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.
1 comment:
sounds pretty dope to me. wish i could have been there. glad you're excited about what you're doing.
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