Sunday: Your turn to discuss traditional marriage and same-sex marriage at our adult forum

Icon of St. Sergius and St. Bacchus,
with Christ blessing them,
St. Catherine's Monestary, Sinai, 303 C.E.
Was it marriage?

First, my apologies for not posting the last few days. I've taken a few days off, and life in our household has been focused on Lori's recovery from knee surgery. She is now walking without a crutch or cane and is keeping up with her physical therapy regimen.

I will get back to posting regularly here next week, and do please avail yourself of the Lenten reflections by members of St. Paul's (just click the purple cross on the left). For our adult forum on Sunday we will be continuing our series on the issues of traditional marriage and same-sex marriage. It's your turn to talk.

We will have an open discussion, beginning with this question: Has anything in the previous forums caught your attention or been eye-opening in ways you have seen these issues before? If you missed our presentations, start by clicking HERE for Part I. You can find the other presentations by clicking HERE and scrolling to find the one you missed.

Also, we will look at the resolution approved by General Convention in 2009 that has essentially authorized bishops to move ahead with same-sex blessings. To give you a head start, here is the resolution, C056:

Resolved, the House of Deputies concurring, That the 76th General Convention acknowledge the changing circumstances in the United States and in other nations, as legislation authorizing or forbidding marriage, civil unions or domestic partnerships for gay and lesbian persons is passed in various civil jurisdictions that call forth a renewed pastoral response from this Church, and for an open process for the consideration of theological and liturgical resources for the blessing of same gender relationships; and be it further 

Resolved, That the Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music, in consultation with the House of Bishops, collect and develop theological and liturgical resources, and report to the 77th General Convention; and be it further 

Resolved, That the Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music, in consultation with the House of Bishops, devise an open process for the conduct of its work inviting participation from provinces, dioceses, congregations, and individuals who are engaged in such theological work, and inviting theological reflection from throughout the Anglican Communion; and be it further 

Resolved, That bishops, particularly those in dioceses within civil jurisdictions where same-gender marriage, civil unions, or domestic partnerships are legal, may provide generous pastoral response to meet the needs of members of this Church; and be it further
Resolved, That this Convention honor the theological diversity of this Church in regard to matters of human sexuality; and be it further 

Resolved, That the members of this Church be encouraged to engage in this effort.

A word about our continuing adult forums on marriage and the issues of same-sex marriage

In case you missed it, I want to draw your attention to our continuing Sunday adult forums on traditional marriage and the issues of same-sex marriage.  I am teaming up with The Rev. Dr. Heather Warren, who is a professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia, to bring you this series.

We've set up a special blog to post our presentation notes. You can get to that by clicking HERE.

On Sunday, we focused on traditional marriage as it has come down to us in our Christian tradition. We looked at how marriage customs and theology developed through biblical story, beginning with Adam and Eve, and we explored the Hebrew concept of covenant. We looked at Christian marriage vows since the Middle Ages, and how those vows have changed through successive versions of the Book of Common Prayer since 1549.

Christian marriage rites were once primarily property transactions (with brides as property) to where we now see marriage as an exchange of vows representing equal pledges of fidelity between husband and wife. Until recently, our prayer book proclaimed that marriage is primarily for the purpose of having children. With the changes in the prayer book in 1979, the Episcopal Church now views marriage as primarily for the "mutual joy" of a married couple.

That is a big shift, and has brought with it questions about why "mutual joy" should be restricted only to opposite sex couples.

My presentation notes are posted in full on our special blog, Marriage & Blessings. Presentations from previous weeks are also posted there. Please join us in person or here on the Internet for this important exploration of these issues.

Next week we will look at the arguments for and against same-sex blessings.

Part III of our series on marriage: Covenant, Vow and Blessing

Adam and Eve, by Marc Chagall

This morning in our adult education series on marriage, and the issue of same-sex blessings, we focused on traditional marriage as it has developed in our Christian tradition. We looked at how marriage developed through biblical story, beginning with Adam and Eve, and we explored the Hebrew concept of covenant. We looked at Christian marriage vows since the Middle Ages, and how those vows have developed through successive versions of the Book of Common Prayer since 1549.

Christian marriage rites have gone from being primarily property transactions (with brides as property) to vows representing equal pledges of fidelity between husband and wife. Our tradition, as it has come to us through the prayer book, once viewed marriage as primarily for the purpose of having children, to now seeing it primarily for the "mutual joy" of a married couple. And that has brought us to questions about why that "mutual joy" should be restricted only to opposite sex couples.

My presentation notes are posted in full on our special blog, Marriage & Blessings, which you can reach by clicking HERE. Presentations from previous weeks are also posted there.

Next week we will look at the arguments for and against same-sex blessings.

Adult forum on marriage and blessings: New blog with notes from presentation

Several people asked me today for copies of my presentation notes on my talk on marriage, same-sex marriage and blessings. Rather than put a lengthy post on Fiat Lux, I have created a separate blog for this series of adult forums. The blog is called Marriage & Blessings, and you can read today's notes by clicking HERE.

My apologies; I have not had a chance to add footnotes or clean up the writing. These are notes, not a polished paper. For those of you who came today, thanks, and for those who couldn't make it, I hope these notes will suffice. We will try to keep up with posting our notes as we go along.

A reflection on the defense of marriage by Barbara Crafton

I did not preach today, and I'd invite you to go to our sermon page to hear and read the sermon by The Rev. Nicholas Forti, who preached on the Transfiguration.

After our 10 am service, we launched an adult education series on marriage and same-sex marriage. I gave an overview of this complex topic, and talked about the shifting meaning of marriage within the Christian tradition over time and the arguments for and against redefining marriage to include couples who are of the same sex.

There is a lot to take in, and over the next few weeks we will take our time looking at Scripture, history, theology and sacraments. I am very pleased to be teaming up on this series with The Rev. Dr. Heather Warren, who is a professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia and a historian of American religious history and our part-time ministry associate for adult education.

I've created a special blog, called Marriage & Blessings, to post our presentation notes and other materials from these talks. My notes from today are posted and you can read them by clicking HERE.

As we go along, I will be posting various commentaries here on this topic, beginning with this reflection that came yesterday from Barbara Crafton, who is an Episcopal priest from New Jersey, an author and a retreat leader. We will be hosting Barbara in December for a parish retreat day, and perhaps we'll get to hear her thoughts on this and other topics as well. Here is her commentary:

DEFENSE OF MARRIAGE?

Things seem pretty solid here at home, the week after the Justice Department announced that it would no longer defend the constitutionality of Defense of Marriage Act cases. So it seems that our straight marriage has survived the unspecified threats gay marriage poses to it. I still don't get what these threats are, exactly, nor do I understand how it is that an institution said to be the bedrock of everything civilization holds dear can at the same time be so utterly fragile as to stand in need of a vigorous defense. Now it seems that the whole thing may be on its way to the footnotes of American constitutional history without my ever having figured it out. Not even the Republicans, for whom this issue seemed so central not that long ago, seem to want to fight about about it any more, except for Mike Huckabee. Of course, he's a pastor, so what do you expect?

But wait a minute -- I'm a pastor. This reminds me of what has irked me about DOMA ever since it appeared, what's been so irksome about the whole moral conversation among us, and it's this: people think there's only one kind of Christian. People think there's only one kind of religious moral vision. People outside faith communities imagine a conservative social consensus within them that isn't there, and people within them often think there should be one, even though there isn't. The old inside joke about Jews -- two Jews, three opinions -- is true of all faith communities. We share a certain moral and cultural inheritance, and our spiritual assignment is to puzzle over it. Often we agree among ourselves about its meaning and application in the world, and sometimes we don't. That's the way assemblies of human beings are, and faith communities are nothing if not human.

Still, many faith communities -- most of them -- do claim a monopoly on truth. They want to proclaim it and then they don't want anybody messing with it. The last sentences of the Christian scriptures contain this warning to anyone who might be toying with the idea of adding something to Holy Writ: I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book. -- Revelation 22:18

Our reverence for our ancient texts trips us up. We imagine the truth of scripture to be of the journalistic sort, the who-what-when-where-how kind of truth, the it-either-happened-or-it-didn't kind of truth, which many among us have come to believe is the only kind of truth there is. But it is not so. There are many truths -- the truth of story, the truth of archetype, the truth of poetry, the truth of group aspiration. None of those fit easily into who-what-when-where-how. And the world's holy scriptures contain them all.

Because we have so beggared our notion of what truth is, we can easily find ourselves imagining religious truth to reside only in our past, as the words on the page record it. There it is, in black and white, we say. Just do what it says. And so we reach back across several linguistic groups and several cultural groups, through the filters of redactors and translators too numerous to count, and struggle to don first-century clothing we can no longer wear. Or we project ourselves backwards through time -- Well, they must have been just like us, we think. Our own local version of The Family, as we know it today, must be and always have been the timeless rock of humanity. In order to believe this, we must not only ignore the varieties of contemporary family arrangements but also significant portions of the very scriptures we tell ourselves we are protecting -- our polygamous patriarchs, their concubines and the children they begot upon them. We must ignore the custom of the Levirate, by which you had to take your sister-in-law as your wife if your brother died. We must read the story of David and his beloved Jonathan selectively, resolutely ignoring the sexual aspect of their deep friendship. And we must ignore some very interesting women of the Hebrew scriptures -- Tamar the wronged daughter-in-law who turned the tables on those who wronged her. Rahab the brave and crafty prostitute, who used her profession to save her people. Ruth, who secured her future by seducing a wealthy farmer. Old Testament women who thought outside the box, remembered fondly in the New -- each of them listed by Matthew the evangelist as part of Jesus' family tree.

The nuclear family, so often imagined to be the norm in America, is not the only family of the scriptures. It is not even the majority family of the scriptures. In fact, it is not even the only American family: American families have had many configurations in the short history of our Republic. The family has always changed. Yes, it has always been a basic building block of society, but it has changed shape throughout history. Human history is shaped by living people, as well as by the testament of dead ones. It is a conversation between the living and the dead. And the history of any community is shaped by forces outside it, as well as by those within.

So, not with a bang but a whimper, the Defense of Marriage Act fades from the headlines. Don't Ask, Don't Tell has ended, too, with hardly any truculence to mark its departure. Maybe we are turning a page. Maybe we are beginning to save our energy for something more worthy of it than the culture wars about sex and marriage we have fought so long and with such zest. Maybe. Because there are, indeed, threats to the health of families everywhere, but they are not other kinds of families. Shocked by an economic downturn, sickened by the sacrifice of young lives in ill-considered wars, sobered by a new consciousness of societal and environmental limits, perhaps we can begin to see an urgency in finding ways through all of these, instead. Perhaps we already do see it.

The Almost-Daily eMo from the Geranium Farm Copyright © 2001-2011 Barbara Crafton - all rights reserved

Forums on marriage, same-sex blessings, begins this Sunday

Beginning Sunday, we will be offering a series of adult education forums at St. Paul's on the topic of marriage and same-sex blessings. The forums will get underway at 11:30 am in the Lounge.

This is a controversial subject on many levels. Meanwhile our diocese will likely see its first authorized same-gender unions this spring.

There are many underlying issues, and I think it important that we as people of good will and faith take the time to understand the competing points of view and how we have arrived at this moment in our history as a church.

When a couple exchanges vows of commitment, who is conferring the blessing? God? The Church? The couple? And what is a blessing? What obligations come with a blessing for us as the people of God and for the couple?

The Anglican Theological Review, which is typically a weighty journal, devoted its Winter 2011 issue to an exploration of these questions and others, with papers commissioned by the House of Bishops representing competing points of view written by a diverse group of eight theologians and biblical scholars. We will be drawing on that work in addition to a number of other resources.

What is the purpose of marriage? Is marriage primarily for the procreation of children, or as it says in The Book of Common Prayer, is it primarily for the "mutual joy" of the couple? Should that joy be restricted only to opposite-sex couples? Are there theological meanings to marriage that need to be recovered?

We are a church that holds dear our history and our connection to the apostolic tradition. We revere the authority of Scripture as the primary guide for Christians to holy and ethical living, though we often don't agree on what we mean by that. What does Scripture say about marriage? What doesn't it say? As Anglicans, how do we bring into the conversation our "three-legged stool" of Scripture, Reason and Tradition?

And is the Holy Spirit calling us to a new understanding of marriage, or are we succumbing to popular culture?

To bring you this series of forums over the next four weeks, I will be teaming up with The Rev. Dr. Heather Warren, who is a professor of Religious Studies and a historian of American religious history. Whatever your point of view, I hope you will come with open minds and open hearts. One of the papers in The Anglican Theological Review (p. 62) noted this, and I think it is a good starting point:

"It is no accident that we now debate marriage. For marriage is an example of the concrete discipline that most of us (liberal and conservative) lack: in marriage we practice common discernment over self-interest. Marriage cultivates concern for one another; it offers lifelong hospitality; it enacts love; and it exposes our faults in order to heal them. It is the marital virtues that the church needs, not only with respect to the Bridegroom, but just now, with respect to one another."

I hope you will join us for these forums.

Moving beyond human precepts

Now and then I run across something in the Daily Office readings that I have never quite focused on before. For the uninitiated in Episcopalspeak, the Daily Office gives us biblical readings from Old and New Testaments assigned for each day running on a two-year cycle.

We are nearing the end of Year One (the new church year begins the first Sunday of Advent, Nov. 29, when Year Two will begin).

So it was that on Monday I came across a tidbit in the Gospel of Matthew that I had seen before, but which now jumped off the page to me. The passage for the day, Matthew 15: 1-20, is a short lecture from Jesus about how religious leaders give lip service to the religious law (Torah) but do not honor it with their actions.

He ends up with the familiar statement that it is what is in your heart that leads to good or bad actions.

But that is not what intrigued me. What caught my attention Monday was Jesus quoting from Isaiah 29: 13. Jesus does not quote Isaiah precisely, but tweaks the Isaiah passage a bit. Here is how it comes out with Jesus:

“The people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.”

Teaching human precepts as doctrines.

That led me to crack open the commentaries on this passage. What I learned is that Jesus was wading into the controversy of the korban, a First Century Jewish practice of declaring something to be sacred, or "clean," when, in fact, it really isn’t. Jesus criticized the religious leaders for looking for loopholes in Torah by embracing human practices and declaring them clean when, in fact, they are merely cultural customs. Let us not forget that in this, like so much else, Jesus is Jewish and is primarily concerned with showing others how to be better Jews.

As I said, Jesus tweaked Isaiah a bit. The Isaiah passage is focused on worship practices. Jesus moves beyond worship and into life practices. He puts it squarely: how much of what we justify in life as central to religious doctrine is really cultural practice dressed up as sacred?

And that led me to wondering how much korban we do as Christians in the theological debates that so captivate us now. How often do we declare that one of our cherished cultural practices is based on “sacred” doctrine when, in fact, it is really only cultural?

This is a touchy topic, and can cut in several directions.

A century-and-a-half ago, white Americans declared that slavery was sacred, and they found much in religious doctrine to support their position. The Bible is certainly full of justifications for slavery. Yet who among us now would make the claim that slavery is justifiable based on Christian doctrine?

Did the doctrine change or did the culture? Or was the doctrine never really in support of slavery, but those who supported slavery forced the doctrine to support it?

Nothing is more culturally based than marriage customs. That has been true since the dawn of humanity, and is certainly true now. Every society and every religion has marriage rites, and rules governing who may be married to whom. The Bible reflects several forms of marriage, including polygamy. When it comes to marriage, the Bible oozes with the culture of the people who wrote it.

But what about marriage is based on doctrine?

I sincerely believe that God blesses loving relationships, and that two people can be bound together in spirit and flesh in life-long committed relationships. I believe that is at the heart of the gospel, and that St. Paul gives us a foundation of “faith, hope, and charity” that can guide us in all human relationships, including marriage.

Yet we also add layers of culture – human “precepts” – to our marriage customs. Our wedding ceremony in the Episcopal Church is based on the Book of Common Prayer; weddings in our church look a certain way, reflecting our European (English) roots. We've added a few extras in recent years, like "unity" candles. Go to Mexico or India or China, and you will see very different ways of celebrating weddings, all wonderful, and all grounded deeply in their cultures.

This passage from Matthew, if taken seriously, poses tough questions for conservatives and liberals alike on the topic of marriage.

Conservatives rightly warn that we should beware of bending our religious doctrine to changes in our culture. Yet how much of that doctrine is grounded in a cultural practice? How much of their opposition to gay marriage is really based on a cultural bias against homosexuality? Do recent votes, like in Maine, against gay marriage prove that gay marriage is wrong, or only that American culture is still much biased against gay marriage?

Recently, a wing of our church has taken to calling itself “orthodox” because it is following traditional teachings on marriage. Yet that begs the question: Are these traditional teachings “orthodox,” or merely human precepts in the guise of orthodoxy?

Liberals warn that the culture is changing, and the church needs to change with it lest it become meaningless to the people it is meant to serve. Yet does the gospel change when the culture changes? Are liberals responding merely to new human precepts? Are there timeless foundations to the gospel that can guide us beyond the boundaries of culture as it changes?

It seems to me that there are. When we discuss the issue of marriage, straight and gay, we ought to be discussing it in the context those timeless gospel values of faith, hope and charity.

True orthodoxy might just get us out of this predicament.

As I understand it, orthodoxy in a Christian context is grounded in the creeds: statements of faith about the triune nature of God and the saving acts of Jesus Christ (note: marriage is not mentioned). Resurrection is central to the creeds, and resurrection knows no cultural boundaries because resurrection comes only by the grace of God through Christ. Resurrection and salvation ought to be our guide in conversations about marriage, whether you are liberal or conservative – and maybe then our conversation might move beyond “human precepts.”