My nook of United Methodism recently resolved not to resolve (yet) a proposal to change our denomination’s official language on homosexuality, opting to curate a ‘conversation’ instead.
Like a virtual, online Sisyphus, here’s another modest attempt to push the burden forward:
Those who oppose gay marriage in the Church- or even gay membership in the Church- most often do so by citing homosexuality as a sin. Indeed the ‘S word’ predominates much of the discussion on sex.
Homosexuality violates the Levitical codes and while Jesus never speaks of homosexuality neither does he single the subject out for one of his ‘you’ve heard it said’ segues.
While much is made of how scripture views homosexuals as sinners, little commented upon is how marriage’s purpose in the Church- it’s vocation (i.e. it’s calling)- is the healing of our sin. Our sanctification.
Under this view marriage, same sex couples would appear to be prime candidates for the very covenant denied them by the Church- and for the very reason they’re so denied.
Sanctification is a theological term that describes one’s growth in grace; it is the process of growing ever more holy in the love of God.
Sanctification is a theological term that describes one’s growth in grace; it is the process of growing ever more holy in the love of God.
It’s living with the Other and learning to them nonetheless that we learn to love as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Married love conveys and communicates to one another and to others something of the grace of God thereby growing us in grace.
The Orthodox Christian tradition, following St. Gregory of Nyssa’s understanding and reading deeply in the Song of Songs, has understood marriage and sexual intimacy to be a means of sanctification, an entering into Trinitarian love.
Marriage allows for Christians’ sanctification for it creates the space and time for eros (intense but self-centered love) to become agape (charitable, other-directed love. In this fashion, married love teaches Christians how to love as God loves.
Marriage is medicine by which the Spirit heals our sin-sick selves.
Married couples do not stay the same people they were on their wedding day. The binding covenant of Christian marriage provides the context-the confines- in which Christians can grow in holiness by growing in the love of someone other than themselves. In this way, Christian marriage makes visible to others the Holy Spirit’s active, invisible work in our midst.
If Christian marriage is also understood as a means of grace and sanctification, then to deny that source of grace to same sex couples is to withhold the medicine for sin under the auspices of sin.
Thus, to deny that source of grace to same sex couples might be understood to frustrate the work of the Holy Spirit in their lives.
And if you know your bibles, then you know that grieving the Spirit- not what ones does under the sheets- is the only unforgivable offense.
As Dr. Eugene Rogers my very first theology teacher at UVA writes:
The question of same-sex marriage therefore comes to the church not as an issue of extended rights and privileges, but as a pastoral occasion to proclaim the significance of the gospel for all who marry, because marriage embodies and carries forward the marriage of God and God’s people.
To deny committed couples marriage deprives them not of a privilege but of a medicine.
It deprives them not of a social means of satisfaction but of a saving manner of healing.
Those couples who approach the church for marriage–and those whose priests prompt them to marry—are drawn there by the marriage of Christ and the church, which alone makes it possible for human relationships to become occasions of grace.
Couples who delay or are denied marriage are like those who previously waited for deathbed baptism; they unaccountably put off the grace by which their lives might be healed.
There is no question of whether the marriage of Christ and the church is available to sinners, but only how it is so.
Because the love of God for God’s people is real, and the declaration “this is my body given for you” is true, the church needs as many witnesses as the Holy Spirit and its mission may draft. Same- and opposite-sex couples who want to marry in the church bear witness to the love of God for God’s people and to the power of that love to atone, reconcile, and heal. Not that they can do those things by their human power alone, but the Spirit can attest their witness to the atonement and healing of Christ.
