Goin’ to the Chapel, or California Dreamin’?

The recent overturning of California’s ban on same-sex marriages by a federal judge has gay rights activists giddy with excitement .  There may be good reason for that optimism, as the court’s legal reasoning seems solid enough to survive a challenge in the Supreme Court.  Opponents of same-sex marriage are understandably livid.  The issue will no doubt turn up the heat on the question that goes to the heart of marriage as an institution.  Just what is marriage anyway, and how did it become sacred?

There is overwhelming evidence that a majority of Americans favor some sort of legal arrangement whereby same-gender couples can share their lives and property in something that approximates a “marriage,” even if we call it a “civil union.”  It may surprise many that the religious aspects of marriage were slow to catch on in the early church–which was not especially interested in the institution at first–preferring to view such arrangements as essentially private affairs unless the couple to be married was of royal lineage.  Ordinary folks often entered into what we might call today a common law marriage.

It was not until the middle to late 16th century that marriage was institutionalized as both a civil and a sacred affair.  Interestingly, the collective voice of the Counter-Reformation through the Council of Trent, as well as the Calvinistic Reformers in Geneva came to nearly simultaneous conclusions and began to require that marriages be considered as both civil and sacred arrangements.  Anyone looking for a link older than about 500 years to “prove” the ecclesiastical sanctity of marriage will be hard-pressed to find one.  And leaving aside remarks of the apostle Paul about marriage, there’s not much to be found in the New Testament either.

The concept of a civil marriage, with the option of a separate ecclesiastical blessing, has been known and recognized in most European countries since the 19th century.  Whenever I sign a state-issued marriage license (and I do so frequently), I am reminded that I play a legal role, as well as a religious one, in solemnizing a marriage for one of many lovestruck heterosexual couples that come my way each year.  I normally spend some time with the couple in which I remind them that the legal and sacred parts are very different enterprises, with the former being required by statute, and the latter being but one more manifestations of the grace of God.  Despite my eloquent attempts, I suspect that most (not all) couples simply want to “get it over with.”

One of my Roman Catholic doctoral students shared a thought with me once about the sacramental nature of marriage from the Catholic perspective.  He suggested that the church was not in a position to declare just when a married relationship becomes sacramental.  My Reformed mind likes that because it shifts the focus to God, which is where it belongs in my view.

So what if one falls in love with a member of the same sex and wishes to build a life with that one?  If homosexuality is not a  pathological disorder, and those who practice it are every bit as genuine as those who oppose it, then perhaps the church ought to create space for those who wish to bless their same-gender unions.

My student is right.  A marriage–anybody’s–is a sacred relationship, but it develops into one over time., independent of state or ecclesiastical pronouncements. When Jesus addressed the issue, he spoke of the sanctity of the union in the context of divorce, which he clearly identified as sin.  Most of us prefer to ignore that, preferring to look  only to homosexual relationships as aberrant behavior.

Will the floodgates of gay marriage open in California?  Will homosexuality one day be accepted as mainstream?   Nobody knows for sure.  What we do know is that the institution has evolved over time.  Perhaps the church should be in the progressive forefront for whatever comes next.