Lost amid the excitement of the election last week for progressive people was the passage of several state propositions against gay marriage, including one in the supposedly-progressive state of California. I have been mourning that fact, not because I am gay, but because I think these measures are cruel and unnecessary. My marriages did not fail because the sanctity of marriage had been watered down, and my future happiness does not depend on whether or not gay and lesbian couples have the opportunity for the same—except in the sense that it always matters when someone else is diminished, since, as Martin Luther King said, injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere.
Yes, I believe this is injustice, and yes, I know you may disagree, but I’m willing to tell you why I think so: I’ve listened for many years to your reasons, those of you who say homosexuality is a sin, and I’ve weighed the question, and I think that good people can disagree about this issue, because they do, although we may (and do) come to different conclusions.
So it was with some trepidation that I listened to Keith Olbermann’s Special Comment last night on the passing of Proposition 8 in California, one of several state propositions banning gay marriage that passed around the country in the Nov. 4 election. I’ve been watching Countdown for some time now, so I expected him to call some names, to make fun of the Mormon Church, who pumped tons of money into passing Prop. 8, or Saddleback Church, who likewise worked for it.
I expected snarky. Olbermann’s Special Comments about George W. Bush have sometimes lately felt like a man kicking another man who’s fallen and can’t get up, and I don’t think of him as someone with any special sympathy or spiritual insight.
So I did not expect sincere, and I did not expect to be challenged, encouraged, and genuinely moved. His comments were quietly intense, and at times, Olbermann seemed close to tears as he spoke. And he explained right off the bat that he was acting differently because this was a very different kind of comment: “This isn’t about yelling, and this isn’t about politics, and this isn’t really just about Prop-8.”
No, it wasn’t. Instead it was about love, and about human happiness, and about equal treatment under the laws of both heaven and earth, and about religion that uses political power to enforce its understandings of Scripture.
Maybe I should have expected this passionate sincerity—as Olbermann anticipated his comment on “Countdown” last night, he asked pointed questions: Should you do what your religion tells you to do?
Or what the founder of your religion tells you to do?
It’s a conundrum being played out in the national and international struggles of almost every Christian denomination, as you probably know. The Bible, in half-a-dozen or so places, has verses forbidding homosexual acts.
And yet sections of the Bible also condone slavery, forbid that women should be leaders in the church, and outlaw that heavenly pork barbecue in North Carolina (or would outlaw it, pigs and other wonderful foodstuffs being made anathema in the dietary rules given in the Hebrew Testament).
In his comments, Olbermann acknowledged that what people—many of them, at least—are doing when they vote against marriage rights for gay and lesbian couples is in line with what their churches have taught them, and what they believe the Bible teaches. But I was challenged—as I hope others were challenged—to look beyond the laws and legalisms and to ask a bigger question: Is this action honestly what the God of the Universe wants of us?
Olbermann put it in this way:
With so much hate in the world, with so much meaningless division, and people pitted against people for no good reason, this is what your religion tells you to do?
With your experience of life and this world and all its sadnesses, this is what your conscience tells you to do?
With your knowledge that life, with endless vigor, seems to tilt the playing field on which we all live, in favor of unhappiness and hate, this is what your heart tells you to do?
You want to sanctify marriage? You want to honor your God and the universal love you believe he represents?
Then spread happiness—this tiny, symbolic, semantical grain of happiness—share it with all those who seek it.
Quote me anything from your religious leader or book of choice telling you to stand against this. And then tell me how you can believe both that statement and another statement, another one which reads only, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
I sympathize with people wrestling to do the right thing, as their faith has them understand it. I grew up in a tradition in which the Bible was taken seriously and literally as a guide to our lives. It simplified things, even as it made it more difficult to live in the 20th—now the 21st—Century.
That simplicity was too simple. The tide of justice and mercy has washed over and past the literal reading of the Bible. Slavery was wrong, even though the Bible didn’t condemn it; racial injustice was wrong, even though the Bible enshrines distinctions between cultures and peoples; genocide was wrong, even though the Bible calls for it; denying women equal rights and an equal stake in the faith is wrong (and at least the Bible got this partly right—what Paul tried to take away, the stories of the disciples of Jesus and of the early Church acknowledge).
In fact, if we’re honest, then we must recognize that what the stories of Jesus do is stand in stark relief to many of the ideas perpetuated in the rest of the Bible; he fellowships with the poor, the downtrodden, the despised. Women are a vital part of his fellowship. He rejects violence for love.
And Jesus never, ever, says a word about homosexuality. Not in any of the four canonical gospels.
Go and look. I’ll wait.
Phyllis Tickle recently talked here in Austin about how the homosexuality issue is the last great issue of Biblical authority, and that it will blow over, as all of these others have, and then we will be left with a larger question: Where is religious authority if not in legalistic readings of the Bible?
Well, I think we’ll find it in other places, and that the Bible will continue to have authority for us, although it will not be the authority of a police officer or lifeguard. Bible scholar N. T. Wright has said that the Bible has authority only because God has given it some of His; The Bible, he says, “is designed to function through human beings, through the church, through people who, living still by the Spirit, have their life molded by this Spirit-inspired book.” In this article (“How Can The Bible Be Authoritative?”), Wright argues that the Old Testament (where we find the legalistic proscriptions of homosexual intercourse and of shellfish, for example), does not hold the same authority for us as the Christian Testament, and that in any case, the Bible is not a rulebook to be held over people’s heads or used to smash them into the dirt. “By coming to the Bible looking for particular answers to particular questions,” he says, “we have thereby made the Bible into something which it basically is not.” [Italics his.]
The Bible is an over-arcing story about God’s love and judgment, Wright says, and to treat it as a rulebook or to say it has authority to condemn or deny others is to treat it as something it is not, to suggest that God made a mistake and gave us a book that requires our hard work to turn it into what we think it ought to be: a Christian Rulebook. Rather, Wright suggests, we should imagine that the Bible is four acts of a five-act Shakespeare play; we have seen the play leading up to this point, the victory of love over hatred and life over death in the person of Jesus, and now it is up to us to act out the last act, given what we’ve seen happen so far.
That is how scripture should guide us, that is how it should be authoritative, and I’m sorry—since I know some people and institutions will disagree, including my employer of twenty years—but in the last act as God has given me to understand it, hating and fearing someone else because they choose to love differently than me is simply not in God’s script.
Keith Olbermann said last night that ultimately this is a question of love:
You are asked now, by your country, and perhaps by your creator, to stand on one side or another. You are asked now to stand, not on a question of politics, not on a question of religion, not on a question of gay or straight. You are asked now to stand on a question of love.
All you need do is stand, and let the tiny ember of love meet its own fate. You don’t have to help it, you don’t have it applaud it, you don’t have to fight for it. Just don’t put it out. Just don’t extinguish it.
Because while it may at first look like that love is between two people you don’t know and you don’t understand and maybe you don’t even want to know, it is, in fact, the ember of your love, for your fellow person.
I believe that there are relationships of all sorts—straight and gay—that do not fit the last act of the play God has given us. Coercion, cruelty, promiscuity, failures of love and respect are sinful in any context. But I also believe we experience God through the love of other human beings, and that a God of Grace has given us the grace to experience a foretaste of His love through the people He has put in our path.
Love is, as Olbermann points out, so rare, so important, the hope in a world where everything seems to be stacked against hope. It’s an ember glowing in the darkness of a world that can be so cold, so frightening, so lonely.
This past week, I stood in a church in the small town of Dickinson, Texas, and we sang the old hymn that begins, “The king of love my shepherd is.”
The King of Love.
Will you do what your religion teaches you to do?
Or will you do what the founder of your religion teaches you to do?
A Pharisee, one who followed the Jewish laws rigidly, asked Jesus, “Teacher, which of the law’s commandments is the most important?”
Jesus said to him, “‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’
“This is the first and most important commandment.
“And a second is like it: ‘You must love your neighbor as you love yourself.’
“All of the law and all the teaching of the prophets hang from these two commandments.”
(Matthew 22: 36-40)
I watched this too and was deeply moved. Thank you for sharing it with others because it all comes down to love. How did Jewel put it? In the end, only kindness matters.
james
November 11th, 2008
[…] have written and spoken against Prop. 8, and I will not stop doing that. I disagree with Rick Warren’s stance […]
The Other Jesus » Blog Archive » Invocations and Invitations
December 19th, 2008