Two stories.
The first, just over three years ago.
My wife Anna and I are sitting in the back courtyard of the Servants houses, enjoying a long summer evening's descent into twilight. A friend who co-led the church community I have been part of for the last two and a half years drops by, an irregular but welcome guest to our community dinner. We catch up on life a bit, now that we don't see each other every week. She tells us she has news to share, then drops the bomb: she is planning to marry her best friend, another woman, I feel blindsided, disoriented. I had no idea.
For the greater part of the next year, as their wedding date approaches, I am intensely conflicted. I know she loves Jesus, I know her as a gracious and hospitable person, deeply committed to creating welcoming spaces for our more marginalized neighbours. Yet I can't reconcile this with my understanding of Scripture. If Paul and other early Christian writers understood sexual intimacy outside the bounds of marriage between a man and a woman as sinful, how could I support my friend's decision? How could I stay silent in their ceremony while the pastor asked if anyone knew a reason why they should not be wed?
I couldn't. I knew it. It would violate my conscience, demand that I behave in a way that did not accord with my beliefs. So with much fear and trembling, I arranged to meet with my friend in a local coffee shop. We talk about plans for the future. We drink tea. I tell her how much I value her as a friend, how she inspires me by the way she has always made me and others feel safe.
Then I tell her I can't come to the wedding.
The second, July 31 of this year.
It is so bloody loud. There are at least three floats within thirty feet of us, each blaring music at volumes that make my eardrums want to permanently secede from my body. The nearest float is a pirate ship, with shirtless men and bandanna-wearing women dancing unrelentingly from at least an hour before things even start. The nearby contingent from the Green Party is carrying bundles of green balloons that look like sea anemones floating placidly over their heads, unaffected by the noise (blessed creatures!). Wads of paper towel in the ears work slightly to damp the noise, but not quite enough...
Finally, a float up ahead starts to move. Our group turns the corner onto Thurlow, then another turn onto Robson. Then, people. Masses of them, completely lining the sidewalk, A tide of applause and cheers, ebbing and flowing from this ocean of humanity as we continue through the downtown core. It's exhilarating, overwhelming, even intoxicating. Gradually, I pick up a groove in my step from the music of the float directly ahead.
I am marching in the 38th Vancouver Annual Pride Parade. Anna and I have joined a group from the Anglican Church of Canada, who has within the last two weeks voted to approve same-sex marriage. The bishop is with us. We have come with the folks from St. Brigid's, and a a sign hangs around my neck that they made the week before, declaring "Jesus loves you", with the Y and U made from bright rainbow tape.
I may actually be having fun...
So what happened?
Some will offer their own answers for this. They might say we've "gone liberal", that we've left the pure revelation of Scripture behind for a pick-and-choose, watered-down cultural distortion of Gospel truth. They might say that affirming same-sex relationships is just one more step along a slippery slope of sexual promiscuity and immorality. They might note all the little steps taken to erode a solid foundation of biblical teaching, then lament that another Christian has crossed the line into error.
Five or six years ago, these were my answers. But however right or wrong they might be - and not being God, I don't claim to have all the facts - they are not my answers now.
My answer might start with another memory: I am sitting at the desk in my room, reading an e-mail from the same friend who had shocked me with her news just weeks earlier. She has written, asking for prayer for her and her future spouse as they "come out" to friends and family. For a time, something in me vigorously resists, refuses -"it's sin! how can I pray blessing for them?" - and then I see it...The juxtaposition within myself: blessing given freely, a opening of the heart to my friends as they are; or defenses built and a retreat into fear and anxiety. A verse comes to mind. "Perfect love drives out all fear." The decision is so simple: love or fear. So, with uncertainty and a certain disbelief at myself, I pray for God to guide and support them. Leave it to God to work out the details...
That moment sticks with me. Not because my opinion changed immediately - I still chose not to go to the wedding - but because it was perhaps the first time I had been summoned to respond to two people whom I loved, both committed to Jesus, yet making a decision I could only understand as sin. My choice had been set before me in the clearest possible terms. I wanted to love, but in order for it to be love, I had to set aside my agenda for what God should do in their lives, press through the discomfort, and be ready to journey with them in what God was actually doing.
To do that, I had to understand what was actually happening. So over the next years, I listened to more stories, stories that broke my heart. Stories of people fighting to change their "sinful" sexual orientation and failing, of far too many contemplating suicide, of finding surprising grace where they thought there would be none. I saw my newly married friends continue in their commitment to extending the healing hospitality of Jesus to those on the margins. I heard anew the longings of a gay friend for companionship - not simply for unbounded sexual gratification, with which LGBT people have at times been caricatured. I watched affirming Christians who held their opinion, not with strident legalism and judgment of those more conservative, but with grace and humility.
My heart grew heavy. Had the Church placed a yoke upon the shoulders of the LGBT community that we were not willing to bear? Although I knew the arguments - "marriage between one man and one woman is difficult for everybody, gay and straight alike" - I began to suspect some dishonesty here, an underlying refusal to acknowledge a real difference in experience: straight people get to marry someone they are attracted to, while gay people have to marry someone they do not.
And where could LGBT people go to worship, to encounter Jesus, to exercise their gifts? There was so much fear, ignorance, and anxious hospitality with strings attached. There were so many stories of feeling unwelcome in churches, or of keeping one's sexuality hidden for fear of being rejected or - depending on the church - dismissed from responsibility and controlled. You couldn't teach, preach, take any public leadership - or, in one church, even work the projector. Yet for the myriad of reasons why they might feel like the Church had no place for them, there were a surprising number who had not given up on the Church. Like the Samaritan woman who was willing to be treated like a dog if only she could eat at the Master's table, there were a surprising number of LGBT people willing to put up with all the fears and restrictions if only to hear the transforming Word and encounter Jesus in the community of his disciples.
Finally, heart furrowed, pommeled, laid bare by the stories, my defenses broke. I decided I could no longer have an agenda. Or rather, that I required a changed agenda: the real flourishing of the LGBT people I knew, whatever that meant, however it looked.
But there was still Scripture. I was unwilling to play fast and free with the text, to arbitrarily and autonomously pick and choose which passages were and weren't relevant. Several years earlier, I had read Robert A. J. Gagnon's The Bible and Homosexual Practice, a thorough, well-studied conservative interpretation of the Biblical witness on same-sex attraction and relationships. I had come away convinced (and would still recommend it). But however powerful and cogent an argument it offered, it no longer seemed to fit with the stories I had heard.
I wanted to find something that took Scripture and people's experiences seriously. After looking for recommendations, I found James Brownson's Bible, Gender, and Sexuality and read it as Anna and I journeyed through the States last winter. Brownson raised possibilities for understanding the text I'd never considered, asked questions I'd until then felt unnecessary. Is the Genesis creation account about gender complementarity? Or is it about the more fundamental need for human kinship, belonging, community? When the Biblical writers speak of a particular sexual behaviour as immoral or impure, why? Is it because of the identity of one's partner and an inability to procreate,or is it the refusal to anchor sexuality within the bonds of relational fidelity, instead using others for one's own pleasure? Could the trajectory of Biblical revelation allow space for loving, life-long committed same-sex marriage? To me, Brownson offered a diligent, thoughtful, even if at times unsettling, approach to Scripture; a nuanced wrestling with the interplay between the eternally inspired Word and the time-bound vicissitudes of culture.
I am well aware that not everyone would feel comfortable with such questions, or with Brownson's conclusions. To re-examine and challenge traditionally held interpretations of Scripture is no light matter; it may seem foolish, arrogant, dangerous even. Yet what has driven me is a love for Jesus - his welcome of the marginalized, embrace of the outcast, his resistance to all that oppresses and crushes the human spirit. He was continually reaching out to those whose behaviour or condition classified them as unclean, immoral, or unworthy. He was astonishingly, uncomfortably quick to offer grace and forgiveness.
And so I can not help to think: even the longest-held tradition, with all its dots and tittles, must continually be brought back to be illumined, invigorated, re-imagined, and yes, sometimes even euthanized, by the person of Jesus. Is mixed-gender marriage one of those traditions? Perhaps. In all honesty, I don't know, but I am committed to sitting and wrestling with the question. Maybe affirming churches have only capitulated to the sexual mores of a liberal, godless culture, and in time will be proven wrong. Or maybe the Spirit of justice is finally uncovering and dismantling the homophobia which has underlain Western society for centuries. All of us, wherever we find ourselves on the liberal/conservative spectrum, wrestle and question and argue from within the dark night of history. We see in part and know in part. We labour and groan for a wholeness we can only glimpse.
So this is my story. No more, no less. Please don't disrespect me by discarding it as mere foolishness and sinful deception. God is in it; I hope you see that. But don't elevate it so highly either, that it becomes the only story, brushing aside or glossing over the stories which challenge and interrogate it. The diversity of ways with which God-fearing people have wrestled and continue to wrestle with this issue is bewildering. People's stories, when we choose to listen, rarely fit the ideological mold.
And maybe that's the point. Maybe it's less about who has the right opinion, and more about the way we relate to one another in this time of seismic cultural change. About whether we can listen. About whether we feel each other's pain. About whether we can be honest about our need for each other's perspective to help see past our own blinders. About whether we can regain our God-given humanity against the seductive, spiritually soporific pull of demonization and objectification. Maybe a disagreement like this is why Jesus presses his new commandment upon us, and why Paul counsels the Roman church to stop condemning each other, reminding that "each of us will give a personal account to God". Gay, straight, liberal, conservative; it makes no difference. God is judge.
Far from frightening, that is the best news I could think of. It means that the final word is not up to us, feeble, vindictive, short-sighted as we are. No; it is in in the hands of One who is wholeness, compassion, mercy, justice, and truth. If that is so, then in the words of Daniel Berrigan, Catholic poet-priest-activist and a personal hero, maybe it is all about:
"Love, love at the end".
The first, just over three years ago.
My wife Anna and I are sitting in the back courtyard of the Servants houses, enjoying a long summer evening's descent into twilight. A friend who co-led the church community I have been part of for the last two and a half years drops by, an irregular but welcome guest to our community dinner. We catch up on life a bit, now that we don't see each other every week. She tells us she has news to share, then drops the bomb: she is planning to marry her best friend, another woman, I feel blindsided, disoriented. I had no idea.
For the greater part of the next year, as their wedding date approaches, I am intensely conflicted. I know she loves Jesus, I know her as a gracious and hospitable person, deeply committed to creating welcoming spaces for our more marginalized neighbours. Yet I can't reconcile this with my understanding of Scripture. If Paul and other early Christian writers understood sexual intimacy outside the bounds of marriage between a man and a woman as sinful, how could I support my friend's decision? How could I stay silent in their ceremony while the pastor asked if anyone knew a reason why they should not be wed?
I couldn't. I knew it. It would violate my conscience, demand that I behave in a way that did not accord with my beliefs. So with much fear and trembling, I arranged to meet with my friend in a local coffee shop. We talk about plans for the future. We drink tea. I tell her how much I value her as a friend, how she inspires me by the way she has always made me and others feel safe.
Then I tell her I can't come to the wedding.
The second, July 31 of this year.
It is so bloody loud. There are at least three floats within thirty feet of us, each blaring music at volumes that make my eardrums want to permanently secede from my body. The nearest float is a pirate ship, with shirtless men and bandanna-wearing women dancing unrelentingly from at least an hour before things even start. The nearby contingent from the Green Party is carrying bundles of green balloons that look like sea anemones floating placidly over their heads, unaffected by the noise (blessed creatures!). Wads of paper towel in the ears work slightly to damp the noise, but not quite enough...
Finally, a float up ahead starts to move. Our group turns the corner onto Thurlow, then another turn onto Robson. Then, people. Masses of them, completely lining the sidewalk, A tide of applause and cheers, ebbing and flowing from this ocean of humanity as we continue through the downtown core. It's exhilarating, overwhelming, even intoxicating. Gradually, I pick up a groove in my step from the music of the float directly ahead.
I am marching in the 38th Vancouver Annual Pride Parade. Anna and I have joined a group from the Anglican Church of Canada, who has within the last two weeks voted to approve same-sex marriage. The bishop is with us. We have come with the folks from St. Brigid's, and a a sign hangs around my neck that they made the week before, declaring "Jesus loves you", with the Y and U made from bright rainbow tape.
I may actually be having fun...
So what happened?
Some will offer their own answers for this. They might say we've "gone liberal", that we've left the pure revelation of Scripture behind for a pick-and-choose, watered-down cultural distortion of Gospel truth. They might say that affirming same-sex relationships is just one more step along a slippery slope of sexual promiscuity and immorality. They might note all the little steps taken to erode a solid foundation of biblical teaching, then lament that another Christian has crossed the line into error.
Five or six years ago, these were my answers. But however right or wrong they might be - and not being God, I don't claim to have all the facts - they are not my answers now.
My answer might start with another memory: I am sitting at the desk in my room, reading an e-mail from the same friend who had shocked me with her news just weeks earlier. She has written, asking for prayer for her and her future spouse as they "come out" to friends and family. For a time, something in me vigorously resists, refuses -"it's sin! how can I pray blessing for them?" - and then I see it...The juxtaposition within myself: blessing given freely, a opening of the heart to my friends as they are; or defenses built and a retreat into fear and anxiety. A verse comes to mind. "Perfect love drives out all fear." The decision is so simple: love or fear. So, with uncertainty and a certain disbelief at myself, I pray for God to guide and support them. Leave it to God to work out the details...
That moment sticks with me. Not because my opinion changed immediately - I still chose not to go to the wedding - but because it was perhaps the first time I had been summoned to respond to two people whom I loved, both committed to Jesus, yet making a decision I could only understand as sin. My choice had been set before me in the clearest possible terms. I wanted to love, but in order for it to be love, I had to set aside my agenda for what God should do in their lives, press through the discomfort, and be ready to journey with them in what God was actually doing.
To do that, I had to understand what was actually happening. So over the next years, I listened to more stories, stories that broke my heart. Stories of people fighting to change their "sinful" sexual orientation and failing, of far too many contemplating suicide, of finding surprising grace where they thought there would be none. I saw my newly married friends continue in their commitment to extending the healing hospitality of Jesus to those on the margins. I heard anew the longings of a gay friend for companionship - not simply for unbounded sexual gratification, with which LGBT people have at times been caricatured. I watched affirming Christians who held their opinion, not with strident legalism and judgment of those more conservative, but with grace and humility.
My heart grew heavy. Had the Church placed a yoke upon the shoulders of the LGBT community that we were not willing to bear? Although I knew the arguments - "marriage between one man and one woman is difficult for everybody, gay and straight alike" - I began to suspect some dishonesty here, an underlying refusal to acknowledge a real difference in experience: straight people get to marry someone they are attracted to, while gay people have to marry someone they do not.
And where could LGBT people go to worship, to encounter Jesus, to exercise their gifts? There was so much fear, ignorance, and anxious hospitality with strings attached. There were so many stories of feeling unwelcome in churches, or of keeping one's sexuality hidden for fear of being rejected or - depending on the church - dismissed from responsibility and controlled. You couldn't teach, preach, take any public leadership - or, in one church, even work the projector. Yet for the myriad of reasons why they might feel like the Church had no place for them, there were a surprising number who had not given up on the Church. Like the Samaritan woman who was willing to be treated like a dog if only she could eat at the Master's table, there were a surprising number of LGBT people willing to put up with all the fears and restrictions if only to hear the transforming Word and encounter Jesus in the community of his disciples.
Finally, heart furrowed, pommeled, laid bare by the stories, my defenses broke. I decided I could no longer have an agenda. Or rather, that I required a changed agenda: the real flourishing of the LGBT people I knew, whatever that meant, however it looked.
But there was still Scripture. I was unwilling to play fast and free with the text, to arbitrarily and autonomously pick and choose which passages were and weren't relevant. Several years earlier, I had read Robert A. J. Gagnon's The Bible and Homosexual Practice, a thorough, well-studied conservative interpretation of the Biblical witness on same-sex attraction and relationships. I had come away convinced (and would still recommend it). But however powerful and cogent an argument it offered, it no longer seemed to fit with the stories I had heard.
I wanted to find something that took Scripture and people's experiences seriously. After looking for recommendations, I found James Brownson's Bible, Gender, and Sexuality and read it as Anna and I journeyed through the States last winter. Brownson raised possibilities for understanding the text I'd never considered, asked questions I'd until then felt unnecessary. Is the Genesis creation account about gender complementarity? Or is it about the more fundamental need for human kinship, belonging, community? When the Biblical writers speak of a particular sexual behaviour as immoral or impure, why? Is it because of the identity of one's partner and an inability to procreate,or is it the refusal to anchor sexuality within the bonds of relational fidelity, instead using others for one's own pleasure? Could the trajectory of Biblical revelation allow space for loving, life-long committed same-sex marriage? To me, Brownson offered a diligent, thoughtful, even if at times unsettling, approach to Scripture; a nuanced wrestling with the interplay between the eternally inspired Word and the time-bound vicissitudes of culture.
I am well aware that not everyone would feel comfortable with such questions, or with Brownson's conclusions. To re-examine and challenge traditionally held interpretations of Scripture is no light matter; it may seem foolish, arrogant, dangerous even. Yet what has driven me is a love for Jesus - his welcome of the marginalized, embrace of the outcast, his resistance to all that oppresses and crushes the human spirit. He was continually reaching out to those whose behaviour or condition classified them as unclean, immoral, or unworthy. He was astonishingly, uncomfortably quick to offer grace and forgiveness.
And so I can not help to think: even the longest-held tradition, with all its dots and tittles, must continually be brought back to be illumined, invigorated, re-imagined, and yes, sometimes even euthanized, by the person of Jesus. Is mixed-gender marriage one of those traditions? Perhaps. In all honesty, I don't know, but I am committed to sitting and wrestling with the question. Maybe affirming churches have only capitulated to the sexual mores of a liberal, godless culture, and in time will be proven wrong. Or maybe the Spirit of justice is finally uncovering and dismantling the homophobia which has underlain Western society for centuries. All of us, wherever we find ourselves on the liberal/conservative spectrum, wrestle and question and argue from within the dark night of history. We see in part and know in part. We labour and groan for a wholeness we can only glimpse.
So this is my story. No more, no less. Please don't disrespect me by discarding it as mere foolishness and sinful deception. God is in it; I hope you see that. But don't elevate it so highly either, that it becomes the only story, brushing aside or glossing over the stories which challenge and interrogate it. The diversity of ways with which God-fearing people have wrestled and continue to wrestle with this issue is bewildering. People's stories, when we choose to listen, rarely fit the ideological mold.
And maybe that's the point. Maybe it's less about who has the right opinion, and more about the way we relate to one another in this time of seismic cultural change. About whether we can listen. About whether we feel each other's pain. About whether we can be honest about our need for each other's perspective to help see past our own blinders. About whether we can regain our God-given humanity against the seductive, spiritually soporific pull of demonization and objectification. Maybe a disagreement like this is why Jesus presses his new commandment upon us, and why Paul counsels the Roman church to stop condemning each other, reminding that "each of us will give a personal account to God". Gay, straight, liberal, conservative; it makes no difference. God is judge.
Far from frightening, that is the best news I could think of. It means that the final word is not up to us, feeble, vindictive, short-sighted as we are. No; it is in in the hands of One who is wholeness, compassion, mercy, justice, and truth. If that is so, then in the words of Daniel Berrigan, Catholic poet-priest-activist and a personal hero, maybe it is all about:
"Love, love at the end".
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