I recently read this article which features John Piper's decisive stance on the issue of homosexual marriage. Despite my consistent disagreement with John Piper on most things theological, I can appreciate his black and white approach to those issues. He doesn't leave people guessing what he believes and in this case who the word marriage belongs to. I cite him because this is the problem in this debate. No one is taking the time to talk about who gets to define what marriage is.
Shortly after the recent vote in North Carolina on the amendment to ban homosexual
marriage, my cousin, a woman who is apprehensive of church, but nonetheless a faithful
Christian, sent me this message:
“In
my normally not-overly-political church this morning, I was a little surprised
by what struck me as political fear-mongering. The pastor said that if
homosexual marriage becomes legal, then it is just a short step before all
churches of all denominations will be required to marry homosexual couples, and
that refusal would be discrimination. From there, the discrimination would
result in churches losing their tax exempt status. And even mentioning God's
condemnation of homosexual behavior would be considered discrimination and
bullying, resulting in the incarceration of pastors who preach the Word.”
My
cousin wanted to know if this assertion by her pastor was in fact true. The preacher used 2 Timothy 4:1-6: “For
the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to
suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers
to say what their itching ears want to hear.” His main point was that homeliticians must preach
the Word faithfully despite consequences.
I
had a feeling that the heart of the issue, however, was not courage, but
marriage, the word marriage. To whom does
the word marriage belong and what does it mean?
In
1996 former President Bill Clinton signed into law the Defense of Marriage Act
(DOMA). Under the law, no U.S. state or political subdivision is required to recognize a
same-sex marriage treated as a marriage in another state. Section 3 of DOMA
codifies the non-recognition of same-sex marriage for all federal purposes, including insurance
benefits for government employees, Social Security survivors' benefits, and the filing of joint
tax returns.[1]
Americans
often vote on the “definition of marriage.” Though I’m a free-church protestant
I sometimes find myself envious of high church traditions that have taken the
time to name important truths. The
Catholic Church, for example, counts marriage as one of its seven sacraments. So when a marriage is performed by a
priest, he is aiding God in a covenant forming ceremony in which an outward
sign becomes an inward reality.
The
community I pastor would say something like: marriage happens when a Christian
community witnesses two Christians exchange vows that reflect a Christological
commitment of covenantal fidelity.
For the state, marriage happens when the license is signed and tax statuses
are officially changed. The state
will never be able to do what the church does nor the church what the state
does.
For
this reason it’s intriguing that American Evangelicals get so feisty about the
state’s definition of marriage. So who really marries the couple? Who owns the word marriage?
This
suggests that we’ve lost our gospel imagination and begun taking our cultural
cues from the state. The state
issues decisions that don’t reflect Christian values all the time. To be frank, that doesn’t bother me. I
don’t expect the state to be Christian.
In
the Spring of 2004 I spent my last few weeks at Bethel University studying for
finals and my last few weeks at Woodland Hills Church listening to Greg Boyd
preach a six week sermon series entitled, “The Cross and The Sword.” This series later became the book, The Myth of A Christian Nation. In that six weeks I watched that church
lose nearly a thousand of its regular attendees. Boyd killed one of America’s most sacred cows. He told the church to get out of the
state’s bed.
As
a pastor I’m often asked if I think homosexual marriage should be
legalized. I respond by asking
someone if they think I should have been circumcised by a Jewish Mohel. Obviously not, because we don’t believe
the same thing about circumcision.
Obviously, the state and I don’t agree on what marriage is or rather
when someone is married so I don’t really care how they define it.
It
strikes me that what we really ought to vote on is whether or not “marriage” is
a distinctively Christian word. If
so then one of two things should happen:
In
communities of Christian faith that have decided marriage should be restricted
to a man and a woman, and that community of faith existed in a state that
passed a law similar to the one described by my cousin’s pastor, then the
church’s job is to be defiantly faithful.
If they lose their tax status so be it. This is a small price to pay when compared with the
testimony of early Christian martyrs.
On
the other hand, if a Christian community or denomination decided that
covenantal metaphors in scripture should be extended to same sex couples, and
if that community of faith lived in a state that had passed laws prohibiting
otherwise, then they should be defiantly faithful. They should offer the marriage sacrament to those couples,
invite them to marriage retreats, list them in the directory as married and
anything else that would testify to the fact that the church lives by a
different reality than the world.
Sure the church cannot change a homosexual couple’s tax status or
legalize their adoptions, but they can bear witness to their convictions, which
is rooted in the truer reality.
What
the church should not do, is let the state define who can participate in God’s
activity of forming covenantal bonds or pay any attention to the state when it
tries do so. That is unless we
have decided to let the state define “marriage” for us.
