Sunday, October 14, 2012

On Marriage Equality

This morning I gave a sermon on marriage equality in connection with Referendum 74, the ballot measure in Washington state that seeks to repeal the law enacted earlier this year removing discrimination against gay and lesbian couples from the law of the state.  It's worth posting here.


On Marriage Equality
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
October 14, 2012

Scripture:  Mark 10:1-9; Luke 10:25-37
Let us pray:  May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.

At its August meeting the Cabinet of this church adopted a resolution in support of marriage equality and urged the friends and members of the church to vote “Yes” on Referendum 74 to preserve the right of all couples in Washington to marry.  The actual vote for marriage equality of “Approved.”  Please read your ballot very carefully.  Now, I don’t know what position each of you holds on that issue, although I suspect, or maybe just hope, that most of you support marriage equality and intend to vote “Approved” on Ref. 74.  I also know, however, that the forces seeking to preserve discrimination in the marriage laws of our state will spend a huge amount of money trying to convince people to vote “No” (actually “Rejected”) on Ref. 74, that some of their material will try to convince people that there is a biblical view of marriage, that that supposed biblical view is the only moral view, and that that supposed biblical view should continue to be enshrined in the secular laws of our society.  You may even hear the ludicrous claim that the purpose of marriage is only to have children, a claim that makes my marriage to Jane and several of your marriages illegitimate, a claim I bother with further here.  If you haven’t heard those things already, you will.  You will hear them in broadcast ads, and you may hear them from some of your friends and family.  So I want to address those assertions (other than the absurd one about children that doesn’t deserve further comment) this morning in a way that may give you tools for responding to them when you hear them.
So let’s start with the basic premise of those who seek to have their personal moral views preserved in the law, namely, that traditional marriage between a man and a woman is “the biblical view of marriage”.  To put the matter quite simply, there is no single view of marriage in the Bible.  Nowhere does the Bible say in so many words that only a marriage between one man and one women is sanctioned by God, as the anti-marriage equality forces contend.  The Bible accepts without criticism many types of marital arrangements.  I’ll cite just one example, the story of Jacob, one of the great Hebrew patriarchs.  He wanted to marry Rachel.  He essentially bought her from her father by working for him for seven years, the Bible there viewing the man’s daughters as his property that he could sell as he might sell a mule.  The father tricked Jacob into marrying his other daughter Leah instead, so Jacob worked for the father another seven years so he could buy Rachel.  Then he stayed married to both of them at the same time, fathering children by both of them.  In this story, and in others, the Bible approves of men having multiple wives and even at the same time having concubines, that is, women with whom they have sexual relations to whom they are not married while the men are married to someone else.. 
We can quite easily see the Bible’s approving of those marital relationships as expressions of ancient cultural norms that we do not accept and that we consider to be immoral today.  But what about the passage we heard from Mark this morning?  There Jesus cites Genesis, saying:  “God made them male and female.  For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”  Isn’t that a biblical mandate for one man one woman marriage, and only that kind of marriage?  The anti-marriage equality forces say that it is.  But if the Bible approving of Jacob being married to two sisters at the same time, and for that matter of their father essentially selling his daughters to him, is an expression of ancient cultural norms that we no longer accept, why isn’t this passage the same thing?  I am convinced that that is precisely what it is.  It states an obvious biological reality—humans come in two main varieties, male and female.  (We know today that that is an oversimplification of human biological reality, but we need not go into that issue this morning.)  Some people then draw a cultural conclusion from that statement of biological reality, namely, that marriage is only between a man and a woman.  The passage, however, doesn’t expressly rule out other marriage possibilities.  It just describes what the ancient world took to be the human norm.  Yes, we are (mostly) male and female.  That is biological reality, but must we really accept as the will and word of God the cultural conclusion that the ancient world drew from that reality? 
I am convinced that we need not accept that ancient cultural conclusion.  We know, as the ancient world did not, that human sexuality comes in many different forms.  For some, sexual attraction to a person of the same gender is natural.  But there’s an even more important consideration.  What is marriage really about?  Is it about sex?  Well, to some extent, yes.  Sexual intimacy can be and often is an important and wonderful part of the intimacy between two people.  But surely marriage is about more than sex.  Marriage is about a much broader intimacy than mere sexual intimacy.  Marriage is about mutual commitment, loyalty, care, and support.  In other words, it is about love.  Love the way Paul described it in 1 Corinthians 13, part of which was the text for our choir’s anthem this morning, love that is giving of the self to the other and considering the other as much as one considers oneself.  Love as sharing your life with another and the other sharing her or his life with you.  Love as being there for each other in the good times and in the bad times.  Marriage is an institution that solemnizes that relationship, that celebrates it, and that seeks to protect it.  And the gender of the people involved has nothing to do with that kind of intimacy.  That relationship can exist equally well between a man and a woman, a man and a man, or a woman and a woman.  The ancient world that produced the Bible may not have known that truth, but we do. 
The New Testament contains that passage that we heard about a man leaving father and mother and becoming one with his wife that merely reflects ancient cultural norms, but it also has another passage that expresses what is for me an actual divine truth.  That truth appears, among other places, at the beginning of the Parable of the Good Samaritan that we also heard this morning.  We know it as the Great Commandment.  It reads:  “You shall love the Lord  your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.”  In Luke, after he approves of that saying, Jesus immediately tells the Parable of the Good Samaritan to make the point that all people are our neighbors, including especially the ones our culture despises and rejects as Jesus’ culture despised and rejected Samaritans.  How can we who belong to the heterosexual majority, for whom marriage to a member of the other sex is life-giving and makes us whole, say that we love our neighbor as ourselves when we deny marriage to our neighbors for whom it is an intimate relationship with a person of the same sex that is life-giving and makes them whole?  We can’t.  If we truly love our gay and lesbian neighbors, we can no longer deny to them the rights, the obligations, and the public recognition that marriage confers.
There are a couple other things that I want to mention that you might find helpful in discussing this issue with friends and family on the other side.  The first is that in our culture there really are two aspects of marriage that we tend to lump together but that can easily be, and sometimes are, separated.  First, marriage has a civil, legal significance.  State and federal laws contain dozens upon dozens of provisions that mention and depend on marriage.  We find them in tax law, estate law, domestic relations law, and in regulations about who can visit a patient in an intensive care unit among many, many other legal provisions.  Marriage in this legal sense involves getting a license from the state, doing some kind of ceremony that can be either before a minister or before a judge, and filing the completed certificate of marriage with the state.  It can be a purely secular matter, as it is when the couple is married by a judge.  Then, for some people but not for all, marriage also has a spiritual or religious dimension.  This is the dimension that we recognize and celebrate when we do a wedding in the church.  There the couple pledges their love and commitment to each other not only before a representative of the law and human witnesses but before God.  We ask God to bless the union of the two people, and then see God as a participant in their relationship, sanctifying it and blessing it.  These two aspects of marriage are separated when people get married before a judge but not by a minister in a church.  Religious objections, misguided as they may be, may apply to the spiritual, religious aspect of marriage.  But in a nation that supposedly is committed to separation of church and state, there is no reason why those objections, misguided as they may be, should apply to the secular, legal aspect of marriage.  If a church doesn’t want to bless those unions, OK.  It’s their loss, but they are free not to marry same gender couples.  It is however wholly inappropriate for that church to try to force its religious beliefs about marriage onto secular society and its law.  Ref. 74 will not force any church to perform a marriage to which it objects and specifically preserves their right not to, so there is no reason why religious objections, misguided as they may be, should be imposed on the secular law, and it is inappropriate for them to be.
Finally, one more argument that anti forces raise that we need to dispose of.  It is the argument that same gender couples in Washington already have most of the rights provided by marriage under our law of civil unions, so there is no need to extend marriage to include them.  The anti-marriage forces are actually running a television ad these days that says that  Ref. 74 is not about equality.  That’s a lie.  Here’s why.  It is true that most if not quite all of the rights and responsibilities of marriage are provided by the civil union law; but what we have is separate legal provisions based on the gender of the people in a relationship.  Much of our country used to have separate school systems based on the race of the people in the school.  In 1954 the US Supreme Court ruled those separate systems unconstitutional because, as the Court said, separate is not equal.  Separate is inherently unequal.  Separate says you’re different.  Separate says you’re less.  Marriage, and not something less than marriage or even something with just a different name than marriage, is how our culture says that it values a committed relationship between two people.  Not civil unions.  Marriage.  If we call the committed relationship between two people of the same gender a civil union but not a marriage we are necessarily and unavoidably saying that that relationship is less and is valued less than the identical relationship between a man and a woman.  Civil union is better than nothing, but it isn’t equal to marriage.  It is separate, and it is inherently unequal.  That’s why the existence of the civil union law does not make extending marriage to same gender couples unnecessary.  And yes, Ref. 74 is about equality.
We are an Open and Affirming church.  Our Cabinet has endorsed marriage equality and urged us to vote Approved on Ref. 74.  You are of course free to make your own decision on the issue, but I urge you to vote Approved on Ref. 74.  (“Approved” on Ref. 74 is the vote for marriage equality.  Please read your ballot carefully, as it can be a bit confusing which vote is for the marriage equality law and which vote is against it.)  I hope some of the things I have mentioned here will help you make up your mind if you haven’t already done so and will help you respond to the claims of the anti-marriage equality forces in our state.  God blesses all of God’s children regardless of sexual orientation.  My prayer this morning is that the marriage law of our state will at last recognize the equality of all people that God already knows.  Amen.

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