KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Couples will no longer be able to exchange wedding vows at one Kansas City Methodist church, which has decided to stop performing traditional marriage ceremonies because a church rule prohibits such services for gay and lesbians.
The last traditional wedding at the Trinity United Methodist Church in midtown Kansas City is scheduled for spring and will take place as planned.
Instead of traditional marriage ceremonies, the church will offer special worship celebrations for couples that do not include wedding vows, Rev. Sally Haynes, the church’s senior pastor, said. Couples will be free to recite their vows elsewhere.
Trinity’s policy, which was approved by 92 percent of the congregation in a vote, will allow the church to treat all its members equally and still remain a part of the United Methodist Church, Haynes said. About one-third of Trinity’s 275 members are gay or lesbian, Haynes said.
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I don’t seem to recall Jesus boycotting the wedding at Cana since cultural prejudices did not allow same-sex marriages. How insensitive Jesus was to even supply and support this wedding by turning water into wine when elsewhere same-sex couple who were in love and in deeply committed relationships would could not be married in a Jewish ceremony. Modern society is trying to do the even more miraculous event of turning same-sex unions into marriage.
I am really getting tired of all the sound bite theology in the media in support of same-sex marriage. The main reason because they are in love. I wonder how many spouses when they heard that their spouse was now in love with someone else accepted this reasoning. Sorry to leave you and the kids behind because I am in love with someone else. I wonder how many same-sex couples will accept this same reasoning when it happens to them. We have been conditioned to this emotionally fuzzy concept of what love is. We will accept such mistaken statement as I am no longer in love with you. Love is an act of the will not something that can ebb and flow like a vitamin deficiency. If you no longer love someone it is because you have chosen not to. Love is willing the good for the other not a feel good aftermath of an infatuation.
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Modern sensibilities have a way of couching all justifications in terms of vagues sentiments, which cannot possibly be called into question, without attacking the individual. In other words, how can you question what I “feel”?
Reverend Sally Haynes? well. there you have it.
Greetings!
Jesus did sort of protest heterosexual marriage in a radical way. He never married himself, which in first century Jewish culture, was considered quite strange.
To the issue of gay love, the lesbian couple that married in San Francisco last week was already together for over 50 years. How many heterosexual couple stay together like that?
Yes, love is an act of the will enabled by grace…but grace builds on nature. The question people are asking is how homosexuals are to live a graced life.
Are they to be encouraged to supress their sexuality to the point where they fall, break off the relationship, run to confession, commit to celibate chastity out of fear of hell, fall again, break off the new relationship, run to confession, commit to celibate chastity out of fear of hell, etc….over and over again?
Or, are they to accept that for some reason beyond their chosing, God gave them an attraction to members of the same sex, and God intends that attraction to be the basis upon which they will grow in healthy loving?
If the latter, can we rule out the possibility that God intends for gays to form intimate and permanent bonds similar to a marriage covenant?
Framed another way, what if we took sex out of the picture?
Is it sinful for two men who have no attraction to women to chose to live together chastely and support one another on the journey through life – to commit to a very close, emotionally intimate and permanent friendship?
Heck – let’s face it, priests have been doing this for centuries!
Jesus was intimate friends with the Apostles, and John was even considered “beloved”.
There is a homosexual dynamic in such a relationship, even if not consciously sexual or genitally expressed. Homosexual love is not sinful, and the Church does not teach that it is. Rather, the Church teaches that homosexual acts are sinful.
If we add sexual expression back in the mix, perhaps we move further from the exact imitation of Christ and the Apostles, but is the bond any less real or any more immoral than two heterosexuals struggling with infertility?
When the handful (literally 5) of ambiguous Biblical texts used to condemn homosexual acts were written, none of the authors of Scripture were aware of the notion of a natural homosexual orientation. The texts do not deal with the type of questions we raise today.
Perhaps God created certain people with homoerotic desire to remind heterosexuals that men should love one another, and women should love one another.
Yet, the love between homosexuals can be just as real and enduring as the love between the healthiest and holiest heterosexual couple.
Peace and blessings!
Amen to that of “Love not being a feeling.” I say that having gone down that road, and paid for it. I can only say there needs to be some real preaching, and pounding into the hearts and minds of our young this message. It can�t be said enough. Love isn�t just something that you sip from over a casual dinner, as if it were a bubbly drink, rather it�s of a more robust vintage that needs time to mature.
jcecil3,
Sort of protest marriage? Virginity does not deny heterosexual marriage or protest it. Jesus words about a man leaving his family and cleaving to his wife was no protest but the example to follow. A vow poverty does not mean that all who have money are being protested.
If I have adulteress thoughts shouldn’t I suppress my sexuality and be faithful. Do you also deny that marriage is permanent. Any thoughts I have including sexual must be bound to the moral world not to my convenience.
Longevity does not equal morality. Someone marrying their child and staying together for life would not make it right.
If god gives same sex attraction as you say does he also give adulteress attraction and adult child attraction? Are babies born with homosexual attraction? What is your proof?
I would look at someone like David Morrison of the example for those who live with a degree of same-sex attraction and still live with someone in a non-sexual relationship.
Didn’t that just hit the nail on the head!
Joe,
I love my best girlfriend. She has been there for me through thick and thin for over 20 years. ANd I resent deeply your inferring that there is something “homosexual” about it! It is love, and it is friendship, but it is not sexual. It is so interesting to me that “progressive” types find it so necessary to put sex into everything!!
As for how many heterosexual couples stay together 50 years… HELLO!!! Lots of them do. Oh, and guess when the divorce rate started to soar Joe- that’s right – right after birth control was legalized and became a widespread part of the culture.
The reasons I’ve heard in support of homosexual marriage is that only via marriage can they get the legal rights they feel they deserve. So they attempt to change the definition of marriage to match the legal rights they want/deserve. I’d like to see this turned around – don’t change marriage, but change some laws that give homosexuals some equivalent rights under the law.
Many companies now provide domestic partner health benefits, so their partners can be covered. Why not let people pass their assets (at death) on to whoever they want, instead of only their spouses? Let people designate whoever they want for these sorts of things, not limiting it to a spouse. And *don’t* change the definition of marriage.
Greetings!
Jeff wrote:
If I have adulteress thoughts shouldn’t I suppress my sexuality and be faithful. Do you also deny that marriage is permanent.
Of course marriage is permanent. If you ever wander over to my site, I argue that the unitive dimension of sexuality as described by the Church is presisely the criteria that the sense of the faithful uses to judge sexual morality.
We know pedophilia, adultery, bestiality, even pornography and so forth are wrong precisely because such acts violate the unitive dimension of sexuality. These acts lack mutual free consent between mature persons and the character of permanent commitment inherent in unitive love.
However, it is hard to argue that homosexuals do not share exactly such a love.
This leaves us only able to turn to the Church’s teaching on the procreative dimension of sexuality, and we allow infertile couples to marry and have sexual relations with no judgment of sin.
Elena wrote:
I love my best girlfriend. She has been there for me through thick and thin for over 20 years. ANd I resent deeply your inferring that there is something “homosexual” about it!
Well, I am sorry that you feel offended, but the truth sometimes hurts. There is something homosexual in all same sex relationships. It may not be conscious desire for sexual gratification, but there is a homosexual context going on in all same sex relationships.
To begin to fathom the truth of this, consider the massive number of studies that indicate that attractivbe men are more likely to be hired for a job even when the interviewer is a heterosexual male!
Homosexuality and heterosexuality are definitivbe of the whole of a person’s existence. There is no such thing as a person who purely one or the other. Rather, there is a prodiminance toward one end of a polar spectrum.
I consider myself heterosexual because I have no conscious awareness of temptation to fantasies of sex with men, and it is women who spontaneously turn my head. As I speak with homosexual men, their experience is the exact opposite – they are not consciously aware of temptations to sex with women, and it is men who spontaneously turn their head.
Despite my self identification as a heterosexual, I am comfortable enough with my sexuality to recognize and publically state that there is a homosexual context to my relationships with men.
Two macho heterosexual guys engaged in sporting activity are in a dance of intimacy, whether they consciously think of it as sexual or not. Thus, football players even pat each other’s rear ends, without considering the implication!
Peace!
JOe writes: “There is something homosexual in all same sex relationships”
Speak for yourself Joe. There’s nothing sexual about it, just as there is nothing incestuous between the love of healthy parents and children. What a bizarre point of view! and they call it “progressive!?”
Jeff,
You are forgetting that Jesus was not a Methodist. If He were, He would have changed water into Welch’s grape juice. Thank God He was Catholic!
jcecil: For someone who 1) Under Jewish law had the responsiblity of the family because of the probable case of Jesus death, 2) Would probably be crucified about 2 years after getting married (most Hebrew men then married during their late 20s, early 30s) – it is rather fortunate that he didn’t get married.
Remember, he is God in the flesh. Not flesh with the power of God. He doesn’t need to reproduce – would God really want a bunch of half-humans half-Gods? Had Jesus reproduce, it would cause a split in the human race – a group would be set apart because they aren’t sinners (sin is passed down through generation by the fathers, Jesus wasn’t a sinner).
And what about Jesus’ wife? Who would take care of her after her death? I’m sure Jesus is more compassionate than that – how many people would marry somebody knowing that a couple of years down the road you would be killed in a humiliating way by the Romans as a revolutionary? Now, imagine how would Jesus feel.
Notice what he said to the adulturous woman he spared from stoning? “Go and sin no more”. If he really didn’t want marriage, surely he would allow pre- and extramarital sex. I mean, I know I can’t handle a life without sex. Why would God create sex if we weren’t to do it?
Jesus also said “Men shall not live by bread alone..” Does it mean I have to stop eating and read the Bible during meal times instead? Gee…
And then you go and state that having intimate *any* relationship with anyone of the same gender is somewhat a homosexual relationship. I wholeheartedly disagree; I love my best friend as I love my brother. It is brotherly love – not a single thought of sex comes to mind. Nadda. Any relationship with my (future) wife would be one that involves romantic love, which is distinct altogether.
Just because you pat somebody in the butt means you’re sexually attracted to that person. I kiss my parents, does this mean I’m having a sexual relationship with my parents.. eeek, that thought disgusts me..
Elena: High divorce rates started when no-fault divorce was introduce. Why stick with a partner through tough times in a relationship when you could easily get a divorce? If you see countries that don’t allow no-fault divorces, like the Phillipines, the divorce rate is close to zero (and only happens because of cases of abuse and infidelity)
Homosexuals being together had nothing to do with it.