I'm looking for the "circle above the line" when it comes to the debate over the definition of "marriage" in this country. Anyone speaking against it is labelled a bigot, and anyone in favor of it is typecast as a liberal. There's not much of a middle ground - you're either for it or against it. Anyone who's "undecided" and in the middle is probably more likely to not care, but not enough to oppose it very forcefully.

Please hold judgment on me until the bitter end.

Is it wrong to allow people to marry if they're the same gender? Yes. Is it wrong to condone such things going on in spite of laws forbidding such? Yes. Is it wrong for me to sit idly by while this goes on? No, and yes. But the reasons aren't "typical" for me, and I'm still discovering more about myself and what God's created, so it's almost always a work-in-progress.

What is "sin" in the first place? Simply put: it's anything that's outside of God's boundaries, God's control, God's discretion. Someone might have negative connotations to those words, and that's unfortunate. There's a real sense of freedom when we're inside those bounds; and we've proven as a race that it's pretty chaotic outside the fences. It appears that from the created order of things, God intended for one man to righteously pursue, or welcome as an unblemished gift, one unblemished and complementing woman, equally pursuing and equally growing in righteousness. That appears to be the goal, the pinnacle of how it should work out; that's how the pieces and parts have been arranged physically, socially and culturally. Inside of the bounds of God's sovereign discretion, this is how it's supposed to happen. Anything else falls short and misses the mark.

And the Bible is full of information on how we've missed the mark. Men had many wives (many mothers-in-law?), married sisters, raped women, etc. There's polygamy and adultery and incest all over the place. But it still looks like, through all of that, the ideal of one man and one woman gets held up above the rest.

It is for that reason that I felt I needed to write this post. I write for myself, and I needed to know where I stood. Because it's more than just saying that gay marriages should be outlawed and condemned - it usually goes beyond those types of easy answers and stances, doesn't it. It's wrong for a man to marry a man, or for a woman to marry a woman, because it's outside of those boundaries that God has built into creation and that we habitually ignore and jump across. Beyond that, the hard part is to also stand and say that marriage itself, between a man and a woman, is shortchanged and railroaded in travesty all over this culture, too. Divorce and adultery and abuse have all been stirred into the pot, and have led more to the demise of the marital outlook than anything else.

If this is an issue today, it's an issue because we've allowed it to be an issue. On some front, we as Christians have not lived out the kingdom life, have not lifted up our families and our wives and our husbands. Men haven't loved their wives selflessly as Christ is loving us, and wives have not submitted to the Lord or the the mutual relationships in their own homes.

We are as much to blame as anyone, and when we take our stand against homosexual marriage, we must also stand strong against the deterioration of marriage that's generally rampant around us.
- posted by Rick @ 15:35