The many questions and concerns at General Convention about same-sex partnerships lead us (or ought to lead us) to reflect on the truth about God (and therefore about ourselves) that is embedded in our practice of baptism.  Unfortunately, the connection between baptism, marriage, and family is not intuitive for many Christians because the American civil religion romanticizes the nuclear family, ignoring the biblical testimony that understands family quite differently.

Our task as the Church is neither to maximize pleasure, nor to discern our duty in terms that maximize what the Enlightenment described as human freedom; our task as the Church is to worship God in such a way that all the world is drawn into our worship (1 Peter 2:9; Cf. Isaiah 2:2-6).  As Stanley Hauerwas so often says, “the task of the the Church is to be the Church.” And that means that our purpose is to order our lives in such a way that our contingent lives speak the truth about God revealed in Christ so that the world is drawn into the friendship with God that is its destiny. If the task of the Church is to be the Church, then the task of Christians is to be faithful.

Ethical discernment is about learning how to tell the truth about God through our actions.  The ethical task for Christians is to discern the paths through which “God meets [our] needs when we call upon him in need and expectation, thus enabling [us] to fulfill all righteousness.” [[Hauerwas, Stanley, and Samuel Wells.”The Gift of the Church”. The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics (Blackwell Companions to Religion). Wiley-Blackwell, 2006, p. 16.]]  Therefore, the first step in considering the ethics of our blessing same-sex partnerships is to restate the question in Christian terms - and not the secular terms of our culture - so that we locate our own story about marriage within the story about God that it is our purpose to tell.  The ethical question we must answer is not “is it just for the Church to deny the rite of marriage to those engaged in committed same-sex relationships?”  Our question rightly is “does God meet our needs when we go to him in need and expectation by bestowing on us as gift committed same-gender sexual relationships, thus enabling us as the Church to fulfill all righteousness so that the world might know him?”

The first thing that needs to be said is that baptism weakens ties to families of origin. Our habit of baptism expresses a strong valuation of the traditional family unit, while at the same time teaching that our primary social unit is the Church; we are ontologically changed so that we understand that we are brothers and sisters, not because of kinship, but because of our shared baptism in Christ.  Our habit of marriage reinforces these implications of baptism for the priority of loyalty to the Church over loyalty to the kinship unit.  Our “Celebration and Blessing of a Marriage” is set within the Sacrament of the Eucharist, reflecting the truth that it is our shared friendship with God that is the source of all holy friendships, including the particular friendship of Holy Marriage. The Church understands itself as “a polity of good news,” and the kinship unit is no more and no less than a “grace-filled friendship within the fellowship of the Church.” [[McCarthy, David Matzko. “Becoming One Flesh: Marriage, Remarriage, and Sex.” In The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics (Blackwell Companions to Religion), ed. Stanley Hauerwas, and Samuel Wells, Wiley-Blackwell, 2006., p. 277.]] So God meets our needs by reconstituting and subordinating our lives within a koinonia grounded in Christ.

Of course the kinship unit plays an important role in the Church.  But we 21st century Americans often get confused about the relationship between Church and family, thinking that the purpose of the Church is to serve the family unit (which is misconceived as an end in itself) by teaching kids good values.  However, as Joseph Mangina points out, our habit of baptism reminds us that the household of kin (oikos) serves the Household of God so that the Household of God can serve the economy of God (oikonomia). The work of kinship units is to nurture the bodies of disciples by being the basic unit at which shelter is secured, food is procured and distributed, cleanliness and health is maintained.  In other words, the holy work of the family is mostly repetitive and ordinary - food is cooked, dishes are washed, diapers are changed, children are bathed.  But that is not all - the members of the kinship unit are members of the eucharistic community and thus are to practice sharing in the koinonia of sufferings - they are to be mindful of others, sharing their burdens, contributing their time, talents, and money, and constantly discerning-in-communion as part of a global communion striving for holiness.  And, importantly, the kinship unit does the essential work of indoctrinating children into the culture of the Church by teaching and practicing the basic habits of discipleship, including the threefold Rule of Office, Eucharist, and personal devotion and ethical discernment-in-communion.  So God meets our needs by locating us in a kinship unit that nurtures the body, is mindful of others as part of their role in the community, and that teaches and practices the basic habits of discipleship at home on a daily basis.[[Mangina, Joseph L. “Conception, Children, and the Family.” In The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics (Blackwell Companions to Religion), ed. Stanley Hauerwas, and Samuel Wells, Wiley-Blackwell, 2006., p. 471.]]

Baptism also tells us something about the role of children in the Church. The presence of godparents who speak in the baptism rite as representatives of the parish reminds us that children are the responsibility of the entire parish.  Just as the Church and not the kinship unit is the primary social commitment of the Christian, the kinship unit has a limited claim on the children; families are stewards and not owners of God’s children.  The congregation is ultimately responsible for the spiritual and material care of the children and must therefore hold the kinship unit accountable for providing appropriate care at home.  Christian parents are never alone in rearing children, and it is not intended that the state ever be required to play its role as the caretaker of last resort for Christian children.  So God meets our needs by providing us with the fellowship of the faithful who are pledged to share the ultimate responsibility for the care of children so that parents are never on their own and who hold parents accountable for the care they give at home.[[Mangina, Joseph L. “Conception, Children, and the Family”. p. 474.]]

Consideration of the role of children and the importance of their care in the economy of God leads us to reflect on our habit of Holy Marriage.  In America, there is a legal entity that uses a similar name but has very little overlap with Holy Marriage.  The entity, “marriage,” is a construction of the American civil religion and jurisprudence that is shorthand for “Property to be jointly held with rights of survivorship.” It is a contractual sharing arrangement between exactly two persons that may be dissolved at will.  Unfortunately, many confuse “marriage” with Holy Marriage and so do not reflect properly on the latter’s implications as a habit of the Church, and this can lead to faulty assumptions about how God blesses us with respect to procreation.

In contrast with marriage, Holy Marriage is not between an “I” and a “Thou.”  We have already seen that Holy Marriage is a special kind of friendship within the Eucharistic community (although rubrics allow for Holy Marriage between baptized and unbaptized persons).  Our habit of Holy Marriage is enclosed within our Sacrament of the Eucharist because Holy Marriage is the creation of the Holy Spirit and is a mystical union through which the triune God blesses the Church.  But it does not merely unite two persons, for, as part of the Eucharist, the future is brought into the present so that the mystical union includes the children who are “not yet”, so that Holy Marriage is a mystical union of the triune God with a male and female and their future children in a special holy friendship that is authorized by and supported by the Eucharistic community.

In other words, Holy Marriage is not a contract for the mutual benefit of a couple but a sacramental unifying act for the benefit of the Household of God. God may or may not bless the Church through the gift of children as a result of the special friendship (as Karl Barth notes, since Christians have been grafted into the destiny of Israel through Christ, that destiny is no longer dependent on the gift of children through Holy Marriage; children are no longer a necessity for Israel because of Christ).[[Mangina, Joseph L. “Conception, Children, and the Family”. p. 474.]]  Yet we can say with confidence that God blesses the Church by creating and sustaining unitive holy friendships between a male and female and their children.

There are those who claim that The Episcopal Church ought to authorize liturgies which proclaim to the world that same-sex committed partnerships are means through which God blesses the Church. Many claim this is a matter of justice, as though we all have an inalienable right to a rite.  Clearly there are matters of justice that we must address, but those have to do with the legal structures in our society that unfairly privilege heterosexual couples over single persons, the two flesh and blood groups whom the state recognizes as legal entities.  There seems to be a strong mandate in our society to address this systemic injustice in our legal structures.

But Holy Marriage is a rite of the Church, not a right of the individual.  It is not a right at all, but a vocation to which one may or may not be called, much like the priesthood.  Authorizing liturgies for the blessing of committed same sex relationships is not a matter of justice, but a question of theology.  The question before the deputies and bishops of the Episcopal Church is singular: does God bless the Church by creating and sustaining unitive holy friendships between a male and male and their children, or a female and female and their children?

If the answer to this theological question is “No”, then we as a community of faith are not done.  We must then wrestle with a second challenge: how ought we understand the vocation of gay persons such that our story as a community of faith includes their uniqueness as part of our telling of the great drama of how God nurtures and sustains his people?

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Mr. Uffman,

I think you somewhat “miss the mark” by stating [emphasis mine]:

Clearly there are matters of justice that we must address, but those have to do with the legal structures in our society that unfairly privilege heterosexual couples over single persons, the two flesh and blood groups whom the state recognizes as legal entities.  There seems to be a strong mandate in our society to address this systemic injustice in our legal structures.

Were there such a mandate, it would be a topic discussed not solely with regard to single persons, nor even solely with regard to homosexuals. Rather, it would be applied more generally to all citizens who might benefit from establishing a “household,” irrespective of whether any sexual activity were involved between the members of that “household.” This was addressed by Professor Robert P. George of Princeton University in an article entitled Law and Moral Purpose, published in the January, 2008, edition of First Things. Professor George makes the case, rightly in my view, that

If law and policy are at least to do no harm to marriage, it is critical that they avoid treating nonmarital conduct and relationships as if they were marital. … Some of the benefits traditionally associated with marriage may legitimately be made more widely available in an effort to meet the needs of people who are financially interdependent with a person or persons to whom they are not married. Private contracts between such people should be sufficient to accomplish all or most of what they consider desirable. … If, however, a jurisdiction moves in the direction of creating a formalized system of domestic partnerships, it is morally crucial that the privileges, immunities, and other benefits and responsibilities contained in the package offered to nonmarried partners not be predicated on the existence or presumption of a sexual relationship between them. Benefits should be made available to, for example, a grandparent and adult grandchild who are living together and caring for each other. The needs that domestic-partnership schemes seek to address have nothing to do with whether the partners share a bed and what they do in it. The law should simply take no cognizance of the question of a sexual relationship. It should not, that is, treat a nonmarital sexual relationship as a public good.

The absence of any significant public outcry for such a solution to the inequitable treatment of all unmarried persons sharing a “household,” (as contrasted with the outcry solely for homosexual couples) argues more that the issues are being raised very much predominantly as public lobbying for same-sex marriage, rather than the purpose you suggest.

Pax et bonum.

I actually considered this issue last night while I wrote the sentence you quote, Keith.  I quite agree with you and Professor George with respect to the location and description of the injustice.  I appreciate your introducing this point, since I thought of it and decided not to detour into that in my piece. 

However, I am not so sure that the public mind is being manipulated in favor of same-sex marriage cynically.  I think the American public is smarter than that; they are able to recognize the basic issue of property rights that is being highlighted by gay activists predominantly but, as you note, affects a broader class of individuals. And Americans want our laws to be “fair,” which most of us think of in terms of equal treatment under the law. That seems particularly true of those under 40, if we are to believe the Pew Research data.

Your post is helpful in naming the real injustice to which I refer. It is not specific to gay persons in our society, but rather affects them across the board and so appears to be a gay issue.  In economics, we speak of the cost of information and cost of change; the reason it appears that this is a gay issue is because the cost of this injustice is to them very high as a group, in comparison with heterosexual single persons, who, as part of the universe of heterosexual persons, have a much lower per capita cost.  And so gay persons have a much greater per capita incentive to invest in changing our structures than heterosexuals do.  Therefore this looks like an issue of sexuality, when, in fact, it has to do with a bias in our legal structures that treats marital relationships as a public good.

You have clarified my description of the injustice for which I claim there is a mandate that will enable Obama to address it (I hope our lawmakers heed George’s counsel).

Craig (following your lead on forms of address),

It was not my intent to be cynical, but rather to point out that I have heard no public outcry for a more general fairness, while there has been substantial outcry on behalf of homosexuals, and what I believe to be a miscasting of the issues as matters of (pick one) civil rights, social justice or equal treatment before the law. I also believe that the miscasting is, very largely, a result of the inappropriate conflation in the law of fundamentally unrelated issues. To cite one example, the conflation of hospital visitation rights with marital state. I would assert that such inapt conflations are very frequently indicated by the presence of systematic perverse results in the law. But Töpfer’s Rule of Systematic Perverse Results is a bit off-topic for this forum and thread.

God’s blessings,
Keith Töpfer

Please call me Craig.  That’s the only name I claim.

I think we agree on this one, Keith.

the conflation of issues is otherwise known as ‘propaganda’, and its purpose is to excite emotions so people act accordingly, drawing in fence-sitters who don’t want to feel guilty or be accused….etc. I use to be on the far left and know how it’s used in both the street, in committee, and city government. Never leave home without it…Clever rhetoric is putting it nicely….?

That’s far too cynical, Charles.  It’s not propaganda.  These are difficult things to sort out.  It takes lots of wrestling with them to see the categories that make distinctions possible.  If one is gay, these issues, I imagine, feel quite personal and seem to be gay issues rather than the broader structural issues that Dr. George describes.  How can a gay person step out of that identity to see them differently?  How can you or I step out of our identity and see them differently?  It’s not propaganda; it’s our struggle as a community to tell God’s story in ways that make sense to all of us in our uniqueness - becoming one while remaining many.  We can’t make the first steps towards healing the wounds of communion until we begin to trust that the “other” might just be trying to tell the truth as they have been given the ability to see it.

Keith and all,

On that I do have to agree. As a moderate gay man in the Episcopal Church (I shant get into debating the morality of my situation here), I find the conflation of issues also difficult and confusing. I wonder what would happen if the debate shifted to “fairness” instead of loaded terms such as “social justice” or “civil rights”.

Also of note that there are really two separate debates here: the civil society debate and the church debate. The gay community has not yet been able to make a division between the two. The civil society debate is a matter of fairness and about providing equal protection under the law (some of you may disagree), whereas the church debate is of much more serious consequence. The Primate’s Theological Commission of the Anglican Church of Canada rightly put it in their St. Michael’s Report when they stated that the issue of blessing same-sex unions touches on many important doctrinal issues which need to be discussed. I don’t think that sweeping them under the rug in the name of full inclusion is a good idea.

Also, I would commend to this debate the Anglican Church of Canada’s work on this issue (which has been largely ignored recently, yet could be of serious impact). It recently released a series of essays called the Galilee Report which discusses the ethics of same-sex relations in the church and how the church ought to respond. Mighty good reading in there: http://www.anglican.ca/primate/ptc/galilee/index.htm

Well, I do not think it’s much different from any other kind of celibacy. It also depends on how you look at it. The unmarried state is a good thing. The eunuch is blessed, Is. 56:4. We can mortify our flesh, live an ascetic life, pray, develop gifts, write, teach, and just live our lives for God in a very focused way. What is forgotten in all this is God’s sovereignty and glory. We no longer belong to oursevles but to the Lord. The saints do not fear dying for Christ. We are to die daily and continually, etc.. All this has been forgotten in the modern church. We want to affirm not mortify. It’s not about “how we feel”, “do people like me/us”, “am I accepted”, but, “is God being glorified”? Do I honor Him above all else? This should be our heart’s only concern, center, prayer, and breath every second we live.

The proponents of various egalitarian/so-called “justice” initiatives have made it virtually impossible to love God. They have made the OT and even many parts of the NT so wishy-washy we can’t live straight path—a life of love and oblation to God. Is the Holy Spirit doing a ‘new thing’, or is God the same yesterday, today, and forever? The marriage question, like many others are only “complex” because we’ve made them so. We don’t want to believe the scriptures could ‘condemn man’ or ‘sin’...

here is a great answer to your question.. 18th century divine and churchman (just substitute ‘employment’ for ‘marriage’).by William Law

Vocation is very much a part of this discussion and one that often is not addressed.  Usually, when we in the church hear the word “vocation,” we think ordination . . . or sometimes perhaps a type of work to which one feels especially called. We often don’t talk in everyday life about marriage as a vocation, which it is.  However, it also needs to be placed within the larger call of all Christians to chastity, which is often used interchangeably with celibacy but is much larger than that. Rather, I at least tend to hold that chastity refers to the call of all Christians to sexual/romantic/emotional fidelity. Ideally, that involves monogamy and loving mutual sacrifice in marriage and sexual abstinence outside marriage.  For most are called to a married state, a few are specifically called to be celibate, which I tend to see as a positive vocation for living with one’s sexuality by choosing not to enter into marriage or other sexual relationship. It’s not simply abstaining from sex. (In many ways, the celibate has to deal with his/her own sexuality in a much more intense way.) Both celibacy and marriage should be seen as ascetic practices that can help channel God’s gift of sexuality, something that does go the the very root of who we are as human beings and how we relate to other people and even, imo, to God. (Mind you, all of this is an ideal, which few if any actually attain given that our lives are still affect by Sin.)

The question then is what kind of vocation do we see gay and lesbian persons as having when it comes to sex.  Does being homosexual necessarily mean there is a call to celibacy?  If so, how does the church then take that seriously and help people with living into that calling?  If homosexuality does not necessarily mean a call to celibacy, then what?  Are we simply to live without the possibility of loving, committed, romantic companionship? That seems almost like a cruel joke:  “Okay, you have sexual feelings, but you’re not necessarily called to celibacy. Your only choice is to either live alone for your whole life or marry someone of the opposite sex, but you’re attracted to the opposite sex; so marriage isn’t an option either. Essentially, you really don’t have any call. Sorry.” If, however, we are allowed to form a loving, committed, monogamous, romantic, (hopefullY) lifelong partnership with a person of the same gender, can sex be a part of it yet still be faithful to God’s call? If not, then can that partnership still exist but with the expectation of sexual abstention within the context of that relationship. If that is the case, then can there be some sort of provision for those two people to publicly declare their vows to each other within the context of the life of the church? (I’m sure even some heterosexuals are probably called to this particular state. It certainly is attested within church tradition.) Personally, I believe that a monogamous relationship which includes sex is a faithful way of living into the Christian call to chastity along with all of the others I’ve mentioned. What the church then needs is to take seriously as part of its ministry a way to help all Christians, whether heterosexual or homosexual, determine their vocation in this respect, help them live into that calling, and provide some form of public declaration of commitment to that call.

Well, that’s my two cents (okay, given the length, more like two dollars). I hope it adds somewhat to the discussion.