Most of my family and I spent a recent weekend in North Carolina taking part in a very traditional wedding. We are talking multiple bridesmaids, groomsmen, rehearsal dinners, bridesmaid's luncheons, Roman Catholic wedding mass, reception afterwards in an art museum, the whole nine yards. Taken all together it was beautiful.
The sights, the sounds, the events, all working together to re-present, with this couple at the center, what it means to publicly declare their troth and ask for the prayers and support of families, friends, and their shared community of faith.It got me thinking - a lot - about weddings, marriages, the Church, rules, policies, politics, and why I am currently personally on the hunt for a new home congregation.
Allow me to elaborate just a bit by sharing with you some of what I have written to my pastors at my old congregation.
[Referring to the wonderfully thoughtful HRC resource "Out in Scripture"] Out in Scripture is a resource looking at Sunday's lessons from another vantage point. I often find the interpretations offered here challenging - which is in large part precisely their value. Looking at things from and among those who are squarely (and I mean that in every sense of the word) aligned with the currently accepted power holders intentionally ignores those prophetic voices speaking new truth to that power.
Newness is often uncomfortable, but there are no promises of comfort in Christianity except those arising from the presence of Spirit, walking along with. God provides and is to provide the comfort, not our traditions or church policies or assumptions that we already and always have known what there is to know.
Having just attended a big traditional Roman Catholic wedding mass in the gorgeous old Duke Chapel, I have been doing a lot of additional thinking about marriage and about church rules as expressed in traditional practice. The Roman Catholic wedding mass unapologetically offers communion to it's own and a blessing to those of us who are not Roman Catholic, and thereby considered unacceptable in full community.
The Roman Catholics "know" they have it right. They have, according to their own authority, had it right for centuries. Those of us considered new kids on the block, such as the entire Protestant Tradition? We have gone astray no matter how fiercely we cling to our own several hundred year old albeit "more recently introduced" traditions and practices.
The church in many iterations traditionally recognized arranged marriages as daughters were offered out to other families as chattel, as signs of economic and commercial liaisons. The church for centuries refused to marry slaves, as they were similarly held as "property" rather than recognized with souls as fully human.
How far is that from our current resistance to recognize and allow marriage between persons who love others of their same gender?
We set arbitrary and inconsistent ideals of "procreativity" as a normative value for allowable sexual expression, legitimately recognized and blessed in marriage as supposedly "ordained" by God.
Yet we cheerfully allow older adults with no chance of further child bearing to marry legally and sanction those with church blessing. We allow heterosexual couples to marry who yet state they have no intention of bearing or raising children, and we allow others to remain married who are not capable physically of reproducing without asking them to consider celibacy in light of their inability to produce offspring.
We all know that "family", as well as "marriage" are not conditions capable of being mandated or legislated but are rather relational realities that "become" in the midst of shared love. As such they can only be recognized, blessed and unfortunately currently "legitimized" by paperwork and legalities.
Are we really that certain we can (or should) define for ourselves and all others strict bounds upon societal and ecumenical support for that expressed love? Do we not then by that defining also try to bind God by our definitions and limits? Is that EVER our appropriate role in our relationship with God?
My family and I were not welcomed at the altar, were not deemed acceptable for communion by the policies and traditions of the Roman Catholic church. As I sat next to a friend I attend services with regularly here in Austin, who, along with her family was similarly unwelcome(d) at the altar, she and I exchanged comments trying to relieve our discomfort at the "sorting out" the act of going up and participating in communion represented in that context.
All of this acceptance highlighted by an intentional ignorance of the bride and groom's previous patterns or practice or non-practice, now apparently all outweighed by an accident of the bride's birth into a Roman Catholic family, and a "promise" by both bride and groom of raising their own children as Roman Catholics.
According to church traditions I am to accept some accidents of birth will bring you into the fold, and others will leave you well outside? Some promises count while others do not?
According to church traditions I am to understand that is how God operates in this world, granting access and privilege to some while steadfastly refusing it to others?
I do not believe God finds me or my family unacceptable, or our other friends from Austin who are not Roman Catholic, either. The Roman Catholic restriction on who may receive communion is a human rule made in reflection of power politics in the service of control of one group of humans over another.
I do not believe those policies or politics are reflective of what is right with this world or with the church in this world nor do I believe they have ANYthing to do with God.
I do not believe those policies or practices are anything other than signs of human brokenness and fear, signs of scarcity thinking in a graciously abundant world.
I feel the same way about the ELCA and the current discriminatory policies towards glbt persons. To demand, as some have done, that the government change their policies first before the church will lead by the morally/ethically correct act of recognizing and offering blessings and ordination to every one of God's beloved children is to totally abdicate our intended role.
To say "you first!" to the government is to ignore both the proper role and rule of Christ in our lives, to refuse to be a light that does anything other than reflect the status quo. To sort out by our own practices who is acceptable and who is not, is by that same act, refusing to be the fully constituted Body of Christ, present and witnessing to God's unconditional love to the world.
I do not believe God finds the gay, lesbian, transgender or bisexual persons any less beloved than the rest of God's created children. The rules and policies of the ELCA and other denominations are again, "merely" human rules made in reflection of power politics.
To defend those rules is not to defend God or the Church as Christ's Body in this world. I believe that with every fiber of my being and go out this summer to search for a congregation where THAT word will be proclaimed by the priesthood of all believers as the good news for EVERYBODY to hear and share and rejoice in.
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