Copyright, © Thomas D. Wintle, 2003

I

When most of us were growing up, homosexuality was a taboo subject. It was seldom discussed, and when it was discussed it was in derision.

And yet today: there are popular television shows with gay characters in lead roles, the Episcopalians have elected an openly-gay bishop in New Hampshire, the Supreme Court this summer tossed out a Texas law against homosexual behavior, and the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts is due to rule soon on whether gay couples should be allowed to receive marriage licenses.

What happened? What has changed? The focal point of the whole subject is probably gay marriage -- it is there that the legal and religious issues become most focused, the emotions most intense, the rhetoric too extreme.

So this morning I want to talk about gay marriage, gay weddings. And since every sermon has three points, I want to talk about the personal, the practical and the theological dimensions of the topic.

II

First, the personal dimension. I think that what has most changed over the years, and what may be most responsible for changing people's attitudes, is this: somewhere along the way, many people realized that we had a relative who was gay, or a friend who was gay, or at least an acquaintance we liked who was gay. Suddenly, then, it's no longer an abstract discussion about "homosexuality," but it's about Alice or Fred or Bob . . . it becomes personal, personalized.

To be sure, we probably had gay friends years ago, but we didn't know it, or didn't want to know it -- the early version of "don't ask, don't tell." But when the AIDS epidemic began, things changed. I remember reading a powerful story about a very conservative woman in a midwestern church, whose attitudes were challenged when a much-loved church employee contracted AIDS. As she became part of a team providing home care for him, compassion trumped ideology, and soon she became an advocate for fairness and justice for people in situations like his.

The personal dimension is that we know and care about people who are gay. We want them to be treated with fairness and compassion, just like everybody else we love. It's that simple.

And "fairness" leads to the practical dimension. There are some very practical issues around gay marriage. If one begins with a recognition that it is fact of life that there are gay couples, then these practical considerations become clear matters of fairness. Does anyone, for example, really want to say to a gay couple that, when one is in the hospital, the other does not have spousal visitation rights, or next-of-kin rights in medical decisions?

Three years ago Vermont passed a civil unions law attempting to address many of these concerns. Basically, couples apply to the town clerk for a civil union license, have it signed by a judge or minister, and receive a civil union certificate. What the law provides is that parties to a civil union in Vermont will be treated as spouses under the law and their relationship can end only through the family courts under the same laws governing divorce. What was fascinating reading to me was to realize how many practical matters are involved in being a "spouse" -- not only medical treatment, but sick leave to care for a spouse, bereavement leave, survivor's benefits in pensions and social security, the ability to inherit or transfer property free from certain estate taxes, even the right to handle burial or funeral arrangements.

The practical dimension is that there are gay couples in our midst and it seems a matter of fairness that they have the opportunities to care for those they love.

Third, the theological dimension. I want to suggest two theological points, one Unitarian and one biblical.

I joined a Unitarian church because it respected the individual journey, and respected the individual choice that people must make in religious matters. "Religion is something we have to do FOR ourselves, but cannot BY ourselves," I've often said. Just as what you must finally believe about the nature of God is an individual decision, so marriage is an individual decision. Just as faith cannot be compelled but comes up from deep within in response to the call of God, so we also fall in love when something deep within us responds to another.

In other words, a couple should not need other people's approval to fall in love. To be sure, there are plenty of heterosexual couples who probably shouldn't have gotten married, but the government does not interfere in your personal choice. There was a time when the government interfered . . . if it was an interracial couple, but that ended in 1967. Indeed, in so many ways this time of gay rights feels so much like the civil rights era of the 1960s; and I remember saying to someone back then, "You know, these black people don't need you to like them, but they do need you to stop trying to keep them from voting or from sitting at your lunch counter. They don't need your approval."

I find this argument about personal choice compelling. It's a matter of respecting one's God-given right to make decisions, to make the choices that define who we are, indeed, to be, to be alive. My colleague in Washington DC, Scott Wells, and his male partner Jonathan were married in the church in DC this summer. He writes in his church newsletter: "It is a credit to (this) church that its gay members neither have to hide, as in many conservative churches, nor have to put on a song-and-dance routine to prove how 'progressive' our liberal church is. . . Though I, as a gay Christian and pastor, have occasionally been treated as an ontological impossibility by some Christians and some gay persons, I won't even entertain a discussion about my own existence. Neither will I uplift 'the Bible doesn't really say that' school of biblical interpretation, which depends on a literalist theology, sociology in theological clothing, or a great deal of spin: none of which does much to dignify our lives. Finally, I refuse to get caught up in the theories of the origin of sexual orientation, because it sounds too much like, 'See, I can't help being so awful.' Such nonsense. If we trust that God will 'restore (us) to happiness and holiness,' as the Universalist [profession of faith] goes, we do not have to fall into evasion or apology. . . . I take it for granted," he writes, "that the love that Jonathan and I have for one another is a gift from God." [Universalist Anchor, July-August 2003, p. 1, 4].

The second theological point comes from this morning's gospel readings. These passages come from a section of Mark which talks about the long, difficult process by which Jesus worked to open the eyes of his often slow-witted disciples. In trying to get them to understand who he was and who would be welcomed in the Kingdom of God, he gave sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, cured the possessed child of the Syrophoenician woman and healed an epileptic boy. What is always so clear, throughout the gospels, is that Jesus welcomes people that society deems outcasts.

Take the much-loved story of Jesus picking up the little child and telling the disciples "Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me." It's the sort of scene that appears in stained glass windows in children's chapels. But in the Mediterranean world in the first-century, a child was insignificant, "without status or honor or power." Parents might love their children, but the children had no "place" in the public arena. The lesson he is trying to teach the disciples, and the church, and us, is that God's love reaches out to those the world sees as "different," embraces them, and welcomes them into the Kingdom. If you can welcome them, if you can change the way the world puts people down, then, and only then, can you know Jesus and the divine love that comes through him.

Would Jesus attend a gay wedding? I think he would bring the wine.

III

Much has changed since we were growing up. Some of it is good and makes us a better, safer world. Some of it has been not so good. Much is hard to understand or accept. But you know, the extraordinary thing about Christian faith is that there is always this element of seeing God as the ultimate change-agent, that Christ was about transforming the ways we look at one another and at our world. In this free church, no one will tell you what you "have to believe" about the nature of God or about whether gay weddings are good thing. But I do hope we continue to respect each other's journeys, and that we all keep ourselves open to finding how God is moving in our world.

But most of all, my friends, I hope we are open to letting God change and transform US.

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