Sermon: The Gay Bishop

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The Gay Bishop

By Charles Rush

August 31, 2003

e staff was worried that things might be a little slow this week, so they suggested I preach on sex to boost ratings. Sex is always a touchy subject from the pulpit. I am reminded of an apocryphal story that is told about the Episcopal Chaplain at Princeton. The boys at one of the Eating Clubs asked him to give a short talk on sex to which he reluctantly agreed. He was rather shy on the subject of sex, so when his wife asked him what he was going to speak on he fumbled for a moment and finally said ‘sailing Dear', much to her befuddlement. She was walking across campus later that week when she ran into some of the members of the Eating Club who rang out “We're looking forward to your husband's talk tomorrow night.” Still confused, his wife blurted out, “I don't know why he thinks he's such an expert on the subject, he's only done it twice.” Perhaps, reticence on the subject hasn't been so helpful after all.

As you know, the Episcopal Church this week voted an openly Gay Priest, Father Gene Robinson, to become Bishop in the Church. It was hailed as Ground Breaking and a sharp deviation from tradition. In a very real sense, it was. However, this is not the first Gay Bishop in the Catholic tradition by a long shot. We have not only had many Gay Bishop's in the past, we have had openly Gay Bishops, if the historian John Boswell at Yale was anywhere near the mark.. You just have to go back a few centuries when standards were different than they are today. You won't read about that in the papers, but it is true.

Nevertheless, this present crisis is not only sensational, it is important. You may wonder why this issue alone could cause a schism in the Anglican communion unlike any heretofore. The answer is that the Anglican communion has been in intense dialogues with the Roman Catholic Church to heal their 500 year old rift. They have reached remarkable agreement on doctrine, on liturgy, on authority- Church hierarchy. And they are very close to recognizing one another's priests. That would mean that in certain cases Anglican priests could serve in Catholic parishes and visa versa. It would be an enormous ecumenical step. But with this appointment, all that is jeoperdized. And while that may not be real important to the secular press or to Protestants, it is a very big deal in Europe, Africa, and other parts of the world.

I have a great deal of respect for orthodoxy. That is what you get when you finish a Ph.d., particularly from Princeton Seminary. They teach you, over many years, to read history carefully and respectfully. And I have a great deal of respect for my colleagues, Catholic and Anglican, that are deeply concerned about Orthodoxy, even though I disagree with them on this issue.

Recently, we have had two articles in the Wall Street Journal written by Orthodox people that succinctly articulate the Orthodox temperament on this latest development, and they probably echo pretty well the sentiment of common sense people from a distance. And their arguments go like this.

Katherine Kerstin attended the Episcopal Conference and said that the rhetoric in the air appears ‘heavily influenced by America's secular therapeutic culture'[1]. She believes that the root of the problem is that the Church is increasingly ‘falling prey to the prevailing winds of secular culture' and ‘losing their theological moorings'. The Gospel of our culture she says is all aoubt inclusion and affirmation. Translated into religious terms, you get a Jesus “who came to make us feel good about ourselves.” Thus, you have liberal Episcopalians arguing that “The church should bless same-sex parthenrships so that everyone feels included. She says, “The Gospel of inclusion preaches a reconstructed, therapeutic Jesus, who accepts us exactly where are. Traditional Christianity, however, holds that Jesus calls us to repentance of sins, and to transformation through a new life lived in accordance with God's will.”

She is worried that liberals lead with their feelings rather than with hard thought. Hard thought would have to deal with the sacrament of marriage which is between one man and one woman rather than how we feel about ourselves as gay people. Ms. Kersten is afraid that liberals lack backbone, a charge not without some merit. She sees the Church going all squishy on her, hardly a faith to get you through major life-threatening crises.

Similarly, Rev. Peter Mullen, the Chaplain of the Stock Exchange in London, also sees the church losing its theological nerve. In his essay, “The Last Straw”, a rather ominous title, he argues that the Episcopal Church has been dominated for decades by liberals and that wishy-washiness is now coming home to roost. In typical British fashion, he points out that St. Paul lists a catalogue of sins in the letter where he cites homosexuality as sinful: pride, vain-glory, envy, gluttony, hatred, malice, conspiracy, back-biting and so forth. None of them more worthy for censure than another. “When”, he writes, “did you last hear of a Churchman being throuwn out for back-biting?” [2]Not for a while. So he doesn't feel that we should be generating any more sensational response to gays in the Church than any of these other sins.

It is symptomatic of a larger problem. “We have ceased to believe our ancient God-given authority” he says. “Western theologians have ‘demythologized the Bible, given up believing in miracles of the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection, and abandoned those biblical teachings felt uncongenial to the modern liberated lifestyle. As an authoritative institutions with its traditional morality rooted in the Ten Commandments and in the teachings of Christ, the Western church no longer exists. It is as if it has resigned.”

Ouch. He's at least half- way right, of course. I bet he's not the first one asked out for a pint after the conference has ended for the day. But a bit of a scold.

And here is where this critique leads. “All the prohibitions have been abandoned. Divorce, once disallowed, is now often celebrated in new rites created especially for it, as what God has joined together the Church puts asunder. Adultery, promiscuity and every sort of sexual orientation are now ‘affirmed.' Hundreds of thousands of abortions each year merely as a means of contraception raise no protests- not even from a Church which commanded: Thou Shalt not kill. Homosexual bishops? Ho long before we see pedophile bishops, necrophile Deans of Cathedrals and cannibalistic Archdeacons.”

Both of these are classic conservative arguments. I might add that almost identical arguments were made in the 1920's around science and the burgeoning field of psychology, as well as historical research. The problem is that you have Church leaders overly immersed in a secular world view, who are more committed to their secular world view than to traditional theology, and thus the Church has strayed so far from it's traditional mooring that it is no longer recognizable to St. Augustine or St. Thomas.

Part of this is largely correct. The problem is Harvard Divinity School, Yale. Just look at Julie. Duke, Emory, Princeton, Cambridge, Heidleberg, Vanderbilt. They all teach our young Ministers history, archeology, psychology. By the time you graduate, you are deeply aware of the distance between our culture and the Bible and how there has to be a translation between their world-view and ours.

But, acceptance of Gays is not simply about being wishy-washy inclusive. And it can't all be laid on the doorstep of secular education. This tug of war is as old as our scripture this morning.

In the very earliest Church, all Christians were Jews, obviously, because all the disciples were Jews. But right after the death of Jesus, the disciples were commissioned by the Holy Spirit to go to the ends of the earth, spreading the good news and making new disciples. But what did that mean?

Do these new converts all have to keep kosher, even if they didn't grow up Jewish? Did they have to be circumcised? You can see that this would be an issue for Church growth. We'd love for you to join, could we see your penis please.

There were a group of disciples, led by St. Paul, who said no. They argued that Romans that became Chrsitian did not have to become kosher, did not have to become circumcised, or do anything traditionally Jewish, to be part of the Church.

And then you had, I guess you'd call them the first Conservatives, that said, everyone must become completely Jewish. And this presented an impasse because Jewish Christians that were kosher could not eat with non-kosher Christians without violating their laws. They couldn't sit at table with them.

But Jesus said that ‘breaking bread and drinking wine together' in his name were at the heart of what Christian fellowship was all about. So you had a lot of Jewish Christians like Peter who said, I will worship with you, talk to you, visit you when you are ill, but I won't eat with you.' And he didn't.

You can understand his position. His whole life, he has been taught that this is God's will for religious people, to keep kosher. That is what tradition tells him he should do. That is orthodox religiosity. Pretty clear. And he won't budge, don't care what Paul says. I have my limits.

Until, he has a dream. God shows him all this stuff that is taboo for kosher eating, totally verboten, vile, abominable, disgusting… all the stuff that God wants us to avoid, as detailed in the scripture and woven into all aspects of Jewish life. And in the dream, God says to him, ‘take and eat… what God has cleansed, you must not call vile.' 3 times he protests, but God persists, ‘What I have cleansed, you must not call vile.'

Now, at that very moment, some of these Gentile Christians were looking for him and knocking on his door. Peter, not a very bright guy and stubborn, needs some close alignment from the almighty to get the spark to jump the gap. He is like all of us. Peter wakes up, meets them, listens to them, figures it out and says, “Truly, I seee that God shows no partiality, but in every nation, any one who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to Him.”

Whoa. What a break through for a middle aged man with deep convictions about what is proper and improper in his religious life. And our text strongly suggests that the Spirit of God actually moves amongst us in this manner, that we get some new insights that overturn our fixed certainties, and points us in a wider, more inclusive direction.

Maybe it is not just secular education and the secular world-view that is driving these Church leaders. Maybe it is the Spirit of God. I understand that in this case it is pretty hard to tell the difference because it has only been in the past 40 years that we have let gay people out of the closet. I was in a fraternity of jocks at Wake Forest. We told gay jokes all the time. After one of my football playing fraternity brothers came out 10 years out of school, I looked backed with more than a little chagrin wondering how that whole atmosphere made him feel.

I have to cut to the chase here. But homosexuality is simply part of God's creation. In fact, the more research we do, the more we discover that is part of a wide swath of species on our planet, a very wide swath.

It is true that there are a couple passages that condemn homosexuality in the Old Testament and a couple condemnation in the New Testament, written in Paul's name. Furthermore, there is quite a round condemnation of homosexuality in the oral tradition of the Church. But, what if God wants us to transcend this part of our tradition for a more creative inclusion?

Let's come at this from the other side first, from the point of view of gay people rather than Church tradition. Once you accept that gay people are simply part of God's creation, once you acknowledge that they have sexual lives also, then if you are to help advise them on how to become spiritually integrated sensual beings, it seems to me that the counsel of the Church to homosexuals ought to be pretty similar to the counsel to heterosexuals. We hope for you a covenant of faithful love in a monogamous relationship. We hope for you trust, vulnerability, support, joy. We hope that you and your spouse are a model for the next generation to understand what faithful love looks like.

Harvey Cox, who teaches religion and ethics at Harvard, also wrote a nice piece in the Wall Street Journal on this note. “For years now many local churches of different denominations have idenitifed themselves as “open and welcoming” congregations. What they all report is that after an initial flurry, soon gay and lesbian members simply attend commuion, sing in the choir, present their adopted children for baptism, sign up for spiritual tetreats, staff the food pantry and attend Bible study and prayer groups. They do not like to be singled out as different, nor do they want to belong to a gay church. They want to be treated with dignity and respect, as we all do, while they try to meet their own spiritual needs and follow the teachings of Jesus (who never uttered a syllable about homosexuality) to care for the wonded, feed the hungry and show compassion t the broken hearted.”

That has certainly been our experience at Christ Church. It seems to me that what Jesus principally came to teach us about was faithful love. The reason that he held marriage up in such high spiritual regard is that on it's best days, it is a stellar expression of what faithful love is all about. You trust one another. You care for one another. You sin against one another but you don't leave because you are offended. You work things through, make changes, make amends, become reconciled. You lift one another up. You bring out the best in one another. You make them feel confident. You embody a Spirit of warm, graceful humanity, tenderness and courage. You become strong. Faithful love can do that. It is a beautiful thing, a profound spiritual possibility. That is what we believe in because of Jesus Christ.

And it seems to me, humbly speaking, that this ought to be what we teach our gay children too. This is what we should hope for them. And if this is what we hope for our children, it is what we should hope for our Church leaders.

Sexual orientation is secondary; faithful love spiritually transcends sexual orientation. This goes beyond the influence of secularization; it goes beyond our adoption of therapeutic psychological acceptance. There are internal theological reasons for us to grow in this direction.

I was sick last week, in bed with the flu, and I watched a PBS show on gay couples talking to their parents. Two sets of the parents were very religious, one Christian, one Mormon. In the end, the parents could not accept their children's relationships. Not only they could not celebrate them, they could not tolerate them. The documentary simply detailed the parents, then the gay couples talking about trying to work this through, only to figure out that they had reached an impasse.

You could see these parents. They wanted to love their boys. They wanted to want the best for their boys. But then they had their religion and their religion said that homosexuality was wrong. And religion won out in the end. They did not get the vision that Peter got that led him to declare, “Behold I perceive that God shows no partiality… but accepts anyone that emodies what God wants for us.”

And to see these grown men. Frustrated sure, angry sure, sad sure, but most of all hurt… deeply hurt because they could not get their parents blessing. Just a basic human compassion says that this needs to be healed.

I will close so you can respond. But I will predict this that in just a few decades, we are going to look back on this time and wonder what all the fuss was about. I am convinced of that. But right now we are in the midst of it and it is muddled. So I will take your questions and hear you your view points. And if you are new to Christ Church, feel free to disagree with the Minister. Everyone else here sure does.

Amen.

[1] See ‘The Gospel of Inclusion' in Houses of Worship (date unkown, page not found).

[2] Peter Mullen, ‘The Last Straw” The Wall Street Journal, Tuesday, August 26, 2003, p. A12