June 23, 2024 – Fifth Sunday after Pentecost
No Link to Service
Genesis 9.12-17
Romans 8.37-39
Marriage Equality at Twenty
Fifth Sunday after Pentecost
Wednesday morning November 19, 2003, I awoke to a headline that created in me a combination of an unbridled elation and a gnawing dread. The front page of the Boston Globe blared, “Gays Have Right to Marry, SJC Says in Historic Ruling.” Massachusetts’ Supreme Judicial Court ruled in a 4-3 decision that the state could not discriminate against same-gender couples seeking marriage licenses. It was the first time any US state declared that gay men and women have the same right to marry as anyone else. It ordered the Department of Public Health to begin issuing marriage licenses on request, but stayed the ruling for six months, recognizing not just the tectonic social shift it had just created, but more mundanely, all the paperwork that would need to be changed in preparation.
I say unbridled elation because this was a moment many of us had been advocating, hoping and praying for for years. In 1999 California granted certain but limited rights to same-gender couples, and in 2000 Vermont recognized civil unions for same-gender couples. But it was the SJC decision that specifically legalized such marriages, and multiple states followed Massachusetts’ lead until the Supreme Court affirmed the practice in 2015. It was a joy-filled landmark day.
I also say gnawing dread because I understood that it is one thing for the state’s top court to rule and quite another for a local congregation to come to grips with the ruling. And in speaking with some of you about this church’s experience, I learned that the topic raised similar questions; the primary one, to my mind, was this: I had long since decided that, if asked, I would gladly marry a gay or lesbian couple. To me it was a no-brainer. However, could I do this in the church I currently served? How would the congregation react? In theory, the church’s pastor administers the rites and sacraments of the church without fear or favor; but in practice, how do I navigate within a congregation that is a) still digesting this brand-new way of looking at marriage, and b) not 100% in agreement with the court’s decision. While it is not my job to make every member of the congregation happy, it is my job to respect every member of the congregation and find ways for us to move forward together, with mutual respect and fidelity to our faith. Still, in a congregation of roughly 350 souls, I knew I would have to navigate approximately 350 opinions. So on that November morning, I understood I had some work to do.
I decided at the outset this would not be a conversation about becoming and Open and Affirming Congregation, which we were not yet. The UCC’s O & A process was looked at with wary suspicion by more than a few. In fact one member of the church was convinced that the UCC sent me to that church with the specific intent of making them become an O & A church because my predecessor had failed to do so. You know, like the UCC moves us clergy around like chess pieces in order to achieve its hidden agendas. I felt that launching an O & A conversation in that moment would prove distracting and diverting; in that moment, I needed to know whether I could perform same-gender marriages in my own church by May 17 2004, when the ruling would become effective.
So I’m sure you can guess what I did to lay the groundwork: I opened my Bible. I put together a series of Bible studies that addressed an array of topics: What does the Bible say about homosexuality? What does the Bible say about marriage? How do we understand the rites and sacraments of the church? For while marriage is not a sacrament in the Protestant Church as it is in the Roman Catholic, it is a rite, and we need to know what that means. How do we approach the idea of covenant? This was important because when we become members of a church we enter into a covenant with one another to work and live as the body of Christ with all that entails. Plus, marriage vows are also a form of a covenant between two people. So how do we countenance that important pair of covenants? And finally we looked at the history of marriage down through the ages.
As I’ve mentioned before, one of the best books I’ve ever read on the topic was published in 1981; it is John Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, winner of that year’s American Book Award for History. I devoured the book when it was published, and it has long informed my approach to the subject. Last year, I shared with you, for a second time, all the biblical passages that people will trot out to sustain their own prejudices against gay and lesbian behavior, and there is no reason to repeat it for a third time. But I think there were two major topics that were eye-opening for my congregation. The first is the history of marriage as it is found in the Bible. We’ve all heard the trope, marriage should be between one man and one woman, and then out trots the story of Adam and Eve. Inconveniently though, the Bible never says the first man and the first woman were married, so there goes that argument. But the eye-opener is that the Bible not only includes, but endorses various forms of marriage that burst the one-man one-woman balloon. For example, there are multiple instances of polyamorous marriages: Jacob married Leah and Rachel; Esau married Adah, Oholibamah and Basemath; Gideon is the husband of many wives; the great King David had at least seven wives; and in Deuteronomy 21 we find the explicit permission for a man to marry more than one wife. The Bible also endorses the practice of concubinage, where a man takes a concubine into the family for the purpose of bearing children with her, even when his wife is able to do so herself. Abraham, Gideon and David all kept concubines in their household. We also find consanguine marriages in the Bible, marriage between two people who are cousins or closer. To borrow a quote from The Princess Bride, when it comes to the definition of the word marriage among the one-man one-woman crowd, “I do not think that word means what you think it means.”
The other conversation that I think was the most effective, surprisingly, was about the church’s rites and sacraments, and how the congregation calls its ministers to officiate at those sacred occasions. When I am asked to marry a couple, I always sit down with them for pre-marital counseling. We talk about what getting married means to them, their plans, their hopes, their dreams. We talk about what it means to be married in the church: why do you want to be married in a church, and why do you want me to do it? For most of the church’s history, the primary way to be married was in a church, by a minister, but this has changed, and I want couples to be intentional about it. So I reminded my congregation that I would treat two men or two women who wanted to be married the same way I would treat a man and a woman. The course of the counseling would be different, but the fact of it would not. And folks, I could see lightbulbs beginning to glow in the minds of some of the doubters. So I drove to the hoop. I reminded people I don’t ask the congregation’s permission to baptize a particular baby or who I should permit to come to the communion table, or who can join the church and who can’t – what makes them think they can tell me whom to marry? Now I didn’t put it quite that bluntly, but the effect was the same. It helped people think about old ideas in new ways.
Well, we made our May 17 deadline. We held a congregational meeting after church, but leadership had already decided we would not vote on the question of whether or not our ministers could perform same-gender weddings in the church – an up or down vote would create winners and losers and that was the last thing I wanted to do. Instead, we simply asked for consensus around the question, Are you comfortable trusting Alan and Esther, our Associate Minister at the time, to use our usual discretion for a same-gender wedding just as we would every other wedding? Two thirds of the congregation said Yes, they trusted us, and while I don’t think the other third distrusted us, exactly, they still could not agree, and that was OK. That was OK. The way ahead was clear.
The story has a wonderful footnote. About four years later we engaged in the Open and Affirming conversation, and had many of the same conversations we did in 2004, but the conversations were much more relaxed, there was nowhere near the tension we had experienced earlier, and it just felt right. When the day came to vote on whether or not to become and Open and Affirming Congregation of the United Church of Christ – and we did vote on this, because we needed to – it was unanimous but for a single vote. The lone dissenter was the woman who thought the UCC sent me to that church to make them O & A. And she was so surprised at the overwhelming support, she gasped – and I’m not even sure if she knew she was saying this out loud – but she gasped, “Am I the only one?” If I ever decide to write a book about the whole experience, that will be my title: Am I The Only One?
One more footnote. You may have noticed my use of the term same-gender marriage. At the beginning of our conversations, a wise member of the church said to me, “Alan, every time someone calls it same-sex marriage, all people think about is the sex part. I think you’ll have more success with a less fraught term, and he suggested the phrase same gender. And he was absolutely correct – by the time we found our consensus, nearly everyone, for or against, was using the term.
My point this morning is that every church takes a different path on the journey. In my story this morning I know you heard similarities to this congregation’s journey with Kathy Peters. You likely heard differences as well. I was asked by a few nearby churches to share our journey with other congregations as a way of helping them chart their own, but my refrain was always, no two churches are alike, and each has to chart its own path. God will lead us from faithfulness to faithfulness, will strengthen our weaknesses and lead us from our strengths. There are more than 1600 Open and Affirming congregations in the United Church of Christ, the most of any single denomination. The spirit of God continues to lead us to a more just and righteous and equitable world, and you and I are privileged to be on the journey together.