Same Sex Marriage And The Anglican Church

Meh.  That is the sum of my response to the issue.  When I first got the news that same sex marriage had been voted down I shrugged and said, yeah whatever.  Then when they turned around and decided for it I was again, like, meh.  Why?  Because to me this is such a non-issue.  This has nothing to do with homophobia.  I am one hundred percent in favor of same sex marriage, adoption and child-rearing rights and everything that goes with that.  I simply do not see it as the focus of the church, which is to say it does not reflect one way or the other Jesus as we know him through the Gospels.

There is absolutely nothing in any of the four accounts of his life and ministry, Matthew, Mark, Luke or John, about gay people or queer rights.  This does not indicate that these things would not have mattered to Jesus, nor does it suggest that he would not gladly welcome LGBTQ people as his own.  Simply that the things that are issues for us are not necessarily going to be priorities for the Kingdom of God.  As with everything else, of course, the Anglican Church has this all ass-backward as they have basically eviscerated the power of the Gospel for a very limp and lame fashionable political correctness that has done sweet Fanny Adams to fill empty pews.

I am not endorsing either that the church take a step backwards and stigmatize queer people.  Far from it.  The church really has no business being in the marriage business to begin with.   This is but a huge hangover from when the church was present in and ran all the minutiae of every day life, religious and civil, individual and political.  It should be and remain a civil matter.  The Anglican Church would best abandon the issue altogether of same sex matrimony as something to integrate into its rapidly disintegrating fabric and focus more on returning to the same Jesus Christ whom they have never known where everyone, straight, queer, two-spirited and other, will be welcome.  Official policy does nothing but assuage collective guilt.  Encouraging unity in the Spirit alone is going to, which also means a general good will among dissenting factors to come together in the love of God.  The anti-gay south (as well as the arch-conservatives here in the north) have got to come to grips with their homophobia and their hidebound stubbornness about change.  The liberal north must get over their militant arrogance and acquire a focus based on reconciliation and love.

One of the few things I actually like about Anglicanism is the freedom to respectfully agree to disagree while focussing on the things we really share in common.  I think now is the time for us to all pray that God will visit us with a spirit of repentance and renewal.  Very few Anglicans (very few church people in general) know what it is to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ or the baptismal experience of the Holy Spirit.  Spiritual renewal can still come to Anglicans but this is going to be a costly grace requiring of us all to rend our hearts and not our garments and to learn to trust God more completely than ever, for ourselves, for one another, the church, for the world.