Gay Marriage and The Flip Flopper In Chief

No, this isn't about Obama.

It's about God.

We Jesus folk know that God is unchanging and eternal, of course.    God's Law...which can't be meaningfully parsed out from God's self...remains constant, sure, and absolute.  God never, ever, ever changes God's mind.

So we say.  It's true.  Up to a point.

Because that's not quite what the Bible describes.  God does change God's mind.  When Israel was whining in the desert, and God had seriously had it up to here, and was so going to smite them, Moses persuaded God to change.  If someone is wrong with God, showing injustice and predatory disdain for others and an unwillingness to show grace to the broken and the stranger, God is perfectly willing to change God's mind about that person, too.  So long as they change, that is.

God's relationship to us is not fixed, and God's attitude towards us is not unwavering.  To argue that it is would be fundamentally in opposition to the Biblical witness to the nature of our Creator.  But what makes for or stirs that change?  What causes the shifts we perceive in the relationship we have with God, and in God's attitude towards us?

The answer to that question, if we're being honest, is that God changes God's mind towards us based on how we live in covenant.  The key to change in our relationship to God is covenant.  If we're living in covenant relationship with God and one another, then God's attitude towards us is one of grace.   If not, then all is not copacetic.  But change in the character of that relationship is entirely possible.  Mutual change in our relationship with God is, in fact, the entire point of Christian faith.

So what does this have to do with gay marriage?   I mean, doesn't the Bible say that being gay is an abomination?  Torah does say that, I'll admit.  But given that the same term in Torah is applied to remarriage, popcorn shrimp, buying a dog, bacon double cheeseburgers, and jeans for women, I'm not sure that quite cuts it if we're trying to get to the heart of the matter.

If we're coming at this from a Jesus perspective, the heart of the matter is living into the Great Commandment, which is itself the highest principle of Torah.  You know, loving God with heart and mind and soul, and neighbor as self.   This is the highest order principle of our relationship with God, and it radically defines every other moral and ethical demand or expectation.

If this is the lens through which we understand God's covenantal attitude towards us...and it must be, if we are to follow Jesus...then what does this mean relative to God's relationship to same-sex marriage?  From what we know about God from this covenantal foundation, why might this...um...cause an "evolution" in God's mind?

Well, it does represent a real and significant shift in that "homosexual lifestyle" that some folks are so eager to go on and on about.   That lifestyle has been one forced deep into marginality and shadow by culture, and places of hiddenness and shadow can create some unpleasant psychological and spiritual dynamics.

Those dynamics are not manifest in the relationships gays and lesbians are now seeking in both church and culture.  Those relationships are of a very different character.  They are, in point of fact, covenant relationships.  When gays and lesbians seek to live in open, respectful, loving, and mutually committed relationships with one another, this is a new thing culturally.  When those open relationships are seen and understood as worthy of being blessed and guided by the love of God as expressed in a faith community, this is also a new thing culturally.

Covenant relationship is, in essence, the core of what gays and lesbians are seeking, both culturally and within the communities of faith that welcome them.   So here we see a change of life, a movement towards embracing precisely the dynamics of existence that are at the foundation of right relationship with God.

Why, then, given that most fundamental understanding of how God changes in response to us, should we not expect that God would not joyously flop the doors of grace open to such a new thing?

Flip Flops

As the campaign season gets closer and closer and...wait, did it ever stop?   I'm not sure it did.

Anyway, I've started to see a recurrence of one of the things I find most profoundly irritating in current political discourse.

That thing is the term "flip-flopper," which surfaced first in the 2004 election, and just kept on trucking through the 2008 season.

The concept behind this attack is simple, as simple as the binary operation of a microprocessor.  Either yer fer sumthin', or yer agin it.  And if you were fer sumthin', then changed yer mind?  That makes you a flip-flopper.

A flip-flopper must be someone who lacks integrity.  A flip-flopper must be governed by political expediency.  A flip-flopper can't be trusted.  They are not a true believer.

Let's take a look out there.  There's a site devoted to Mitt Romney's flip flops.  Rick Perry is a flip flopper.  Herman Cain is a flip flopper.  Michele Bachmann?  A flip flopper.   Ron Paul?  Amazingly enough, even the eternally consistent, never-varies or wavers, teeth sunk into libertarianism like a bulldog with a grudge Ron Paul, even he is accused of flip flopping.

And I'm not even going to get started googling Obama.

But here's the rub.  Flip flopping means two things.  First, it can mean the willingness to compromise, to move towards consensus and a middle path with someone who disagrees with you about how to attain a goal.  In that sense, what the blogosphere and talk-radio shoutocracy proclaims as flippity-flopping is absolutely necessary to the functioning of a democratic republic.

Second, and more significantly, it's the willingness to change your mind based on new evidence, or the persuasiveness of another's position.  If you can't ever change your mind, and cannot be persuaded to modify or evolve or adjust your thinking, then you aren't being consistent.   You're being inert, unaware, and intellectually lazy.   You barely qualify as a sentient being, let alone the enlightened, thoughtful citizen you need to be to participate in a pluralist democracy.

That bothers me as a citizen who cares about the future of our republic.

But it bothers me more as a Christian.

One of the central concepts underlying the Christian faith is the idea of repentance.  You do something.  You realize that something is not the thing you should be doing.  You change your mind, and you change your life.   Repentance is, for many Jesus people, a way of life.  You don't just fix yourself once and be done with it.  You are continually correcting, as you miss the mark and turn your being back on the course towards grace.

You can't once be lost, and now be found, be blind and now you see, without flip-flopping.

Sigh.  I'll just have to grit my teeth and bear it, I suppose.