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4Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant 5or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. 7It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
When I told the worship committee at the January meeting that I planned to talk about Marriage Equality today, I had NO idea how timely a topic it would be! That is, I felt it was time for me to speak on this issue, but I had no way of knowing that the whole country would be speaking on it as well. I am grateful that this issue is so before us today, because I feel it is important for us, as Christians, to stand up for Justice to take an active part in this civil rights issue. Some of our citizens are being denied the right to enter into a loving, committed relationship with all the legal rights and responsibilities involved when two people stand up together and say I do.
37 years ago, there was a landmark case in the United States Supreme Court called, interestingly enough, Loving vs. Virginia. Loving was the last name of a couple that was prosecuted for marrying. Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving committed a felony under Virginia State Law....they were married in Washington D.C....and then lived together as husband and wife in Caroline County Virginia. Their marriage violated the states antimiscengenation law --- The Racial Integrity Act --- which prohibited any white person to marry anyone other than another white person. Richard was white and his bride, Mildred, was black. The Virginia judge who tried the case sentenced Richard to a year in prison....but the sentence was suspended if they would move out of the state and not return for TWENTY-FIVE YEARS. The judge lectured them on the justifiability of the states policy by saying that almighty God had initially placed the races on different continents shows that he did not intend for the races to mix!! We might be tempted to laugh at how ludicrous this sounds now 37 years later. A Gallup Poll taken in 1965 showed that 42 percent of Northern whites supported bans on inter-racial marriage, and 72 percent of Southern whites agreed. At that time SIXTEEN states prohibited people from marrying across racial lines...as a result of that court case, all of their antimiscgenation laws were declared unconstitutional. In the fifteen years before this court case, fourteen other states had repealed their prohibitions of inter-racial marriages --- those states included CALIFORNIA, North Dakota, Oregon, Montana....and more. Of course the reason these laws were repealed is that they were discriminatory some citizens were allowed to marry while others were not.
Weve seen a number of changes in the legal definition of marriage over the past 40 or so years. And certainly Christians concerned about Civil Rights have been involved in supporting those changes. Today we stand at on a new frontier in Marriage Civil Rights. Some of our citizens are allowed to marry, while others are not. What can we find in the Christian religion to guide us in understanding our responsibilities as followers of Jesus teachings? I am grateful to many who have done enormous amounts of research to give us some concrete answers to this question. I am particularly indebted to a document put out by The United Church of Christ Coalition for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Concerns.....its called Blessing Ceremonies resources for same-gender services of commitment. Also, the Pennisula chapter of Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, or PFLAG, distributed some wonderful resources this week as well. Peter Gomes The Good Book is also a helpful resource.
Let me quote from the opening essay in the Blessing Ceremonies book from an address Dr. James B Nelson gave in 1992:
I am deeply convinced that the issues of sexual orientation and the churchs inclusiveness are, in this society at our time in history, the preeminent test case of whether the church can be the church.
I want to be clear this morning that I understand that some of you have probably not decided how you feel about same-gender marriage. Our feelings on this topic are deeply held, and though we might hope to be fully inclusive, I know some in this room may still be in process about this. Part of my reason for speaking to you this morning is to urge you forward in your process because you will be called upon to have an opinion, perhaps to take a stand in the coming months or years. I want to give you some information on which to ponder.....and encourage you to be in prayer about this, because it does matter, a great deal, to some of our own members, and to many of our friends, co-workers, and brothers and sisters in the human family. It is not something we can set aside to think about later. As Mayor of San Francisco Gavin Newsom said this week : When I took office, I vowed to uphold the California Constitution. We have been denying civil rights to some of our citizens. We have no business denying basic rights to any of our citizens. But of course, this is not just a civil issue. It is an issue of deep spiritual import. Id like to share with you something Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said about civil rights ---
In spite of our tendency to conform, we as Christians, have a mandate to be
nonconformists. There are some things in our world to which men and women
of good will must be maladjusted. I confess that I never intend to become ad-
justed to the evils of segregation and the crippling effects of discrimination, to
the moral degeneracy of religious bigotry and the corroding effects of narrow
sectarianism, to economic conditions that deprive people of work and food and
to the insanity of militarism, and the self-defeating effects of physical violence. Human solution lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted. I call upon you
to be maladjusted as Jesus of Nazareth who dreamed a dream of God and of all of us as sisters and brothers. God grant that we will be so maladjusted that we
will be able to go out and change our world and our civilization. And then we will be able to move from the bleak and desolate midnight of men and womens inhumanity to others. Then we will be able to move to the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice.
Many of us in this church might welcome the title of maladjusted Christians....we believe in that dream that Jesus had we can be stirred to stand up for that dream when we know the safety and security not to mention the right to happiness -- of our brothers and sisters are at stake.
Dr. Nelson says this: As Christians, we are all people of the book, The Scriptures are of critical importance. But we must shift the biblical debate from its periphery to its center. Many of us have become tired of debating those infamous seven Biblical texts that purport to condemn gay, lesbian, and bisexual people. So now, let us insist more loudly than ever that the church attend to the central message of the scripture. And how does this look?? It pictures Jesus as setting aside every human barrier, every false tradition that violates the oneness of God and the oneness of Gods human community. It pictures the Jesus who lived out the live-changing reality that Gods oneness cannot be compromised by human prejudice, human fear, or human bigotry.
I have some good resources to recommend if you want to explore those seven scriptures he referred to it would take too much time for me to outline to you today why many Biblical scholars are quite certain that it was not homosexuality that was being condemned, but ANY sexual behavior that exploited another human being. Homosexual relationships were not common practice among Jews, but they were common in the Gentile world of Jesus time. The (mostly) Jewish writers of the Bible texts were speaking against the kinds of behaviors that deny humanity and indicate devotion to something other than the God of Love.
Peter Gomes, professor of Christian Morals in Harvard College, says in his chapter on The Bible and Homosexuality,
The biblical writers never contemplated a form of homosexuality in which loving, monogamous, and faithful persons sought to live out the implications of the gospel with as much fidelity to it as any heterosexual believer. All they knew of homosexuality was prostitution, pederasty, lasciviousness, and exploitation. These vices, as we know, are NOT unknown among heterosexuals, and to define contemporary homosexuals only in these terms is a cultural slander of the highest order, reflecting not so much prejudice, which it surely does, but what the Roman Catholic Church calls invincible ignorance, which all of the Christian piety and charity in the world can do little to conceal. The problem of course is not the Bible, but in those who read it.
The question of whether or not same gender couples should be allowed to marry, with the blessing of the church and state, is as I said not something far removed from our lives. It matters to our friends and neighbors, and it matters to some who are here today. We have seen this week a flood of gay and lesbian couples who are delighted to have the opportunity to publicly declare their love and commitment to each other in San Francisco. On the Jim Lehrer news hour last week, I heard this clear statement that speaks volumes: The women married today, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon (they were the first same-gender couple to marry in San Francisco this week), have spent the last 51 years of their lives together. There is absolutely no good reason for a couple so loving and so committed to each other to be denied the right to marry and the thousands of protections that come with it," said H[uman] R[ights] C[ampaign] President Cheryl Jacques. "Todays historic step will result only in making families like Del and Phyllis stronger. Nobodys marriage will be harmed by providing more security to them. In fact, the historic step taken today will result in increased protections of many families, which will make America stronger....and we think thats a good thing!
As I mentioned earlier, this does affect us close to home. Ive invited my daughter Tesia and her partner Laura to join us today to have a conversation about how this issue affects their lives.
He drew a circle that shut me out ---
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win;
We drew a circle that took him in.
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