Address at the launch of the Equal Love Campaign.
King's College London, 21st December 2010
Given by Revd Carla Grosch-Miller, Minister of St Columba's, Oxford URC
The Equal Love Campaign is a campaign inaugurated on the fifth anniversary of the civil partnership law to advocate for the right of same-gendered couples to be married and for opposite gendered couples to be partnered civilly under UK law. An Application will be filed in the European Court of Human Rights in early 2011 seeking these rights.
See the Equal Love Campaign website for more information.
These comments were offered by Revd Grosch-Miller in support of the campaign.
Before I immigrated to the UK in 2003, I was senior minister of a multicultural United Church of Christ congregation on the western edge of Chicago. In my time with that community of faith, we wrestled the question of homosexuality in a lengthy process of thoughtful study, prayer and conversation and in March 1998 the church discerned a call to affirm and welcome LGBT people. For five years, then, I had the experience and the privilege of being a part of a family of faith that welcomed and blessed gay and lesbian people. I want to tell you what that was like.
I remember one youngish man, Rob, coming to see me who told me how his family and his church had disowned him when he came out. He was so grateful to have found a church home that blessed and loved him as he was. As I listened to Rob, I felt as though I were standing next to Jesus, welcoming the exile home. Rob worked for a charity that helped young people who were struggling with their sexuality. He could draw on his faith and on his faith community in that work. He died peacefully in his sleep six years later from unknown causes. I thank God that he, and many others, found us.
And I remember the first time I baptised the children of a same-gendered couple, Chris and Roger. As I stood on the dais with the fathers and their boys around the baptismal font, one an infant in arms and one a toddler, I found tears flooding down my face. Such grace swept over me in that moment that I could not control the flow that fell from my eyes. I wept throughout the baptism, so very grateful to again be standing with Jesus, blessing his people.
I confess that I cannot understand the position of some in the church who would deny religious marriage to same-gender couples. Why ever would we seek to limit the outpouring of grace and the blessing of love? The church has an interest in supporting and strengthening committed love and families; the right to marriage is one aspect of that work. How ever can granting the right to marry in church to one couple denigrate that right for others? That makes no sense to me. Rather, it seems another manifestation of homophobia — the idea that homosexuality is a contaminant, much like being female is a contaminant in the sexual ethics of the Hebrew Scriptures.
In regard to biblical sexual ethics, just as we don't go to doctors whose medical knowledge is limited to what was known in the 1st century, we must not be satisfied with a theology that is bound and strangled by 1st century culture. Reading the Bible is like overhearing the conversation of people from a different time and place; it requires careful and prayerful attention that makes room for the Spirit.
I lecture in the theology of sexuality and sexual ethics in ministry. A close reading of scripture reveals a sexual ethic we do not and would not want wholly to embrace now: polygamy, concubinage, levirate marriage, and such horrifying rules as the requirement that a rapist pay the bride-price to the rape victim's father and marry her without the right of divorce. (Deut 22:28-29) These sexual ethics reflect their place and time in a patriarchal society in which women were domestic and sexual chattel and women had to have five live births to keep the population stable. A tribe's survival depended on female fecundity.
We no longer live in that world. Our tribe's survival requires a different sexual ethic — one not just blessing heterosexual coupling with procreative potential, but one that affirms the qualities of self-giving love and mutuality, qualities embodied in the Trinity. The sanctity of marriage is not the sanctity of an outer form, but of an inner reality — the sanctity of committed, self-giving love.
I fear that we in the church forget who we are. The early Christians were called Followers of the Way…not the way things are, but the Way they could be; not the way we've always done it, but the Way the spirit moves us.
I come from a land where the argument that separate is equal had a long life and too slow a death. Strong were the voices that were raised to dismantle it; courageous were the lives that argued for a better Way. In 1963, the Revd Dr Martin Luther King, Jr wrote a letter from a jail cell in Birmingham, Alabama where he had been put because of his nonviolent protest against American apartheid. He wrote the letter in response to a plea from white ministers to not press so hard for justice for the American Negro, as they were known in that time. If I were the queen of the church universal, I would paste his letter into every Bible because People who belong to the Way need to hear it. Here is a small excerpt:
There was a time when the church was very powerful. It was during that period when the early Christians rejoiced when they were deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Wherever the early Christians entered a town the power structure got disturbed and immediately sought to convict them for being 'disturbers of the peace' and 'outside agitators'. But they went on with the conviction that they were 'a colony of heaven,' and had to obey God rather than man. They were small in number but big in commitment. There were too God-intoxicated to be '… intimidated'. They brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contest.
Things are different now. The contemporary church is often a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. It is so often the arch-supporter of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church's silent and often vocal sanction of things as they are.
But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If the church of today does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authentic ring, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the 20th century.
I can't read that last line without quaking, thinking of so many of our congregations clinging not to the Way of Jesus but to the 'way we've always done it', the Way that people in the ancient Near East lived their sexual lives — when women were sexual and domestic chattel, femininity a contagion, and men who took female roles condemned. Why would we ever want to live like that again?
God expects more from the church than blind allegiance to the status quo, 'the way things are', in the church and in the world. People who belong to the Way, whose vision is trained on the horizon for where God needs us to be, ought to be the headlights — not the taillights — on the road. People who belong to the Way, who see all life as a gift, with dignity and value, ought to be at the forefront of the great movements for justice and compassion in the church and in the world, movements like the Equal Love campaign. People who belong to the Way, who know that God does new things, ought to be looking and listening for those new things, and ought to bless and not to hinder them.
Church people are people who belong to the Way — not the Way things are, but the Way things can be; not the Way we've always done it, but the Way of justice proclaimed by the prophets, embodied by Jesus and inspired by the Spirit.
I believe the Equal Love campaign to be a manifestation of the Spirit in truth, justice and love. I long for the time when, as a minister of religion, I am permitted to marry same-gendered couples in the sanctuary and toast them in the hall. In saying that, I do not denigrate the blessing of civilly partnered people in the church; that has been an important step forward. But it is completely unacceptable to me that the government prohibits the conduct of religious marriage for same-gendered people. Separate is not equal; all couples deserve the choice to be partnered in the way that best reflects their unique personalities and the public or religious commitment that they wish to make and that their friends, families and faith communities wish to celebrate.
With others in my church community in Oxford and with other church communities around the UK, I urge the government to extend the right to marry in a religious as well as civil settings to same-gendered couples and the right to civil partnership to heterosexual couples. Justice demands it; Grace cries for it.
© 2010 Carla A. Grosch-Miller. All rights reserved.
