Same Sex Marriage and the Church

Though I am an untrained theologian who has not studied the church fathers on this subject, I have found myself often in discussions with people over the issue of homosexuality. It's an important issue within the Church, and (at the request of a friend) I'm going to post what I typically say in response to questions about why the Church doesn't allow practicing homosexuals to commune / marry. This is my opinion. That is to say - it makes sense to me, but I'm not confident enough to say that it is "the" Orthodox reply to this question. My conclusions are Orthodox, however, and perhaps that is in some way sufficient.

I struggle, as I'm sure many do, in the way I phrase my perspective because I want to avoid communicating any hatred or denigration of those who have same-sex attraction (whether they follow through on that attraction or not). It is a sensitive issue, full of difficult and powerful emotions - an issue which can strike to the core of people's identity (though sexual orientation strikes me as an odd source for one's identity; perhaps that's part of the problem?).

In general, if asked, I say "I don't believe the Church should perform sacramental marriages for people of the same gender." I refrain from saying anything about accusing homosexuals of deviance or sin, as this issue requires a more nuanced delicacy to avoid coming across as hateful and judgmental. If asked why, I generally ask if the person has some time and an open mind, then launch into something like the following...

Our theology of marriage begins, as all things do, with the Holy Trinity. We profess that God is love in His essence - love within Himself. This, however, cannot be a narcissistic sort of selfish love of one monad unto Himself. Rather, as we are called to imitate that love, we know that love to be other-centric and self-denying. This is manifested in the great mystery of the Triune God. He is Father loving Son loving Spirit. While there is hierarchy in the relationships (Father as fountainhead of divinity) they are co-equal and of the same nature, fully God. One God, Three Persons, Perfect Hierarchy, Perfect Love. Notice also that it within the Trinity each person has their distinctness - they own thus-ness.

We must understand this love to have any hope of understanding human love. We were made for relationship - specifically relationship which is ascetic (that is, teaches us to be other-centered and thus helps break down our own ego). Furthermore, we were made for relationships that, while having hierarchy, are so perfect in their love that the hierarchy fades to the background and we see functional (and true, thanks to the perfection of this love) equality. Human love can never achieve the fullness of union that the Divine Love has by essence, but we can begin to imitate it. This is what it means for us to become one with one another. Marriage is the divine sacrament in which these principles of love find fulfillment as an icon of the Divine Love. This principle does not have any direct bearing on homosexuality in the Church, though it does set up the sacramental nature of marriage. As all sacraments, it is a real symbol, not an empty one. It makes manifest - makes incarnate - that which it represents. At its best, marriage makes the Trinity accessible to the world.

There is another divine relationship, however, to which marriage is also an icon: that of Christ to His Church. Ephesians directly relates that to marriage. We have, as prophecy, the words in Genesis that speak of a man leaving His father (in heaven) and His mother (on earth) to join with His wife that the two may become one flesh. This certainly speaks of earthly marriage, but you can see how it prophecies and finds fulfillment in Christ.

At what point do we understand ourselves to have become one flesh with our Lord and Bridegroom? Well, He became man in the Incarnation, joining the divine and human natures so that we may participate in His divine energies. We also enter, iconically, into His death and resurrection (and thus the energies of His resurrection - His saving grace) by baptism. We recieve the grace of His forgiving hand in confession. We recieve the Spirit - even as He had it (as a man) - in our personal Pentecost: Chrismation. Chrismation makes us into "little annointed ones" - we become little Christs. Those who are ordained become icons of Christ in His role as priest, revealing in the liturgy the things of heaven, serving the faithful as Christ served His disciples.

The fullness of our oneness with Christ, however, in this lifetime, is fulfilled in the eucharist. This is the eros love of this wedding between Christ and Church - the foretaste and full realization (for those who have eyes to see) of the feast of the bridegroom. Certainly we look forward to the 2nd coming, but the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand today - Christ came to save this world - and the eucharist is our full participation in that. Here, our Lord comes to us in the flesh, and we take the body of our Lord into ourselves, and we become one flesh with Him. If there is no physical union, there is no marriage (hence why we still call Mary the bride unwedded). We are Christ's bride. We are one with Him.

It is that physical-eucharistic womanhood that so clearly ties the icon of marriage to the male-female relationship for me. It's about more than leadership within a relationship (since the Christian leadership is really about self-death and service anyway). It's about our way of loving Christ (submission in voluntary love) and our way of become one with Christ physically (by recieving His body into ourself).

Marriage is, therefore, an icon of this love. Here we have the man, who is to be like Christ to His wife - so loving of her as to give the totality of his life to her benefit. He is to give her all his dreams, all his hopes. To make his life about her life. To serve and not to demand. To die to himself. This is to be done no matter what she does in return, for if we demanded that our wives reciprocated we would be hypocrites. Christ Himself has the worst bride possible - think of all the sins we commit! We must thank God that He has provided us with such a model of a husband, for we, as a bride, must be a hideous harlot and adultress, yet He dies for us.

Here also we have the woman - the one who recieves the body of her lord in that act of vulnerability and love, who embraces the totality of who he is and submits to him. That is both a physical and emotional recieving, embracing, and submitting. Here we have hierarchy, but hierarchy which, when lived out with the love that is the Divine Love, fades into non-existence and becomes perfect love.

Here is one level on which homosexuality is "wrong" (or spiritually unhealthy / not-an-icon-of-the-kingdom). Two men cannot represent Christ and the Church. The Church is uniquely feminine in its noblest sense. To take that from her is to distort the image, indeed to rob women of their womenhood. Furthermore, Christ is uniquely male (in so much that He became a boy), and though God is in essence gender neutral (by human standards) within the context of this typology, God is the male. Two males or two females distorts the image and is, therefore, not the sacrament of marriage. With no sacrament, there is to be no sex. Therefore, since the Church cannot marry two men or two women (as they don't form the correct and given icon of Christ and the Church) two men or two women ought not to have sex outside of that marriage. Since there is no communion of those having sex outside of marriage, there is no communion for those living in homosexual relationships.

Another level exists to this, though. The eucharist is not just unitive in nature. It is life producing. We have Christ born in us by the grace of the sacrament of eucharist, and by that birth we become more Christ like. In this, again, we have a woman as our model (for in so much as we are the Church, we are feminine). Mary, the Theotokos, is our model and hope. She, by the "yes" she gave to the incarnation, became one with the Holy Spirit, and by that union and at the good will of the Father, she bore the Son physically in her womb.

She BORE Christ and had Christ BORN from her. By this union, she became more Christ like. She is truly the icon of the bride of God! In this way, she is an icon of the Church.

Homosexual union cannot produce life - not naturally, anyway - but heterosexual union (generally) can. It fulfills the eucharistic Christ-Church icon to its fullest. And by giving birth to children (the prayers for which, by the way, are all over the marriage sacrament - most who see an Orthodox wedding are suprised by how much focus is paid to having children) we learn, again, to be self-sacrificing in our love. It becomes about the child, not about 'me.' This again, goes back to our understanding of Divine Love within the Trinity. Because homosexual union can never produce such a miracle, it cannot recieve the prayers of the sacrament of marriage and, once again, becomes sex outside of marriage. Remember that for the Orthodox, the prayers of the Liturgy are considered fertile ground for theology - the enshrine the tradition - if anyone doubts that the Church doesn't marry people of the same gender, read the marriage sacrament. It would make ZERO sense.

Now, what about those who cannot have children from within hetero-sexual relationships. The first point about how man-woman = Christ-Church still suffices on its own.

However, I also accept the idea of the miraculous births God accomplished for the infirtile. It fits so perfectly into this typological understanding. Who is it that produces life in us? Well, it may be explanable biologically, but ultimately it is a miracle of God. The "miraculous" births remind us of that. Keep in mind that Mary was celibate, yet was a perfect icon of marriage to God. There are celibate men and women in the Church for whom she is an icon of their life (along with John the Baptist and Christ Himself). Some marriages choose to live as brother and sister (St. John of Krondstadt did this). I think the principle is this: the marriage sacrament, if we are going to make general rules about it, cannot be between man and man or woman and woman because no possibility of producing new life exists. Because it is possible (even if unlikely) between man and woman, the church can marry them. Beyond that, it is up to God.

To put it another way, the Church, in the sacraments, is the immediate joining of this world to the New Kingdom. It is the invasion of this fallen world with that perfect one. In this sense, it is of itself a miracle that we have sacraments. They bring us into a unique state of being - into contact with Christ and His Heaven.That said, I think the iconography of the Church, as a window into Heaven, is helpful here. You'll notice that most physical infirmities are absent from icons (unless those icons depict a specific historical event, in which case they aren't so much looking at the present state of Heaven as at Heaven's [real and present] remembrance of a key event of salvation). In heaven, such products of the fall as physical ailments will be absent. Human mortality will be no more.

The Church is, therefore, eschatalogical in it's approach to the sacraments, and, in being eschatalogical it is deeply optimistic. The sacraments are acts of hope. So when we marry a man and a woman, we do so because ontologically - in an unfallen world - they'd be able to produce life from their iconically eucharistic union. That is to say, we don't take into account the failures of the fallen world when partaking of sacraments precisely because those sacraments are not the matter of the fallen world. It is precisely by refusing to allow the evil and suffering of this world to compromise, in ANY way, our actions or eschatalogical optimism, that we imitate Chirst on the cross.

In other words, we must look at the potential marriage couple from the perspective of the Kingdom (Without the lense of the fall) and see them as man and woman, capable of producing life. From that, it is up to God. The fall is indeed real, so when the sacrament is complete, perhaps there will be no children. But in our eschatalogical optimism and kingdom-oriented view we don't see them this way. By nature, man and woman can produce life together, where as people of the same gender cannot.

Hope that helps!

In Christ,
Macarius