By Mark Azzara
My Dear Friend,
I have struggled to write this letter for the better part of three weeks because the subject of love, God and gay marriage isn’t easy to tackle. A week from now I may wish I’d said things differently, but I have to begin somewhere, and for me that means Scripture.
In the parable of the two sons (Luke 15:11-32) the father gives his rebellious son his share of the estate (the power of free will) without a word of protest. You and I have received the same gift and we, like that son, have abused it, to our detriment and that of others.
In that sense, there is no difference between gays and straights. None! We have all abused our free will to create conflicting definitions of love, marriage and sex and thus refusing to allow God, who is love and the author of human sexuality, to define and explain those terms for us. Small wonder that the theologies, attitudes, desires, feelings and fears of heterosexuals and homosexuals alike are equally, and totally, messed up.
Even worse, we all claim the moral high ground for our definitions by labeling those who disagree with us as immoral. We ignore Luke 6:37 and Matthew 7:1, where Jesus said, “Do not judge lest you be judged.” Since so many Christians ignore that injunction by criticizing a court decision they say legalizes a perverse form of sexuality I think it’s fair to test their definition of perversion.
Is gay marriage more perverse/sinful than … Demanding physical sex that has nothing to do with love from an unwilling heterosexual spouse? … Cavalierly abandoning one straight marriage for another one, which often means abandoning the children born out of that previous relationship? (Read Matthew 19)… Being in a sexually active heterosexual relationship outside of marriage? … Or a straight couple choosing never to have kids, whether the means are deemed sinful (i.e., contraception) or morally acceptable (i.e., natural family planning)?
In a 2014 New York Times article, psychology professor Eli J. Finkel describes society’s penchant for perverse marriage revisionism. “Since around 1965, we have been living in the era of the self-expressive marriage. Americans now look to marriage increasingly for self-discovery, self-esteem and personal growth.” Translation: Good-bye self-sacrifice, hello self-actualization.
In the National Catholic Reporter, Father Thomas Reese, a Jesuit priest, recently criticized the Catholic Church’s perverse practice of hiring and providing benefits for those involved in “illicit” marriages (i.e., non-religious civil marriage and remarriage) while rejecting those in gay marriages.
What’s really perverse and hypocritical is to ignore, downplay, overlook and/or tolerate other kinds of sin while condemning homosexuality. To argue this from the opposite perspective, those who loudly condemn homosexuality must loudly condemn all sin. But doing so means they would eventually condemn themselves, because we are all sinners. Now do you understand why Jesus tells us to keep our mouths shut?
Jesus’ harshest criticism is reserved for hypocrites. In Matthew 7:2-5 and Luke 6:41-42 Jesus says those who criticize others must deal first with the reality of sin in their own lives. This is what Jesus meant in John 8:11 when he said, “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.”
The supreme irony of the Supreme Court’s decision is that the court has outed the church. Once again God himself is using the courts, as he did in the priestly sex-abuse scandal, to push the church out of its closet so that it no longer can use contradictory theologies, institutional authority, political power and, worst of all, hypocrisy to dictate to others.
Love (i.e., God) doesn’t dictate. God, who is love, lets you exercise the free will He gave you, no matter how repulsive your subsequent actions may be. And in the midst of such reprehensible actions Jesus asks his father to forgive because “they don’t know what they’re doing” (Luke 23:34).
Christians must do the same. Remember the Lord’s Prayer: “Forgive us our sins as we have forgiven those who have sinned against us” (Matthew 6:12). We need to ask for God’s grace because we lack the capacity to forgive like that. Grace empowers us to love the sinner and ignore the sin, just as God does with us. This is what it means to love one another as Jesus has loved us (John 13:34).
Those who govern the institutional church have failed to do that, which is why they, too, must ask for God’s grace. Based on its actions thus far the church (laity as well as clergy) has shown it has a long way to go before understanding love from God’s perspective. In Revelations 2-3 Jesus rebukes churches that don’t live what they preach. Why should the 21st Century church escape criticism?
Church leaders claim to act in accord with their theologies to prove that they’re blameless, and yet their actions contradict Scripture. In Romans 2:24 Paul rebukes such leaders by citing Isaiah 52 when he writes, “Because of you the name of God is reviled among non-believers.” Paul is fed up with church leaders who want laws and courts to impose church teachings. As he writes in Galatians 2:21, “If justification [being put right with God] comes through the law, then Christ died for nothing.”
Eons of institutional sin have put the church in an uncomfortable, even dangerous, position. Church leaders must address serious questions in the wake of the court’s ruling. Will the church publicly repent for hypocritically judging some sins/sinners while disregarding others? Will the church repent for relying on the political process to enforce its teachings? In short, will the church re-examine itself to see where love has become cheap jargon instead of a lived reality?
The word “repentance,” derived from the Latin, means a change of thinking that leads to a change of conduct. By its conduct the church must consistently answer “yes” to those questions before it can recapture its teaching authority and its role as a source for understanding love and thus drawing back to itself those who have fled. The church must either truly live the message of love that it preaches or abandon that message.
If you have read these three letters I fear you may have misinterpreted them as a statement on whether I support or oppose gay marriage. If not, you’re probably wondering whether I do or don’t. I can’t answer that question because, believe it or not, it’s irrelevant and irreverent. What I’ve been trying to say is that God’s understanding is the only thing that matters.
You may fear seeking God’s input because it may begin with him loving you, just to bless you. You may not want God to love you because you suspect that his love is merely a bribe to manipulate you into changing your beliefs. All I can say is: You’re wrong. Experiencing his love is the only way to learn love’s true definition. But seeking that love, as the prodigal son did, is a decision only you can make.
All God’s blessings – Mark
