One more introduction to try and set the stage for what I am working to communicate. So far I have posted three pieces that are seeking to engage myself and anyone who might stumble across this blog to “ponder” some thoughts about our human identity and sexuality.

I doubt I will change anyone’s mind. Those who agree might find some useful information. Those who don’t agree…well I am simply trying to offer a cogent exploration of the situation…and possibly, just maybe, you won’t think that friend of yours who is a traditionalist…maybe you won’t think of her or him as a bigot…it is why I had the three earlier pieces about dissent, about starting in the wrong place, and about whether or not I am a bigot.

For me this is not hypothetical. I am the voice of dissent in my church and I wonder…“Don’t we need dissent—in fact shouldn’t we intentionally seek it?” Then after the SCOTUS decision and me testifying at hearings and speaking from the floor of our church’s national convention, I sure was led to believe I was a bigot.

Like I said, I doubt I will change your mind, but I am going to look at Genesis chapter one through three in the next few blogs…and I want to start in the right place…I am not going to start with sex or sexuality…I am going to start with the Person…the Individual…and see what the Bible has to say.

Let me tell you how I approach Scripture. I think it is the Word of God. I don’t worship the Bible, I worship the God of the Bible. That means that I tend to expect the Bible to have meaning for me…and for us. One of the things that happens when you begin to believe in Jesus…in the Word that became Flesh…is that your mind stops marshalling all the facts of the universe against the Bible, and instead you mind sees all these facts of the universe as testifying to the God of the Bible.

I am going to look at Genesis chapter one…creation and yes “male and female” and there may be a tendency right now to jump to your conclusions about sexuality…but hold off. Because while I am going to look at Genesis chapter one…it is not where I am starting…

AND NOW

And now, after all the preamble, I want to start in Genesis, chapter two, verse four.

These are the generations

of the heavens and the earth when they were created

in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens.

I really like the juxtaposition of the word “generations” as compared to “in the day”…here we get a sense of the prose…that there is a sense of chronological time that elapses and yet it is all in a singular purpose…the singular “day” of the Lord.

While I just wanted to point that bit out, it is not what I really want to get to. Check out verses five through seven. Notice in verse five there is no “man to work the land.” Before humanity is created there is this idea of work…I will return to that later, but the idea of work is before “Adam and Eve eat the fruit.” In verse seven we get to what I am really wanting to hone in on:

Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground

and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.

He formed us “out of the ground.” Now I am not trying to be a literalist. I just want you to sense the intimacy of God as He made us…it is like God is down on his hands and knees forming us…and then He breathes his very breath of life into our lifeless mud-pie bodies…and we become living creatures. The word for breath in Hebrew (I imagine you know) is the same word for Spirit (or wind). God breathes his very Spirit into us.

So here is the question, “Who are you at your core?” Furthermore, “What value do you intrinsically have as an individual person?” Ephesians 2:10 says we are “God’s handiwork” which seems to fit this story…but then Ephesians goes on to say the we are “created in Christ Jesus to do good works which God has prepared for us in advance.” Created in Christ Jesus…with a purpose. In fact it says earlier in Ephesians, 1:4 that “God thought of us, before he thought of the world” (paraphrase from The Message Bible)…and that also kind of fits what we have just read in Genesis.

So what is the big deal? The BIG DEAL is You! You are a big deal. You are of infinite worth. You have the Spirit of God in you! Unfortunately you and I live in a world where people keep looking outside themselves for meaning and purpose and love (and I could go on and on about that…think of all the things we do to fit in, or be noticed, or have people “like us”, or…).

The point is that Genesis tells us that if we want to understand who we are and our purpose, and if we want to talk about who and how we are to have relationships…the point is we need to get ourselves grounded in who we are as created by God.

Today in the world…compliments of the sexual revolution…people describe themselves as sexual beings…to which I say hogwash.

We…as individual persons…are souls that are created by God and who contain his very Spirit…it is God’s Spirit that first animated us and brought us to life…it is therefore seeking a relationship with God that will satisfy the primal longing of our souls…we are souls who happen to have bodies. We are not bodies that have souls…and so our bodies and our sexuality is not our starting point…our starting point is being filled with the Spirit of God.

We will get to sexuality in a few blog posts…but let’s not rush past this point…savor it…go to church, sit in a pew or chair, and ask God to fill you again with His life giving breath.

Oh...and the picture...so how many hands did God use when he was forming you?

AM I A BIGOT?

Am I a bigot? Seriously. I start with this question for a few reasons, but first let me back up by providing a bit of a disclaimer and also some background.

First the disclaimer. People do not like it when I talk or write about things related to sexuality. It is uncomfortable. Many of us are trying to find a way to “get along.” Two blog posts ago (“Most people do not set out to destroy where they work…” dated 6/3/2015) I argued the need for a formal dissenting opinion process in The Episcopal Church. In that post I suggested one of the benefits of such a process is that it helps keep people in dialog. I even worked at our most recent Convention to have that required as the Task Force on Marriage has been commissioned for another three years. That amendment was not only soundly defeated…the body voted to not even discuss it! So with that action the minority are relegated to the blog world.

Now onto the background. In my last post (“Starting in the wrong place” dated 7/3/2015) I posited that we, The Episcopal Church, in evaluating whether marriage of same-gender couples was biblical, started in the wrong place…we failed to start with our identity and purpose. And so now I am on to write about this notion of “our identity and purpose” as described in Holy Scriptures. But first…

But first I must ask if I am a bigot. Why? Because the Supreme Court of the United States declared marriage (albeit civil marriage) a fundamental human right. They upheld the idea of religious freedom…and I could take a tack to draw distinction between civil marriage and the sacrament of Holy Matrimony…but I am not going to do so. To take that path seems a bit at odds with my purpose. My purpose is to examine our fundamental—down at the very root of our being—identity and purpose.

If in the end that leads to the option of same-gender marriage, then civil marriage and the sacrament of holy matrimony should be consonant with one another. If my opinion leads to heterosexual marriage as only appropriate, then I will find myself at odds with the recent decision from SCOTUS. To be at odds with their recent decision does not mean that people who are not drawn into a lifelong view of marriage should be discriminated against. Nor does it imply that people who are single should somehow be penalized by tax policy, health care proxies, and the like. And certainly hatred and violence towards anyone in these matters is evil. Yet if I am somehow saying No to this newly acclaimed civil right, might that imply that I am a bigot.

This emotionally charged word is at times defined as someone who holds an opinion that does harm based on the judgment of another…and by me holding this opinion, I am denying people their right to marry, and thereby harming them. Being called a bigot is rather troubling. But consider, in a recent hearing at the General Convention of The Episcopal Church a man got up and testified that our Book of Common Prayer was racist in its Marriage liturgy. He drew on the recent hate crime in Charlestown, South Carolina and drew a straight line, a direct correlation, to the Prayer Book’s continued discrimination against same-gender marriage. To hold to this traditional view, in this one person’s opinion was to be a bigot. He shared this emotionally charged view right as I was thinking about my view.

Now this idea, me being prejudiced, is not a new to me. To be however immersed in the 78^th General Convention is to think about these things, to think about myself. At the convention I intentionally went up, after having shared publically my own thoughts, introduced myself to others who held opposite views, and thanked them for theirs. Most were shocked at my approach to them. My response to them was that getting up in public and testifying was hard to do…we shared this common experience…we shared in this process of trying to put ideas into the public debate…me with the label of bigot and them with other labels…and it was not pleasant for either of us, but we obviously each felt the need to do so. For the most part, those post-testimony conversations were healing.

And I continue to feel this need, this need to offer something positive to the discussion. I say positive because so far those who hold to the traditional view of marriage seem to be offering one thing…and that one thing is denial of marriage. And that has me asking, “So for people not drawn into a heterosexual relationship that has the intention of lifelong marriage, what does God have to offer them…what is their identity and purpose in God’s grand design?” With that long preamble, let me then begin.

That question, “What is my identity and my purpose in God’s grand design?” starts well before our sexual identity…in fact it starts in Genesis. Genesis…that old book about old times and deep truths. Some call it “pre-history.” Their sensitivity to dinosaurs and evolution and science cause them, when drawing on this text, uncomfortableness. I welcome this prose, this narrative so rich with its deep truths from God. Genesis chapter 1 and 2 tells the story of God as Creator and Sustainer. It tells us that God is the source of life. It tells us that we, are above and beyond all other creation and have a special role. It tells us that “human beings” are God’s image bearers to God’s good, very good creation—it begins to tell us our identity and purpose.

In my next post I want to specifically dig into that a bit more, but I wanted to really “put out there” the uncomfortableness…and the necessity of even writing about this subject. 

STARTING IN THE WRONG PLACE

I am looking out my window at the amazing Rocky Mountains…from the West Side…which is kind of cool for me to think about given I first just assumed I was on the other side. I am not used to being on the western side of mountains. Living on the east coast my whole life, my orientation, has been to look westward.

It is easy to become disoriented. It is easy to think you are in one location, start out on your journey, only to end up at a destination that you never intended to arrive at.

This past week I have been at the General Convention of the Episcopal Church and I want to suggest that many have been thinking we are “starting” at one place, thrown ourselves into a journey, and quite frankly are on a way to a destination that many people did not expect (let me emphasize many not all). I got a glimpse of that destination this week.

We thought we started at a place called Marriage…or Marriage Equality. We were offered the idea that two…count them two…people in a lifelong monogamous relationship, should be treated equally regardless of gender and sexual orientation with regards to marriage. I will not rehash all the debates about this change in theology. This week the General Convention of The Episcopal Church changed its Canon for Marriage, it changed its theology of marriage, redefining it as between a couple, irrespective of gender. You might have thought we had arrived at the destination; we had not.

This battle that many have fought (and I know my pacifist friends deplore that language, but it is honest) this battle, was thought to be over the right to marry. Said differently, some thought that the journey had set out in the direction of marriage equality. Apparently that was not so.

We learned it was not about marriage equality. I am not inferring or extrapolating anything in that sentence. We were told directly—it is not about marriage equality, but rather equality.

This week, person after person gave testimony in committee hearings and from the floor of the House of Deputies that it is about equally for all. Now equally for all sounds nice. But their context was equality for sexual behavior. One person unabashedly stated they were living with their mate, had no plan of marrying, no plan for children, and no plan for lifelong commitment…but then stated they hope that soon the Episcopal Church will be able to bless them. At another hearing I heard a similar comment after the person testifying provided a long list of possible…well let’s just say arrangements.

Now, just for a moment let me stop here from further describing the situation. Let me avoid the fear mongering of where this might lead…let me…well let me just point out that none of these possible arrangements is about marriage. In all these discussions, what is really going on is IDENTITY. People wonder, “Who am I?” and “If I am this kind of person, am I OK?” and finally “If the Church would bless me and my behavior, then perhaps (big emphasis here on the word perhaps) then perhaps I will feel OK.”

As people living in the early part of the 21^st century, we are inheritors of the sexual revolution of the late 20^th century, and that revolution…so potent with its allure…has completely hijacked our understanding of identity. This is not an “anti-sex” article…it is an article about how we have started these very serious and important discussions in the wrong place…we thought we were starting with whether two people of the same gender, with the intention of a lifelong committed relationship, should be understood as married…and if so, then should the church asks God’s blessing upon them in this institution which most Christians say God instituted…we thought (at least many) we thought this was the starting point.

It is obvious now that it was not. It is instead a fairly vocal amalgamation of people, who have formed themselves together, each crying out for recognition of their identity. I note that most people involved in this gallant effort speak passionately about their identity. And let's face it, our identity is hugely important. In fact the letters LGBTQ…are about identity, but identity that seemingly reduces the matter of personhood to the singular lens of sexuality.

Furthermore, returning to evaluating this under the idea of marriage/relationship starts again in the wrong place. Identity starts first with the individual before moving to relationship.

I doubt the outcome on Same-Gender Marriage would have been different. I do think however it has sent us on a course, a path of thinking, which start’s in the wrong place. What if it started with a different question, a different name to the Episcopal Church’s Task Force? Instead of the Episcopal Church’s Task Force on Marriage, what if, it were the Episcopal Church’s Task Force on Human Identity & Purpose?  If we started there I imagine our thinking, our approach would look quite different. No doubt we would run the risk of producing a summa theologica.

We could start in a few places. In some future blog posts I want to explore just that question. For now however I would return simply to where I began…and that is…I wonder if we did indeed start in the wrong place.