Still, a declaration of God’s love is not the entirety of the gospel. The purpose of that declaration is to elicit faith in Jesus Christ and thus gain eternal life. And this aspect of the gospel is elucidated in Luke 24:46 "and he said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.”
In Acts 1 when Jesus speaks of baptism, and in Acts 2 when Peter preaches the first post-resurrection sermon give specific content to the message. Thus in "Acts 2:38 Peter said to them, “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit."
Nor can we leave the mission of the church with preaching, baptism, and the Holy Spirit. In the end of Matthew Jesus specifies that baptism is accompanied by “teaching them everything that I have commanded you.” And with that phrase (and many others) we are reminded that Jesus taught that God’s Reign was present in his life-giving ministry. Indeed in the rest of the book of Acts and throughout the Epistles preaching about and enacting in human lives the nature and promise of God’s Reign becomes central to apostolic ministry.
Having noted this, we can also note that when disagreements arise among the apostles it isn’t over points of doctrine, but over how the church enacts signs of God’s Reign in its life. Circumcision, tongues, leadership roles, food offered to idols, the role of women, and marriage are all discussed in the context of how the Church witnesses to the presence of God’s Reign in its life.
And here I think we find a source of the contemporary fissure in the UMC. We disagree on what it means to enact the presence of God’s Reign in Christ. Cut through all the cultural bias, misrepresentations on both sides, needless associations with various political parties and agendas, and theological red herrings: in the end our disagreement is about the how to enact the presence of God’s Reign among us.
Specifically our disagreement is about what kind of marriage should be one of the signs of God’s coming Reign that we enact on earth. I add "on earth" because Jesus teaches that marriage is not part of God’s Reign “in Heaven” or after the eschaton. (Matthew 22:30) If marriage is a sign, it is a sign that is being transformed as God’s Reign approaches. This is what we see in Matthew 5 and 19, and in a more positive light in John 2. It isn’t surprising that Paul struggles with advice on marriage, which is both something passing away yet remains part of God’s good creation. (Corinthians 7 in relation to I Timothy 4)
So it seems to me that our conflict about same-sex marriage is whether it can be a sign of God’s Reign and thus something the church should enact in its communal life as a sign of God’s Reign. And that in turn depends on how we understand the culture into which we preach the gospel.
There are arguments against same-sex marriage being a sign of God’s Reign. Those arguments assert that according to the Bible the only intimate sexual relationships that serve as a sign of God’s Reign must be in the context of a lifelong bond between a male and a female. This is one part of a larger assertion that God has revealed in scripture a permanent natural order, assent to which is fundamental to obedience to God until God creates a new heaven and a new earth. The moral law as given to Noah, and then Israel, and reiterated by Jesus and the apostles remains in effect, and obedience to that law is a fundamental sign of the presence of God’s Reign in the church.
Yet this isn’t the whole story of how Jesus and the apostles enacted the presence of God’s Reign. In the preaching and teaching of both Jesus and the apostles the enacting of God’s Reign isn’t merely re-enacting the ideal put forth in the Old Covenant. It isn’t merely the recovery of what was lost in the long history of fallen humanity. The enacting God’s Reign is also aspirational. It looks forward to what God intends for creation in the eschatological realization of God’s Reign.
Re-creation isn’t just restoration. The emerging priesthood within the Church doesn’t look like the old priesthood. Neither do the new sacrifices on the altar. The hymnology of Heaven will be different, as will the natural ordering of the beasts of prey and those upon whom they feed. And while the old order is an ordering of ethnic nations, tribes, genders, and classes the new order makes none of these distinctions but is instead based on spiritual gifts. Even marriage is transformed in light of God’s coming Reign. "It was because you were so hard-hearted that Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so.” (Matthew 19)
Because the aim of the church in mission is not only to signal restoration, but also re-creation it seems to me that same-sex marriage can be seen as part of the aspirational witness toward a Reign of God in which there is no marriage at all. In its very difference from different sex marriage it points to the deeper nature of marriage: an institution in which humans learn to love one another as God loves until such time as we learn, not from our disciplined relations with one another, but directly from God. Like all marriage it should be able to stand as a sign of God’s love to a world that hardly knows God’s love at all.
It is a witness as well (like any marriage in the church) to God’s gracious accommodation to our humanity. (I Corinthians 7) In this case same-sex marriage is an accommodation to a group of people who through some yet not fully understood set of genetic and social circumstances find genuine intimacy only with a person of the same sex. It is an accommodation to a deeply felt sense of personal need and identity that cannot be compromised or abandoned. And it is an accommodation made possible because the primary features of marriage can still be present in same-sex marriage. It reminds us of what we affirm in all our United Methodist exceptions to the exception that marriage will produce biological offspring of the husband and wife: deep personal intimacy (bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh), monogamy and cooperation in child rearing are the foundations for God’s ordering of human society; not sexual relations.
This is why in many cases in which United Methodists and other Christians actually have same-sex married people in our congregations, and indeed leading those congregations, there is no great anxiety that they represent some sign of social or even congregational breakdown. Because within the cultural context of contemporary America they don’t. Nor do they represent a failure of the church to enact signs of God’s love in Jesus Christ.
I understand that for many American Christians the issue of how to enact the ideals of God’s Reign in congregational life is tied to deep fears that the authority of God’s Word is being replaced by merely human authority. They do not agree with the argument I’ve put forward that an aspirational enactment of God’s Reign is an act of submission to the authority of God’s Word and the example of Jesus and the apostles. They cannot recognize the authority of scripture apart from their own interpretive methodologies and the particular way that scripture is embedded their particular culture. They cannot recognize re-creation except as re-iteration of the old order of creation.
For these American Christians recognition of same-sex marriage is a sign of something being lost: a distinctive and authentic Christian identity which needs to be recovered and restored within the Christian culture that reliably affirmed that identity in all its social dimensions. And because for some same-sex marriage has come to represent that loss of identity it really isn’t negotiable. Loss of identity is a kind of death, and no one willingly dies. Not on either side.
Still, it seems to me that we can conceive of an ecclesiology based around the wideness of the mission of the church rather than the preservation of identity; anyone’s identity. It would be an ecclesiology that recognizes the possibilities of real difference when it comes to appropriately enacting signs of God’s Reign, given that all such signs must both be rooted in their cultural context and point forward to something unimaginably different from our present reality. And it would recognize that all identifiers that mean so much to us, while precious, ultimately lose their luster in the light of Christ.
"For this perishable body must put on imperishability, and this mortal body must put on immortality. When this perishable body puts on imperishability, and this mortal body puts on immortality, then the saying that is written will be fulfilled:
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