Marriage for All!

Yesterday President Obama announced that he had evolved further and now openly supports gay marriage.  I may be paraphrasing wrongly, of course.  I've now likely heard paraphrases of the paraphrases.

My heart sank, not because I'm unhappy with his evolution, but because I knew that his announcement will bring out the Christians that I'd like to not have associated with me or my beliefs.

You know the ones:  the ones that always seem to be photographed when they look angry and hateful. If, as the old song from the 1970's is right, they will know we are Christians by our love, we won't be seeing much of that in evidence in the Christians who are going to get air time in the next few days.

Sigh.

I would like to see people who would talk about marriage as a sacrament, as a way we see a visible sign of God's invisible grace.  Why should we deny our homosexual brothers and sisters that sacrament?

I know, I know, I'm a Lutheran, and my church doesn't see marriage as a sacrament.  My church is wrong.

Nothing else has helped me understand God's love for me the way my spouse's love for me has.  I make mistakes, and he forgives me.  He forgives me, even though he knows I will likely make the same mistakes again and again.  I do the same for him.  He sees me--the best me, the worst me--as I truly am, and he loves me.  Largely, he loves me not because of my anything I might say or do to convince him, but because he knows me.

Yes, my vision of Christians invading the airwaves to talk about marriage as sacrament will not happen.  I understand how news coverage works.  Angry Christians make better TV than grace-soaked Christians.  Alas.

Maybe we could talk about how we, as a nation, talk a good talk about the sanctity of marriage, but our actions belie our blathering talk.  Look at our divorce rates, our domestic violence rates, and then come back to me for a discussion of the sanctity of marriage.

I hope that conservatives like David Brooks get more airtime.  He wrote one of the better essays about marriage that I've ever read.  He says, "Few of us work as hard at the vocation of marriage as we should. But marriage makes us better than we deserve to be. Even in the chores of daily life, married couples find themselves, over the years, coming closer together, fusing into one flesh. Married people who remain committed to each other find that they reorganize and deepen each other's lives. They may eventually come to the point when they can say to each other: 'Love you? I am you.'''

He doesn't use the term "sacrament"--after all, he's writing for the secular The New York Times.  But he's talking in sacramental terms nonetheless.

He begins to conclude his piece by saying, "The conservative course is not to banish gay people from making such commitments. It is to expect that they make such commitments. We shouldn't just allow gay marriage. We should insist on gay marriage. We should regard it as scandalous that two people could claim to love each other and not want to sanctify their love with marriage and fidelity."

Amen to that!  May it be so, for all of us, and sooner, rather than later.

Who Is a Minister?

I'm still puzzling over the recent Supreme Court decision about Cheryl Perrich, the teacher in the Lutheran school, which you can read about in this article from The Washington Post.  I'm most puzzled that the female teacher in question was considered a minister in her Lutheran school--especially once I found out that the school is part of the Lutheran Church--Missouri Synod tradition.

Why did this fact make me take notice?  The Lutheran Church--Missouri Synod does not ordain women.  More traditional LCMS churches don't even let women read from the Bible in the pulpit.  Yet the school claimed that the teacher was a minister?

True, her training went far further than that experienced by many teachers:  "Perich joined the school as a “lay teacher” in 1999 and then underwent extensive religious training. She became a 'called' teacher, expected to perform her job 'according to the Word of God and the confessional standards of the Evangelical Lutheran Church as drawn from the Sacred Scriptures.'”

I can't shake the feeling that there's more to this story, but I must confess I'm more interested in the Human Resources side of the story.  The teacher left on medical disability leave for over a year; not surprisingly, the school did not hold her job for her, and as I understand the law, the school was not required to do so.  The Post reports:  "When she threatened to sue to get her job back, she was fired for 'insubordination and disruptive behavior.'”  Why was she not simply let go for dereliction of her teaching duty when she didn't return from medical leave?

It's hard for me to see the discrimination here, but like I said, there may be more to the story.  Did she ask for reasonable accommodation?  Did the school take pity on her and try to keep her employed, only to find themselves baffled at a worker threatening a lawsuit?

The courts ruled unanimously, which makes me think that the case was fairly clear-cut in First Amendment terms.  The school called the teacher a minister, the teacher disagreed, the Supreme Court has just decided that she was a church leader.  Will this case have far-reaching implications?

Some of the Justices don't think so:  "Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Elena Kagan wrote separately to make clear that they do not think the term 'minister' is central to courts determining who is covered by the exemption. Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists rarely use the title, they wrote."

So, will later cases revolve around how a minister is different from a chaplain, a pastor, a priest?  Will the Justices need to think about church founders like Martin Luther, who coined the term "the Priesthood of all believers"? 

The newspaper article points to all sorts of inconsistencies, again making me think there's more to the story.  The teacher "claimed a special ministerial housing allowance on her taxes."  And again, I come back to the idea that the LCMS doesn't recognize women as ministers, which makes me wonder what the school is thinking.

It also makes me wonder if the Supreme Court thought about that fact.  If you don't ordain women, can you claim the exemption that the LCMS school claimed?  I would say no, although I would support the school in its claim to have done no wrong, based on what I read in the article.

I wish I could come up with some snazzy conclusion that would tie up all the loose ends in this blog post.  I wish that writing this blog post had helped me clarify all the points which left me confused, but that hasn't happened.  I remain where I was at the beginning, wondering about all the parts of the story that haven't been covered.