On Saturday, a bishop of the church rejected the authority of the Episcopal Church. The next morning, scripture rebuked him.
Of course, nobody thinks this started on Saturday. We’ve been fighting about sex for decades.
But Saturday, something new happened.
Bishop William Love, as The Episcopal Bishop of Albany, you wrote a pastoral letter to your diocese and the wider church declaring that you would not go along with a decision from the General Convention. [The General Convention is the triennial gathering of The Episcopal Church and its primary governing body.]
It would seem, that in matters of sex, identity, and inclusion in the church, there can be no internal or external matters. Bishop Love, you made your views thoroughly public.
This present story needs some backstory.
In 2012, the General Convention allowed for the trial-use of liturgies for same-sex unions. The next Convention, in 2015, authorized marriage equality across the church. This came with the allowance for local dissent. So, therefore, marriage equality came to Episcopalians all over the country. But not universally.
Eight dioceses objected and predictably prevented their priests from celebrating non-binary weddings. This includes your Diocese of Albany. This ensured hundreds, if not thousands of Episcopalians would have no access to the sacramental rite in their home.
This summer, in an act of compromise, the convention passed B012. I trust that your objections were heard with the same grace that you heard the arguments for it. Either way, this will bring an end to the church’s separate but equal problem regarding marriage and the LGBTQI community. B012 makes it possible for Episcopalians in every diocese to have access to the sacramental rite of marriage without driving to the next state.
But you don’t want that.
In a letter which feels like the unleashing of an id long kept in check, your letter is disturbingly lacking in love and charity. Or humility.
Virtually every one of these arguments could be reversed upon you. Including your use of scripture and the place of prophecy and the work of the devil. It’s the kind of event so cynical it makes the blood boil.
Yet the church has a more subtle way of dealing with herself.
As if on cue, we were greeted the following morning by the climax of Ruth. Quite literally.
Ruth
The Book of Ruth is a fascinating story of unconventional love and Jewish law. It reminds us of the Jewish customs of protecting the outcast and preserving the dignity of the widow. And it smashes these customs up against the practical tradition of ignoring them. God demands the people leave a portion of the harvest in the fields for the poor. But few did.
Or do.
This is one of the ways we know Boaz is special.
From the beginning, we know this story is different. The titular character is a Moabite woman. And when her Jewish husband dies, she stays committed to her new family, including her mother-in-law, Naomi. They return to her late husband’s homeland and find they are both left on the outskirts. And face rejection from his family.
Except for Boaz. The decent man who ensured she would be fed when his people weren’t likely to honor those commitments on their own. And in the end, he would take her as his wife.
Of course, those looking for “traditional marriage” in the Bible easily ignore the potential for plural marriage here. Or the economic conditions which impoverish widows and widowed step-mothers. Oh, and the part in which there’s no sacramental rite of holy matrimony. They just have sex.
On Sunday, I joked with some that we had just read porn in church. Mostly because the euphemisms obscure what is actually taking place here. We almost don’t realize what we’re hearing. Otherwise, more than just a few of us would be blushing.
But of course, that isn’t right. It isn’t pornographic. It’s a romance.
Narrow Interpretation
And this is why it feels like such a rebuke of your letter. Your narrow use of scripture, your leading understanding of tradition, and your uncharitable understanding of the sacraments were all countered by this beautiful reading of true love and compassion.
A love which showed the traditions which matter and how easy it is for the unrighteous to excuse them for selfish gains.
A love which was outside the “normal” ordering of marriage. And brought protection to the outcast.
And most importantly, it was a story from scripture which exposes the lie of “traditional marriage”. Because the only aspect of the phrase that means anything to these defenders of tradition is the gender identity of a man and a woman.
Because this one man and this one woman didn’t stand at the front of a church to get married.
They slept together. [Literalists never seem to define marriage the way the Bible does…]
Not to procreate. Or because natural law commands it. But because he was compassionate, had fallen in love, and this was the only way this wealthy man could protect this widow.
A Tangled Web of Justification
Bishop Love, virtually all the arguments you make revolve around the tangled web of scripture, tradition, and natural law. You appeal to all and each, but they represent a narrow interpretation more than a full and robust one.
One such appeal is to nature — that God created the first humans as man and woman. You then appeal to Scripture (Genesis 1 & 2), tradition (a history of seeing marriage from a binary lens), and natural law (God has given us two sexes in nature).
This bundle of appeals feels authoritative, but only when encountered narrowly and when accepting your definitions.
For the creation stories describe a myth-building understanding of creation and God’s role in it. It isn’t the rule but the story which informs and enfleshes the rule. Tradition has reflected an evolving understanding of relationship and autonomy — we keep reinterpreting marriage in light of new understandings of humanity. Praise God!
Natural Law
It seems all of the structural and intellectual underpinnings of the “traditional” view of marriage are built around a biological construction of two genetically different sexes. Based on the actual scientific evidence, geneticists have thrown this view in the trash.
God doesn’t create us as male and female. That’s not how genetics works. God creates us. And all of the multiple internal mechanisms which contribute to…let’s call it the finished product. At several stages in our development, after we’re born, we can find ourselves outside the gender binary. Male and female don’t contain it all.
That LGBTQI persons exist isn’t an affront to God or some selfish choice made by confused people. Not according to the mass of evidence. God has created us non-binary.
The only affront here is the binary imposition on God’s creation!
Scripture, tradition, and even natural law can handle the evolution in the understanding of marriage. Because we do that in all manner of things, including economics and war.
“Traditional Marriage”
These phrases, “biblical marriage” and “traditional marriage” are complete fabrications. There is no uniform consistency in scripture around the aspects of marriage as we know them today.
In fact, virtually all the marriages from the Hebrew Scriptures directly violate modern norms and understandings. And marriage has so little relative import in the Greek Scriptures, one has to dig for it. Unlike the politics of economics or radical welcome which are everywhere [but conspicuously absent from too many discussions].
And as for tradition, marriage has constantly evolved with us over the last 3,000 years. Particularly shifting with norms and scientific discovery. While there are useful, general through lines, declaring a “traditional” view of marriage does more to ascribe a solid consistency to a shifting liquid than it does accurately describe an eternal truth.
In other words, these two phrases are just hollow place-holders for a conservative worldview. One that narrows the beautiful, binding power of God to the small preservations of desperate rulers.
Who here is preserving?
The Presiding Bishop’s response to the letter is compassionate and thoughtful. He reminds us that Paul, often quoted to narrow our world, also wrote some of the most expansive prose in Christian history. For it is his words which compel many of us to widen our embrace to match God’s much wider embrace:
“For as St. Paul reminds us in Galatians 3, “in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.””
But it is Paul’s later words from Romans which condemn your statement more readily. As I have written previously, Paul is often used to condemn LGBTQ persons and their relationships, as you do in his letter, Bishop. But if you had any respect for the Scripture we both love, you would keep reading. Because just a few verses later, Paul condemns the condemning.
This inconvenient truth is at the heart of our church’s frustrations.
It is not simply about whether or not you can abstain from participating in equal marriage or that you can force an entire diocese to abstain. It’s that you’re refusing to let anyone serve those you refuse to serve.
It conjures images of those principled predecessors refusing young men at a lunch counter or blocking children in the schoolhouse door. The attack dogs, the water hoses, the vile outrage flaring to belittle some of God’s own.
For what?
You’re willing to break the law to refuse service. To narrow God’s embrace. And more than that. You’re willing to tear the whole church down for that right.
While the church has other things on their mind. They remind us through the unlikely couple of Ruth and Boaz that marriage is beyond our own narrow priorities. It has the power to expand our hearts. And widen our embrace.
The question isn’t whether we’d be willing to include you. You’re already included. I’m more concerned that you don’t want to be embraced by these wide arms.
Official responses to the Bishop’s Letter