1/19/98

A Preface

The Editor, The Wesleyan Christian Advocate, United Methodist Center, Atlanta

Greetings:

On Friday I faxed you a letter concerning the matter of homosexual marriages, and in which I sought to show that the same logic leading us to reject such marriages would also require us to reject the remarriage of (most) divorced people.

I have rewritten this letter and have tried to express my thinking clearer (which is a problem for me generally) and have attached here this revised letter. I have no objections to the first letter being printed, for both it and my letter here attached convey the identical sentiment; it is only that the present letter better facilitates an understanding of my position, I think.

I hope that you will publish this letter (even though you just published one under my name a few weeks ago) or some other letter with the similar sentiment, as the matter is very important for our church and our understanding of ourselves as Methodist people.

Yours in Christ,

PS I am really quite surprised that we do not have an Advocate web site and certainly that we are not able to access you via e-mail. I am sure an appeal for programming help to the Georgia UM's would be fruitful in this regard.

The letter proper now follows

1/16/98

Letters to the Editor Department of the Wesleyan Christian Advocate

Greetings:

I wish to point out what seems to me to be a clear inconsistency on the part of some United Methodists with regard to the homosexual marriage debate.

First I wish to establish that our Lord's stricture against divorce and the remarrying of divorced people is one of the moral absolutes that our more fundamentalist friends should certainly crow about. The scriptural passages in this regard are clear. But the logic itself reveals why our Lord took his absolutist stance against remarriage and called it adultery. 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 secretive 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 community. Indeed 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 force spouses to testify against each other.) So reason itself tells us that our Lord meant his stricture against divorce to be taken very seriously .

Let us take three parallel cases: a woman contemplating abortion, a man contemplating divorce and remarriage and another man contemplating a homosexual marriage. Let all three actions be sins. Then the three people are all in the same boat and can refrain from their sin.

But now let the sins take place, i.e., the abortion, the divorce and remarriage, and the homosexual marriage. Now there is a difference, for only the woman who committed the abortion is free for grace, for only she can now do nothing to rectify her situation and therefore must rely entirely upon mercy. The other two are in a state of sin (according to this interpretation) and cannot expect grace as long as they continue therein, for "God is not mocked."

Therefore if we call upon the church to refuse to permit homosexual marriages due to Scripture, then we must, if consistency still be a virtue among the United Methodists, also call upon the church to refuse to permit remarriage where the former spouse is still alive (and in the absence of the supposed mitigating circumstances of a previous adultery leading to the divorce), and to refuse communion to those who "willfully continue in their sin" and certainly not permit such people to make baptismal vows on behalf of any offspring of such marriages. The scriptural solution: let both the homosexual and the remarried desist in their respective (and sinful) relationships, and let the latter return to his first wife and, if she is remarried, let him wait for her to return to him (or die) before remarrying. Legalistically speaking the Scriptures are very tough!

My sincere recommendation in faith is to forget the Scriptures as a law book, and instead: 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 of things at that time); and then go forth in faith that that same Holy Spirit will lead us, too (à la Abraham, Francis of Assisi and our own John Wesley) if we will but humble ourselves before God, and even if we make mistakes on the way (Acts 15:39).