1/16/98

Letters to the Editor Department

Wesleyan Christian Advocate

United Methodist Center, Atlanta

Greetings:

This letter is directed toward those who think that the so-called scriptural injunctions against homosexuality are binding on Christian conscience, much as we might consider the injunctions and decrees of the Roman Catholic Church if the reformation had not taken place.

I was challenged by a fundamentalist friend to look for the moral absolutes of the Bible. After discounting the obvious ones like murder and stealing, which are common to all cultures, I came across the one which separates the Christian perhaps from all others, i.e., the ban on the remarrying of the divorced (whose former spouse is still alive). Nothing, as far as I can tell, more characterized the uncompromising moral of our Lord. In fact, in the one case where Jesus is reported to have permitted divorce (Matt.5:22), the case of fornication, the very use of terms (fornication instead of adultery) leaves no doubt but that this meant someone who entered a marriage under false pretenses, i.e., putting him/herself out to the other as a virgin when he/she were not, i.e., a person who engaged in fornication before the marriage and did not inform the intended mate.

The logic of the absolutely no-divorce stance of Jesus is quite compelling. The only way that a man and a woman can be totally free (as God intended in the garden economy of Genesis) is when there is no fear. And there can be no fear in a relationship only when there is "one flesh," i.e., open consciousness (= no secreting fig leaves), i.e., when it is impossible that any party in a community (like a marriage) could reveal to outsiders what takes place within the marriage. Think about it very carefully! if there were even the possibility that something I said to, or did with, my wife might be used against me some day, then automatically I will not open my heart to my wife; and so immediately our mutual self expression is limited and I will not speak my mind within my marriage. (For this very reason our courts do not permit spouses to testify against each other.) So divorce is impossible, as our blessed Lord saw so very keenly, for its very possibility destroys the very purpose and foundation of the marriage in the first place. And those who continue in a second marriage (while the first love lives) are adulterers. Pure and simple! (And what courage on the part of our Lord publicly to rebuke his society [and Moses, too] on this point!)

Therefore the true scandal, it seems clear to me, would not be homosexual marriage, but rather homosexual divorce! And if it is scandalous (according to scripture) for Emory to permit homosexual marriages, it must surely be equally scandalous that UM churches not only permit second marriages, but permit remarried persons to take communion and to take baptismal vows on behalf of their children. For what is good for the goose is good for the gander!

My sincere recommendation in faith: consider the OT as a letter to the boy Jesus from Abba; look at the gospels as the best portrait we have of the Lord Jesus, and at the remainder of the NT as how the Holy Spirit moved men/women of that time (given their understanding); and then go forth in faith that God will lead us, too (à la Abraham, Francis of Assisi and our own John Wesley) if we will but humble ourselves before Him, and even if we make mistakes on the way (Acts 15:39)!