standing on different assumptions

Most people already know this from my facebook, but I want to write more about what I was trying to do. A little over a week ago in my preaching class, I chose one of the troubling texts - the story about the creation of Eve out of Adam's rib. This text is used not only to tell me as a gay guy that I'm unnatural, but also to tell women that they're subordinate to men (and nature is subordinate to men), and that marriage is the only truly blessed relationship. I don't agree with any of those things, and I wanted to see what would come out of it for me - both in inspiration of the spirit and in wisdom of feminist preachers & teachers. I also wanted to give a sermon about same-sex marriage that wasn't about defending or reasoning, but that was grounded in different assumptions. I didn't want to apologize, or defend my decision to get married to my partner, but rather to stop assuming there might be a problem in the first place. People have said, "But you're gay, how could you be a Christian?" That's like saying, "But you're a woman, how could you be a Christian?"

So I can't say I overwhelmingly succeeded, but in the course of reading, studying, and conversing about the text, what emerged was a more fundamental notion about what it means to be human. I always read sacred texts for their revelation about what my ancestors believed were core truths about human existence, and that's what I discovered. The power of the Adam & Eve creation myth is not in its ordering of gender, or its supposed declaration about "natural" heterosexual marriage [in fact, nothing about the story says that God married them to each other in the first place]. Rather, it's a more fundamental declaration of how much we need each other. Adam and Eve (two very different people, sharing a bone of humanity, a small something similar amidst their differences) help each other enflesh their reality. The story starts with Adam naming and categorizing everything - owning and objectifying it all - and Eve comes around and helps him see the world through her eyes, too. I called it 'relational reality,' which is maybe not the best preaching word, but it works. The story is about helpers and partners in life - not just partners in marriage, but a whole host of relationships with friends, family, and strangers, whom we depend on to survive and make our world 3-dimensional. In the sermon, I chose to talk less about my partner and more about my mother-in-law, because she is also a partner in my life. She is part of our household, and she helps me see the world differently because of her different experiences.

In doing so, I wanted to sidestep apologies or reasons that same-sex marriage was okay, in favor of re-reading a text used against it to discover a deeper truth, and to use my upcoming marriage to illustrate it unapologetically.

I like this method, and I hope to do it more.