Loganotron

The passage of Prop 8 was a devastating blow for me. In May when the Supreme Court ruled that the ban on gay marriage was unconstitutional, I openly wept at work for 20 minutes. That I would finally be accepted as a full human by the state and the people of California was a powerful feeling. When Prop 8 was announced, I worked on to defeat it in many ways. I raised thousands of dollars and volunteered my time. In the weeks leading up to the election, various gay marriage messages moved me to tears. For me this issue meant acceptance in the world. When Prop 8 passed, I felt that acceptance ripped away.

The day after the election I felt hurt, angry, and depressed. I lashed out at the groups that helped pass the measure. Luckily, 24 hours was about all I needed to move past the hurt and then to start processing what was needed to move forward. One of the things I did was reach out to a few religious friends from my high school days who live in California. One was my old high school math teacher who is a Mennonite and leads a progressive Christian discussion group each Friday night. The other is an old track-and-field teammate who still lives near my hometown and who is loving, caring, open, and engaging. Finally, I wrote my best friend from high school who is Mormon and has a large Mormon family, many of whom still live in California. I need to open these channels of communication with my religious friends so I can better understand where our common ground is. I want to build bridges, form alliances, educate and be educated.

My amazing friend Dangermarc also helped me on this front. He reached out to his friend, the Reverend Gene McAfee of the United Church of Christ. Gene shared two sermons with me and Dangermarc that specifically deal with the issues of gay rights, gay acceptance, and gay marriage. I got permission to share one of them with you here at Loganotron. As you read Gene’s sermon titled “Why We Did It” think about the religious friends and family in your life. Ask yourself whether you can start an open, friendly dialogue with those folks about this difficult issue. Go into the conversation with openness and a willingness to learn and change your perspective. Hopefully if you are prepared to learn and grow from the dialogue, so will your religious friends be prepared to do the same.

And now, Reverend Gene McAfee’s sermon:

I.
One of the most important things parents learn is to treat their children fairly. Not to treat them the same, because each child is unique, and a child’s uniqueness must be respected if she or he is not to be psychologically harmed, but each and every child must be treated with the same degree of understanding and support, the same access to resources and attention, and the same assurance of their unconditional worth. Parents have to learn this, as do teachers and deans and everyone who works with groups of children.

And, as all these folks know, children are very quick to react when they feel that they are not being treated fairly. Children are extraordinarily sensitive to slights and injustices, and what often annoys adults as petty squabbling and bickering over trivial differences are, to the children involved, serious matters of right and wrong, and one of the things an adult dreads hearing most is the declaration of a child, usually with tears in her or his voice, “That’s not fair.”

II.
The prophet Micah, in our first lesson this morning, was urging his listeners to fairness. He used the word “justice,” which is the grown-up word for fairness. Justice is nothing more than people with more power treating those with less power fairly. That’s all justice boils down to, despite all the ways we complicate it and theorize about it. Justice is simply treating people fairly, not the same, but with the same degree of understanding and support, the same access to resources and attention, and the same assurance of their unconditional worth.

Micah told his fellow Israelites — actually, he told anyone who would listen, which is why he used the words “O mortal” — he told people that God’s expectations of us are really pretty straightforward: “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”

Treating people fairly — doing justice in Micah’s words — is the first thing God asks of us. Treating people in ways that respect their unique identities and unique circumstances, that gives them equal access to the resources all of us were meant to enjoy, and that affirms their dignity as recipients of God’s unconditional love — this is what we do when we do justice.

And this is what we, as a denomination, were attempting to do on July 4th, when the delegates at our twenty-fifth General Synod passed with overwhelming support a resolution supporting gay marriage. We were attempting to respect the identities and circumstances of our lesbian and gay sisters and brothers in committed, loving relationships, we were attempting to give them equal access to the resources that all married people enjoy, and we were attempting to affirm God’s unconditional love in their lives, as individuals and as couples.

That’s why we did it. That’s why we took such a controversial step, which has pushed our denomination back into the headlines and has put many of us on the defensive. When people ask, “How could your church support gay marriage when the Bible clearly says homosexuality is wrong?” many of us, I know, are reduced to stammering out an unsatisfactory answer or to a bewildered shrug or to complete silence. It’s often not easy to respond to a challenge when you’ve not had the same time to think and discuss as the delegates to our General Synod had, and so I’d like, in this morning’s sermon, to try to give you at least the beginnings of an answer, to help you find your voice again.

III.
We all know that we’ll be criticized, mocked, and condemned by our siblings in the faith for having passed this resolution, and we also know that we will lose members and perhaps even whole churches over this decision. One of the things that has always characterized the U.C.C. is disagreement. There is virtually no decision we’ve ever made, whether it be in support of civil rights for African-Americans or reproductive rights for women, that has not met with controversy, so we should be used to that by now and not frightened by it.

We know that we’ll take hits from several sides for this, and our delegates to General Synod knew this, too, but they also knew that it’s wrong to treat people unfairly, and when the choice comes down to doing the right thing or doing the popular thing, the church’s mandate is clear: do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God.

Some people, of course, disapprove of gay marriage because they disapprove of gay sex, but if someone reduced your marriage simply to what you do — or used to do — in bed, how would that make you feel?

Would you not, quite properly, be insulted that something that you and your spouse have committed your lives to, that you have worked so hard and so long at, that has meant so much to the two of you and so many others, that has provided so much of the comfort and strength and support we all need to face life’s challenges — that all of that and more has been reduced to what you do in bed — would you not feel that someone had treated your marriage unfairly if they reduced it simply to sex? I think most of us would.

Perhaps, then, you can appreciate how hurt and angry gay and lesbian people are when their lives and their most important relationships are reduced to what others imagine they do in bed. It’s terribly unfair, and even children know we shouldn’t treat each other unfairly.

You may or may not want to think about what your gay or lesbian neighbors or relatives do in bed, but you probably also don’t want to think about what your parents or siblings or grown children do in bed, either, which is why we should not base our morality on what we like or dislike. The world is full of things of things I don’t particularly like — oysters, grits, sunburn, and spin doctors are a few — but my not liking them doesn’t make them wrong.

If something is wrong, we certainly should not like it — although, too often, we do — but we simply cannot use our likes or dislikes as the basis on which to declare things right or wrong. Alice Walker, in her novel The Color Purple, says that God must love the color purple even though many people don’t, because there’s so much of it in life, and she tells us to remember that God loves everything we love and a whole mess of stuff we don’t.

IV.
“But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female,’” we read in Mark’s Gospel, and many people interpret that to mean that God doesn’t approve of same-sex relationships.

God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve, those folks often say, but God also made a talking snake according to the story they’re referring to, and how useful is a talking snake to helping us sort out how we should live and how we should treat others? Not very, I’d say, and I’d say the same thing about Adam and Eve. They’re hardly what I’d call role models for men or for women or for couples. Eve contributes to Adam’s disobedience, Adam blames Eve for his bad behavior, and one of their sons murders his brother — and this is the model some people say Jesus is holding up for all people for all time? Somehow, I don’t think this is how Jesus intended his words to be used, and if Jesus thought heterosexual marriage is as important as many people today seem to think it is, why did he remain a bachelor?

I’m not sure that sexual orientations of any kind were of much concern to Jesus — he never said a word about same-sex relationships, for instance — but that which I do know was of great concern to Jesus was love: love of God, love of self, love of neighbor.

It was not sex that mattered to Jesus, but love, and that’s why we did what we did in Atlanta two weeks ago. The U.C.C. made love rather than sex the priority in human relationships, and it shouldn’t come as a surprise that a culture like ours, which is obsessed with sex rather than love, wouldn’t understand or appreciate or approve of what we did.

V.
But that’s okay, because being in the majority has rarely meant being in the right. Remember Jesus’ words about the narrow gate and the few who would enter it? In American religion, we tend to do morality by numbers: what’s right is what most people say is right. That may be American, but it’s not biblical.

The people who have always tried to do the right thing by God and by everybody — and not just by a few — have always been in the minority and they always will be, and although I know we’d like to see lots more people in our churches, we need to remember that numbers are not the most important thing in a church’s life. Being faithful to the gospel is.

We did what we did in Atlanta because we believed it was the right thing to do. We believe that treating people fairly, regardless of whether we share their likes and dislikes, is the first thing God calls us to do if we wish to live a life that God calls good. Loving kindness and walking humbly with God are parts of that good life, but we fool no one but ourselves if we think we can treat people unfairly and call ourselves good. Our denomination knows that and said that, and that’s why we did what we did.

Let us pray. Almighty God: Guide us, we pray, into the ways of justice and peace, not merely for ourselves and our loved ones, but for all people and for all creation. For the sake of him who invited all to himself we ask this. Amen.