There’s an old joke where a man, in conversation with God, asks, “God, how long is a million years?” God replies, “To me, it’s about a minute.” The man asks another question: “God, how much is a million dollars?” To which God replies, “To me it’s a penny.” Finally the man asks, “God, may I have a penny?” And God says, “Wait a minute.”
That joke came to mind today as two pieces of writing came across my desk. The first was an email from a man named David. As the founder and editor of Whosoever – the only online magazine designed especially for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Christians, I get a lot of mail from people who want to argue with me about the morality of homosexuality.
David is one of them. He wrote:
Being homosexual is not a sin. Every person on earth has temptations for certain things are not part of God’s Will. If you live with your partner and your relationship is plutonic [sic], there is no sin. Sin manifests itself in the form of falling to temptation that is displeasing to God. If your relationship is sexual, and let’s remove the homosexual part of it and not even bring it into the conversation, I think we can both agree that fornication is a sin. Once we are saved by God’s Grace, our desires should be as Christ’s desires. Nowhere in scripture did Christ fornicate, and once you have accepted Christ as your Savior, you should no longer want to fornicate, whether it is with a same sex partner or a partner of the opposite sex.
I have to say this is one of the more charitable letters that passes through my email box on the way to the trash bin, but it basically says the same thing I’ve been told over and over by anti-gay people – being gay isn’t a sin, but gay sex is. So, as long as my partner and I are “plutonic” – by which I guess he means “platonic” – then we commit no sin. Which is to say, as long as my partner and I are just friends – roommates, even – then we are not “sinners” as far as homosexuality goes. You see, as long as we’re not gay – we’re okay. The moment we express our love for one another in a physical manner though, look out! We’re headed for hell. Thanks for, um, straightening me out, David. Much obliged.
David’s letter is but a microcosm of the larger dilemma facing LGBT people in both church and society. In the latest issue of Atlantic Monthly, Paul Elie writes an excellent piece on the schism threatening to tear apart the Anglican Church over the ordination of gay bishop V. Gene Robinson in the Episcopal Church. The article is a portrait of Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and his unenviable struggle to keep the church together amidst the widening rift.
Williams was lauded by liberal Anglicans when he was elected in 2002 to lead the church because of his past support for gay and lesbian people within the collective body. Since then Williams has worked to walk a fine line between the two extremes – pleasing none of them.
Elie, however, points to one past writing from Williams that seems to chart that middle path with some clarity – though Williams has backed away from the piece in recent years. In “The Body’s Grace,” Williams shied away from the usual pro and con exegesis of Scripture and instead argued the case for gay and lesbian acceptance on the issue of grace – especially when it comes to sex.
From a sex scene in Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet, he drew a definition of grace as beautiful and convincing as any I know.
“There may be little love, even little generosity, in Clark’s bedding of Sarah, but Sarah has discovered that her body can be the cause of happiness to her and to another. It is this discovery which most clearly shows why we might want to talk about grace here. Grace, for the Christian believer, is a transformation that depends in large part on knowing yourself to be seen in a certain way: as significant, as wanted.”
From there, the essay has the inevitability of a proof in philosophy. Gay people, too, deserve to be wanted sexually – deserve the body’s grace. The full expression of this grace through sexual relations takes time and the commitment of the partners to come to know each other – through the commitment of marriage or something like it. Sexual fidelity is akin to religious fidelity – “not an avoidance of risk, but the creation of a context in which grace can abound.” For the church to stand in the way of such relationships, straight or gay, is to stand in the way of God’s grace.
This is the message I wish each David that writes to me could understand. Yes, fornication is wrong – but fornication is sex outside of a commitment, whether it’s marriage or not. When people like David write to tell me that my partner and I cannot fully express the grace of our bodies simply because they find the thought of the act sinful “is to stand in the way of God’s grace.”
David, the Anglican Church, each government that denies marriage equality to LGBT people, and any other body that denies the full rights of LGBT people stand in the way of God’s grace in this world. Like the joke, we’re constantly told to wait a minute – and by that they mean – wait until it’s not my problem anymore. Wait until someone else is in charge. Wait until LGBT people shut up – or preferably disappear – so we won’t have to talk about it anymore.
Rowan Williams, despite his earlier defense of LGBT people, I’m sad to say, is among those who continue to tell us to wait. It’s not time yet.
In the Anglican Communion, I said to him, all the changes that the traditionalists have resisted – married priests, women priests, openly gay priests – have eventually come to pass. Did he think there would be openly gay bishops in the Church of England in 10 years? Was it just a matter of time?
“I highly doubt it,” he said. “I don’t think we’ll have progressed that far in our discernment process.”
It was not a no, just a not yet. Even as he declined to endorse the ordination of gay bishops, with that roundabout phrase about progress he left the possibility open – the possibility that it would come to pass eventually, and that he would think it a good thing, too.
But, until then he’s happy to stand in the way of God’s grace and turn a deaf ear and a blind eye to the suffering of God’s LGBT children. To both David and Williams the LGBT message should be clear: We can’t wait one minute more.
