WHERE THE CHURCH GETS IT TERRIBLY WRONG

In spite of dramatic shifts in cultural patterns, the church goes on pretending that the wedding ceremony, which it calls a sacred rite, a sacrament, is a signal to the couple being married that they can now sleep together, they can “do it.” In the not-too-distant past, whether or not a couple waited until after the wedding ceremony to consummate their marriage was beside the point. The church “blessed” the marriage whether or not they had already consummated their union. Nobody asked. Nobody told. The bride and groom, the minister, and the attending guests all pretended that the white gown ensured that the bride was “pure,” and even if the groom, as men will do, had slept around, at least she had not yet had sexual experience. So churches and congregations developed a firmly fixed attitude about marriage, that it was primarily about sex. If you are married, you can “do it.” If you are not married, it’s a sin.

The policy of the United Methodist church regarding same-gender marriage is a good example of confusion about weddings and what they mean. Many people who have long ago given up participation in “church” in any regular, meaningful way still want to have their weddings in church; and it’s as easy to arrange as buying bread if the couple asking for the church’s participation and blessing are a man and a woman.

After the California Supreme Court ruled recently that marriage is a civil right in the State of California whatever the gender of Party A and Party B, a couple of people who have been a family for at least twenty years of domestic partnership, decided to get married. Besides being long-time domestic partners, they have been long-time members of First United Methodist Church in San Diego. FUMCSD is the one perched like a cathedral above Interstate 8 in Mission Valley. The couple, Party A and Party B, have long been considered “family” by clergy and lay members. In a colorful, dignified Church Directory their photograph appears in the “Family” division of the book. For years they have given freely of their time and their money to the church. They have never been known to cause trouble in the community or in the church. They are an ideal couple. As far as I know, there has never been any wonderment or any talk about how, when, and under what circumstances they “do it.” It hasn’t been an issue.

Now that they want to be married it is an issue. Party A telephoned the senior pastor to tell him the good news. He and Party B were getting married... and guess what? “We’d like to have our wedding in the church we love, and we’d like you to perform the ceremony.” Silence. Then the bad news came like a rock thrown onto tender tissue. “I’m sorry,” the Pastor said, “You can’t be married in the church, and none of the clergy will be allowed to participate no matter where the wedding takes place.”

Reeling from that bit of bad news, Party A asked for the next best thing. The church has a great social hall. He asked, “May we have our reception in Linder Hall?”

The pastor said that he was sorry, but that they wouldn't be allowed to use any part of the church campus. "It’s not my decision. The Book of Discipline forbids it," he said. Why? Because somebody a long time ago misunderstood. A whole bunch of somebodys misunderstood. In spite of all the evidence to the contrary, they thought being married was about sex, which would make being family about sex. Wrong.

A favorite response of fundamentalist Christians, the church people who insist that the Bible is the absolute, word-for-word, out of the mouth of the Head Person of the Trinity Himself truth about everything, is that “marriage is for a man and a woman.” Another version, “marriage is between a man and a woman,” is probably closer to actual fact if “between” is the significant word. Presently, 57 percent of marriages in America end in divorce. In the Bible the brief mention of sex between persons of the same gender, “a man may not sleep with a man as with a woman,” is found in what is called “The Levitical Code.” It is sometimes called “The Holiness Code.” The code developed as a way of ensuring the long-term survival and welfare of a small group of nomadic desert people.

Almost everything in tribal codes and rules was about property or about the propagation, health, and safety of the tribe. Then as now, relationships between persons were complicated, and it was necessary to anticipate all the kinds of interpersonal relations that could be harmful to the group. Tribal people had no permanent land, so it was necessary for them to include in their codes the definition of property and its distribution in the tribe, everything from tents to camels to cooking pots to women. Because practically everything was about property, marriage was a matter of property. Looking back thousands of years before the time of Abraham and Moses, we can guess that their ancestors probably existed together without having a formal marriage arrangement. When the earliest people mentioned in the Bible began to make codes, the codes addressed basic issues. It was important to know specifically which of possibly many sons was to inherit the tents, and sheep and camels. It became necessary to have some kind of business arrangement, which marriage most surely was in earliest times, to make clear which of the several, perhaps many, women with whom a man might have intercourse was to be the one to bear the son who would inherit property and responsibility. The contract of marriage, the wedding enacted as a public ceremony, was a transfer of property. The ownership of the woman was the issue. She had belonged to her father, and from the time of the ceremony she was henceforth the property of her husband. In some of the stories and myths from the period there are indications that sometimes the wife didn’t leave her father’s group; the husband came to her there, often or not often, for sexual intercourse with the hope of producing a son who would inherit his property. Sometimes the wife joined his little wandering group which included lesser wives and concubines and slaves; sometimes she did not. Legally under the code, he might have sexual intercourse with any number of women. The point is this: Marriage was not primarily about sex; it was about property. The stories of Jacob and Essau, recently included in the Lectionary, were powerful reminders of the great importance of family relationships and property.

Sexual intercourse! What did all those rules dealing with that activity have to do with the welfare of the tribe. That’s simple enough. Because a man, the husband, might wander in and out of his father-in-law’s group to be with his wife, it was apparently necessary to remind him that he could not have sexual relations with his wife’s sisters, with her mother, nor with any of her daughters, which, of course, were presumed to be his daughters. They were all women. They were property. But decisions had to be made about sexual relations with them. In the first place, the sisters and mother of his wife belonged to another man, his father-in-law, or in the case of his wife’s married sisters to his brothers-in-law. It would have been a grave offense to have used them sexually. The offense and the penalty had to be made clear in the Code.

There was another purpose for sexual intercourse that had to be considered in the Code. Obviously the sex drive in humans, as it is in other animals, is powerful. Because it was presumed that sexual encounters could be initiated only by the man, the Code addressed the matter of whom a man might consider “lawful” sexual partners. The Code’s property laws were specific and clear about the matter of sexual relations with women who were in-laws and women who belonged to other men. The Code allowed, even encouraged, the man to have sex with females who were his own property (concubines and slaves) because children from those encounters gave him more property and ensured the stability of the population of the tribe. Diseases were wicked and could wipe many people out quickly. The more children, the more people, the better.

It made sense to include specific rules in the code regarding sexual relations between men. It’s not surprising that the Code forbade the practice of men being with men to relieve their sexual tensions, obviously a common practice or it wouldn’t have been mentioned. The powerful sex drive had to be directed toward reproduction, producing more people in a scarcely populated world. Man to man sex or masturbation, “spilling the seed upon the ground,” didn’t meet that criterion, so both practices were banned. There is nothing in historical records or in literature to indicate that homosexuality is a modern phenomenon. We may excuse those early leaders of a primitive tribe in their critically under-populated world for including in their code a prohibition against men sleeping with men instead of with women. Sex with a man wasn’t going to help with the population problem. The world no longer has that particular worry. With a rapidly growing population that is now over six billion people, the world today has exactly the opposite problem. The church in the twenty-first century knows better; so it cannot be excused for doggedly holding onto a four-thousand-year-old prohibition that no longer makes sense.

The Code also addressed sexual relations between people of different tribes. The Leviticus Code, as does the Code of Hammurabi, emphasizes the importance of keeping the tribe distinct from other tribal groups. Until relatively recently, civil laws forbidding sexual relations, hence marriage, between people of different races were common in many countries of the world, including the United States. Those civil laws, made with a polite nod to the church, were based on the Leviticus Code. We are now officially enlightened. We no longer have provisions in the law that make it illegal for Party A and Party B in a marriage to be of different races or ethnic groups. Civil law has finally been adjusted to allow people from different races who love each other to marry.

In the matter of “allowing” same gender marriage, people are more reluctant and slower; but we’re getting there. Civil governments are finally, slowly catching up. The United Methodist church and other fundamentalist (our church leaders have chosen to be in that larger Christian tribe) groups aren’t willing to affirm the love relationships between two people of the same gender. The church allows them to be listed among the families in the directory, and the church allows them to contribute time and money; but marriage is obviously going too far. Pity.

It’s a paradox. Church leaders are charged with the responsibility of setting the standard and the example of what is right and just behavior; yet they are being directed to take a stand behind a policy which most of them know is flawed, perhaps even evil because it does harm. That stand ultimately weakens the church rather than strengthens it. One of California’s Bishops has reminded clergy that there are “consequences” for disobeying denominational policy. It isn’t clear if a “consequence” would be loss of a specific job or perhaps revocation of credentials; or maybe the consequence the Bishop has in mind is that powerful, influential church members might stop contributing their money and their time.

What’s a minister to do? Preach and teach. A good start would be to remind people that marriage is much less about sex than it is about family. When two people marry they form a family. The officiant at a same-gender marriage is surely not thinking he is giving the couple permission to engage in sexual activity. That is also not what traditional, opposite gender marriage does. If the wedding takes place in a church, privileged guests participate in the legal formation of a family which has the blessing of the state as well as of the church. Already First United Methodist Church has affirmed the family status of Party A and Party B by including them in the Family section of the church directory. The church has welcomed their participation by accepting their gifts of time and of money. It is unbearably cruel for the church, in spite of all its language of acceptance, to deny same gender couples the right to participate in the important sacrament of marriage. In the case of my friend, Party A, and his partner, Party B, they have chosen to respond to that cruelty by abandoning the church altogether.

The next larger Church General Conference (perhaps not the exact title) will take place in 2012. While leaders continue to insist that the church is “inclusive,” they will have four more years in which they inflict humiliation and pain on some of the very people they say they include in church fellowship. For enlightened people who stay with the church, it will be four more years of embarrassment that their church continues to be wrong in this important matter. The church's motto, "Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors," will continue to be a hollow promise.