First Church in Cambridge, Congregational UCC
28 March 2004

Mary Luti

Something Old, Something New

Isaiah 43:16-21
Philippians 3:4b-14
John 12: 1-8

For some time now, I've wanted to preach about so-called gay marriage. Now, on the eve of what may be the decisive session of the Constitutional Convention, it's time I did.

Tomorrow our legislators will not be debating whether the Commonwealth should regard gay marriage as a reflection of God's joy or a sign of God's wrath. That is and always has been a question for faith communities to decide. And in 1991, First Church did just that. We decided to become an Open and Affirming congregation. As a consequence, we agreed to welcome, affirm and advocate for the rights of gay and lesbian people, and to invoke God's blessing on gay couples who make life-long commitments. And we've been doing just that ever since.

The Christian tradition affirms that a marriage is made when two adults make promises to each other before witnesses. Ministers do not "marry" people. We witness their vows. When we pronounce a couple married, we simply affirm what they have already created by those vows. I believe, therefore, that when a gay or lesbian couple makes such promises, they are truly married.

But we ministers are also agents of the State, invested with authority to make marriages legal. And in Massachusetts today, I can declare a gay couple married and keep declaring them married until my jaw locks, but my pronouncement will have no legal standing. I cannot sign that little piece of paper for them—­that marriage license that the Commonwealth recognizes and that automatically confers thousands of rights and benefits on straight people whenever I sign a license for them. As much as I may love any straight couple that exchanges vows before me, when I put my signature on that paper, I knowingly commit an act of discrimination against other people I love (and, ironically, against myself).

Let's be clear about this discrimination. The question before lawmakers is not, "Should we confer a marriage right on gay people?" It is instead, "Now that the Supreme Judicial Court has ruled that there is no rational basis in the law to deny gay people the right to marry, shall we revoke that right?" What is up for grabs tomorrow is an existing civil right of gay citizens. What is also on the table is the basic human right enshrined in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence—­the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

You have heard many arguments in favor of denying gay people this right:

• Marriage has always been between one man and one woman. It must mean something that this tradition has held "down through the ages."
• Marriage should be between only men and women because they are genitally compatible. This "fit" was ordained by the Creator and indicates the primary purpose of marriage—­to perpetuate the species.
• Allowing gays to marry will destroy the institution of marriage, opening the door to polygamy and incest.
• Children are at risk in gay households. Children's best shot at well-being lies in a heterosexual family.
• We must not give special rights to special interests. This isn't a civil rights issue. Gays have not suffered the oppression that Blacks have endured.
• Why not just make two categories? Marriage for heterosexuals, civil unions for gays—­separate, different, but equal.

You have also heard many counter-arguments:

• In human history, marriage has taken different and complex forms. In Christian history, for example, it was not even held in very high esteem until the 16^th century.
• If the State is to defend "traditional" marriage, we need first to know the kind of traditional marriage we are talking about. "Traditional" definitions of marriage have included those in which men had control over women and Black people could not marry White people.
• If arguments from tradition were decisive, Protestants would still be Catholics, women would not vote, and Americans would still be singing "God save the Queen" instead of squabbling about "one nation, under God."
• The door to polygamy and incest was opened a long time ago. Gay people had nothing to do with it. Read your Bibles.
• Good, healthy kids are not guaranteed even in the best of families, gay, straight, nuclear or extended.
• Massachusetts answered to its own satisfaction long ago the question of whether gay families are suitable environments for raising children. The State permits gay adoptions.
• Yes, the institution of marriage is threatened by allowing certain people to marry—­the immature, the radically-selfish, the violent, the chronically-unfaithful, and pop icons who decide to tie the knot in Vegas on a drunken lark.
• If marriage is undermined, it is unlikely that it will be because gay people choose to form stable monogamous unions; it is more likely to be harmed by unfriendly social and economic policies and by a popular culture that finds it entrancing to watch a person choose a marriage partner by test-kissing complete strangers in hot tubs at resort hotels over a period of twelve weeks on primetime TV.
• Heterosexual sex is the ordinary way children are conceived—­no argument there. But biology is not destiny. Moreover, merely manipulating compatible genitals does not make a marriage a marriage , nor do even the most compatible of genitals always succeed in making children. Restricting marriage to heterosexuals on this basis is disingenuous and ignores the other traditional purposes of such unions. It reduces relationships to body parts: Marriage is about having the right equipment to make children "the old-fashioned way", regardless of whether a couple ever actually chooses to do so, regardless of whether they are even able to do so.
• Civil unions? No, no, no! At its core, as Andrew Sullivan observes, homosexuality is about the emotional connection between two adult human beings, and there is no public institution more definitive of that connection than marriage. To deny gay people full marriage rights is therefore, "the most profound statement our society can make that homosexual love is not as good as heterosexual love; that gay lives and commitments and hopes are worth less. To deny [them]...marriage in full cuts gay people off not [only] from civic respect, but [also] from the rituals and history of their own families and friends. It erases them not merely as citizens, but also as human beings."
• As for the comparison with the civil rights movement and the suffering of human beings who are denied their rights: Where is it written that to redress a wrong done to one group of people is to deny or devalue the wrong done to another? To withhold human rights from even one person is to make that person kin to all who have ever suffered such a denial. To have been considered less than human is a terrible thing, but is it really all that different from being considered less than normal? It is a sad day when we show each other our wounds to compete, not to console.

You have heard the arguments. There are many more on both sides that I could describe. But the pulpit is not the place to debate. It is the place to preach Good News. The question that concerns us most as Christians is whether the Gospel has any light to offer by which to guide our consciences, form our convictions, and ground our civic participation. As our evangelical friends might ask, "What would Jesus do?"

Well, what did Jesus say? He said that marriage is for life, and that the only grounds for divorce ought to be adultery. (Oh, my.) He said that there'll be no marrying in the kingdom of heaven. (Oh, my—­again.) He went to a wedding, saved a bride and groom from embarrassment when the wine ran out, compared the kingdom of heaven to a wedding banquet, and told stories about bridesmaids waiting for the tardy groom to show up. And that's about it. Jesus says nothing more about marriage, civil or religious, gay or straight, temporal or eternal. And he says nothing at all about sex, let alone about homosexuality.

So, is that all we have? A few tough words from Jesus and the fact that he liked parties? Oh, I know that there are half a dozen Bible verses about abominations that stink to high heavens; a few brutal texts about what a pleasing thing it would be to God if we all went out and stoned to death men who have exploitative sex with other men. We could spend time this morning trying to understand the shaky relevance of these verses to this modern debate; but, frankly, I would rather simply admit that the Bible is full of arcane stuff, and a lot of it is just plain irrelevant to our situation.

Besides, even the devil can quote Scripture. He'll match you verse for verse and never tire. We should not be playing the devil's game. We're not fundamentalists. We are people of the whole Book, not people of the proof-text. And when we look at the Bible as a whole, it presents us with something far more compelling than a few self-justifying verses. The Bible offers us a vision, a grand trajectory from beginning to end, a generous and all-embracing impulse that is undeterred even when a particular verse takes a nasty little turn into the dark dead-end of judgment and exclusion. And it is to this heart-stopping vision that God's people most faithfully turn in moments of crisis when the choice is between liberation and enslavement, freedom and constriction, life and death.

A vision—­look! It was lifted up before us this very day in the Lectionary readings for the Fifth Sunday of Lent. Listen to the prophet Isaiah: "Thus says the Lord, your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel... Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing..."

In other places in Scripture, the God of the Bible commands that we do remember the former things. God tells us to look back, to recall and preserve the ancient tradition. But do not be fooled; the God of the whole Bible is not a God of yesterdays. What is, after all, the tradition that God wants us to remember and preserve? It is the tradition of old things made new, the memory of usual ways overturned. It is a record of faithfulness—­not to the way things were, but to the creative task of making a way where there is no way—­dry sea beds, walls of water on left and right, manna in the desert, hope in despair.

The thing you can count on from the God of the Bible is change, and not just any change, but revolutionary reversal. Lambs lying down with wolves, a child leading grown-up people, the meek inheriting the earth, the last becoming first and the first, last.

The trajectory of the Scriptures is towards a new thing in which the poor have good news preached to them for free. ("No, no!" cries the world, "Make them work for everything they get!") The trajectory of Scripture is heading towards a new thing in which all the jailed go free. ("No, no!" cries the world, "Lock them all up; toughen the sentences for first offenders!") The arc of Scripture bends towards a new thing, equal status for Jew and Greek, man and woman, slave and free . ("No, no!" cries the world, "Keep things in "natural" order, don't rock that hierarchical power boat!")

Well, the world can say "No!" all it wants, but the vision of Scripture from beginning to end is what it is—­upsetting. It entails the reordering of everything that divides, conquers, subordinates and enslaves. At the beginning, in the Book of Genesis, God draws something from nothing and calls that new thing "good." At the end, in the Book of Revelation, among the last words God speaks to the saints are: "Behold, I am making all things new!"

This is the same newness that made it possible for the apostle Paul—­who was a Jew, a Pharisee, a true believer and a zealous defender of old ways, a man willing to pursue, arrest and execute to preserve those old traditions—­to say, in our second reading, "I count that past a total loss, rubbish, compared to the new life I have in Christ."

The new thing, as he writes in another place, is the extension of God's mercy to all who were "once far off and who are now brought near"; the reconciliation of opposites thought to be permanently incompatible; eating with Gentiles, previously regarded as unnatural and disgusting; abandoning circumcision and dietary rules; ousting or reinterpreting everything that could harden mere difference into unbridgeable distinctions among people who now, by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, have equal access to the Holy Spirit and to the amazing grace of God. This is the new thing, Paul says, "towards which I strain, forgetting what lies behind."

And then there is our gospel reading in which we see what happened at Bethany, in the unconventional household of three siblings, Martha, Mary and Lazarus. Martha is there, cooking and serving, right in character, seeing to someone else's needs, making sure Jesus is fed and feels at home. In God's realm, it seems, we shall be distinguished not by the person with whom we slept, but by the lambs of God we fed and served.

And there is Mary, right in character too, paying intimate attention to Jesus, making sure he knows how much he is loved, wasting precious time and precious ointment on him. (Judas objects, paying smarmy lip-service to the needs of the poor. But Jesus defends her—­her extravagance is a sign of the day when he will pour himself out in love and suffering on the cross.) In God's realm, it seems, what will mark us as God's children is not whether or whom we married, but whether we were lost in wonder, love and praise.

And Lazarus is there too, back from the dead, seated at the table, the main object of the crowd's curiosity. You can hear them wonder, as perhaps they also poke and prod, "What must it have been like to be in your grave and hear Jesus say, 'Lazarus, Come out!'? What was it like to see tears on Jesus' face and know that you were wept and groaned and loved back into life?"

Gay and lesbian people who have in some sense died—­people whose families don't want to know them, who are still living deep in airless closets, who are barred from the fellowship of churches, who believe that God can't stand the sight of them; people who have in some sense died because they are not who they are—­they want to know the answers to those questions too. What would it be like to be raised from the dead? To be made new in dignity, in freedom, in hope, in commitment, in faithfulness and family?

Here at First Church we have many Lazaruses among us who can testify to the resurrection that the Bible says that we will all have one day. They can tell us what it was like to be dead, and what it is like to be called into life again by the openness, affirmation and blessing of a community of faith.

We have many Lazaruses here whom Jesus has called by his own groans and tears to sit at this table with brothers and sisters, together serving and feeding, together wasting time and precious gifts on each other. We are blessed to be included in this house of Jesus, where there is life, where old things are new, and where all people—­kindly, compassionate, earthy, and odd—­are loved fiercely by the one true and ever-living God.

In a house like this, it is not hard to imagine the new thing God is doing. And perhaps there will soon come a time soon when we who insist upon the centrality of freely-chosen marriage to every citizen's equality will seem somehow less marginal, less troublesome, less dangerous and perverse to those outside this blessed house. Perhaps one day soon we will seem more or less harmless, just people who were allowed to see a vision, people who by grace were permitted "to imagine the possibility of a new and larger human dignity and who could not wait to achieve it" (Sullivan). For better or worse. For richer or poorer. In sickness and in health. 'Till we are parted by death.

© 2004, Mary Luti