News from the Culture Wars . . .

We are still in the culture wars. At the last General Assembly meeting, we pulled back once again on defining homosexuality as an unordainable offence. G-6.0106b was taken out of the Constitution, pending the Presbytery fights. Every GA, this bit of our Constitution comes under fire once again. We don’t do gay and lesbian weddings, we don’t ordain ‘practicing’ (read: sexually active) homosexuals.

In the meantime, our conservative brothers and sisters in the evangelical churches and more conservative Reformed churches are boasting powerful growth while we bleed congregations.

Well, here’s the thing, are we cutting edge or are we cultural victims? As cutting edge, are we the churches fighting the battle that will eventually engulf the whole of Christendom? Are we fighting for Scriptural interpretation of homosexual behavior because we are the church that is called by God to lead that fight?

As cultural victims, are we so bogged down in the culture wars over the issue of how we deal with the current ‘them’? At the moment, people branded as ‘homosexual’ are ‘them’.

Here is what makes me angry, defining any group of people as ‘them’. I think it is a greater sin to do so then the sins that lead us to define ‘them’ in the first place.

Something both sides might agree on is the remnant motif happening in our church. This is a motif found in Scripture repeatedly. God’s people are punished for transgressing the covenant and a remnant of the faithful return to start fresh. As cultural victims, we might see the remnant of the faithful finally coming out as the ‘victors’ in keeping ‘them’ out.

As cutting edge, we might be the remnant that begins to build the church up once more to include sexual orientation as a blessing of God, not a curse.

A satirical final thought: Jane Spahr was acquitted of charges that she performed a homosexual marriage ritual because, according to the denomination, marriage is by definition heterosexual, so it cannot happen between people of the same gender. I see that application of Genesis where man and woman, God created us. The second part of that command is procreation as the reason for sexual activity. If we are going to be rigorous, if marriage cannot happen between two men or two women, can we really define sex as happening between two men or two women? It cannot lead to procreation.