View From The Pew
by Gerry Hunter
(Posted May 28th, 2000).
"The coming of the lawless one by the activity of Satan will be with all power and with pretended signs and wonders, and with all wicked deception for those who are to perish, because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. Therefore God sends upon them a strong delusion, to make them believe what is false, so that all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness."
2 Thes. 2:9-12
The Process
Part of the "dialogue" process decreed for the Diocese of New Westminster was an opportunity for those who support the blessing of gay "unions" to speak at a parish "twinning" meeting. For our parish, and its designated "twin," that opportunity came to pass on the evening of 1 May 2000. For that 90 minutes, two gay men (speakers S1 and S3), a lesbian (speaker S2), and a woman who described herself as an "evangelical Anglican" who favoured blessing same sex "unions" (speaker S4) were free to present their position, under warrant of episcopal writ.
For a believing Christian, to hear what followed was to be dumbfounded. To attempt to relate what transpired is to grasp for a frame of reference suitable for its meaningful exposition. It is a formidable task, and in the end, I have chosen to characterize it using a term of one of the speakers.
The speaker was the younger of the two gay men (S3). During the concluding question period, he described the process we were going through as one of "enlightening." It was leading to an "awakening" in the Diocese, he expounded, which would continue, and eventually lead to the approval of the blessing of same sex "unions." And so, I will attempt to give you a glimpse of this "enlightening" which is taking place, and the things it is "awakening" to our attention.
Every effort was made to give the evening the veneer of a Christian occasion. It opened with a liturgy, which featured an abbreviated renewal of our baptismal vows. In a baptismal service, this renewal begins with the profession of faith, based on the Apostles Creed. This part was conspicuously absent. As the evening progressed, it became clear that what we believed, and in whom we believed, did not figure greatly into the scheme of things for the purposes at hand. In the environment of enlightened awakening, this was the first of the baggage to be chucked out. It was not the last.
Lordship
The omitted portion of the baptismal renewal includes the reaffirmation that Jesus Christ is Lord and Saviour. The believing Christian, in affirming that truth, undertakes the most daunting challenge of his or her life - placing all aspects of life under that lordship, all of the time. In the new enlightenment, though, there appears to be some room for negotiation and sharing of lordship. What we listeners were to learn about was the lordship of self.
The terms of the shared lordship were such that, according to S1, his experience of finding that "pictures of a nearly naked Jesus were exciting. And that's when I was 7, well before puberty and my sexual awakening, and that's my point" made his present state fully acceptable. Later, he proposed to us that an opportunity to be of service to someone he met on his flight home from a visit to Canterbury, having prayed to be of use to God as a gay, was an answer to that prayer, and therefore an imputation of righteousness to his state of being.
For S2, her experience of the "magic" of the liturgy was presented as the major factor binding her to the church in her younger years. Later, when she returned to a church, it was the experience of hearing the organ again, and how it moved her, that directed her to continue coming.
This setting up of the self, through the subjective interpretation of experience, chiefly through feelings, continued with the third speaker. He related an experience at the Sorrento conference centre, where he heard the well-known hymn "The Lord of the Dance." Many of us recall the verse that refers to the crucifixion: I danced on a Friday when the sky turned black. It's hard to dance with the devil on your back. The enlightenment, it seems, had changed the second of these lines to read: It's hard to dance with a monkey on your back. There was no discussion of the theological significance of this change to the hymn during the evening, so I will not interject one now. But S3 did relate how he came to "examine the monkey." He "faced it," and "realized it wasn't nasty." The exercise of lordship over his life, then, led him to a point where he could tell us, "I'm okay with it, he's (Jesus?) okay with it, I want the rest of the world to feel okay with it."
The lordship of self, we were enlightened, is intended to go beyond the individual. The second speaker let us know that the question is not about whether God would bless her relationship, since she feels He already has, but whether the church will. In a similar way, S3 informed us that the reason the combination of being gay, in relationship, and being a preacher was not allowed was only because the church did not allow it. (He said this during the question period, where he told us we were not dropping the moral standards, but were engaged in the process of "enlightening".) The decision to be made, in other words, was entirely in our human hands, and subject only to human considerations.
Speaker 4 made a unique and troubling contribution to the lordship of self. The young woman shared with us that she had endured a lifelong struggle with clinical depression. Many times, she drew a parallel between her battles with this condition, and the gay and lesbian experience of what she presented as exclusion. Her empathy with them was clear. So was the message that we were to base our actions on similar subjective criteria.
There was no doubt that we were being called upon to face this issue, and make our decision, based only on what we were hearing, and how we felt when we heard it. Just as those speaking to us sought to move us through experience and feelings, so we were to use experience and feelings as the chief tools in responding to the issue. We were to join the speakers, and become Lord of our own lives.
Scripture and Tradition
To no one's great surprise, Holy Scripture received little mention in the meeting. The first speaker, though, did have something to say about it. In the tone which failed to fully mask belligerency, he advised, "none of the gay bashing passages in Holy Scripture stand up to scrutiny." Nothing more was said about Holy Scripture during the evening. There was one question, though, asked by someone in the audience. "If the people who wrote the Bible knew what we know about science today, would they have written same thing?" Between the assertion and the question, the attitude to Holy Scripture which prevailed is pretty well summed up.
I have already mentioned the truncation of the baptismal promises. For thousands of years, a Christian's faith predicated a Christian's behavior. In the enlightened era, it seems, behavior can stand on its own. Even B.F. Skinner would be surprised by this turn of events. One can only wonder what St. Paul's reaction might have been.
What of marriage in the Christian tradition? Would we recognize it when we awakened to enlightenment? The question was asked about what a same-sex blessing might look like. In the reply, we learned that the draft of the proposed liturgy was not supposed to be markedly different from the marriage liturgy. This was elaborated on by saying that the purpose of it was to make vows, and have the community witness, affirm, strengthen, and support them. In addition, the marriage ceremony was meant to strengthen ties broader than those between the man and the woman. Apart from this last mention, the concept of marriage as being something between a man and a woman had clearly been discarded.
Next Steps
The prevailing expectation among those who came to speak to us was the blessing same sex "unions" will be approved in 2001 by the Synod. Even if it is not, said S3, the "awakening" will continue, and eventually the motion in favour of the blessings will be approved.
Meantime, speakers 1 and 3 urged everyone to overlook what happens in the bedroom, get to know them as people, and enjoy them. Meanwhile, S3 assured us that his relationships (he used the plural) were mutually loving and nourishing. Speaker 4, the affirming evangelical, wanted to avoid "exclusion" at all costs, which, to her, meant granting the blessing of the "unions."
The local liberal hierarchy has been, in the past, swift to chide those who suggest that they might leave the corporate organization if blessing of same sex "unions" is approved. However, the most militant of the speakers, S1, made it very clear that some of his gay friends had said, "We're gone" unless the approval happens. The consensus of the speakers was clearly that this would constitute exclusion. No mention at all was made of the concept of faithfulness. It was clear that a call to "inclusion," in the new enlightenment, shouted down any call to spiritual faithfulness.
One of the most deceptive parts of the evening occurred during the question period. Speaker 1 recounted a synopsis of the council meeting in Acts 5, where Gamaliel suggested to the council that they should let events happen, and if they prevailed, they were from God, but if not, they weren't. This, it was posited, should guide us. Given the non-standing of Holy Scripture in the proceedings, the thought of following the example of the Jews in Beroea (Acts 17) was clearly not appealing to the speakers. This deceptive ploy, and a comparison of the two approaches cited in the Book of Acts, sums up rather well the overall delusion of the evening.
John Stott, among others, has pointed out that Gamaliel did not provide believers with a trustworthy mechanism. As a Pharasee, Gamaliel was not a member of the power elite, made up of Saducees, and had to be cunning to have a say in the events. He carried the day, offering a political solution to a political forum of unbelievers. And that is what we were presented with that evening - nothing less than a series of political arguments, and appeals to emotion and feelings, devoid of any grounding in scripture or tradition. Unlike the Jews of Beroea, hearing the words of Paul and Silas, a believer present at that meeting, comparing what he heard to Holy Scripture, would have been anything but eager to receive it.
The Overall Effect
The whole affair had one immediate effect on at least one listener. When the audience member asked whether today's scientific knowledge, if they had it, would have influenced the writers of Holy Scripture, the fruits of the overall delusion were clearly manifested. Let no one suggest that occasions such as this are, in any sense, neutral and benign in their effects.
The evening began with a truncated baptismal liturgy, that did violence to the sacrament by omitting the profession of faith from which these promises flow. It moved on to an exultation of the lordship of self, the denigration of Holy Scripture, the neglect of tradition, and the exultation of political solutions. Grace, salvation, and the source of Christian fellowship were replaced by a call to embrace solutions predicated upon human political considerations, and validated by feelings.
All together, it provided a unique and astounding event, and it all happened in a parish church, under episcopal warrant. It was truly the most disgusting 90 minutes I have ever spent in the precincts of a church of Jesus Christ, in over half a century of life as a believing Christian.