thursday-week, at the State House, it was the gay community’s turn to speak, and the memory of some of the speeches delivered there, may well, someday, rival the memory of Dr. King’s famous speech, so many decades ago. They echoed that same dream of freedom, justice and equality, that I remember hearing, via television, from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, when I was twelve years old. That dream has never died and it goes on, encompassing any and all who are marginalized or disenfranchised, anywhere.

And, to those religious despisers of justice, we need to make answer, in context of the congregation of this church which treasures its anabaptistic soul liberty; its autonomous freedom to interpret the Word of God according to the lights that God has given it. We need to answer, to anyone who would hold up to us the so-called “texts of terror” in the Bible, we need to answer. This family of the People of God, who twenty-three years ago proclaimed itself welcoming of all sexual minority people, and, who four years ago committed to be part of the Religious Coalition for the Freedom to Marry, one of the few congregations actually to have made this commitment, needs to answer.

The Focus on the Family and its allied organizations, the Massachusetts Family Institute, and the Coalition for Marriage have promulgated their task as a concerted effort to, as they say, “keep marriage the way it always was.” Oh, really? And how was that? Do they read their Bibles, at all? What about Abram’s wife who bore him no children, so she gave him her maid, and when that one did bear a child, she treated her so badly that the maid, Hagar, had to flee? What about Isaac, who lied, and told everybody that his wife, Rebecca, was really his sister? What about Jacob, the deceiver, who worked seven years to earn the right to marry Leah, and then seven years more, to earn the right, simultaneously, to marry her sister Rachael? The patriarchs of the Bible are clearly no paradigms of twenty-first century Western notions of monogamy. Then, of course, there were David the King, and King Solomon after him. Notwithstanding that David seems to have had a wild hair or two for Jonathan, after his failed marriage to Michal he was also simultaneously married to Ahinoam of Jezreel and to Abigail, the widow of Nabal. I Kings 11: 3 tells us that his son, King Solomon, the builder of the great temple in Jerusalem, and remembered as “Solomon the Wise” had seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines. Lots of family-values there!

And on and on it goes, “marriage as it has always been.”

The once chair of the history department at Yale University, now deceased, John Boswell combed through ancient Christian history to discover mountains of evidence about male-male marriage occurring in the ancient church. Boswell, himself, used to tell the tale of one of his discoveries and it is telling about why it has come to seem to us as though such things did not exist in the past. It is said that a monk in a very ancient monastery in Greece wrote him a letter about a passage that the monk had discovered in a tome in an ancient library there. Boswell, being the curious character that he was, got on an airplane, and went and found the monk and the passage. The monk told him that he was learning to read these ancient records and when his mentor had discovered what he was reading, he made him fold the pages aside and told him not to read that. Later, the monk, as anyone would, sneaked back to the library to see what had been forbidden him and he found there an account of a same-sex marriage ceremony from the eleventh century church. Boswell, so grateful for the discovery, volunteered to cite the monk in his upcoming book, but, at this, the poor fellow nearly fainted. “Don’t tell anybody who helped you find this,” was his plea.

The surest way to oppress and control any person or group is to remove from him or her or them, their history.

When we think of minorities, we do not customarily think of sexual minorities, but this “deracination”, this intentional taking away of one’s roots, is what the sexual minority community shares with the African American community and with other racial and ethnic minorities. The slave owners went to great lengths to see to it that people from the same tribes did not wind up at the same plantation. If they should have found out that they shared a culture, a language and a history, God knows what might have broken out . . . and their oppressors knew this well. But, the slaves learned the iconography, the language, and the liberative sweep of the Bible, and that was the seed of their liberation.

I heard that language from the rostrum at the Statehouse on Thursday-week; that language of freedom, that language of justice, that language of liberation. Meanwhile, the religious despisers of justice were busy quoting the texts of terror (you know, those five little verses that seem to be talking about something like what we might possibly construe as homosexual behavior—mind you, not about what we now understand as “constitutional homosexuality.” (even liberals get confused about that!)

The Apostle Paul once made an unfortunate remark that got recorded in Colossians 3:22, “Slaves” he said, “should be obedient to their masters,” and we all better understand that the slaveholding aristocracy used that single line for as long as they could to forestall revolution. But God will not be mocked. In learning the Bible, the slaves learned more than just the third chapter of Colossians. They learned the sweep and the intent of the whole Scripture, toward the end of human liberation. They learned to imagine freedom.

Recently, Bishop John Shelby Spong of the Episcopal Church responded to similar proof-texting by no less a personage than George Will of the Washington Post. Will, an Episcopalian, accused the General Convention of the Episcopal Church of “cultural trendiness” in its willingness to ratify the consecration of Gene Robinson as the bishop of New Hampshire. Spong’s recitation of the problems involved in Will’s approach to Scripture and tradition is so succinct and on target that I wish to quote it extensively:

The Bishop writes:

“The Bible was quoted to support the divine right of Kings when the Magna Carta made its appearance in 1215. History has demonstrated that the Bible was wrong on that issue and today no king rules on this planet by divine right. People have embraced democracy. [Will] might think that represents "cultural trendiness," but I believe it represents an emerging consciousness that the writers of the Bible, bound to their time in history, could never have contemplated.

In the 17th century the Church, acting out of what [Will calls] "doctrinal clarity," imprisoned Galileo and almost executed him because his study of the motion of "heavenly bodies" led him to the conclusion that the earth was not the center of the universe and that indeed the earth rotated around the sun. The "fathers of the Church" in their attack on Galileo quoted a verse from the book of Joshua, in which the sun was made to stand still in the sky to enable Joshua to kill more of his enemies, as sure proof that the sun rotated around the earth. I think” writes Spong, “[that] eyes should roll in the space age when this "clear teaching of the Bible" is referenced.

In the 19th century, Charles Darwin challenged the "clear teaching of the Bible" in the story of creation. But no matter how many passages of scripture have been quoted since The Origin of Species was published in 1859, our modern world is quite sure that it is Darwin rather than the Bible that is closer to the truth. That is unless one now wants to regard DNA evidence as a bit more "cultural trendiness."

We could go on and show how "doctrinal clarity" led the Church to participate in, and to justify with biblical quotations, the institution of slavery as well as slavery's two bastard stepchildren, segregation and apartheid. Are you not aware that even the popes in history have been slaveholders? Is our present integrated society, which has opened the door to people like Colin Powell to serve in an office that was previously denied to any African-American, just another example of "cultural trendiness?"

Women in this country were certainly treated up until relatively modern times with what [Will calls] "doctrinal clarity." The Ten Commandments defined the woman as property that, along with the ox and the ass, was not to be coveted. With full biblical encouragement, the Church in the Middle Ages regarded women as anything but equal, and even today the Southern Baptist Church, has directed women to be subject to their husbands. The word "obey" required of the woman alone, was not taken out of the Episcopal marriage ceremony until 1928. Women could not enter our universities in any significant numbers before the 20th century. Women did not receive the power of the vote in the United States until 1920 and even that was accomplished against the opposition of the Bible quoters. The Supreme Court of the United States ruled in 1876 that a woman could not practice law in the State of Illinois because "God has designed her for the more domestic role." Is that what [Will is now calling] "progressive cultural aggression" which [he suggests] is challenging "the conservatism of institutions?" I consider it a step into enlightenment.”

So, let us go into our into our text today, mindful that the way we interpret the text, in true Baptist tradition, is critical. Let us do something that the religious despisers of justice do not do. Let us look under the text for its meaning: Let us look at the creation account as related in the first book of the Bible, the Book of Genesis. Let us look, mindful, as well that them that would press for traditional marriage proof-text their appeals on the creation story: “Adam and Eve,” they cry, on their placards and their bumper stickers, not “Adam and Steve.” Mindful, as well, that the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, himself, is climbing aboard, this issue, according to an upper left hand (above-the-fold) headline in Wednesday’s New York Times, with a 1.6 billion dollar proposal to “strengthen” the institution of heterosexual marriage.

The text that we read this morning is actually the second of two texts describing the creation of the world. We will not be dealing with the first creation account, found in Genesis 1. I have, however, copied some handouts for you regarding that first text, and, I encourage you to go home and read them! But, ironically, it is the text contained in the second chapter of Genesis that is the older of the two, and I believe, thus, the more authoritative tradition. It is this text that bears the closest resemblance to a campfire tale. It comes from the earliest strands in the Hebrew Bible, what we call the “Javist strand.” It is not hard, for me, at least, to project myself backwards into the history of consciousness and to imagine ancient shepherds, after a day’s work minding their herds and flocks, gathering around their warming fires and cooking up stories of how it all began. As they looked up and saw the majesty of the stars, they asked themselves, “How did we get this way and what was it like in the time before time?” And, drawing on stories they had heard from elsewhere, they came up with this one, about how the sun and the moon and the stars and the mountains and the valleys and the waters and the plants and the animals came to be. And then, they got to the part about what we, in our great sophistication would call, perhaps, existential longing: that thing in the human consciousness that puts us in constant search for a soul-mate, for another like us, for someone who understands, for someone who feels with us, walks side-by-side with us, someone who loves us, fully and completely.

Notice, please, that the author of the text cites that the purpose for the creation of the “other” is that God saw that it was “not good that the ‘earth thing’ should be alone.” And God presented all that had been created to the “earth thing”, but, the “earth thing” felt no kinship with them. And, out of an attempt to please the “earth thing,” and make the “earth thing” enjoy all this marvelous creation, God finally created a partner for the “earth thing”, out of its own flesh.

Anyone of us who has ever been in love knows that feeling, that the object of our affection seems to have been miraculously drawn from our own flesh. It is a very human feeling.

Thus, in this, earliest Javist account, the purpose for the creation is a remedy for that inevitable human feeling of existential aloneness. When we meet the one whom we love, the terror of being utterly alone dissipates.

But, it is our present understanding of science that tells us another simple fact of creation: it is utterly diverse. Out of the hundreds of trillions of snowflakes, no one is exactly alike. No one of us is exactly alike, in addition to all the obvious things, like hair-color, complexion and so forth, any physician will tell you that each human body is utterly unique. And so, it happens, that for some of us, the parameters for the “other” whom we seek are confined to those of our own gender or sex. For others, that is not the case. For others, the parameters of whom it is that they desire are confined to the opposite sex and gender, and for still others, it doesn’t matter. Years ago, Alfred Kinsey showed us the bell-curve. It’s not a condition we have, like cancer or diabetes, it is something that goes to the deepest core of our beings, it is one of the more important lenses through which perceives the unioverse.

Jesuit theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, wrote of it this way:

“Socially, in science, business and public affairs, [people] pretend not to know it, though, under the surface it is everywhere. Huge, ubiquitous, and always unsubdued—this wild force seems to have defeated all hopes of understanding and governing. It is therefore allowed to run everywhere beneath our civilization. We are conscious of it, but all we ask of it is to amuse us, or not to harm us. Is it truly possibly for humanity to continue to live and grow without asking itself how much truth and energy it is losing by neglecting its incredible power of love?”

If our god is a good and a just god, would God not want everyone’s human fulfillment? Would God not extend to all the means to ease our very human sense of existential aloneness in companionship and community with another? What kind of god is it, anyway, who might even consider saying “No” to that?

I want to conclude by quoting something that touched my heart very deeply this summer just past. I found this little article in a bar-rag in Montréal. It was quoted from an article that ran in La Presse, the official French daily in that city. It was written by one Raymond Gravel in a courageous response to a missive from the Vatican decrying Canada’s progress on the issue of homosexual marriage. Forgive, please, my own, perhaps clumsy, translation. Father Gravel writes:

“Marriage is the official recognition of the union of two people who love each other and who wish to partake in a project of love in faithfulness, open to fecundity. For Christian faith, this project becomes sacramental, since it signifies the Love of God for humanity, the Love of Christ for [the] Church. According to this definition, two homosexual persons may also live well within this loving project in faithfulness, open to fecundity. A fecund couple is not, after all,
a couple which procreates in order to continue the species, but a couple who inspire others to love. In this case, gay marriage can become a sacrament, which is to say, a sign of divine Love and the Bible [might be read to say]: “What God has united, may the Church not separate.”

In the name of God. Amen.