For visitors and first-time attendees in the congregation this morning, and there are quite a few, at this point in the service I would ordinarily read some verses from one of the four Gospels or from one of St. Paul's Letters as a second lesson. I am not doing that for two reasons. First, the lectionary reading from II Samuel should stand on its own. It is the well-known lament of soon-to-be King David over the death of King Saul and Saul's son, David's friend and soul-mate Jonathan. It contains the words "Greatly beloved were you to me. Your love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women." Commentators have fallen all over themselves for centuries trying to explain the meaning of those sentences. People who have experienced same-gender love have found comfort and assurance in them.
David's lament over the death of Jonathan reminds us that the Bible is not a monolithic book that can be read uncritically. The Bible is the record of many people's experience of God and of life, and those experiences were conditioned by time and place. Many voices speak to us from the Bible, and they don't all say the same thing. Most people recognize the out-datedness of some Biblical teaching. Hardly anyone accepts the Biblical prohibition of divorce and re-marriage, and just about no-one endorses the Biblical law that a child who curses mother or father should be put to death (Leviticus 20:9)
Yet people still say (and I heard it on Broadway three days ago), "The Bible says homosexuality is an abomination—end of conversation." Well, it isn't the end of the conversation, because any thinking person's conversation with the Bible is an on-going one. We continue to perceive what people heard God saying to them a long time ago, and we seek to discern God's message for us today—always through the lens of what I affirm as the Bible's central truth, which is that God is love.
The other reason I am not using a second reading from the Bible this morning is that the subject of marriage is not primarily a religious subject, although there are certainly religious and spiritual overtones to a Christian understanding of marriage. Marriage is a civil or secular institution, and while many spiritually minded people want the blessing of God on their marriage, they do not need the approval of any church for their marriage to be recognized as legitimate. In the United States of America people have the right to hold religious beliefs and to practice a religion, but they do not have the right to impose their beliefs on the general populace, including their beliefs about marriage.
In the current Summer Issue of New York Magazine there is a long and generally helpful analysis of the New York State Senate's likelihood of passing a same-sex marriage law this summer. It is a political "given" that the votes necessary for passing a same-sex marriage bill will come mostly from Democrats rather than from Republicans. I find it interesting that in noting which Democratic senators are opposed to same-sex marriage, there is often mention of a religious affiliation—Baptist, Pentecostal, or Roman Catholic. It's important to note that Christian churches, like Jewish synagogues, are not of one voice on the subject.
Speaking as a Presbyterian, I know that I am not the only Presbyterian pastor in Manhattan who supports gay marriage, or same-sex marriage. If you know history, you know that parts of the Christian Church have consistently lagged behind other parts and have lagged behind the wider society in favoring change with regard to human rights. But, thank God, other parts of the Christian Church have been in the front ranks of people advocating the end of slavery, the equalization of gender rights, and the de-criminalization of inter-racial marriage and sexual activity by same-gender partners.
If I were to use a second reading as an introduction to this sermon, it would be these two sentences:
"Times can blind us to certain truths, and later generations can see that laws once though necessary and proper in fact serve only to oppress. As the Constitution endures, persons in every generation can invoke its principles in their own search for greater freedom."
Those words were written by Justice Anthony Kennedy in the 2004 6-3 majority decision of the United States Supreme Court in the matter of Lawrence vs. Texas, a case about so-called sodomy laws. In 1988 Ronald Reagan appointed Anthony Kennedy to the Supreme Court. Kennedy was a Roman Catholic, a traditional Republican jurist who had consistently ruled against gay litigants when he was a federal circuit court judge. But Justice Kennedy has written the two most significant Supreme Court opinions upholding civil rights for gay and lesbian people. I have read parts of those decisions recently, and at their core they are about liberty and equality, two basic principles of our American system of government and way of life.
For a full treatment of the legal and theological aspects of same-gender marriage, I refer you to William Stacy Johnson's excellent book published in 2006, A Time to Embrace: Same Gender Relationships in Religion, Law, and Politics. Professor Johnson is on the faculty of Princeton Theological Seminary, where he and I were colleagues for several years. He is an ordained Presbyterian minister and an attorney. His book has been influential in my thinking about gay marriage and in the writing of this sermon.
The concept of equality in America goes back at least as far as the Declaration of Independence, which affirms the belief that "all men are created equal." That it says "all men" can hardly go un-noticed in 2009. And the fact that the man who is credited with writing the Declaration of Independence owned slaves at the time reminds us that securing equality is an un-ending process. One important strand in our legal history has been the broadening of the Declaration's statement of equality by court decisions and enacted laws to include "all people" rather than "all men" without regard to race or gender. The current focus in the broadening of "all people are created equal" is extending it to include sexual orientation. Given the current make-up of the U.S. Supreme Court, an easy victory is not in sight, although the change in Justice Kennedy's thinking after being appointed to the Supreme Court is ground for hope.
For me personally the source of a belief in equality goes back way before the 1776 American Declaration of Independence. Without going into detail, I see the seeds of equality in the words of the ancient Hebrew prophets, in the ministry of Jesus, and in the proclamation of the early Christian Church. Israel's prophets and priestly writers called for the equal treatment of aliens and residents in the growing nation and condemned the marginalization of the poor and un-married. Jesus went out of his way to mingle with social and religious outcast who failed to meet the standards of the self-righteous critics who deplored his inclusive ministry to all people. The early Christian Church taught that God loved the whole world, not just the church or synagogue. They were blind to some of the implications of their preaching, but the seeds of equality were unmistakably present. The Church, like the legal community, is divided between those who seek to expand and re-interpret basic principles of truth and justice and those who hold to established truth as inviolable. Clearly I am in the expand and re-interpret camp.
I believe equality for gay and lesbian people (LGBT people) means the right to marry, not just the right to enter into legally protected civil unions, although that would be an advancement over the current status in most states. The regulation of marriage is a matter of state law, not federal law, and the actions of legislatures in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, and courts in Iowa, Connecticut and Massachusetts are significant. But personally I hope for clear leadership on the issue of full gay rights, including marriage, at the national level from President Obama, whom I support enthusiastically and admire personally. His reluctance to lead on the issue of full justice for LGBT people is being widely debated and analyzed. I invite you to join me in sending emails and letters urging President Obama to be as fervent on the issue of gay rights as he is on the issue of universal health care.
And that leads me to the second of the two values I mentioned earlier: equality and liberty. Liberty is many-faceted. Stacy Johnson's book gives a helpful analysis of it. What I want to say here is that liberty involves some fundamental rights, among which are self-determination and privacy. I quote Justice Kennedy again:
Freedom extends beyond spatial bounds. Liberty presumes an autonomy of self that includes freedom of thought, belief, expression, and certain intimate conduct.
I believe that liberty, like justice, is blind to arbitrary differences. It recognizes no distinctions of race, color, gender, or sexual orientation. That means any two people are at liberty to enter into marriage without regard to their gender, given that just about every progressive society affirms the right of two adult people to be intimate with each other so long as they are not married to other people, that there is mutual consent and the absence of physical harm. American society protects that intimacy with a shield of privacy, which is an essential component of liberty.
Some people, at least two or three Supreme Court Justices among them, cling to the narrow understanding of marriage as a contract or covenant between a heterosexual man and a heterosexual woman. Clearly that is the most prevalent form of marriage in the modern world. But in reality there are and have been different forms of marriage around for a long time. Early Biblical history documents polygamous marriages between one man and two or more women. In parts of Europe and North America there are now marriages of same-gender couples, and there have long been marriages, for a variety of reasons, in which one partner is gay and the other partner is straight.
It is my strong conviction that any two people have the absolute right to enter into a marriage so long as they do so voluntarily, and they have the right to maintain their marriage so long as they are completely honest with each other. Whether or not they are celebrities, they owe explanations to no-one but each other. They are entitled to all the rights and benefits of marriage, including the blessing of any religious group willing to grant such blessing. All marriages deserve the full recognition of the state and the support of the wider community.
As we celebrate Gay Pride today, we affirm the total worth of all human beings—their minds, their spirits, and their bodies, including sexual orientation. I hope and pray that next year we can take pride in the State of New York's legalization of same-sex marriage. There's no good reason for it not to happen.