I was set to preside at a wedding ceremony. Just before its scheduled start, the groom told me, "Mark, we forgot to get a marriage license. But we figured it was more important to be married in the sight of God than to have our marriage recognized by the State of Ohio."
"You figured right," I told him. "Let's get this wedding started!"
Under Ohio law, I'm authorized to perform legally recognized marital unions. As a result, couples can claim all the legal benefits (and be held to all the legal responsibilities) that the state assigns to married couples.
But I tell each couple over whose wedding I preside that I attach little significance to all that legal stuff. It's far more important that couples be truly married than that they be truly legal.
Marriage truly begins when two people, seeking God's help and the prayers of the Church, their families, and their friends, make public commitments to lives of loving faithfulness to one another. (And who renew those commitments, when they fail in them.)
I bring this up because there is a lot of talk these days about whether states should recognize "gay marriages." I want to make two points on this issue.
One: From a Biblical perspective, "gay marriage" is an oxymoron. As one person put it, "God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve." As a Christian pastor, I would not preside over a gay wedding and would fight any mandate to do so, because I believe that it is contrary to the will of God. (For an extensive, scholarly, and sensitive discussion of this subject, you can read the book, The Bible and Homosexual Practice by Robert A. J. Gagnon.)
Two: It bothers me to see how many in the Church approach this question as a political issue, becoming invovled in lobbying. That's just caving in to the world's definition of marriage as a primarily legal or financial arrangement. Christians believe that marriage is a sacred covenant between God, a man, and a woman.
The Church's mission isn't political. The Church's mission is to call people into a personal relationship with the God made known to the world through Jesus Christ, helping people turn from sin and receive new life from Christ.
If the Church focused on its mission, many of the moral issues that are being addressed politically today would not even be political issues.
This may seem like a strange perspective coming from a preacher who once ran for political office. But the Church is not a political organization.
Church political efforts may in fact, reflect a kind of atheism, a lack of trust in God and in God's way of doing things. God's usual method for changing people's minds and hearts isn't the law that political activity seeks to change. Instead, God commissions His followers to go into the world, live authentically for Him, and tell others about the eternal changes God makes in the lives of people who turn from sin and follow Jesus Christ.
That isn't glamorous and it takes time. But it, rather than the coercion that church political activists of both the right and left seek to chisel into state and federal law, is how God changes lives for the better. God persuades us through the faithful love and witness of committed Jesus' followers.
Marriage is a sacred relationship between God, a man, and a woman. Nothing will ever change that, no matter what laws go on the books. (Although, solely as a personal opinion, I have to say that I have no objection to provision being made for civil unions of various kinds if for no other reason than to protect people's civil and economic rights. It's these factors, more than anything else that give the state an interest in people's most intimate relationships, anyway.) But, I believe that if we Christians will strive to be faithful in living for and sharing Christ with others, marriage and every other facet of life in our world will be the better for it.
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