YES, AND ROUND IS SQUARE TOO:

A Diatribe On ‘The Sacrament Of Homosexual Marriage’.

“Matilda told such awful lies/It made one gasp and stretch one’s eyes...” According to a recent posting on NWNet, Robert Warren Cromey’s brother Edwin asked him ‘if I believed the marriage of same sex partners was the same as the sacrament of marriage between opposite sex couples. I’ll start off by saying yes they are the same. The articles of faith in the 1978 Book of Common Prayer, P. 857, says, “The sacraments are the outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace, given by Christ as sure and certain means by which we receive that grace.”

· ‘The outward and visible signs in marriage are two people.’ No. If we get the doctrine right, we shall get the rest right. In marriage the “sign” is sexual consummation. This is by definition between a man and a woman, in accordance with the Lord’s own word. Sex itself (from Latin sexus, the physiological difference) involves two sexes not one. No amount (to be blunt) of messing about with genitals makes an act into sexual consummation or intercourse, which is the irreducible reality without which there is no marriage, in the sight of God or in the legal sense. That is why for non-consummation one may ask for and obtain an annulment, not a divorce. Marriage, however complex and interesting it may become as a phenomenon of Christian civilisation, remains irreducibly sexual.

· ‘The inward and spiritual grace is the couple’s vows and the assurance of God’s blessing on the couple...’ No again. The “inward and spiritual grace” in marriage is much less ethereal: it is God’s gift of married sexual love: that it is present is signified by consummation, that it grows and flourishes is ensured by sexual belonging.

· ‘Marriage conveys what it signifies. Marriage conveys vows of fidelity, life long union and love. One doesn’t have to be of the opposite sex to convey the significance of marriage.’ No again: marriage does not convey vows, the vows convey consent to, and the intention of, being married. To use the terms “union” and “marriage” in this connection is to beg the question. Same-sex people may well wish to promise to be one another’s best friend for the rest of their lives, even to mess around with one another’s genitals exclusively, but neither deep spiritual friendship nor messing around etc. is of the essence of marriage. It is surely not coincidental that very many languages cannot even express the idea of same-sex persons’ marrying one another: sometimes, as in ancient Greek, different forms of the verb are used for the man and the woman, sometimes, as in modern Russian, the actual verbs differ.

· ‘We also know that the ministers in the marriage are not the clergy but the couple.’ Yes, and they are a “couple” because, by virtue of their differentiation by la petite différence, they will be able to copulate. To accept less is to accept something short of a full marriage. ‘This means that the sacrament of marriage happens with or without the clergy and the church. It happens when the couple choose to enter into the covenant of marriage. They may go to the church and ask the assistance of the clergy for counsel, prayer and in the American church sign some legal documents. These have nothing to do with the sacramental nature of the marriage.’ Yes, but we go to church for weddings for another reason, even if the church wedding is itself a legal form (which in many places it is not): we are proclaiming our willingness to obey God’s call to this marriage. Our commitment is made publicly, our friends and family witness it, and they stand ready to support our marriage in the future with prayer and counsel. God Himself is in the sacrament; if He were not, it would be a form of magical mumbo-jumbo which we do to one another.

· ‘The church is ready to assist straight people but not gays and lesbians.’ If the sacrament happens anyhow, what is lost to such “couples”, except of course a colourful ceremony? Why not a City Hall ceremony (if City Hall could be induced to attach any meaning to it in the case of a pair of people of the same sex)? But seriously, a Christian church cannot celebrate what is not, or treat people as called to what is not. If I want to complain that all my life I have been excluded from the pleasure and privilege of begetting children I can go right ahead, but I need to be fair and blame the Management alone for my exclusion.

· ‘The articles of faith in the Book of common Prayer continue P. 861. “Holy Matrimony is Christian marriage, in which the woman and man enter into a life-long union, make their vows before God” and the articles of faith in the Book of Common Prayer continue P. 861. “Holy Matrimony is Christian marriage, in which woman and man enter into a life-long union, make their vows before God and the Church, and receive the grace and blessing of God to help them fulfill their vows.”

I believe that same sex couples enter marriage and holy matrimony when they “enter into a life-long union, make their vows before God and the Church, and receive the grace and blessing of God to help them fulfill their vows.”’ What union? As a legal concept this does not exist, as a biological reality it is impracticable. It is incidentally thoroughly sexist as a term: the plain facts are that the male gets up a back passage, a female gets nowhere fast. Because both the sex-act and sexual love work differently in each sex, women suffer a different, and arguably a much severer, kind of deprivation in homosexual relations. And I’m not meaning children here, but the specifically feminine experience of awakening in which most women are, initially at least, a lot more interested than in progeny.

· ‘It is clear that some same sex couples in my experience desire to “enter into a life-long union.” That is their wish, desire and intent. I as a priest must simply take their word for their motivation and intention. They “make their vows before God and the church.” In the ceremonies I have conducted and witnessed, same sex couples make vows of faithful, life-long union before God and in church.

I believe they “receive grace and blessing of God to help them fulfill their vows.” As celebrant and witness to such blessings I ask God to give grace and bless the couple. I assume God does that. I am not willing to limit God’s grace and blessing in any matter. I assume God graces and blesses same sex couples as He does opposite sex couples just because they ask for God’s blessing and grace. We have no proof that God provides those gifts, we accept on faith that He does - for opposite sex as well as same sex couples.’ This will work when one can put together a long grey nose, four large hooves, a stringy tail and an unwieldy body and hope for a live elephant out of it. God has not granted it to us to make our own elephants, still less bring them to church for some impersonal substance called “grace and blessing” to be poured out upon them.

· ‘Paul’s words are that marriage is the sign of the mystical union between Christ and His church. The personal and sexual intimacy between the couples speaks of a deep connection, unity and bonding. That intimacy is a sign of our oneness with God and all creatures. The exhilaration of sexual and orgasmic union reflects the creative, intimate, and explosive character of divine energy available to all human beings. That intimacy happens to same sex couples as well as opposite sex couples. It is not dependent on procreation. It is dependent on robust sexual connection, trust, love and joy.’ It is an idea , before one tries to get anything out of any passage of Scripture, to have read it recently and attempted to submit one’s mind to it. These remarks bear virtually no relation to the words of the text. First, in Eph. 5 Paul is addressing men qua husbands, women qua wives. Second, he is addressing people who in most cases were in arranged marriages. Third, he must have assumed sexual connection with all its possible joys, but he has nothing explicit to say of the nature or quality of anybody’s orgasms or the degree of personal intimacy enjoyed. That the ideal of a romantic and intimate love between husband and wife would eventually come out of his teaching might well have surprised him (but not of course the Holy Spirit). Fourth, he is speaking of an asymmetrical relation between one who gives up his life for another, woos and pursues, enters, awakens and makes fruitful, and one who is at first empty, then turns and responds, receives, is changed and matured, conceives and produces. I do not wish to be crude, but he is saying, as the whole Old Testament is, that the facts of sex are a God-given metaphor for an eternal relation. Fifth, marriage is not Paul’s topic except incidentally: his subject is the archetypal truth, which he applies to actual marriages. He is not getting a picture of the relationship of Christ and the Church out of natural human marriage, whether or not orgasmic or intimate, but trying to get Christian marriages to function as little acted parables of that supreme love-relationship. In it all the getting comes through giving, just as we are happiest in sex when we forget ourselves entirely. In it all of us His people are feminine, and His passion and our response are made visible in fruitfulness. Heterosexual relations are the metaphor, Christ and His bride are the reality to which in Paul’s mind actual marriages are to bear witness. As the black Episcopalian preacher whom I heard in NYC recently put it so vividly, “Jesus wants to open you up and climb right down inside you.” In practical spiritual terms he is telling me that if I am in a Christian marriage, the wishes of my husband, or the needs of my wife, dictate the shape of my obedience to Christ. This has tremendous healing implications for, among other things, the greedy claims of careers, ecclesiastical or secular, or of children. It was almost certainly incidental to his aim that his prescription works for falling in love in an arranged marriage, and for climbing back into love when we fall out of it, that it is uniquely counter-cultural, contradicting equally male mother-fixation and female smother-love, that obeying it makes men grown up and women fulfilled, and that the happiness produced by it is perhaps “the best bliss that earth imparts”. After several decades years of passionate monogamy I am still discovering new wonders and riches in this passage; but what has it to do with homosexual relations, or even chaste same-sex friendships? Absolutely nothing: there is enough teaching in the rest of the NT on all other relationships to keep us occupied for a lifetime. One might as well look to this passage for guidance on kindness to animals.

· ‘Some say the purpose of marriage is procreation. The Book of Common Prayer indicates three purposes of marriage. “The union of husband and wife in heart, body and mind is intended by God for their mutual joy: for the help and comfort given one another in prosperity and adversity; and, when it is God’s will for the procreation of children....”’ The ECUSA’s BCP is not quite Scripture, but it’s Scriptural all right, if a little coy on the first purpose.

· ‘While same sex couples cannot have children biologically, they are quite capable of having children by adoption, in vitro fertilization, and foster care. The church allows straight couples to be married who are too old to have children, who are not physically able to have children or just plain don’t want children. Procreation is not a necessary requirement for marriage. Same sex couples can pledge each other mutual joy, help and comfort in prosperity and adversity without the expectation of procreation.’ Same-sex couples will always be dependent for children on the coming together in one way or another of spermatozoon and ovum, in other words two sexes are necessary for procreation. To have children is the predictable, regular and typical (dare I say normal?) result of physical union between people who are biologically compatible (cf. Latin parens, pl. parentes ‘one who brings forth’), the contrived, incidental or artificial result of homosexual relations. The people who enter a homosexual relationship with a view to having a family must be almost as rare as those who regret that they are heterosexual. And (speaking as a mother), I cannot subtract from the joys of marital relations the joy of anticipating the offspring that were to come that way when we were young, and the memory now that we are much older of the people who have now come that way. I speak as someone who, when I entered upon matrimony (a denominative Latin noun from mater “mother”), did not desire children, just believed that to have a couple was probably my Christian duty.

· ‘I also believe that God enters human history and brings about change in the social order. Saul and David were permitted many wives. Jesus said a man should not divorce his wife. We know now that men could divorce wives but women could not divorce husbands.’ “We know now” is an interestingly contemptuous way of putting it, but scarcely right. The Jewish situation has always been known to the interpreters of the relevant passages. Roman wives divorced husbands quite a lot. ‘Jesus<’> proscription of divorce was to protect women and not marriage. Even the idea of faithful, life-long monogamy was a development within the Jewish people of God from a society that permitted polygamy.’ The protection of women and men is a real effect of the monogamous ideal: but why, unless Jesus was dead stupid (He spoke or read at least one more language than most clergy in the ECUSA for starters), must we assume that He was incapable of holding more than one idea in His head at a time? Suppose He was after several things, above all glorifying His Father by reversing the Fall and destroying the works of the devil at the point where human beings sin most cruelly against one another? Jesus was at the very least recalling the people to God’s intention in making mankind sexually differentiated, and it wasn’t so that we should all get the mostest for the leastest.

· ‘We know that slavery in many varied forms was permitted in Jewish and Christian societies. Heroes like Wilberforce in England and the abolitionists in the United States felt called by God to abolish the institution of slavery. I believe God acted in and through these prophets to change existing religious notions and bring freedom to people in bondage and offer them full humanity.’ It seems to be implied here that the abolition of slavery represented an advance on NT teaching. Wilberforce & Co. would be astonished. So would Paul, who “accepted” slavery only when it could not be changed. When a convert found himself caught in a situation which could not be changed, the trick was (and is) to live in Christian freedom within those limits. The alternative was to wait for some time which would never come before starting to live for Christ. The writer seems not to have noticed that some form of slavery has always been the lot of most people, because it is the privilege of very few to choose their domicile, occupation or status.

· ‘The church had it that the ordination to the priesthood was reserved for men. God acted in and through the church to bring about change and justice so that women are ordained priest and bishop. We know that all Christians do not agree with this change. But the church, her rules, theology and liturgics are always changing and developing.’ There are three implications here to all of which I object most strenuously. The first is that ordination is some kind of a human right. NO!!! I have no such right. If God calls me, or I think He has, there need to be fair means of determining that this is so, and of doing something about it, that’s all. But the justice argument is the worst and weakest. Secondly, while I am not currently contemplating or seeking ordination, if I were to do so I should find it insulting to be regarded as someone who needs to persuade the authorities of my fitness in spite of my sex. Mainstream Christianity, whatever we may hear these days, has never thought it regrettable to be a woman, even one who has been “sexually active” with one man for more than half her life. My ordination is not of the same order as that of someone whose mores would until 30 years ago have been condemned in any Christian church. I had better in this context stop at that before I boil over onto the Net. Thirdly, not everything is up for grabs in the Church. The Apostles must have all worn sandals and robes, and thought them good: we needn’t. They may have considered women ritually unclean and so unfit for presiding over the Eucharist, but they don’t seem to have said so. We need to distinguish between Apostolic custom and Apostolic teaching.

· ‘Cuthbert Simpson’s old book Revelation and Response, indicated God reveals himself in human history and we, God’s people, respond, change and develop, as did the ancient prophets and people of Israel.’ Biblically God interprets His acts to His people in words and acted parables. The stock view of the prophets as initiating a whole new set of ideas is based on misunderstanding. Much truer to the record is that Moses represented God’s Statement and the prophets His Reminder. In any case God is not captive to events and in flux like them.

· ‘Jesus indicated the law was made for man, not man for the law.’ Not exactly. What are my body and sexuality made for? ‘The sacraments are made for man, not man for the sacraments. The laws and sacraments of the church now say marriage is only for heterosexuals. I believe God reveals to us today a new creation, a new being, a new phenomenon. We live in a time when some same sex couples want to enter life-long faithful relationships.’ How do we test the spirits? What if some of us sometimes have little urges which are not quite right? Must God the Grandfather baptise it all?

· ‘Some homosexuals, not all by any means, want to vow to be with each other “to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until we are parted by death.” They want to make a solemn vow. The writers of Leviticus didn’t face this.’ Not in so many words, for chronological reasons. Paul never heard of such a thing. Not precisely in Judaism or the Church, but there’s no knowing what may have gone on in fringe groups. He will, however, certainly have heard of the pagan equivalent. Tarsus where he was a student was a big city with all the vices. ‘The ancient fathers, the theologians, the reformers, the writers of Prayer Books and liturgies never faced a situation where same sex couples came to the church asking for a blessing, a marriage, a wedding ceremony, or a nuptial mass.’ Homosexual “marriage” motivated as in modern times was known in pagan antiquity. At least one ancient bishop taught the rightness of male homosexual conduct. But by and large the reaction to such a request before Process Theology was so wholly predictable that nobody tried it. ‘Homosexuality in the past was seen only as fun for the initiated and perversity (Note: He means “perversion”. The perversity is elsewhere.) and abomination and immorality by the church at large.’ This does small justice to negative pagan views of the activity, or to the Christian tradition of distinguishing desire from action. ‘We are in a new world now. God is revealing new things through our homosexual brothers and sisters. They are not going away. They will always be with us no <matter how> badly we treat them.’ We have been in a new world since the Ascension. Is all modern change for the better? What precisely, apart from the loss of a sense of shame, is new about it anyhow? Our Third World brethren would term this change an epiphenomenon of extreme affluence: given a short course of austerity, it will vanish away like the dew i’ the morn. Historically speaking they would be right. The real mistreatment is the cruelty of promising that what is not to be had is there for the asking.

· ‘God’s law on social custom is not immutable. It has always changed and will continue to do so. The sacrament of marriage is nowhere near the doctrine of the Incarnation, the Trinity and Eucharist in power and strength. Even in those we know there is a wide variety of interpretation about those great statements of belief. The doctrine of Christian marriage must be expanded to include the marriage of same sex persons if it is their desire to seek the blessing of God through the church.’ I need to hear some scriptural and theological argument for this, instead of a flimsy appeal to sociology and the winds of societal change. Hands up all those who are better and wiser than the Lord Jesus, who have matured out of a perfect love for all their neighbours, a perfect forgiveness and constant intercession for all who have injured them, and a perfect self-giving to (all) their wives, and long to move on from these primitive little rules to higher things...!!!

· ‘Neither the church nor the sacrament of marriage need protection.’ Right enough. These great realities will endure when this whole discussion is sunk without trace. ‘They are large enough in heart and compassion to expand even further to include the new being of homosexual love and marriage.’ This is sentimentality cloaked in theological cliché. Whatever next?