Our relationships are faulty...

Some Pharisees came, and to test Jesus they asked, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?" He answered them, "What did Moses command you?" They said, "Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her." But Jesus said to them, "Because of your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you. But from the beginning of creation, 'God made them male and female.' 'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.' So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate." Then in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter. He said to them "Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery."  -Mark 10:2-14

I think we need to be honest... our relationships are universally faulty. That is why we can are so captivated by stories be they comedies, dramas, or tragedies... because there are faults and failings that permeate our relationships with each other. The problem is that while we can recognize in art the faults inherent to our relationships we seem to be unable to do so when it comes to our day to day lives.

As a rule our attempts at relationships are incomplete. We do not become irrevocably "one"with a person to a state of fullness, completeness, and wholeness. But we maintain these expectations regardless of how problematic they are. We maintain them even though, on account of their impossibility, they create a system where happiness and peace of mind are impossible to find. When it comes to creating relationships without faults, without comedy, drama, and tragedy... we are going to fail.

Expectations are Important!

Fail is a strong word. I think that overall we do not want to speak of our relationships with individuals as failing. In a lot of cases even mentioning the possibility will get people in a tizzy. We want to be that which can provide all and everything for another person, complete them, bring them into the fullness of who they are, leave them with no emptiness or concern. We want to be God... but we are not God. So our relationships are, in the end, faulty.

This is a difficult truth to recognize. We want to be the perfect friend, spouse, parent, child. We want to live into these amazing standards that if we could just get right then life would be golden. We do not want to read a statement that says we fail to contribute everything another person needs in the midst of our relationship with them. We confuse the statement, we cannot be another persons all and all, with the statement, we are not giving our all.

Let us say that I honestly commit my all to a relationship, every fibre of my being committed to another person... I am still not going to be able to provide everything they need. It is just not going to happen and that is a reality for each and everyone of us. The reality is that to complete disregard everything but the needs of another individual is not a healthy place for any of us to be in. The reality is that to expect someone else to enter into that space for ourselves or another is to put forward a set of expectations that is abusive.

Hardness of Heart does not build relationships.

When Jesus speaks of the hardness of heart held by husbands towards their wives, and do note that the chastisement is only directed towards husbands, it is my belief that what he was speaking to was the propensity of husbands to make themselves like unto God. He was speaking to their propensity to expect wives to utterly disregard their own needs and sacrifice their very beings in an attempt to provide everything for them. When wives failed to live into these inherently abusive expectations then husbands could discard them. This type of thing will no longer stand... it is not the purpose of the relationships we are called to have with one another.

What the pharisees are talking about is a system of relationships where men are served by women, where men can cast out women when the needs of the man are not met, and where women are basically powerless. What Jesus is talking about is a system where distinct individuals were created and are joined as one equal mutuality, where needs are held in common and provision of them flows from God, and where the abuse and discarding of either party by the other is an offense against God.

We were not created to be alone, we were not created to be as gods lording over each other and forcing others into self sacrifice, we were created to live in mutual relationships that seek provision from God. This is a truth that should permeate itself through every relationship matrix in our live and for which our calls to be spouses should be Icons.

Over the past centuries this and other parts of scripture have been abused as calls to create a hierarchy of privilege with straight males staying at the pinnacle and all others in subservience to them. This has had continual impact on the lives of women and members of the LGBTQ+ community who are asked to either meet the expectations of straight men or be cast aside. In reality what Jesus is doing here is not laying down a new prescription about marriage but requiring the pharisees to interpret their understanding of the laws about divorce in the context of the summary of the law, thou shall love the lord thy God with all they heart, with all thy mind, with all thy soul, and thou shall love thy neighbor as thyself.

Our relationships are going to be faulty. They will not fulfill all our needs. They will be outside of the false expectations society presents for them. As Christians we have to recognize that is ok and that these expectations are not our expectations. The expectations for our relationships is that they are seeking to be done in the midst of love for God, love for ourselves, and love for others and bringing others to do the same. When we require expectations in our relationships beyond this we are hardening our hearts. When we recognize that living into the summary of the law is a life long journey of understanding for all involved, not a static set of laws and expectations, something that we and those around us are going to fail as we go about it... then and only then can we begin to take it up in truth. Then, and only then, can we embrace the faults, the comedy, the drama, the tragedy... not as points of failure but points of success.

At the start of the conversation: Where Sacramental Marriage Equality will place the Episcopal church...

The Episcopal Church has gone about the inclusion of the LGBT community in its own curious way. As we are a prayer book people our process of inclusion has been about allowing the inclusion of LGBT individuals into our prayer book rites. While at some point a hurdle has been placed before every rite in the Book of Common Prayer the two major hurdles for the LGBT community have been that of entering into the rite of Ordination and the rite of Marriage. There might have been better paths we could have taken but I am not sure if, given our strengths and weaknesses as a church, we were actually capable of any other. This path does, however, have ramifications that, on account of our perspective, I am not sure we recognize.

What has been asked from the LGBT community is that the Grace manifested in their lives be recognized and named as such by the Church. That the inward invisible grace alive and well in the LGBT community be placed in the context of the Church’s outward and visible signs. The struggle we have been taking up is that of bringing the church to a point where it is capable of discerning, openly and honestly, the fruits of the spirit that manifest themselves when Christ’s Crucifixion is Proclaimed within the LGBT community. This is the basic struggle the church has encountered throughout history as outsider groups have begun to openly make such proclamations and in so doing call into question things taken for granted by the church.

A trap that we have fallen into repeatedly, in these discussions and others, is speaking about access to the sacraments as inalienable rights. This is simply bad theology. When we are dealing with matters of Sacrament we are dealing with matters of Grace and no individual has an inalienable right to Grace. Grace is the fundamental reality of God’s creating, redeeming, and sustaining us from which the natural order flows and it is upon that foundation that arguments of inalienable rights are then built. One simply cannot build a functioning theology of God’s Grace thats foundation is the inalienable rights of individuals.

The problem is that while the grace denoted within Ordination and Marriage might be the ones that we are most prepared to discern and able to facilitate they only engage the tiniest fraction of the fruits of the spirit manifesting themselves in the LGBT community and the greater LGBTQ+ community. The Q+ signifying individuals whose reality simply is not readily contained within the terms Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, or Transgender but is also contained neither within heteronormative nor cisnormative contexts. Discussions of Ordination and Marriage allow us to engage and work with members of the LGBT community whose lives generally conform to our preexisting concepts of ordained clergy and married couples. Individuals who are as close to white european heterosexuals as one can be and also be LGBT. It also means that we are primarily focused on LGBT adults.

Now these are good conversations to have, we have to start somewhere and on account of our context as a church these were the conversations that we were going to fall into before all others. The problem is that the church, even at points the LGBT individuals in the church, think this is THE conversation with the LGBTQ+ community. That a church with LGBT individuals being ordained and married is a church inculturated and aware of the Grace of God manifesting itself within the LGBTQ+ community. This is simply, and overwhelmingly, not the case.  

This summer we will be continuing the conversation around wether we will recognize the grace manifest in many same gender couples for what it is, Marriage. Some want space to keep the conversation percolating on local levels, some want local levels to be able to name the grace for what they know it to be, some want the time for this conversation to be over and the recognition of this grace to be Marriage throughout the church. There is a chance that, on the national level, the conversation will be closed. Regardless, however, the local conversation will be far from over.

In some places an end to the conversation on a national level will make the conversation easier on a local level and in some cases it will not. That is the case with any of the outcomes above, and I think what will make the final decision at the end of the day is which of the three possibilities before us will best facilitate further honest and open conversations with the LGBTQ+ community that lead, as we have found them to do, towards the inclusion of LGBTQ+ individuals. It is, in my mind, the perpetuation of those conversations that is of utmost importance, far beyond the actual pronouncement around marriage.

What the LGBTQ+ community has within it to transform the Church in regards to its witness about the Grace of marriage is huge. The LGBTQ+ community inherently moves us towards an understanding of Marriage outside of the oppressive gender norms inherent to its use in our history. As the church fumbles towards an understanding of the Grace of Marriage that is not determined by patriarchy it is the queer voice that will be key in the subversion of this gender oppression and the undermining of patriarchy. This is, however, only the smallest of ripples that the LGBTQ+ community has to offer a church willing to be transformed by the grace manifesting itself in our midst as we proclaim Christ Crucified. 

The conversation so far towards the inclusion of the LGBT community in regards to Ordination and Marriage is not THE conversation the church needs to have with the LGBTQ+ community. It is the conversation we needed to have so that we could have in our midst those able to facilitate the actual conversation between the church and the LGBTQ+ community. The LGBTQ+ community is truly diverse, way beyond the spectrum of those individuals whose lives and patterns, like my own, can readily fit into the expected norms of the church. For those of us from the LGBTQ+ community who fit in It is rather easy to forget that the rest of the LGBTQ+ community exists and has overwhelming value for the church. It is easy for those whose only experience of the LGBTQ+ community are the LGBT individuals who readily fit into the church to even know that we are not all that there really is to know. It is easy for us to fall into an echo chamber and think that because we all are hearing the same thing the full conversation is taking place. 

No matter what happens this year at General Convention the conversation will be extraordinarily far from over. The conversation to include the LGBTQ+ community that can readily conform to our general expectations within our norms is the easy one, it is the minor one. The actual conversation is the one ahead of us, the one were we begin to ask not how can the church readily include the LGBTQ+ community in its midst but how can the church be transformed to a deeper and greater understanding of God’s Grace through the unique proclamation of Christ Crucified by Queers. The conversations will be like unto those that tore through the church after the early Jewish followers of the Rabbi Jesus began to be transformed by early Greek followers of the Way of Jesus. It is for those that we must prepare ourselves, more than anything else.