Same-Sex Marriage (part 2)

In the comments section from yesterday, Kevin raised one of the more interesting “problems” surfacing from this whole debate.  As I mentally wade into this issue, I’m realizing one problem is I don’t have a clearly defined definition of what actually is a Biblical marriage.  Let’s illustrate…or in keeping with the approach in these posts, lets ask some more questions.

Suppose Jack and Melinda meet up for the first time while partying amongst friends in a Las Vegas taproom.   Sparks fly, several rounds are ordered, and on a whim of drunken spontaneity, they stumble into a small chapel, exchange words (which they’ll struggle to remember in the morning) in the presence of a rent-a-priest, and sign documents that make them legally married in the eyes of Las Vegas.  How about your eyes?  Do you see them as married?

Or let’s say Maria is desperate to become a U.S. citizen and arranges a deal with a man from California, offering to pay “X” amount in exchange for two months worth of official husband duties so she can legally enter the citizenship process.  The arrangement stipulates she’ll sign divorce papers after the necessary time required by the state.  They sign the papers and are pronounced husband and wife.  No consummation.  No commitment.  No genuine love or even interest in the other.  But the state says they are married.  What does the Church say?

If we say “yes, they are officially married”…we have a real problem.  I don’t see how we can claim to be defenders of traditional God-honoring marriage at that point.  If our only criteria for marriage is the right combination of sexes plus the signature of a local magistrate, our criteria is woefully anemic and our corporate witness to the beauty of God’s marriage all but snuffed out.

But on the other hand, if we say no and refuse to recognize them as married.  If we say Jack and Melinda are sinning when they go back to some hotel and sleep together outside the confines of Biblical marriage, then we have tacitly acknowledged there are two types of marriage in our culture – marriage recognized by the state and marriage recognized by the word of God.

I don’t know about you, but I find this a bit difficult to think through.  These might be extreme examples though, so lets back it up a bit.  What do I do with two individuals who, for tradition’s sake, want to be married in a Church, but really have no interest in covenanting before God, have no interest in being counseled by God’s word, and actually, when pushed on it, find the Biblical notions of marriage archaic and even harmfully regressive.   Should I officiate their wedding?  Do I pronounce them husband and wife by the power vested in the office of minister of the gospel?  Do I pronounce God’s blessing on their marriage?

Kevin, can you help me out here?!!

I’ll admit I’m still thinking/praying through all these questions.  But one thing I’m pretty certain on at this point, I’m very uncomfortable with the thought of relinquishing marriage-defining responsibilities to the state.  I’d much rather see the Church of Christ, in faithful stewardship of God’s word, coming to a clear understanding of who is and who is not married in God’s eyes.

But okay, bear with me as I play that one out a bit.  That means I’m acknowledging there are two types of marriage in American culture – state defined and church defined.  And as part of the Church, I reserve the right to stand contrary to state pronouncements.  I reserve the right to treat Jack and Melinda, Maria and her contractual partner as unmarried couples.  I reserve the right to pronounce a couple husband and wife by the power vested in me by the commonwealth of Pennsylvania but at the same time withhold God’s blessing.  And should the state choose to allow same sex marriages, I reserve the right to tell a same sex couple they are not married in God’s eyes.

Perhaps we’ve already accepted that state of affairs.  Perhaps that’s why we don’t expect the state to legislate against divorce (see yesterday’s question).  Perhaps that’s why we don’t expect the state to require marriage ceremonies to be in the form of covenants before God.  And perhaps…just perhaps, that’s why it might be okay if a Christ-follower chooses not to stand in the way of the state expanding their definition of marriage to include same-sex relationships…all the while standing rock solid and even proclaiming in word and deed their own convictions about what defines marriage in God’s eyes.

At the end of the day I guess I’m saying I already view state pronouncements as rather shallow and meaningless.  I already think we have two different concepts of marriage.   So I’m not exactly sure why I should care anymore how they decide to use the term “marriage”.  Then again, there is the moral erosion factor brought up in the comment section from yesterday.  Let’s visit that particular issue in a day or two…

Whatever the case though, I go back to the opening point and say this issue, if nothing else, should force the Church to stop relying on the state to determine for us who is married and not married and instead come up with a good working definition to guide us in these matters moving forward.

What do you think?  Where is my logic screwy (it often is so feel free to point it out)?  How would you view Jack and Melinda or Maria and her partner?

Same Sex Marriage? (part 1)

“But…but…but…hold on a minute.  Something about all this just doesn’t sit right with me.  At least not yet.  I’ve got some questions.”

Or so I wanna say as I feel swept along in the raging current of evangelicalism (my branch of Christianity) calling for political powers to legislate against the wishes of same sex couples.  I wonder if we’re rushing into arms without fully, prayerfully, thinking this one through yet.  I’m not sure we realize just how complicated this whole matter is.  And so…I’ve just got some questions if you don’t mind.

I intended to raise some of those questions in our adult Sunday School class this past week.  I only got through one of them because the back and forth was so rich and lively.  So I’m continuing that discussion here in the blogosphere for any who might be interested.  There are a series of posts formulating in my head right now.  We’ll see how many work their way out.  However many that may be though, I intend to state them more in the form of questions…questions not for the government or the surrounding culture, but for the Church of Christ of which I’m endlessly thankful to be a part.

But before I dole out the first, some disclaimers.  I do need to say up front that my commitment to the Bible as God’s intended word and my understanding of that Bible lead me to view same-sex marriage as not the way marriage was intended.  Marriage plays a significant role in the unfolding drama of God’s purposes from creation on up through new creation.  And all along the way, it is precisely the uniqueness of male and female in covenant together before God that brings that role into its own on stage.  The Church is right to grieve the fact that our culture feels worthy to rewrite the script and perform the play in ways other than the Author intends.

But let’s keep going.  Let’s keep talking about how the Bible defines God-honoring marriage.  Let’s talk about Ephesians 5 for instance.  That’s the whole, “husbands love your wives and wives submit to your husband” passage (Let’s tackle one culture war at a time and leave the submission issue for another day).  What interests me here is how the admonitions to men and women find their basis in the relationship between Christ and the Church.  Husbands love your wives as Christ loved the Church.  Wives, submit to your husbands as the Church is called to submit to Christ.  Husbands, leave your mother and father and hold fast to your wife, so becoming one flesh…because in so doing you reflect the glorious mystery which is Christ and His bride – the Church.   In other words, our marriages here, at best, mere copies.  The prototype, the transcending reality to which our marriages are called to reflect is the covenant relationship between Christ and His Church.  That says an awful lot about marriage!  Marriage thus involves sacrificial love, sacrificial submission, sacrificial faithfulness that endures the sins of the other as demonstration of Christ’s own sacrificial love to His sin-stained bride.

And certainly, we could keep going even beyond Ephesians 5.  We could talk about Jesus words on divorce or Paul’s words on remarriage.  We could talk about being “unequally yoked.”  We could discuss the parenting dimension.  And so on…

But at long last, here is my question for the day:  Why is it the conservative wing of the Church seems to be isolating just one component of a God-honoring marriage and asking the state to legislate in favor of it?   Or put another way, why are we not similarly asking the state to make laws forbidding, say, divorce except in cases of infidelity?

I graduated from Wheaton College – a flagship institution for evangelical Christianity (woot, woot!)  Year after year, Wheaton College churns out noted scholars, skilled workers, faithful kingdom servants…and…lots of marriages!  If you’re a senior and don’t have a ring on the finger or in the back pocket with a plan for delivery, you’re likely waking up in cold sweats several nights a week.  The pressure mounts with each passing day.  The only problem is, that pressure produces a lot of weak marriages that don’t last.  At the time when I graduated, I’m fairly certain the rate of failed marriages coming out of Wheaton College was a point or two higher than that of the broader culture (fellow Wheaties, feel free to correct me on that).  There is a good bit of discrepancy on current divorce statistics in evangelical Churches, but a representative for the leading Christian polling group (the Barna Research Group) has been quoted as saying ”We would love to be able to report that Christians are living very distinct lives and impacting the community, but … in the area of divorce rates they continue to be the same.“

So when I read and hear these sort of statistics, I can’t help but wonder why the Church is so strongly insistent the state legislate against the transgressions of the broader culture without at the same time asking the state to legislate against their own.  Again, what I’m saying is that God-honoring marriage is a very broad, and richly defined concept.  Yes, I understanding same sex marriage is a sinful deviation from God’s intentions.  But so is divorce (for most reasons).  And so is being “unequally yoked”.  So is even doing marriage without God in the picture for that matter.  So where are the cries for laws against these other deviations?  Why are we only picking one?

Part of the reason I ask the question is this issue of same sex marriage, in the U.S., is perhaps the civil rights issue of the day.  There’s so much more at stake than just a marriage ceremony.  Visitation rights, medical benefits, tax burdens, parenting privileges, etc are all part of the issue.  This is an incredibly important issue on which the Church has to think carefully and act wisely.

The Church is called to stand against the effects of sin, to be a redeeming force “far as the curse is found”.  Part of that calling is to be the living demonstration of the Redeemer who relentlessly sacrificed in love for rebellious sinners (ourselves included!).  We show Jesus that we might be used to bring others to Jesus.

So let me restate my question of the day:  If we pick and choose the aspects of Biblical marriage that are particularly offensive to us,  if we ask the state to legislate against those and simultaneously refrain from asking that state to legislate in all areas of a God-honoring marriage…especially the areas we ourselves are failing at, are we faithfully fulfilling our calling to Christ and that hurting world?

Our Savior Come

Our family is a bit new to celebrating advent.  Gotta say though, I’m looking forward to November 27th.  And if know me, you know that comes with a fair amount of reservation.  I’m one of those whose stomach starts to turn when…like…the other day when I was in Wal Mart and got totally blindsided by “Have Yourself A Merry Christmas” over the loudspeakers… and I started thinking all the eloquent but perhaps inappropriate things I might say to the manager if I he/she happened upon my aisle…and…well, anyway.  I’m not one for jipping Thanksgiving.

But yeah, I find myself peaking past Thanksgiving just a bit these days.  Not for all the Christmas hubbub.  More so because I enjoy celebrating advent as a family.  I look forward to dusting off our Joshua Tree, sitting around over dessert and discussing the events leading up to Bethlehem, hanging the ornaments, placing strands of straw in our popsicle-stick manger, and praying together “Come, Lord Jesus.”

So I was pretty excited when asked to submit a chapter for Our Savior Come: An Advent Companion.   It is a neat collection of perspectives and reflections on the events and implications related to Christ’s incarnation.  It’s a daily reader intended to help guide and inspire worship through the season.

I’m not good at sales pitches, but if you’re looking for some good devotional material to help in your celebration of Advent this year…

I posted some extended thoughts on Advent and liturgical seasons on the book’s blog-site.  Oh, and its available in (the much cheaper) e-reader format too.

Not sure what to make of the fact that most of the Penn State talk over the past week has been about Joe Paterno.  Not sure why the flurried tenure of this story seems to have lasted about as long as it took to come to a decision about Joe.  Maybe I’m not in tune with the media coverage enough to catch what all’s still being said out there.  The impression I get though seems to be that the central plot line in all of this is the career and reputation of the head coach…and I can’t quite figure that one out.

Why so much outrage over what happened to the victims but very little expressed sympathy for the victims?  Why are millions of not-really-affected readers and commentators so vocal about justice?  Why are they playing the physician – prescribing remedies of healing for the victims…and why is it again that healing always necessitates increasing the pool of suffering?  Why do I feel like talking about the cross (with its innocent victim suffering so the aggressors wouldn’t have to) at this point would be callous nonsense?

I’ll spare you whatever opinions I might have on Joe’s job.  More interesting to me is how our culture (how I) absorbs and dresses the wounds of wickedness.

Ugghhh….

 Ryan Madson has always been one of my favorite Phillies.  Granted, that love wasn’t reciprocated a whole lot back when he was a starter.  But man, how could you not love the guy after all he’s done the past few years?   That to say, I got that unsettled stomach thing going on thinking about the happenings in the Philly front office this past week.   First of all, I’ve been increasingly unsettled trying to distinguish the Phillies spend-and-win mentality from that of the ol’ Yankees I’ve always detested.  But okay, a lot of our guys are homegrown.  And it seems fair to pay these homegrown success stories what they’ve rightly earned.  But why in the world do you stiff a top notch, home grown talent, and all around good guy like Madson for…Papelbon?!  And why do it in a way that’s sorta shady?  I don’t like it.  Brgggg!!

Why I Am Believing (Part 5 – Resurrection)

I’ve been teaching a class on Church History  - a very broad look at major points in the life of Christ’s Church.  I’m not really one for scientific proofs and all that, but I did tell the class that if there is tangible proof apart from the Scriptures for the resurrection, it likely comes in the form of an historical argument.

The early Christian Church really is an incredible phenomenon.   We all know the persecution and martyrdom stories.  I made mention in the previous post about Paul’s transition from comfort, prestige, and power to hardship, outcast-status, and persecution the moment he publicly converts to Christianity.  Its obviously interesting that any religious institution would not only survive under those conditions but actually flourish and quite literally change the known world in a just a few centuries.

The really interesting thing though is the fact the early Christian church is a Jewish messianic movement.  Jesus and His disciples are Jewish.  The Church that gets off the ground in Jerusalem is Jewish.   And these types of movements were by no means uncommon.  There are numerous self-proclaimed Messiahs hitting the streets in Jesus’ day, inviting people to repent and follow their lead that God might usher in His promised kingdom (cf. Mark 1).  There are messianic movements and groups built around these dynamic characters.  But eventually the leader dies off.  And when this occurs, one of two things happens to every one of these messianic movements: (1) it dies with him, or (2) it continues and the new messiah becomes a close kin of the original.  They’d often die away simply because the promises didn’t hold up – the leader dies and the kingdom never comes.  But if the movement continues, you still need a messiah, and closest kin was the likely choice.  Christianity is the only known messianic movement that does neither.  The leader dies, but the movement doesn’t die with it, and it doesn’t centralize around Jesus’ next of kin (the well respected James would have been the most likely candidate).  The messianic figure dies, (a very shameful death mind you), and instead the movement explodes just a few weeks later still centered around Jesus.  And… it explodes with the message, the kingdom of God has arrived!

Rome is still in power.  The Jewish people are still property of this oppressive empire.  Christianity is officially declared illegal and its followers hunted.  And yet the Jesus-centered movement flourishes announcing the kingdom of God has been inaugurated.

Historically speaking, there really isn’t a better explanation for the explosion of the early church and the declaration of the kingdom than the resurrection of the messianic leader.  You could say the Church was duped by power hungry men contriving the idea of resurrection (hiding the body, etc).  But historically, that doesn’t work.  First of all, these men couldn’t have expected power from such a proclamation.  Instead, they would have expected exactly what happened to their leader (a criminal’s death).  And again, there was already an established way of dealing with dead self-proclaimed messiahs who don’t usher in the kingdom as expected.   Historically, it doesn’t hold water to think this band of Jewish people would be duped in such a way.  Some say Jesus feigned death, but then walked out of the tomb (the swoon theory).  But that wouldn’t have swayed anyone to believe the kingdom had arrived.  The only thing that could’ve done that apart from full victory over Rome was the seeing the awaited future resurrection (complete with its bodily change) here in the present.

Again, its a historical discussion…an interesting one I think.  I recommend N.T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God for a much fuller treatment (700+ pages) of resurrection in its historical context.  The simple suggestion here though is that nothing explains why this illegal religion would get off the ground and thrive, why good Jewish leaders and common folk would believe the summation of their story and long, rich heritage had suddenly burst onto the scene, no real reason why people would sacrifice home and comfort, wealth and family to follow a movement centered on a criminalized and crucified messiah, no reason why the early Church starts sacrificially living the future into the present (a separate discussion), unless…they had experienced and so been convinced that death and all of God’s enemies were now defeated foes on account of Jesus’ resurrection from the grave.

History – just another reason why I am believing…

Why I Am Believing (part 4)

As a pastor, my attention these days is shifting towards our celebration of Easter as a Church family.  As I think and read about resurrection, I keep going back to the sentiment of Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:  If Christ has not been raised, all our preaching is useless…your faith is useless…and we are to be pitied more than anyone in the world (NLT).  He goes on throughout the chapter to say essentially, if Christ has been raised though, the world has a whole new story.

I’m with Paul.  This business of life and faith, this story of God, really all hinges on the resurrection of Jesus Christ.  If ever I come across “indisputable” evidence that Christ’s bones belong to the earth somewhere, I will quickly trade my belief for something not so useless.  No offense, but the more liberal camps of “Christianity” that might deny bodily resurrection seem completely pointless to me.  Why bother?  On the other hand, if Christ has been raised, everything I thought I knew about life, death, hope, evil, justice, redemption, the natural world, etc all changes.  (Side: This is why someone who doesn’t believe in resurrection and someone like myself have very little common ground to meet on.  We live, quite literally, in completely different worlds.)

So I’m thinking at this point, I might need to make some kind of case for resurrection so as to explain why I would believe something so uncommon and even strange.  Probably need a few posts to do that.  But before I do, please hear me out:  I’m not saying here the resurrection was some sort of magic trick to validate the existence of God or the divinity of Jesus or anything like that.   That wasn’t Paul’s point either.  Resurrection is so much more than just a stamp of authenticity.  For Paul its the center-point of history.  It’s the key to understanding the whole of creation history.  It’s the locus of meaning for the world.  Resurrection is God’s answer to every human longing, every cry for justice, every search for hope and meaning, every attempt to make sense of life’s beauty, joy, pain, etc.

That to simply say, my view of life and the world I live in sorta stands on one leg.

But so is belief in the resurrection of Jesus warranted?  Obviously, I think so.  Let me just give one reason why here, and then I’ll add a few more later.

Let’s stay with Paul to round this out.  There’s really no explaining the life of Paul apart from an encounter with the risen Christ (as described in Acts 9).  Prior to this event, the idea of one man walking out of the tomb in the middle of history was pretty well inconceivable for Paul.  It wasn’t part of his religious or intellectual expectation at the time.  It was nonsense in the Hellenistic culture he was part of and it went against the religious story he believed.   Add to that, this resurrection rumor was threatening the stability of life in his homeland (messianic leaders and groups typically did).  His intent, for understandable reasons, was to snuff out the Jesus movement before it destroyed the peace his people had worked on for so long.

Paul was also comfortably a part of the religious, social, and political elite in the culture.  To join with a small, unattractive, and oft-despised band of Christ-followers would mean loss of power and privilege.  It would mean himself becoming the object of scorn and hatred…the same scorn and hatred that motivated his (and other social/religious leaders) persecution of Christians.  It would mean leaving the comforts of the synagoge to go worship behind locked doors in undisclosed locations.  It would mean the possibility of trials, separation from loved ones, physical suffering, etc.

Yet, for some reason, this is exactly what happens.  Paul trades everything, his religious perspectives, his security, his position of privilege for a life seemingly with nothing to offer.  The only explanation that stands up to historical reason is that Paul met up with Jesus Christ who he’d previously assumed was dead in the grave.  And as he has this encounter, his religious story now has a whole new center, a wonderfully surprising twist.  Whatever hellenistic ideas he may have flirted with now have a whole new light shining on them.  His take on power, privilege, comfort, security are redefined as he sees the greatest enemy of all (death) swallowed in defeat.  His view towards suffering takes on the color of participation with his new conquering emperor-king.

Paul goes on, most likely, to die a martyr’s death, a martyr for a cause with nothing of prestige or worth in the eyes of the culture.   There’s only one thing Paul stands to gain with his drastic life choice – participation in the life of a risen savior.  And there’s just no reason to expect Paul to believe in such without an actual, worldview shaking encounter with that object of his newly acquired faith.