Over the past few weeks I have encountered a state of mind I have not experienced in several years. I have never thought of myself as having trust issues, generally because I stoically accept human frailty and am a free-thinker enough that I don't require authority to feel validated in my own convictions. But recently I have found myself teatering on the edge of a larger doubt, sown by the seeds of the Church voice in American activism.
First I will create the context: Last week California legalized gay marriage. Now I don't think that I have a problem with the symantics of "marriage" vs. "civil union" - though it could be argued that words in and of themselves inform and shape an entire culture and collective thought process. But I see nothing within our culture and secularized government belief system that would be consistent in denying a man and man legal rights to pulling the plug if one is comatose, or to receiving the medical benefits derived from one partner's job, and the list goes on. And I do not think that believing our government ought to allow gay marriage is the same as professing that God blesses the union. He does not.
The one issue I would strongly oppose would be affording adoption rights or artificial insemination to gay couples. The American family is on average highly dysfunctional and often divided. Many children do not have both a father and a mother by circumstance, but I agree that it would be a different thing for the LAW to deny a child both a father and a mother. But is this any different than the law allowing all kinds of divorce? And this issue gets dicey too when you ask the question how different are men from women across the board, regardless of sexual orientation? Are they different enough that a child would be lacking to not have both characters strongly represented in the home? Or are there only "feminine" and "masculine" (as we call them) qualities that are in reality represented in both genders that could perhaps be just as distinctively contrasted between a nurturing man and his protective partner, to the child's benefit? I have trusted the Word of God on this one - the family unit, believing in his divine order of things. I try to follow the line of that wisdom to its root to understand why the order of a man and a woman are better - but I haven't gotten there to the degree of an unwavering conviction yet.
So anyway, that's the issue but the agent that started to brittle my trust in the church's stance on this and other kinds of political and social movements came strongly when someone from the city of San Francisco, fighting for gay marriage was asked to comment. He stated that America has a proud history of correcting it's civil injustice and that this is becoming one of those moments in American history. I started to reflect on those other movements in the past that were such a controversy at the time, but which we now almost unanymously recognize in hindsight as being progressive and good (with the exception of legalizing abortion, still hot-button). Sadly, I was reminded of how often the largest Church voice during most of these movements were the last to get on board at best and the loudest, strongest opponents at worst. With this history of the American Church, it makes me feel very insecure in trusting our current accepted views on this issue, since I have seen that we are bound to change our minds in many cases. I suppose we don't always, such as with abortion - and marriage may seem far more sacred ground than women's rights to vote or desegregation. But even as I write that, I feel short-sighted and flippant about the gravity of those other issues.
Shouldn't we, carriers of the very Holy Spirit, be more keen on morality and justice and the value of human life and the order on earth than any other thoughtful group? Aren't we? Don't we fundamentally believe that we ARE guided more, molded more, transformed more? Or is it all only a hope that we would be, not actually a reality that we are? It is deeply disturbing to me that the world has proven to lead on these issues and the Church proves to fight them. Am I not viewing history correctly? Was not our voice most frequently stubborn on social, civil rights? Pockets of Christians who had gotten right at those times don't help me much. If of the wide net of the Church, only a few are mature enough in their walk to really hear the Holy Spirit, then we have another discouraging issue that makes me still disappointed in God. Does he really exercise his power, and to those who sincerely ask that of him, as weak and torn and unable as they are to make themselves ready for Him?
I was listening to one of Beth Moore's "Breaking Free" sessions yesterday and she metioned that one of the meanings of the name Enoch has to do with "a narrowing". He was the man, if you'll remember, who was recorded as having walked with God during his long lifetime and then was simply "taken." I do not find in my own life that I am continually narrowing my convictions, like laser beaming. The longer I go, the fewer dogmatic convictions I feel like I can count on and actually hold. The other side of this is that I do feel all the more strongly about the few pillars that do stand beneath my feet. But what it comes down to is that I want to know God as the person He is, and I feel like His identity in our minds is often the product of our time and generational understanding. Perhaps it is not even as much my disappointment with whether or not God moves the hearts of His people that gets me, as it is the feeling of insecurity, incapability of being able to even know Him, talk about Him, act based on Him.
There is more. But I will leave it there for now.
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