Throughout the scriptures, we see people of faith striving with God: bargaining, negotiating, pleading, seeking signs, asking forgiveness, claiming blessings—from the Garden of Eden to the garden of Gethsemane. Our Lord himself asked that God deliver him from the cup he was about to drink, the suffering he was to endure. In the midst of that suffering on the cross, he cried out to know why God abandoned him, yet he gave up his spirit to God's will and God's care. His trust in God led from the garden of Gethsemane to the garden of the empty tomb.
Though many of our theologies have since constructed a less pliable God, the truth is that we still contend with God. We still plead and bargain and claim blessings. I suspect its something about being human, an imprint of Eden when God wrestled clay into human form for companionship, and took walks with us in the cool of the day. For Christians, the communion of that innocent time is tasted again in the bread and wine we share with One who wrestled into human flesh out of love for us. Yet Communion is also a foretaste of the communion to come, the marriage feast of the Lamb, the kingdom or commonwealth of God that is in-breaking even now, transforming our old ways of understanding and living in the world.
We all struggle with God: people of all colors and abilities and ages and genders and sexualities. We also wrestle with “the powers that be” on this earth. We claim the blessings endowed every human being: equal opportunities, equal rights, equal privileges, equal responsibilities. Socially, marriage is a privilege. Legally, marriage is a right. Spiritually, marriage is a calling, a vocation. In all three categories, marriage is a responsibility. Recently, lesbians and gay men are claiming this blessing and its responsibilities for themselves, socially, legally, and spiritually. Yet there is resistance. Social resistance. Legal resistance. Religious resistance. Paradoxically, some who denied gay and lesbian people other blessings because they were believed incapable of forming long-term exclusive relationships now resist them claiming the blessing of marriage. And yet, in the United States, the majority of citizens, while not necessarily affirming homosexuality or same-gender marriage, believe lesbian and gay couples should be afforded some form of legal rights and protections.10
Lesbians and gay men of faith have struggled with God, grappled to understand their sexuality in the context of their faith, wrestled for God's blessings in their relationships. Despite God's blessing, perhaps rather because of God's blessing, gays and lesbians feel called to reconcile with heterosexual brothers and sisters, some of whom may perceive them as “stealing” their birthright of marriage.
Church and culture may come to realize that the struggle is about something deeper than homosexuality or homosexual persons. The travail is over something essentially human and holy, the imago dei within each one of us that calls us to coupling, communion, and community. That's the blessing of the same-gender marriage debate: it helps us look deeply within ourselves and within the institution of marriage and the mysteries of human sexuality, spirituality, and companionship.
Claiming the Blessing of Marriage
There is some difference of interpretation over whether Jacob contended with God or with an angel of the Lord. But such messengers of the Lord served as God's presence to those to whom they appeared. Today individual Christians wrestle with God's messenger the church; in other words, with one another. Rather than regret the struggle, as we often do, we do better to realize that this is a human condition as well as the Christian dynamic: to wrestle with our conscience and the consciences of our sister and brother Christians, respecting that “God alone is Lord of the conscience.”11 Christian tradition—the Bible, creeds and confessions, literature and history—invites us to grapple too with our spiritual ancestors, guided by the Spirit. And we must also face the church of the future, being faithful in this time and place so that our posterity may be blessed by our legacy.
The peace which we seek in the church is not necessarily the absence of struggle. Though uncertain, it is believed the Greek word for peace, eirene, comes from the root eiro, “to fasten together.” As the writer of Ephesians described Gentile and Jewish Christians blended in the same church despite their cultural and philosophical differences, “Christ is our peace.” Jesus Christ is what binds us together as Christians.
Throughout this book, scripture will play a central role, and the texts that are the “usual suspects” will be discussed. If the issue were readily settled by the Bible, however, Christians would not hold such divergent opinions, as can be seen by the wide spectrum of Christian positions and scholarly interpretations on homosexuality and the Bible. Respected scholars such as Johanna Bos, Walter Brueggemann, Victor Paul Furnish, Peter Gomes, Carter Heyward, Robin Scroggs, Jeffrey Siker, Helmut Thielicke, Walter Wink, and others have concluded, in Siker's words, “the Bible has relatively little to say that directly informs us about how to address the issue of homosexual Christians today. The Bible certainly does not positively condone homosexuality as a legitimate expression of human sexuality, but neither does it expressly exclude loving monogamous homosexual adult Christian relationships from being within the realm of God's intentions for humanity.”12
The declaration that “the Bible says what it means and means what it says” gives short shrift to the multilayered intentions of its writers and the complexities of their cultures and eras and circumstances, as well as to the Holy Spirit, who, through the ages, has led succeeding generations of Christians into “further truth,” as Jesus promised. The “plain meaning” of scripture also fails to account for our own bias and possible ignorance in approaching the Bible. It could be said that such a method for reading the Bible does not take the authority of the Bible seriously enough. Reading the Bible requires first “reading” ourselves, both what we bring to the text and what we cannot bring to the text without scholarly help. It invites comparisons within the Bible itself. And, ultimately, reading the words of scripture must take us deeper—to God's ultimate revelation for Christians, the Word of God, Jesus Christ.
Other Times the Church Changed Its Mind
Same-gender marriage is the occasion to be faithful in our own time. While race and gender and abortion are still matters of conflict, they were even more so at various times in church history, and are still volatile in various venues of Christian faith (such as Eastern Orthodox or Roman Catholic attitudes toward women as priests and Southern Baptist rejection of women as lead pastors). Many Christians hold that the stakes are higher today because they believe that gay and lesbian acceptance challenges biblical authority, Christian sexual ethics, church boundaries, and the institution of marriage. Yet this was also the perception of past controversies. Slavery and segregation, as well as the subjugation of women, were justified with scripture. Women's suffrage, women's ordination, equality in marriage, and a woman's right to make decisions about her own body were viewed (and still are viewed in some circles) as a rejection of traditional sexual ethics and family values, as well as destructive of the institutions of church and marriage and family.
We may not remember (or even know) the anguish of past conflict, just as the mother whom Jesus describes “no longer remembers the anguish [of childbirth] because of the joy.” With this metaphor, Jesus comforted his disciples who were about to suffer his loss (John 16:20–21).
The New Testament devotes many pages to arguably the greatest and most controversial experience in church history, when the Gentiles were “grafted onto the root of Jesse” without first converting to Judaism. We are so focused on our present time that we cannot grasp the revulsion that Jews felt for immoral, illegal (because they did not follow the Law of Moses), and unclean Gentiles. The controversy of accepting them “as they are” is arguably the single greatest