Claiming the Blessing

       “I will not let you go unless you bless me.”

      — Genesis 32:26

       The Present Moment

      While writing this book in the fall of 2008 I attended a wedding in California of two longtime friends, George Lynch and Louie Tamantini. Thirty years ago George was “outed” on his way to ordination after seminary, but has continued to serve the church as a volunteer in a lay capacity with a denominational peacemaking program. Louie was reared Roman Catholic. They have lived together for fifteen years. Both attend West Hollywood Presbyterian Church, where I once served on staff, and their pastor, the Rev. Dan Smith, officiated at the ceremony. Family and friends gathered on a glorious day at their home for a brief ceremony in which they exchanged vows and rings. There were few dry eyes in the house.

      When my partner and I had made our plans to fly from our home in Atlanta to attend, I realized it would occur the week of our own anniversary, celebrating eight years together. I noted also that the wedding happened to coincide with National Coming Out Day (October 11) and would be the day following the tenth anniversary of Matthew Shepard's brutal murder in Wyoming. During the ceremony the pastor reminded us of this synchronicity, as well as the ongoing struggle in California to retain this right at the ballot box the following month. The blessing of same-gender marriage had not come at the hands of the church but as a ruling from a primarily Republican-appointed California State Supreme Court. Little did we know at the time that a few weeks later, a state that would overwhelmingly help elect the progressive Democrat Barack Obama as president would also approve a ban on same-gender marriages by a 52% majority.

      The week prior to the wedding I attended a friend's trial in Pittsburgh Presbytery for officiating at the wedding of Nancy McConn and Brenda Cole. The Rev. Janet Edwards is the descendent of famed eighteenth-century American preacher Jonathan Edwards. Janet and I became friends when we lived in the same dormitory at Yale Divinity School in the 1970s. I knew what a deliberate person she was; she rarely took any action without thinking it through with great care, considering what it would mean to the church, the community, the people, and the vocation she felt called to serve. Now, as she faced accusers who did not have the decency or courage to show their faces, she chose to invite friends and supporters from around the country to attend the trial to be held in the Grand Hall of the Priory, a name I considered worthy of the ecclesiastical intrigue of The Da Vinci Code! After the presentation of the cases and witnesses of the prosecution and the defense, as we awaited the verdict of the next morning, she invited everyone— opponents and supporters—for dinner and worship in a banquet hall at the Soldiers and Sailors Museum. Our seminary classmate, the Rev. Gail Ransom, led a creative worship, using innovative and interactive principles developed by Creation Spirituality theologian Matthew Fox. And I was to preach—an honor of great significance to me and to many in the room who knew of my nearly forty-year struggle as an activist within the church.

      But what a tough text Janet asked me to preach on! The marriage feast of the Lamb, described in Revelation 19:5–10. This is the beatific vision of the future wedding of Jesus (the Lamb) with the faithful “‘clothed with fine linen, bright and pure,’—for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints” (Revelation 19:8). This is of course the only marriage truly “made in heaven.” In fact, Jesus had declared there was no such thing as marriage in heaven when asked about resurrection (Mark 12:25). Yet the metaphor of Christ the groom and his Church as the bride is the basis for the later sacramentalization of marriage itself.

      In this moment of conflict, Janet wanted to give everyone—including those who opposed her—a taste of the marriage feast of the Lamb. The theme of the evening was “A Time to Embrace: Toward Love and Reconciliation.” In the sermon I described how many if not most of us knew what it meant to be prevented from embracing because of color, gender, disability, age, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or gender identity. Artificial barriers get in the way of what we really want. I explained,

      And what we want can be simply put: we want to belong. We want to belong to each other in marriage. We want to belong to our congregations in ministry. We want to belong to our vocations in service. And we want everyone to belong, even those whose privilege grants them immediate access to blessings we can only pray for, work for, struggle for, and sometimes die for. We have something to teach about gratitude for blessings too many take for granted.¹

      I also spoke of my recent experiences serving as interim pastor of several congregations and of my need to talk with those in conflict about diabolos, the New Testament word for devil, which literally means “divider” or “adversary.” The spirit of division or divisiveness is what we experience as demonic. And the word to challenge division is dialogue, which literally means “through the word” and suggests finding common ground through what interim ministry training terms “holy conversations.”²

      As we engage in dialogue, we overcome the demonic within and among us, that adversarial spirit that would separate us from one another. I believe this may be applied not only to conflict within a particular congregation but disagreements within denominations and religious traditions. It is my hope that this book may further our holy conversations about marriage, and same-gender marriage in particular.

      The proximity of the sermon to Saint Francis's feast day prompted me to recount how, in Nikos Kazantzakiss novel Saint Francis, the saint tells the narrator, Brother Leo, that even the Tempter, the devil, will enter paradise and be transformed. “How do you know, Brother Francis?” asks Brother Leo. Saint Francis replies, “I know because of my heart, which opens and receives everything. Surely paradise must be the same.”³

      Now that's a vision worthy of Jesus. If even the devil may be reconciled, how much easier will it be for the adversaries around any particular conflict in the church!

      The next morning the verdict was reached in Pittsburgh Presbytery v. The Rev. Janet Edwards, Ph.D. Because the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) does not recognize same-gender marriage, the court decided, it was not possible for Rev. Edwards to have performed a same-gender wedding, thus she did nothing, right or wrong!

      “Where there is no vision the people perish,” Proverbs 29:18 (KJV) declares. What Janet Edwards offered as a vision, the church declared an apparition.

      Another of our friends who lived in Bushnell House, our dorm at Yale Divinity School, was Barbara Brown Taylor. In her book Leaving Church and recent interviews, she grieves how conflicts like the one over homosexuality have surfaced dogmatic litmus tests for Episcopalians. She observes that the Anglican Church she loved was not so much a church of common beliefs as it was a church of common prayer. Scholars such as Elaine Pagels in Beyond Belief have documented how diverse beliefs characterized the church from its onset. And during Janet's