A sermon preached by the Very Rev. Dr. George Sumner, Principal of Wycliffe College, Toronto, on April 22, 2008, St. Margaret's Anglican Church, Winnipeg, on the occasion of a conference on "The Nuptial Mystery"
It was a moment of clarity, and I convey it to you with permission. I was a tagalong at a meeting of Windsor bishops in Texas a year and a half ago, and it was the turn of Bishop Mark McDonald, then of Alaska, now of indigenous Canada, (and I would proudly add, a Wycliffe College graduate), to speak. He began by telling us that, during debates on the same-sex issue, Gwitchen Anglicans would sometimes whisper to one another "white people are crazy." He went on to explain why. The Gwitchen want to say three things, actually. First of all, in the village we have ways to make room for those who are unusual. Second, the male and the female are the two tentpoles God put up to support his creation. And thirdly, in the frozen western Arctic, to leave is to die. And I would add, editorially, the genius of the quotation is in saying all three at once.
It is an interesting question to ask why this crisis has occurred over this issue. One explanation is the latent prejudice against homosexual people, and this factor is not to be discounted. I do sometimes wonder, why not abortion, which to its opponents is hardly a small matter. And of course, there are other issues that could, and may yet, disrupt our common life: open communion, lay presidency. When it comes to potential conflict, hold on to your hats. But in fact, it was this issue, and the struggle therein is not over one thing, but several at once: what should the nature of marriage be in our changing Western culture, by what authority shall we address these theological disputes, and how thereby shall we hang together as a Church? Seen in this way, it turns out to be no accident that it was this issue. For the body in marriage, and the body politic, and the body of Christ catholic, and finally the larger body of truths, and of words, which are Scripture, have everything to do with one another. And it is to this connection between them, to what the anthropologist Mary Douglas calls the homology, to the way they line up, that our Gospel reading attests this afternoon.As my wife the marriage therapist will attest, human wants and needs and relational struggles are one complicated hairball, and while the Pharisees' motive in bringing the question up in Mark 10 is not a pure one, the human problems and the human woe underlying their question are nonetheless real. What are we to do when the circumstances simply do not fit the model? Jesus' answer is ringingly simple, and our first task is to hear it is so. The male and the female and their being joined together are built into the very fabric of God's creation. Animal behaviorists can find all the gay penguins they like, geneticists can study all the Swedish twins separated after birth they wish, cultural anthropologists all the varied polygamies they care to, but it all can prove nothing conclusive. For the question remains whether these are data of creation in the divine intention, or its fallenness, and that is a theological question. Jesus appeals to the very first chapter of the Book of Genesis in making the clear and comprehensive claim of Mark 10. The impossibility of homosexual marriage is not some isolated proof-texting, for it follows from this declaration on the nature of marriage from the mouth of our Lord, and it is tethered to the doctrine of creation itself. All our theological reflection either moves from this grounding truth, or it is sophistry. Ethically there are still sticky wickets, but the pitch is defined.
One can see this word of Torah quoted by Christ as a deadly legalism, and so it can become for us, but the word of law is first, in this case as elsewhere, a map of the contours of God's creation, a pattern of God's will for our weal. We diverge from it to our own pain. And so, our culture, and our government can define marriage as it wishes, and even a synod can follow suit, they can legislate for all they are worth, but marriage's contours are already given. As a sidebar, we are now at the very nub of the conflict in our Church, from a systematic theologian's point of view. For what we have been struggling over all along in this conflict has been the place, if any, of the theological category of law in our life and thought. On the one hand, some say that Jesus is all about acceptance as we are, and rules are the stuff of the stern Old Testament. But without a doctrine of law, grace becomes a permissive I-and-you-are-OK-ism. On the other hand, and at the same time, where the accompanying categories of sin and forgiveness are abolished, what remains on the left is a Pelagianism of social enlightenment, and on the right, its twin, a conservative moralism. The Church comes to be populated by what Bishop Fitzsimons Allison for some time has been calling the Pharisees and Sadducees of the sexuality debate. A doctrine of law is required, precisely because grace needs law to make sense, and law cannot save.
The larger context of this discourse is the instruction of Jesus' own disciples, and of the Gospel of Mark as a whole, the instruction of us as disciples, our formation and articulation as His Body. While Ephesians 5, which David helped us with so eloquently, is more directly apposite here, marriage as sign and gift for the Body of Christ is not absent from this passage. For God's work in creation and in salvation is one. Marriage's rooting and its outreach are connected. The question of the marriage of man and woman, and the question of marriage of Christ and his church, and as a result the question of our baptismally avowed marriage one to another as Church, are inextricable.
How do we know it to be so? Because we are bound, married you might say, to these words, witnessing as they do to this one work of God. We are so bound, even when they dissonant and conflictual, even when we all, liberal to conservative, have had more than enough years of this disagreement. It is so even when we feel how attractive it would be to create separate zones, untroubled by certain words, a functional local option for an edited canon, a amicable divorce from uncomfortable texts.
But what of that word about making space in the village for those who are unusual, who are different? How does that fit with the sheer clarity and simplicity of Jesus' word? The cliché I hear in the Church goes this way: the Church should be hard at the center and soft at the edges. That can be a way to avoid this issue and all the conflict it brings, to talk around it. And there were times when, as a parish priest, I was avoidant. But there is also a way in which real-life parishes in their good moments, in their complexity and their folk wisdom, embody a principled generosity. There is teaching, and yet people are allowed space to constellate themselves around it. As any priest knows, their stories are messy, not in one way but in many ways. As the real point of the early chapters of Romans make clear, all of us, in our varied disorders, need the word of grace. I fear that this conflict has actually shrunk that space of tolerant and patient incongruity in the real lives of local communities. The disciples congregated around Jesus in our reading, are also messy and incongruous lot.
It is at this point that the third and final gnomic utterance from the Gwitchen, to leave is to die, rings in our ears. The male and the female bound together in fidelity is a gift to the Church which bespeaks our bond, one with another, in the Body of Jesus Christ, until we too are parted by death. The conservative who says, "I can bear this corruption no more" and leaves, is deaf to this word. The revisionist who says "we can wait no longer, justice demands this remedy now, whatever the rending," is deaf to this word. To our fallen minds, in the presence of strife, another child of the fall, bonds are to be loosed. But marriage is a sign of the love of God by which he covenantally binds himself to his people and to his world, and is ready sacrificially to suffer for her.
It is a curious fact of North American Anglicanism that most of our brothers and sisters, of the most divergent points of view, nod their heads in vehement approval when it is suggested that the post-modern and post-Constantinian Church must now be countercultural. It sounds curmudgeonly to some, sixties-ish to others, but it sounds good and bold to us all. Counter-cultural is another way to say we are indeed bound to the culture, to the world around us, for we and they need one another for definition. But we are bound in ways that neither they nor we will find easy. Still we welcome the notion. But as with most vows of fidelity, they work themselves out over the long haul to be something harder, and yet more gracious, than we reckoned. "Peter, do you love me? Yes Lord you know I love you…" What if counter-cultural means hanging together in this three-pronged Qwitchen Christian wisdom? All would be counter-cultural, and so all shall have surprises. For the social conservatives, there is making room and welcome for gay Anglicans. For the revisionists, there would be the hard admission of the logic: blessings have promises, so blessings are marriages, and gay marriages are, from the foundations of creation, impossible. With that admission would come what Anglicans fear most, opprobrium in elite and progressive society. And, for the fed-up on both sides, there is the interminable putting up with one another in a very prolonged family argument. What if all that together is a part of what counter-cultural actually looks like? As with marriage itself, that would be the day when the glamour and romance had worn off, and reality sets in. Our fraying, individualist, gratification-oriented, impatient, balkanized society needs to see real marriages of man and woman, and it needs equally to see that real marriage which is the Church in its protracted unity-in-conflict. As is real marriage, of the no-no-fault kind Jesus describes in Mark 10, so is our counter-cultural witness, as a bound and avowed Body, to the costly, covenantal, enduring grace of God in Jesus Christ.
