[Originally written in late 1985 as a sermon, and preached at several churches. Adapted as an article for Open Hands Magazine, Spring 1986.]
by J. Benjamin Roe
Ministry in Human Sexuality, Inc.
Lincoln, Nebraska
In my work as a pastoral counselor, I see over and over the importance of the family in our lives.
It is in the close quarters and close daily contact of the family in which we grow up that we learn how to live and relate with other people. It is here that we learn how to look at the world, how to communicate and what to expect from life and other people.
Families can be the kind of model human community that generates emotional and spiritual health. These families are loving, optimistic, and warm. They have that "just right" balance of humanness: not too perfect, but "good enough": perfectly human, modeling forgiveness, grace, and flexibility when mistakes are made, and showing commitment to struggling through differences to resolution. These are the families where each challenge is met, coping skills strengthened, knowledge expanded, and adjustments made so that each family member comes out a true winner. There is a closeness, openness, and sharing honestly that can facilitate growth in everyone. "Family," then, ideally means a high quality of interpersonal relationships.
This kind of "Walton's Mountain" or "Bill Cosby Show" family is rare, I suspect, and most of us have at least some "unfinished business" relating to some aspect of our own family experience.
The contrast between the ideal and the reality of a given family can be extremely painful. Alcoholism and other chemical dependency, physical, emotional and sexual abuse, and mental illness all have dynamics that make the reality of a given
family's life particularly painful. A family that ideally prepares each member for more full and effective participation in life, instead compromises growth potentials, undermines and saps coping resources, or fails to facilitate their development altogether.
The pain of real-life family experience is often accentuated with the issue of homosexuality. If openness and honesty were present before, they may simply disappear when homosexuality appears. The truth of who a gay or lesbian person is, is a truth which can clash severely with favored notions about sexuality, morality, and spirituality. Sometimes the notions win, and the gay, lesbian, or bisexual son or daughter must find family elsewhere.
As one of my friends puts it, what could have been family becomes only relatives. So lesbian and gay people often have to take a hard look at what "family" means.
Non-gay/lesbian family members also face painful difficulties. The social stigma faced by lesbian/gay folk is also shared to a degree. When gay persons come out to family, many families go into the closet, often having no one to share their struggle with, feeling the same isolation their lesbian/gay family member felt.
One helpful model of these struggles is the grief process. After all, there is usually a sense of loss: of an image, expectation, interpretations, dreams, hopes. Different families react differently, some more intensely than others. Denial, as the first stage of grief, can last years, even after disclosure occurs: "Oh no! You can't be gay!" Shock is common: "We've lost our child." Numbness and confusion are normal.
Bargaining is another stage: "Is our child (brother/sister) really gay?" "You need a psychiatrist to change you." Bribery and threats are sometimes used to try to bargain away the reality.
Anger is also a common stage of this process: "If you loved us, you'd ..." "You're only doing this to hurt us."
Sadness or depression need to be moved through, too: a family member can feel the sadness of the losses. Perhaps there will be no grandchildren. Perhaps there will be sharing of the painful realities that can go with being gay or lesbian. Perhaps there will be difficulties with other family members.
Finally, there is a growing sense of acceptance: "Yes, my son/brother is gay." or "My daughter/sister is Lesbian," maybe including a sense of pride at tahe accomplishments in the face of some adversity. (The Switzers' Parents of the Homosexual and Fairchild and Hayward's Now That You Know are helpful guides to this process.)
But the biological, legal, and social definition of family is not the whole story. There is a psychological and spiritual meaning of "family" that can be helpful. And, for Christian believers, there is an additional, profoundly rich meaning to "family."
There is a vast difference between the idea of "family" as nuclear (father, mother, children living together) and the family
in Hebrew culture. The family was a central part of Hebrew culture, including many beyond blood relatives: slaves, foreigners, hired servants. The family was so meaningful it was used as an image for the tribes and nations of Israel and Judah, and for Israel's covenant community with God.
Jesus' use of the word "Father" to refer to God implied a new closeness, "simplicity, and directness of approach to God" (see The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible, Vol. 2, p. 433) and took the Jewish use of "Father" to a new depth of relationship and intimacy.
Jesus' use of "my Father's house" in Luke 2, for instance, immediately deepened and expanded the meaning of the family of God, particularly in the context of the yearly "family outing," the visit to the temple.
In our times of greater concern for equality of women and men, we need to note that it is the depth, intimacy, and closeness that is important in the term "Father," not the gender of the term.
Now, for some, Mother could also connote this closeness.
For Jesus, the idea of the family was not biological. In Matthew 12:47-50 is the story of him gesturing to his disciples, saying, "These are my mother and my brothers, and sisters. Whoever does God's will is my brother, sister, and mother." And in Luke 8:21 it reads, "Those who hear the word of God and act upon it are my mother, sister and brother." Family becomes based on a close relationship with God, so close that God's will is desired and done.
In Galatians 4, Paul uses the image of adoption as sons and daughters of God in describing how the relationship with God
changes for believers. I like to think of the change being one of invitation, acknowledgement, and welcome: potentially all people can live as sons and daughters of the Creator. The invitation is constantly extended. The only thing needed to be welcome in God's family, is for one to recognize God's parenthood and one's sonship or daughtership. Over and over Paul's message is that there is no way to win favor with God: the only thing required is to allow the Spirit to "move in us" enabling us to respond to God's love.
God's initiative and our response to God is the key to membership in this family.
This family is not based on accomplishment, on appearance, on good grades, or "merit" of any kind. God's family is based on acknowledgment of God's being our loving creator, a creator who cares for us as a parent for a child, and God's being co-creator with those who respond. This family is characterized by a high quality of relationship: the I and the thou relate in the presence of The Thou (Martin Buber).
This family begins with God's love always being there for us--constant, urging, coaxing, inviting us into a more open, active
relationship. We experience some little goodness and recognize it as a gift of true grace, and we might utter a little "Thank
you...God." Paul would say this is God's spirit moving in us to call out "Abba--Father" or "Mother" or simply "God".
This is the beginning of faith, when we are enabled to interpret some goodness as a gift of grace. From there we can be on an ascending spiral: we wonder about where that grace came from, we wonder if God was somehow involved, then we decide to look into it more or be open more. We might decide to pass on the grace in a small way. And our action helps confirm our beginning faith. We recognize God's involvement in our lives in many ways, finally turning more intentionally to forms of worship, prayer, and meditation. Until finally we're recognizing a sense of sonship or daughtership--co-creatorship.
In my many contacts with gay and lesbian people, I see God's love at work and the growth in faith as response is made. I have seen and heard the stories of response by lesbian and gay Christians. And I remember the faith of the Roman centurion in Luke 7 who asked Jesus to heal his daughter. I remember the other Roman who responded on Golgotha, "Truly this was the son of God" (Mt. 27). I remember the thief who asked Jesus to remember him (Luke 23). I remember the Ethiopian eunuch's response and baptism (Acts 8). And I remember Peter's dream, the sheet full of ritually "unclean" things, and God's invitation for Peter to change his belief about what was clean and unclean (Acts 10).
There are many instances where the faithful in an established religion either had difficulty accepting, or refused to accept those outside their definition, their particular understanding, of religion. There were the outcasts who responded to Jesus: the tax collector disciple, the Samaritan woman at the well, the leper who desired healing, the woman pouring expensive oil over Jesus' feet, and Zaccheus. Jesus didn't turn aside. He engaged each in the way that was most healing for each. The Bible speaks of those excluded in society being included in God's family. God's love reaches out to include those exiled by their society. There are also numerous times God has challenged us to expand our definition of faith.
John Fortunato's excellent book, Embracing the Exile, explores how gay and lesbian Christians can use the "exile" experienced in so many parts of our culture as an opportunity for spiritual growth. The exclusion from human institutions of work, church, and families exposes the myth that we are in control of life, that if one works hard, and does the right things, one can be in charge, get more power, more money, more rewards.
The rejection experienced by gay and lesbian folk is not just a rejection of behavior, like a troublesome adolescence or difficulties with parents or job, but a rejection of a basic part of identity, the way a person is.
The resolution of problems open to nongay people is not open to gay/lesbian people: once one's homosexual (or bisexual) orientation is disclosed, certain options of work are closed, no matter how hard one works (such as ordained ministry and teaching). One can never be integrated into the "mythic system."
And so lesbians and gays and their families must go deeper in faith, in claiming a place in the broadest family of all, the family of God.
This kind of depth of faith is illustrated by this passage from Fortunato's book:
When you are sitting and looking into the face of the mystery, when you are overcome with awe and gratitude and joy for for the overwhelming everythingness of God, and you feel like an empty vessel being filled to overflowing with love, the sexual preference of the person next to you is just nothing. It doesn't matter at all. What matters is that you are both there, looking, worshiping, and being loved by love. Anything else is a distraction. (p. 108)
When we can be faithful members of the family of God, our concern with sexual orientation will take a rightful place as just one of the many facets of the uniqueness of another member of the family of God.
What would it look like for a church to be this kind of family? It would mean a sensitivity to a member having difficulty, without rushing either to judge or "fix" the problem. It would mean listening actively, sensitively, and lovingly for the person to grow in their faith a bit more. It would mean a deep level of acceptance of each member at their own particular point in their faith journey. It would mean actively looking for the gifts and graces of each person and actively recognizing and appreciating them, not for what the person does or doesn't do, but for who the person is. It would mean actively seeking to learn about the differences among people and how the Gospel can be spoken to them. It would mean learning about the different stages of faith development, so that folks could be met where they are.
In order for our churches to be more this kind of family, we might have to challenge some of the assumptions our culture has about the place of faith, religion and spirituality. We would have to challenge assumptions about the diversity of the gift of sexuality and its expression. But these things are already part of what is the best in our tradition, and things that express the best of our United Methodist spirit.
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References
Fortunato, John. Embracing the Exile; Healing Journeys of Gay Christians. Seabury, 1982.
Switzer, David K. and Shirley A. Parents of the Homosexual. Westmnister, 1980.
Fairchild, Betty and Nancy Hayward. Now That You Know: What Every Parent Should Know About Homosexuality. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1979.
Clark, Don. Loving Someone Gay. Celestial Arts.
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(Ministry in Human Sexuality, Inc. [was] a counseling, education, and advocacy agency in Lincoln, Nebraska, dealing with a wide range of sexual issues, including homosexuality. Ben Roe [was] a United Methodist minister, pastoral counselor, educator, and Executive Director of "M.H.S.")
[MHS was active from 1981-1988 in Lincoln.]