Homosexuality

Today I was encouraged about change in the denomination I recently left before joining the Episcopal Church. Nothing huge. No new female preacher hired by a large church in the Bible Belt. No new merger of an African-American church with a Euro-American church. No new theology professor of a different denomination in one of its universities. But a new hopeful voice in the blogosphere. A voice of someone who is committed to his denomination and unashamed of his same-sex sexual orientation. In the few lines that follow I am going to reproduce a few comments I made on this new blog along with some further interspersed thoughts.

I had many reasons for leaving this past September and joining the Episcopal Church, but one was the issue of homosexuality. Not only did I disagree with my former denomination's traditional position opposing same-sex relationships, but I was encouraged in general by the stance of the Episcopal Church, and in particular by the recent ordination of an openly gay bishop in New Hampshire. [An Aside: So for all the people I've heard said the Episcopal Church would lose for this action, I am at least one member they gained because of it.]

The conclusion that I've come to over at least the past five years is that any committed relationship between equal partners is valid. For me the ethical and justice issues far outweigh arbitrary interpretations of the culturally-bound texts we consider scripture. In my opinion, the examples in scriptures that seem to prohibit same-sex relationships refer to situations where one person was either non-consenting or being taken advantage of (for further reading I suggest Robin Scroggs' The New Testament and Homosexuality). The Bible does not discuss (and thus does not prohibit) the situation of an equal and committed same-sex relationship. What I do think the Christian LGBT (Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgendered) community needs to struggle with (along with the straight community), is how to keep these relationships serious and committed. What God wants to save us from is the flitting around from sexual partner to sexual partner, and the relational/psychological/physical/spiritual mess that accompanies the breaking up of relationships.

I came to this conclusion by listening to others' experiences and reasoning through the issues. I have had gay-Christian professors, classmates, and friends whose lives and predicaments convinced me that God cannot prohibit same-sex relationships. And I could not reconcile the idea of a loving and compassionate creator God with the idea of a God who would condemn people for the very way they were created by that God. That is not a god I can worship. Something had to give. And that something was a rigid biblical hermeneutic.

Because I am happily married to a member of my previous denomination and I still have many friends within that group, I wish it well. And I have a great deal of respect for people like this new blogger and my spouse who can patiently tolerate the current situation and work for change. Yet I am impatient and want to belong to a denomination that is on the frontlines of social justice concerns, believing these are the issues closest to the heart of God.

I hope you will visit and spend some time at Gay Restorationist. I'll be adding this blog to my links.

Communal Prayer

I have believed for a long time now that communal prayer is primary. While there are instances of private prayer in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, the overriding assumption is that prayer happens within community. Consider, as one example, the testimony of Acts that says that the Christians met together daily in the temple and devoted themselves to prayer (2:42-47). I believe that private prayer derives from communal prayer.

Yet in my past personal church experience, private prayer was emphasized over communal prayer. Private prayer was a sign of devotional piety. The more one prayed in private, the more holy one was. Even the ability to pray in public in an extemporaneous way seems to stem from a prioritizing of private devotion over public devotion. Those people who were good at praying extemporaneously in public were thought to have superior private devotional lives. I even remember hearing that if you couldn't pray well in public "on the spot," then you must not have a close relationship with Jesus. This is, of course, hogwash.

On the other hand, those communions that have emphasized communal prayer have tended to formalize its language. These formal written prayers are quite meaningful to the people who pray them together on a weekly or daily basis. Contrary to what I was once taught, this kind of prayer does not automatically become ritualism. [I would make a distinction here between ritual and ritualism. Healthy ritual is an established form of religious devotion, while ritualism is an excessive attachment to the form.]

This type of daily communal prayer has long roots in Christian history. In fact, there is solid evidence from the early second century that the church was already praying communally three times per day (perhaps loosely patterned after then current Jewish practice). Over the centuries, along with the development of monasticism, these times of daily communal prayer were multiplied from three to five, and eventually to eight times per day. And eventually these set times of prayer had their own written forms. Of course, the common person with a normal job could not keep up with such a time consuming pattern. Because of the grueling nature of this kind of prayer life, daily communal prayer fell out of practice altogether among common Christians. Daily communal prayer became the "profession" of those monastics who could devote all their time and energy.

When the Reformation came along in the 1500's and did away with monasticism, it threatened the final destruction of daily communal prayer. In fact, most denominations that have roots in Luther and Calvin have no tradition of daily communal prayer. However, the conservative nature of the Anglican Reformation, which resisted throwing out anything that smacked of Catholicism, preserved this ancient practice. Thomas Cranmer, in his editorial work on the Book of Common Prayer in 1549 and 1552, reduced the eight medieval daily prayer times to two: Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer. Cranmer's goal was to simplify the complex medieval system and place a stronger emphasis on the reading of the entirety of scripture. His system of twice daily communal prayer was an attempt to more closely reflect ancient church practice. It enabled common Christians to assemble at the church before and after their work day for communal devotion.

Morning and Evening Prayer are still in the current Book of Common Prayer, though few Episcopal Churches have these services daily. I doubt that today's workaholic Christians would ever populate these services enough to make them viable on a daily basis. However, I appreciate the vision that keeps communal prayer the primary form of daily devotion of the church.