WEDDING PLANNING

While I would like to write a pastoral reflection on some topic that would make us all feel better about life, there is something more pressing on my mind today.  I got a call from someone this morning who would like to get married next spring.  She was excited and anxious and full of questions as brides so often are when they make their first contact with us.  We scheduled the wedding, talked about counseling, discussed fees, and went over a dozen other questions.  Unfortunately, there was another level of anxiety on this young woman’s mind.  Depending on the outcome of the voting in November, she may not ever get to have the wedding of her dreams.  She may not get to walk down the aisle of First Parish.  She may not get to say “I do” or see her mother’s tears of happiness or get cake smeared all over her face.  The reason, of course, is that the person that she loves more than anyone else in the world; the person who makes her happy and around whom she wants to build her life is another woman.

We’ve spoken a lot about this issue this fall in the First Parish community and our conversations are not over yet.  However, a few weeks back someone in the church asked me a question that was bothering him and I thought it might be helpful to share my response with all of you.  The question I was asked was this: “How can we reconcile same-sex marriage with our biblical understanding of marriage?”  Because so many conversations around this subject for people of faith always seem to end up with vague references to marriage as the Bible would have it, some response is crucial.

The short answer is that we can’t reconcile same-sex marriage with the biblical version of marriage at all.  In fact, we can’t reconcile biblical marriage with any of our modern ideas about what constitutes marriage.  Marriage as we understand and practice it, as a partnership between two people based on love and equality is not a biblical idea. 

In the Hebrew Bible, polygamy was the norm.  David had at least seven wives and numerous concubines.  His son Solomon, who tended a little to excess is said to have had 300 wives and 700 concubines.  The idea was to have as many wives and children as one could afford.  Most of these marriages were not in any way based on love, they were business arrangements, usually carried out as a deal between the groom and the woman’s father with or without her consent.

In the New Testament, polygamy was less commonplace but marriage as a financial contract between a man and a woman’s father was still very much the norm.  People seldom considered issues of love or even affection as an issue in deciding to marry and women were essentially property to be exchanged.  The wife in the relationship was strictly a second-class citizen bound to obey and serve her husband.  None of these “biblical notions of a traditional marriage” have anything to do with the way most Americans view marriage today.

For us, marriage is about a bond of love and commitment between free and equal adults.  This is not biblical.  It is not traditional.  It is not some dictate of our religious dogma.  It is a relatively new idea.  Marriage and how we understand it has evolved.  Even a couple of generations ago, brides promised to “obey” their husbands and divorce laws differed for each gender.  Today, most of us embrace the idea that two people enter the covenant of marriage as equals and that their love for one another is at the very heart of the arrangement.  Understanding how far our ideas of marriage have come may help us to embrace this next step in the evolution.

I believe that the ability of two people to enter into a life-long covenant deepens and strengthens the bonds of love and companionship between them.  This makes their life a better and a richer thing.  This is a gift that allows someone to put this bond of love at the very center of every part of his or her life.  The ability to makes those commitments in the context of family, friends, church, and state is crucial to the fullness of who we are.  How can we celebrate that so fully for some and then deny it to others?  How can we say to people that their love for another person is not appropriate or sanctioned because the person they love is not of the gender that we prefer?

The next time I speak with the young woman whose wedding is scheduled here this spring, I do not want to hear the disappointment in her voice or see the pain in her face that would come if her fellow citizens here in Maine denied her the right to have her love and commitment celebrated, consecrated and recognized as a full and equal marriage, bearing all of the beauty and power of our long but evolving tradition of holy matrimony.  I want to be there to see the tears of joy and to eat the cake and to bless the day and to celebrate the greatest gift that any of us can receive; the gift of someone to love for the rest of our lives.