Sunday

Psalm 98 / John 15:9-16 / Acts 10:44-48

            One Mothers’ Day from my childhood stands out for me.  I was 12, my sister Susan was 9, and my brother David was 5.  We decided that for Mothers’ Day we would serve Mom and Dad breakfast in bed.  We put orange juice, toast and two bowls of Lucky Charms with milk on a tray and carried it into their bedroom, where we promptly spilled it all over them and their bed.  This made more work for Mom, not less!  But I remember the grace with which they handled the situation.  They did not punish us.  They understood that we were trying to do a good deed and managed to rise above the mess we made and celebrate our expression of love.

            In the United Church of Christ across the country, we use Mothers’ Day as the Festival of the Christian Home.  We have a section in our hymnal dedicated to the Festival of the Christian Home, from which all of our hymns come today.  While we certainly honor motherhood in the UCC, we also expand that to include other kinds of Christian homes: families without children, single-father and single-mother families, LGBT families, foster families, divorced families, the homes of single people and the homes of women who are not mothers.  Given all the diversity in American families today, what makes a home a “Christian home”?

            On TV on Thursday, Tony Perkins defined what a Christian home is (for him) in a debate with Congressman Barney Frank.  Tony Perkins is director of the Family Research Council, a sister of Focus on the Family, both of which have been labeled as “hate groups” by the Southern Poverty Law Center that tracks the Ku Klux Klan and other such groups.  Reacting to President Obama’s endorsement of marriage equality, Mr. Perkins said that his children would never turn out to be gay because he “taught them the difference between right and wrong and raised them on biblical principles.”  Barney Frank replied that he was surprised that Mr. Perkins considers himself more righteous than Dick Cheney and his wife, Lynn, who have a lesbian daughter. 

            Tony Perkins’ definition of a Christian home does not work for us in the UCC.  Instead of taking religious rules and hate-group values and slapping the name “Jesus” on them, we seek to actually follow Jesus, who said that he gives us only one rule: to love one another as he has loved us.  Because we value diversity in the UCC as well as the “sanctity of the personal conscience,” the concept of a Christian home is, for us, self-defined.  What it means to be a Christian home is our personal dedication to live or abide in Christ, however we define that for ourselves.  So, for us, if you dedicate your home to Christ’s love, as my parents did, you have a “Christian home.”

            There have been many definitions of home and marriage down through the centuries.  When a politician says, “I support the traditional definition of marriage as one man and one woman,” he is not just pandering, he is lying about what traditional “biblical” marriage was. 

For example, here’s a biblical law defining marriage:

            Deuteronomy 22:21 – If a woman on her wedding night proves not to be a virgin, the the elders shall bring her to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shal throw stones at her until she is dead, because she played the whore in her father’s house.

I found it ironic that Sarah Palin’s daughter, Bristol, made a public statement condemning President Obama as a sinner for re-defining biblical marriage, for, as an unwed mother, biblical law decrees that we must take her to her father’s door and stone her to death.  Fortunately for Bristol, we are liberals, so we don’t take the Bible literally.  (As for her son, see Deut. 23:2.)

            Another biblical definition of marriage comes in Deuteronomy 22:29.  If a man rapes a virgin and they are caught in the act, the man will be fined 50 shekels (to be given to the virgin’s father for property damage) and she must become his wife.  This is an example of traditional biblical marriage: a rape victim forced to marry her rapist.  This is the definition of marriage that Tony Perkins and his co-religionists want to codify into U.S. law.  These are the “biblical principles,” the “right and wrong” that he and Focus on the Family want to impose on all of us as they tear down the separation between church and state that our constitution guarantees.  How can the UCC, being a church, support the separation of church and state?  —It’s because we know that the “church” that they want to rule our country in their theocracy is not the United Church of Christ.  It is not our values, not the love of Christ that they want to codify into law! 

            One of the hardest fought legal battles we’ve had in the United States was overturning the Bible-based laws in our country that protected marital rape, which we did not win until the 1980s.  According to the laws of traditional marriage based on biblical law, a woman was a piece of property, first of her father and then of her husband, once the father had transferred ownership of his daughter through a legal contract called marriage.  Since a husband owned his wife, the very concept of “marital rape” made no sense, because a man has the freedom to do anything he wants with his property.  Believe it or not, it wasn’t until the 1980s that laws allowing a man to rape his wife were overturned, state by state, in this country.  Guess which one of the 50 states, in 1993, was the last to overturn laws protecting a man who raped his wife? —North Carolina!

            One evangelical website I visited for research on this sermon states that “a husband cannot be guilty of raping his wife for, by their mutual matrimonial consent and contract, the wife has given herself up to the husband and she cannot retract.”  Traditionally, marriage meant not only that a husband could rape his wife at will, but also that a woman could not have her own bank account, apply for a mortgage alone, or legally make other financial decisions on her own.  These old U.S. laws were based on “biblical principles” and were not overturned until the 1980s. 

            Just six months ago, on October 11th, the Evangelical/Republican-controlled city council of Topeka Kansas de-criminalized domestic violence.  On this day of motherhood and the Christian home, domestic violence is one of the leading causes of death for women, and it is the leading cause of death for pregnant women.  But, according to evangelicals, domestic violence cannot be a crime because when a woman marries, she contracts to accept any kind of battery and abuse from her husband—that is, after all, the traditional, biblical definition of marriage!

            Speaking of biblical marriage, here’s a good one.  According to 1st Kings 11:3, King Solomon had “700 wives and 300 concubines.”  Personally, I find it hilarious that Romney supports “traditional marriage,” since his own family tradition is that his great grandfather had 5 wives and his great-great grandfather had 12.  But I can’t put down the Mormons because, historically, polygamy is the Bible-based definition of marriage.  It was only much later that we changed the definition of marriage to monogamy.  The Early Church thought it was fairer.

            But in Bible times, the Patriarch Abraham had a wife and a concubine, Sarah and Hagar, by whom he had two sons, Isaac and Ishmael.  Yet, in keeping with traditional biblical marriage, when Abraham no longer needed Hagar, he pushed her and her son out into the desert to die of thirst.  Abraham had more wives and concubines.  According to Genesis 25:1-6, he married a woman named Heturah and had many concubines.  The Bible tells us that his grandson, Jacob, had two wives and two concubines. Moses had two wives. Is this the traditional biblical marriage that conservatives are talking about?  Or have we changed our definition of marriage before?   

            These concubines were actually slaves—what today we call “sex slaves.”  Slavery is commonplace throughout the Old Testament and, in the New Testament, slavery is also assumed, so that in Ephesians 6:5 we read, “Slaves, be obedient to your masters,” and in 1st Peter 2:18 we read, “Slaves, submit to your masters.”  Just as polygamy is common in the Bible, slavery is so pervasive in the Bible that southern Baptists, southern Methodists, and southern Presbyterians all used it to justify slavery before the Civil War…and to justify segregation afterwards.

            That’s why it is tragic to see some black churches and black ministers using the Bible to justify bigotry against gays and lesbians.  But it’s understandable.  African Americans have been put down for so long that they want a group that they can put down and feel superior to, a group that they can see as lower on the totem pole than they are.  And in traditionalist churches, you don’t necessarily need to go to college, let alone seminary to be a minister; you just “feel the spirit” and start preaching whatever you heard as a child.  Still, it’s hard to understand how some black churches can reject the Bible verses on slavery, but not reject the Bible verses on sexual orientation.  The Black Church is our hero, our guide when it comes to civil rights for women, for immigrants, for veterans, for gays and lesbians, so it’s painful to see.  That’s why it’s great to see the black intelligentsia like Michael Eric Dyson, Melissa Harris-Perry, Rev. Peter Gomes and the great theologian, Dr. Irene Monroe—not to mention our own Thelma Flowers—and others supporting marriage equality.  Perhaps the biggest effect that President Obama’s endorsement of marriage equality will have is to break open this conversation in the black community.     

            Bible-based marriage law in our country has a long, ugly history of oppressing African Americans.  When southern slave-owners read that Abraham had sex with his slave, Hagar, they said that the Bible proves they could have sex with their slaves.  When black people were slaves, they were legally forbidden to marry each other because that would make it troublesome for their owners to sell them off.  And to allow slaves to marry would humanize them, which is also why conservatives are fighting against marriage equality: because it will humanize LGBT folks.  But in the pursuit of happiness, the human urge to marry is universal, so down in the slave quarters, even though their masters outlawed slave-marriage in their state legislatures, slaves did marry among themselves with their own ritual called, “Jumping the Broom.”  

            After the Civil War, most states outlawed inter-racial marriage.  Called “miscegenation,” it was legally defined as “cohabitation, sexual relations, marriage, or inter-breeding between persons of different races.”  (Notice the dehumanizing language.)  This was the traditional, legal definition of marriage and it was Bible-based (for example, Deuteronomy7:2-3).  This traditional definition of marriage was finally changed in 1967, when the liberal Supreme Court, under Chief Justice Earl Warren, overturned anti-miscegenation laws in this country in a case called Loving vs. State of Virginia.  Ironically, the inter-racial couple’s last name was “Loving.”  Mrs. Loving was black and Mr. Loving was white.

            They went to Washington DC to get married, where it was legal, and then returned home to Virginia.  Word spread in their hick town that they had married.  They were caught sleeping in their bed by a bunch of cops who broke into their home in the hope of catching them having sex because that was another crime. In their defense, Mrs. Loving pointed to a marriage certificate on the wall of their bedroom.  But rather than defending them, it became the evidence the police needed for yet another criminal charge, because it proved that they had been married in another state and come home, which was also a felony in Virginia. They were found guilty and sentenced to prison.  In his legal decision (in a secular court), conservative Judge Leon Bazile decreed:

            Almighty God created the races separate by placing them on separate continents. But for the interference with His arrangement, there would be no mixed marriages.  The fact that God separated the races shows that He did not intend the races to mix.

            Thank God, in 1967, liberal “activist” judges overturned miscegenation laws and changed the traditional biblical definition of marriage.  To this day, when conservatives talk about “state’s rights,” they are talking about voting rights, segregation, anti-miscegenation laws and traditional marriage.  But our Supreme Court has already ruled that, since the urge to marry is universal in the pursuit of happiness, marriage is a civil right and even people in prison have a right to marry.

            In 2005, the UCC in convention voted for marriage equality—that is the church we are.  The definitions of marriage and the “Christian family” have changed again and again—from polygamy to monogamy; from stoning non-virgins and a man’s right to rape his wife to a woman’s right to dignity within marriage; from segregation to interracial marriage, to prisoners’ rights to marry and, in some states, gays and lesbians’ right to marry.  For my whole career, I have preached from the Bible every Sunday.  I respect the Bible enough not just to pass on the prejudices I learned as a child, but to go to graduate school to study it.  I love the Bible.  But I love Jesus Christ more.  The whole thrust of Jesus’ ministry was to push back against biblical law and replace it with a spirituality of love.  And so we have our gospel lesson for today:

            “This is my one commandment: love one another as I have loved you.  Make your home in my love.  I do not call you servants, because a servant does not know what the master is doing.  Rather, I call you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from God.”

As the friends of Jesus, we know what his mission was and how to carry on his ministry in our 21st Century cultural context. Jesus re-defined the Bible for us. We judge the merit of individual Bible verses by using him and his one commandment-of-love as our rule of interpretation.

            That’s why the Trinity is so important.  The Bible is not part of God, but the Holy Spirit is.  It is the Spirit of Christ within us that empowers us to judge the Bible and carry on Jesus’ ministry of love and liberation for all people.  The old Congregationalists did not fight to end slavery because they rejected their faith!  They fought for abolition and for the emancipation of women because their educated approach to scripture, combined with their faith in Jesus, led them to see that the parts of the Bible that support racism and sexism are anti-Christ and that, as the friends of Jesus, they had to fight to end injustice.  Now it’s up to us, in our generation, to abide in Christ’s love in such a way that we extend that justice to LGBT people.  So this Mothers’ Day, let’s “sing a new song” and replace the traditional biblical laws with marriage equality by re-dedicating ourselves to making our home in Christ’s love.

Pastor Dan Geslin

6th Avenue UCC

Easter 6 – 2012