However, what is becoming clearer to me is this. That we, who take it upon ourselves to judge as misguided, misdirected and participating in sin those who advocate and live in same-sex partnerships, need to be wholly aware of the very high standard of sexual morality and purity to which the Gospel and the Church of God through history calls all of us. Put another way, unless we are both proclaiming and striving to keep the full Christian norm as our standard, goal and ideal, we really have no right to say anything much at all in criticism of the lives and claims of homosexual persons who seek to live in covenanted, faithful unions. Otherwise we run the danger of being hypocrites and of telling others to live by a norm that we do not fully accept for ourselves.
Obviously what I am referring to is the whole Christian approach to sexuality which includes
(a) chastity and purity of soul and body and thus, for example, a limited and careful use of “dating”;
(b) no live-in arrangements for a short or long term by heterosexual couples, for this is a sophisticated form of fornication;
(c) a commitment to marriage as a one-flesh union of two persons, male and female, until parted by death;
(d) divorce as a rare and painful separation and certainly not a right for everyone;
(e) no automatic church marriage for a divorced person if she or he wishes to remarry;
(f) the understanding of being made one flesh in terms of a commitment to procreation in a responsible way;
(g) the rejection of the use of marriage as simply a means to personal sexual fulfillment and companionship through the use of birth control appliances and means, with no intention to procreate;
(h) the rejection of the use of abortion in any form as a means of birth control for this is an aspect of the culture of death.
Now where are we as regular Anglicans, as “orthodox” Evangelicals and as good Anglo-Catholics in this important sphere of personal relations and sexual morality? Generally speaking it would appear that we fall short of the norms both in our teaching and our living. In our forgetting or neglecting of the call to chastity, in our connivance in live-in arrangements for our church members and friends, in our common use of marriage primarily as a means of sexual fulfillment, in our use of birth-control methods to aid this fulfillment, and in the prevalence of abortion on demand in our circles, not to mention the very high divorce rate with many second marriages in our circles (including bishops and clergy), we stand under the judgment of God just as surely as do those “gay” church members whom we believe to be misguided and sinful.
Do we have any right to tell homosexual persons what to be and do except we do so with streams of penitent tears flowing down our face and drowning our voice?
“Let him who is without sin cast the first stone,” is maybe a word in season to all of us.
In conclusion
I do think, and I stand to be corrected, that in the present crisis of Anglicanism over sexual ethics, the reforming groups active now in Episcopalianism and Anglicanism in the West are most probably doomed to failure in their goals of creating a renewed Anglican Way, unless and until they are prepared to face this matter of their own internal practice of sexual relations. Is not the Church called to be the pure Bride of Jesus the Bridegroom? Or put in an altogether different way, Is Gene Robinson really any more off the mark than many of us are if the pure law of God is the judge?
petertoon@msn.com November 17, 2005
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