The Wedding of Charles and Robert

It was January 6, the Feast of the Epiphany, sometimes called “Old Christmas” in some parts of the Eastern Orthodox tradition. The church was still decorated with its hanging greens and beautiful poinsettias. After all this was the twelfth day of Christmas.

About thirty people gathered with me on that day to attend a wedding and to witness a marriage. The two people who formed the wedding couple were 77 and 65 years of age respectively. Both of them live under challenging, if not necessarily fatal, medical diagnoses. One of them is a priest, who has had a spectacular career, serving both as the leader of congregations and on the faculty of a theological seminary that trains others to be priests. He is a man of rare pastoral sensitivity and he possesses a gentle spirit. In both of his career settings, people have been drawn to him not only in admiration, but also in affection. The other member of the wedding couple was a highly successful graphic designer and is both an active lay Christian and a significant member of the church, serving competently in key leadership positions. The people who gathered to share in and to witness this ceremony were all good friends of this couple. They were lawyers, politicians, movers and shakers, widows, spouses and even other priests. Three of those couples attending had themselves cooked the wedding luncheon to which we were all invited. Another couple had baked a three-tiered wedding cake, complete with two male figures on the top, both of which reminded me of Thomas E. Dewey in 1948! Before the cake was cut, it looked somewhat like a miniature version of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

Two other facts entered into the wonder of this day, adding to the drama. The first one is that this couple had lived together in a faithful, monogamous relationship for decades. The other quite obvious fact was that they were both males and, on this occasion, that reality appeared to bother no one. Indeed it served to fill those gathered with a sense of a long-awaited completion. Finally, at a time late in their lives when the actuarial charts suggest that life expectancy is not unlimited, the State of New Jersey, through the action of its Supreme Court, had decided that the two of them were no longer to be denied the legal recognition and full benefits of marriage. At the same time, my church was finally free to convey not only its blessing on this couple, but also to know that now that blessing carried with it full legal marriage equality. I was privileged to be the officiant at this wedding. It would be my third “gay marriage,” but this would be the first one that both the state and the church would recognize and celebrate.

The lessons for this wedding had been carefully chosen; indeed they had an almost autobiographical flavor in their messages. The first lesson defined God as love (I John 4:7-16) and raised the question: If God is love, cannot we also say that love is God? Is not love the experience that calls human life into wholeness? Is that not the work of God? Is not love the emotion that gives us the courage to be all that we were created to be? Is that not the work of God? Does not love transcend our individuality and our biologically driven survival instincts? Does not love bind us into life-giving relationships and community? Is that not the work of God? Do not Christians even call that experience “the communion of saints?”

For centuries theologians have been comfortable saying: “God is love.” Today, in the still evolving life of the Christian faith, the need has become obvious to stop thinking of God in theistic terms as “a being” and to begin to conceptualize God as “Being itself” or as the “Ground of Being.” That was the phrase that the 20th century’s most provocative theologian, Paul Tillich, had both used and popularized, though he had borrowed it from a third century CE philosopher named Plotinus, who founded a school of thought now called “Neo-Platonism.” I thought that day about the difference it would make to our understanding of God if we could only make that intellectual leap. For if we can say that God is love, then surely we can begin to understand that love must also be seen as God! When we make that breakthrough, God will cease to be a noun that we are forever seeking to define and God will instead become a verb, out of which we will forever be seeking to live. In that leap of faith we will discover that we have begun our journey out of our religious past and into our religious future. The two men who stood before me on that day were symbolic of that part of the Christian Church that is finally willing to take that step.

The second lesson (I Cor. 13) continued this theme as it sought to define love. Love is other-directed not inner directed. Love is called out of us by love itself. Love is the essence of life. Love is beyond faith, beyond ritual, beyond religion, beyond creeds, doctrines, dogmas or liturgies. Love is even beyond our ultimate and noble sacrifices, for this lesson says: “Even if I give my body to be burned and have not love, I gain nothing. “Love,” it says, is “patient and kind, not jealous, not boastful.” Love does not insist on its own way, is not irritable or resentful. “Love never ends!” Why? Because love is God and God is eternal.

In the gospel lesson (Matthew 5:1-16), which was read by a priest, who was a member of one of the other two gay couples over whose weddings I have been privileged to preside, we heard that the life of love is not easy. From the world’s perspective those who practice sacrificial love are frequently judged to be “poor in spirit,” perhaps even naïve. They are sometimes assumed to be “mourners.” The world tends to tread on those it defines as the “meek” of the earth, those who appear to hunger for something more than that which we define as power or even righteousness, those who see themselves as peace makers, not power brokers. Frequently the world rewards this kind of behavior with persecution. “You will be reviled,” the gospel lesson proclaims to those who dare to live this way. “Evil will be uttered against you.” That is the familiar fate of those who are able to see beyond survival, power and acclaim. Those, however, are also the ones who see further into life and thus they tend to see further into God. Is that not then because God is also experienced as the “Source of Life”? Is it not both the vocation and the fate of those who discern this higher law, those who appear to walk to the beat of a drummer that others seem not to hear, those who dare to challenge either the status quo or even what is traditionally called the “wisdom” of the past, to lead us?

Yet they are also the ones, who in this gospel reading, Matthew has Jesus call “the salt of the earth” and “the light of the world.” The two men who stood before me on that day were surely aware of all of these things. They have lived their lives together for years with a radical integrity, while both the state and the church by refusing to recognize them, not only diminished their humanity, but also had the audacity to feel righteous and appropriate in these calculated acts of public diminishment. Yes, the lessons for this service of holy matrimony were carefully chosen not only because they were appropriate, but also because they autobiographically illuminated the journey of the two people who were being joined together on that day.

In this wedding service all of us had to understand exactly what we were doing. These two men, who stood before us seeking the blessing of the church, were not now “getting married.” They did that years ago when they committed their lives to each other in a covenant, which they intended to last until “death do us part.” The reality of their marriage had been denied for years by the church they both served and the nation in which they were both citizens. In that kind of world they lived and made their witness by daring to be themselves. Sometimes they lived closeted, as a requirement for their survival. Sometimes they were open, at least among those who loved them. What we were doing on that day was to confer the church’s blessing and the state’s recognition and we were deliberately doing it in a very public way. Indeed we were determined to shout it from the rooftops

In the prayers at that marriage ceremony we recognized that something new and profound was happening. Their life together had become, we said, “a sign of Christ’s love in this sinful and broken world.” Their publicly acknowledged marriage would, we prayed, “enable unity to overcome estrangement, forgiveness to heal guilt and joy to conquer despair.”

We rejoiced on that day because of this couple’s witness. They had been forced to walk a difficult path, but by walking it they had in fact served to awaken the consciousness of the church and to enlighten the mind of the world. They had made it possible for both church and state to see new dimensions of life and love than neither had previously seen.

On that day I, as a priest and a bishop, was finally able to add to their commitment to each other, the blessing of the church and the legal status of the state. That was what this service was about. That is why we gathered and that is why we celebrated.

I feel a deep sense of gratitude to Charles and Robert and indeed to all gay and lesbian people, who, like them, had been forced to walk this walk. I am grateful to them all for their example, their patience and love, for that is what enabled the rest of us to reach this day. Through the life of this couple we could also see the emergence of a church that is more whole and a state that is more compassionate.

When the service ended I could say to this newly married couple both personally and publicly: “Charles and Robert we, as Christians, bless you today; we, as citizens of New Jersey, recognize you today as living in the state of holy matrimony” — even though we all know that you both entered that state long, long ago!

~John Shelby Spong

Read the essay online here.

Richard Sherratt from the United Kingdom writes:

I was wondering how you would respond to the work done by N. T. Wright on the resurrection; from what I have read, you have argued that there is no notion of a bodily resurrection in the earliest traditions of the church (the Gospel of Mark and Pauline work), but this belief gradually emerged and is reflected in later traditions (e.g. the Johannine corpus). From what Wright says, the belief in a physical resurrection was not alien to the belief system of the second Temple period and so could plausibly stem from the earliest traditions. So I am just wondering what your counter argument is to Wright.

 

Dear Richard,

N. T. (Tom) Wright is a prolific writer and I have read much that he has written. He has obviously read much that I have written because he attacks it so regularly. I am honored to be the one who threatens him so deeply that he does his attacking by trying to use ridicule.

Tom was the Dean of the Cathedral in Litchfield in the U.K. He is a student of the Bible rather than a biblical scholar. The distinction I mean here is that Tom assumes an understanding of the Bible that is basically evangelical and fundamentalist and he studies the Bible in order to sustain his already-reached conclusions. That makes him in my mind a propagandist rather than a scholar. A biblical scholar studies the Bible and allows his discoveries of new truth to challenge and to change his or her present convictions about the Bible.

Tom was appointed Bishop of Durham in the U. K., which turned out to be something of a travesty since previous bishops of Durham like Ian Ramsey and David Jenkins had been genuine scholars. That tradition of scholarship, however, was broken with the appointment to Canterbury by Margaret Thatcher of George Carey, an old line evangelical, who had no great appreciation for the role of scholarship. Tom Wright was the second person appointed to Durham, who violated that classical scholarly tradition, though his appointment was by Rowan Williams who was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury by Tony Blair.

Tom Wright co-authored a book on the gospels with Marcus Borg, a genuine scholar and one of the leaders of the Jesus Seminar, in which they set out their points of view on various gospel issues like the Virgin Birth and the bodily resurrection of Jesus. I thought it was a fantastic book because it showed how deep the chasm was between Tom Wright’s fundamentalist mentality and Marcus Borg’s grasp of the critical biblical scholarship of the last 200 years. Tom either ignores or dismisses that scholarship, but he speaks in ways that perfume his knowledge of the Bible with intellectual respectability, which I do not believe he accomplishes. So I do not think his conclusions on the empty tomb are anything more than the attempted apologetic of a threatened fundamentalist. I do not see the genuine biblical scholars saluting his perspective.

I hope this helps,

John Shelby Spong

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