Neither male nor female

Dr Bruce Hamill, a Dunedin parish minister, has clarified a cloudy issue for me.   I am grateful to him.  In the just-concluded General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa NZ, the big issue of contention was, unsurprisingly, whether Presbyterian ministers were to be permitted to marry same sex couples.  The Assembly said no. 

I am a long way from these debates these days – I watch from afar with emotions ranging from dismay to despair.  The generation of ministers and lay people younger than mine, who long for an inclusive and intelligent church marked by generosity and Christlike openness, have been hanging in there, “much in sorrow, oft in woe”.   Some of their ministers and churches have been open for same sex marriages ever since the law of the land allowed it, and for same sex civil unions and blessings even longer.  But now the church has spoken.  The church has said no. 

The next day St Andrew’s-on-the-Terrace in Wellington announced that they will defy the Assembly’s ruling.  Others will follow, and I have no idea what the outcome of that will be.

My difficulty with all this until now has been recognizing same sex unions as marriage.  Civil unions, it seemed to me, and de facto arrangements, could be blessed in Christian ceremonies and in Christian churches where they were genuinely loving and stable relationships between people who know what they are doing.  But I saw marriage as a special thing.  It is clearly and biblically intended to be permanent, however often marriages fall short in practice.  I saw marriage as between a man and a woman.

Bruce Hamill identified for me the point I had been missing.  Here is what he had intended to say in the General Assembly, but was prevented by the exigencies of debate.  He began with St Paul:

In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, there is no male and female” (Gal 3:28).  Not even the great complementarity of male and female defines the new world of life in the body of Christ.  What there is according to the writer to the Ephesians is a practice called marriage which signifies the mystery of Christ’s relationship to the church. (Eph 5:32)…  Both a witness to God’s love and a practice in which we learn to love, in all the intimacy of our bodily existence, our nearest neighbour.   ... I do not want to deprive homosexual people of the opportunity to share in this witness, this asceticism, this practice in holiness and hope.  Jesus made the reform of a range of institutions into an art form.  I believe he is calling us to reform our understanding and practice of marriage, not to set it in ecclesiastical concrete.  I urge this assembly to remember the spacious love of Christ.

If (for the Christian) marriage is a sign of the love of God in Christ, then on what basis do we deny such a sign to two people of the same sex, in a loving, committed bond? 

Good one.  Thank you, Bruce Hamill.