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A Sermon for Judson Church
June 25, 2006
Gay Pride Sunday
Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper
Love and Marriage Go Together Like a Horse and Carriage
We had some amazing candidates for the position of administrator here at the church. We have hired someone, quite wonderful, after a fairly long search. One of the things that happened during the search is that we were required to define who we are, not only to applicants but also to ourselves. Something important happened with one candidate. He was extraordinary well qualified - and we really wanted to hire him. However, when I said, "How do you feel about working in a very unique environment, where gays and straights are used to being with each other, comfortably, even joyously on a regular basis?" I wanted no surprises. He responded, "I have no trouble with that." When I paused too long, nearly gagging on my disappointment in his answer, he continued. "I have no trouble with gays, my son is gay." We concluded the interview quickly and that was that. He would not be a good fit at Judson. We are not people who "have no trouble with that." We are people who REJOICE in "that." We are not open and accepting. Or open and tolerant. We are open and affirming. Open and rejoicing. We like GAY and queer and all the initials that describe all "that." There is a big difference in these attitudes.
A similar thing happened to me last Sunday. I preached at the Sierra Arden UCC in Sacramento, California. When I got to the church, I went straight to the rhythmic sounding chapel where Mexicans were singing accompanied by drums and guitars. I was excited by the sound. An elderly Anglo woman interrupted my journey, "You are in here with us." There I was stuck in the big church with 40 old Anglos while the percussion pierced our ears from the crowded chapel across the way. This same church building also housed a Bosnian Islamic congregation, a Jerusalem Orthodox congregation, the Hispanic Peruvian congregation which met after the Mexican one in the chapel, a Filipino prayer group, an African American Open and Affirming UCC start-up, and an Ethiopian group. The Buddhist Meditation Fellowship and the Nigerians had outgrown the space and left. My interrupter (the greeter) said to me, "Isn't it awful that we have grown so small that we have to rent out to all these loud groups?" I said, no, I thought it was wonderful, not awful. There is a big difference between welcoming diversity and tolerating it. There is a big difference between being gay about gay and "having no trouble with it."
On this Gay Pride Sunday, it is important to say out loud what that difference is. We rejoice in each other. We rejoice in human sexuality that is many faceted, beyond old male and old female and old ways. We are alive in the century that is going to break open all the old stuff about sex and marriage and horse and carriage. It is going to be mostly fun - especially when we get the punishmentalists out of our way. Right now we are in a nearly ridiculous struggle as the President pushes an amendment to the US constitution to prohibit gay people from being married. New York State will have a decision, probably this week, on the same subject. We still have hate crimes, even here in Greenwich Village. Thank God Kevin Aviance is OK. The fight is neither over nor just begun. We are mid stream, mid way - and we know that we are facing simply the last burps and bumps of a dying order. The Pew Trust tells us that 40% of people over 50 approve of gay marriage - and 90% under 50 approve of it. The change has already happened in the young generation who just don't get it. Neither do I - but that is what I am going to talk about today. I want to talk about gay marriage and how I just don't get the fight - while simultaneously I do get it. And it chills me to my bones. What is the problem? As my retired military father-in-law says, "What hurt is it to my marriage of 55 years if my nephew Sam and Garret get married? What possible horse could I have in that race?"
So why is sex so much on the minds of Christians and churches today? What happened to poverty and war? What happened to economic justice and peace? A political chicanery screened them out. They got people riled up about sex instead of the abuse of political and economic power. While the rich get richer, the very people whose pensions are being taken away to help the rich get richer are out in the street yelling ridiculous things about one man and one woman. The success of this substitution of cultural issues for political and economic issues is frightening. It says some very disturbing things about the American people. We prefer the false issues to the real issues. We are easily duped. We do bread and circus and watch our civil liberties go down the drain and our economic security follow it - and then we rant about so-called morality.
Watch the agenda of the major denominations. The Anglican Communion is being ripped apart by disagreements over the consecration of Bishop Gene Robinson. Methodists are battling over whether to welcome gay people into their churches. At the 2006 General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, a task force on "peace, unity, and purity" will offer its recommendations regarding issues of sexual orientation. Ordination of women remains a controversial issue in many denominations. In the RC church, still reeling from the scandal of pedophilia, Pope Benedict XVI's first encyclical, on love, celebrates the value of heterosexual love within matrimony. The UCC has lost 72 congregations since the Marriage Equality Vote of last year's Synod. We have also gained 16 - and two of them are so large that they make the membership tally in the "switchover" very much larger. We have Baptists in our own Judson congregation, fully prepared to be ordained and to work as chaplains, who have to worry about whether they can get through because they are "out." These issues preoccupy spiritual leaders - while AIDS ravages Africa, global warming grows, the war in Iraq spends down the treasury, and the rich become grotesquely richer. What possible moral balance can there be in such preoccupations? Sometimes when I wake up in the morning, I say things like, "This day brought to you by Kafka." Such wryness helps me understand what is going on.
What is the real issue, the issue behind the screen and the feints and the fakes and the spins? I believe the sexual issues matter because we are seeing the last gasps of hyper-masculinity. We are seeing the last hacking coughs of excessive masculinity, the kind that can't be penetrated. It can only penetrate. Only be on top. The kind that needs to be in charge. The kind that needs to control. The kind that is afraid of the power of its own strength. What we are seeing is the end of an old absurd kind of masculinity - and a new one breaking in. We see the new in lesbian couples who enjoy all kinds of gender roles from tender to tough. We see the new in men who are as female as they are male, as male as they are female, in outdated terms that can only be said in the past tense. Of course, the powerful use these changes as screens to scare people off the real issues. They are also genuinely afraid. Imagine a world without masculine violence. Just imagine how wonderful it would be - and how little power they would have to force democracy down the throats of the world. Imagine what capitalism would be without its armies and its violence. It would be like racism without the KKK. Imagine if we begin in our own bedrooms with an exchange of penetrations. You do me, I'll do you. Imagine gender equality. Imagine just how far that would take us. We go straight to Romans: the whole creation has been groaning in travail, waiting for the day when nothing can separate us from the love of God or the love we have for each other.
Now lots of people will tell you the Bible has no horse in this race. Wrong, wrong, WRONG! The Biblical testimony not only "has no trouble with homosexuality." It is better than that. The Bible loves good sex and good love. It has absolutely no stake in hyper-masculinity. The Bible is getting not used but abused to support homophobia. Not only is it turned in to a NO book when it is a YES book, it is also caricatured as being a recipe book. The Bible is a book about love and it is simply astonishing that people would DARE to use it in such balderdash, bigotry, and bamboozlement as opposing marriage because it was not between one man and one woman. We need to start with the obvious truth: the bible prefers celibacy to marriage. Maybe not Karen Armstrong's version of it, as stated in our bulletin, but pretty close. For 16 centuries the Christian church clearly preferred celibacy as a lifestyle. Jesus, they say, was a celibate. The second you really look at Jesus you see that he is gay, at least at the level of gender roles, if not behavior. No, I am not saying Jesus is Gay. But today, if he walked our streets, you bet we would wonder. He had no interest in masculine violence or aggressiveness. He is downright "girly." He used non-violence in a non-masculine way. He was beyond open to affirming of another way of being a man. Surely St. Paul was a celibate. He thought marriage was OK if you had to - but sexual asceticism was at the heart of his gospel. Surely the entire theology of marriage in both Augustine and Aquinas, the two biggest guns, was based in a "I have no trouble with that" kind of theology. Marriage was something you did because otherwise you did something worse. Augustine refers to it as the necessary evil over and over again. We are not at rest till our hearts rest in the love of God - that is where we are to go, then we can get involved with human relations. Marriage was not marvelous or fun or even sacramental. The notion that the bible is pro-marriage leaves out Jesus, St. Paul, Augustine, and Aquinas. It also leaves out the marvelous legacy of celibacy - which even today is a pretty wonderful thing, for those who choose it. The Punishmentalists' interest in marriage is absurd in biblical terms. Instead, the Bible has a remarkable, if hidden, love of the body and its erotic uses. Think of the remarkable first chapter of the Book of John. And the word became flesh! It became what? It became flesh. Not dogma, not creed, not marriage institution. It became flesh. Or think of the big fight at Nicea about the Nicene Creed. They kept in the Resurrection of the Body as a version of the life everlasting. Or think Solomon. Even today, please, as this marriage battle goes on - this distracting, absurd political battle, which we must fight - note that half of the world, even today, is celibate. Half of human beings on the planet today are celibate or single. Let us please not make marriage more than it needs to be. Remember just how ridiculous an institution it has almost always been, what Amelia Earhart called an attractive cage, what Charlotte Perkins Gilman called a high priced insurance policy for women. Remember what happens to widows in India when they are no longer the property of a man? See the movie Water - you won't feel so great about marriage. Remember that marriage can be a good institution only if power is shared and people are able to be free in it. It is not always a good thing to be married. Sometimes it is a taking of a great moral powder - to align yourself with someone you don't really love, to keep yourself from romance, to keep yourself from adventure, to keep yourself safe instead of sensuous. Worse, sometimes we stay in marriage, even with violent or abusive husbands, because we, too, affirm the institution of marriage. Lots of women are in cahoots with bad kinds of marriage. We don't know how to live outside of it so we live in it. The word "divorcee" scares us. I often say congratulations when women tell me they are divorced. I know how far they have walked to get there. I so love the New Yorker cartoon this week, where the mother puts her arms around the son and daughter and says, "Well I guess you are ready to get married. You fight all the time and you don't have time to have sex." In this marriage debate, we have to have perspective. I don't think we want marriage equality just so gay people can have the death-dealing security of marriage. Instead, we want to sanctify marriage - and that is exactly where our century is going.
We are going beyond a dangerous, violent understanding of masculinity into a form of sexual justice and economic justice and freedom from men and their domineering wars. That's where we are going.
How will marriage be sanctified? By getting rid of the prisons of fixed gender roles. By creating a world where women earn more than 79 cents on the dollar. By creating a black family in which both men and women can make money - and not be oppressed by moral punishments for being poor. By letting men know that violence is no longer accepted in marriage or on the streets or in wars. Violence doesn't solve things. Violence comes from excessive absurdist masculinity. That is the horse and the carriage in this race. Some men, and many women too, are protecting the old way of being a guy. It's over, but they don't know it yet.
It is a very good time to remember who else was told they couldn't marry. Who else was told that they were not good enough to marry? Slaves, that's who. The black enslaved were routinely denied the privilege to marry. Because black people were considered chattel, they were thought incapable of loving relationally. Nevertheless, many slaves routinely risked life and freedom in order to marry the one they loved. The question of course is why? A good answer is found in the words of black novelist William Wells Brown. In his 19th century novel, Clotel, Brown says of the enslaved determination to be married: "It is the most intimate covenant of heart formed among humankind, and for many persons the only relation in which they feel the true sentiments of humanity." For slaves, marriage was not about becoming white - although surely that was a piece of it - so much as it was about the sacredness of their loving relationships.
Many heterosexuals today choose not to be legally married until all people can be married. That, too, is a testimony to the good safety and the true beauty of marriage: it can be about love, despite all the impediments in its way. Marriage can be a very good thing. A beautiful thing. By all means check out Edith Wharton's delightful short story on the subject, "The Fullness of Life." It starts with a woman hating the sound of her husband's boots on the stairs. She dies and is promised anything she wants from the angel who greets her at the gate of heaven. A man without boots that scrape and grate on the stairs is what she says. Such a man is given her. She rejects him. She remembers that she has had "'Scattered hints' of the fullness of life." Sometimes, alone, she had longed "for someone at my side to listen to the song the morning stars sing together." She had remembered the night her husband said, "Shan't we be going" just when she was starting to have a mystical experience. She felt "ordained in vain on earth …and hoped for a kindred soul in heaven." She had been alone in marriage. And yet, she rejects the perfect companion in heaven. Why? "Home would not be home for me unless you slammed the door and wore creaking boots." There is an extraordinary comfort in marriage. Wharton both loved and hated it. For those of us who are married, and have the heterosexual privilege to show it, consider how much fun it could be to be married, not as the Augustinian necessary evil or the Aquinasian "better than the alternative." Consider what it would be like to be a candidate for our administrator position and instead of saying "I have no trouble with that," Saying "What a privilege it would be to work in such an environment." Imagine heterosexual marriage that was filled with a sense of joy, privilege, and sanctity. Imagine that. Marriage is our most anti-consumerist moment. It is also our most anti-perfectionist moment. At its best, marriage is a laboratory for grace.
What this whole gay thing is about is, finally, gayness. The old kind. It is about restoring joy to love. It is about restoring marriage to love. It is also about an end to violence and its props and the beginning of an interpenetration and communion of men and men, women and women, women and men. It is about truly understanding the scriptures when they say, "the whole creation has been groaning until now." Waiting for the time when NOTHING can separate us from the love of God or from each other. Instead of responding, "I have no trouble with that, " the proper response is WOW.
Amen.
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