Currently the topic most likely to get a group of Anglicans angry at you is what to do about glbt people. More specifically, taking a stand on whether same-sex couples can have their relationship blessed and on whether a person in such a relationship can be ordained a priest or consecrated as a bishop is very likely to either get you cheered on or viciously attacked depending on the views of the group you are talking to. I suspect that how the Communion responds to this issue will not be as significant in the long run as what the Communion does about theological education and/or what TEC, and especially the parishes and dioceses in TEC, do about evangilism, stewardship, and service to the broader community, but it is a popular issue to distract from those more important issues. Still, this question of morality isn't unimportant, and one of the better ways of removing a distracting question is to find an answer to the question.
Since it is essentially a theological question, I will be approaching it as I currently prefer to approach theological questions and see what sense simple principles drawn from scripture and tradition can make of the problem. I think the simple scriptural principles that will be helpful in this case are clear enough to not require exigesis to show how they come from scripture.
Everyone human being has a sexuality. Traditionally, there are two ways to express this sexuality. A person either gets married or chooses to be celibate. Living out either of these options has traditionally been understood to be sustained by God's grace. Traditionally, marriage has been a one man/one woman thing (sorta, kinda, as long as you ignore polygamy and those who claim that scholarship proves same-sex unions of some sort where once thought to be fine. I'm not familiar with the scholarship on that last bit and so I will be ignoring it for now.) Clearly this suggests that homosexuals ought to remain celibate their whole life, at least given the current understanding that marriage is in large part about living out romantic love. Assuming that grace makes a noticable difference in how a person lives out her/his life, this leads one quickly to the rather empirical question, "Have all homosexual people been granted the grace that sustains the celibacy?" I don't have any stories I can tell from my own experience, but, in listening around to others talk, I get the strong impression that not all homosexual people have been given that grace. Certainly I have heard a story or two that sounded like they said that a celibate gay man went and committed suicide because they found the celibate life style intolerable. This gives me pause because it suggests that God's grace isn't enough for everyone. This conclusion is an explicit denial of what is probably the only scriptural principle in this ramble; God's grace is always enough to deal with the tasks of the day. If these stories are true, and the problem was that the person who gave up hope gave up because s/he had not been given the grace to be celibate, then the church has clearly missed something very important. My guess is that the hole left by the absent grace in these cirmcumstances is a hole shaped alot like the grace that goes along with the lifelong partnership of marriage. In other words, we (or the church) have been rejecting a part of the grace God is trying to provide to bring us to Him.
Jon
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A wonderful heart; but the argument leads me to puzzles. How does this thinking apply to straight people who are not yet married, or widowed, and are not experiencing much grace in their forced celibacy? More broadly, it seems to me that all of us Christians miss God's grace more often than we find it; so, when we find ourselves short on grace in this or that part of our lives, the most likely reason is not our external circumstances but rather the need to rise up from our mud hole and say, "I will arise and go to my father."
It does make sense to look to human experience (among other things) to decide what is right and wrong. It seems to me that our lgbt's best argument from experience is not to point to the unfulfulled need felt by unmarried gay folks (the whole point of repentance is the some percieved 'needs' are bad for us) but rather the good fruit and godliness fostered in specific same-sex relationships among us. Still, that's tricky: all relationships have good and bad in them. And does this or that dysfunctional same sex relationship prove they are all wrong?
Dad
Actually, the perception of need doesn't worry me as much as the stories of priests suiciding does. If a person is doing everything as right as they can manage, they shouldn't wind up suiciding. Of course I'm making some assumptions about the people I've heard about. The big assumption is that, since they're priests, they are praying and studying scripture daily, and doing everything else the church recommends doing to sustain the Christian life. The second assumption is that suicide indicates a deeper problem than an unmet felt need, and is not being done just to make a political point.
Of course this runs along with the reality of the possibility of the dark night of the soul John of the Cross talks about, so, as you say, felt need on its own isn't enough to say that ssm is the solution to an apparent lack of grace. Still, I think the tragedies that have been a part of the history of glbt people in the church don't quite fit with the people needing to repent.
Jon
"This gives me pause because it suggests that God's grace isn't enough for everyone."
Jon, that's a huge leap: from a few anecdotal accounts to a theodicy. There are other solutions to your false dichotomy. It's not necessary to pit the Church's traditional teaching on marriage against no less than God's Grace Itself.
Is it possible that the lonliness, depression, suicidal thoughts and homosexual feelings are all of them symptoms of another, underlying problem? My experience interacting with persons who exhibit homosexual feelings (and I have had plenty of occaision) has been that they tend to have an external brittleness and a superficial sanguine outlook coupled with a deeper sadness. In those that I've known over longer periods of time, my sense was this sadness was a deeper brokenness than could be explained by social rejection or ongoing tension with society or family. In fact, in most cases they tended to be incredibly sociable and engaging, had understanding families, and ran in circles that totally accepted them and had no hangups whatsoever.
Rather than discard centuries of the Church's teaching on the family and the overwhelming consensus of the rest of the Church, I'll take the most common sense view, the one the comports most easily with Scripture and my own experience, which is that homosexual tendencies are an expression of a deeper brokeness, as all of our failings and misplaced desires are.
What persons with homosexual tendencies need is not santioning and sacramentalizing of destructive sexual behavior, but gentle admonition, and affirmation that they are loved by God and can find wholeness when they submit to God's best intention for sexual expression.
Is it reasonable to believe that a priest of the church wouldn't know both that God loves them and how they are supposed to live? I ask because the cases which worry me most are cases in which priests suicided after years of living celibately.
Under what circumstances is it appropriate to think nothing of a person suiciding even though they were doing all the right things and hearing the truth of how much God loved them?
Jon
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