The Plan B God – Dr. Mark Achtemeier
This essay has been excerpted from an October 27, 2012 address and edited for ecclesio.com.
The issue of gay marriage now rocks our culture and our politics, generating new headlines almost daily… At a time like this, it seems both odd and out of character for the PC(USA) to be presently keeping silent.
…The cost of keeping silence on this issue is quietly present in the legions of anguished souls who have been driven away from our congregations, away from Christian faith, and sometimes away from life itself by the unrelenting personal condemnation they hear in the church’s proclamation.
But there is another, equally grievous cost to our silence: Our church’s quiet complicity in the status quo now serves to undermine the credibility of the Gospel.
… While the PC(USA) keeps silence, other churches across the land loudly proclaim that their opposition to gay marriage is deeply rooted in the Gospel and the Scripture. And because of this, broad reaches of American culture have become convinced that the Christian Gospel is something hateful.
… Not only have our churches turned a deaf ear to the voices of gay people, we have also shut our ears very selectively to the voice of our own theological tradition…
When Martin Luther and John Calvin went back to the Bible to purify the life and witness of the Church, their conclusions included the strong conviction that it was unfaithful and cruel to impose vows of mandatory celibacy upon whole classes of people… The Reformers were not saying that sexual self-control is an unrealistic ideal… The celibacy question is not about waiting till you’re married; it’s about whether you ever hope to get married at all. The Reformers condemned the church of their day for requiring priests, monks and nuns to forever renounce hope of falling in love and getting married. Such requirements, they declared, were spiritually harmful and biblically unfaithful.
And yet our churches of today, heirs of the Reformation, turn a deaf ear to our own heritage and glibly proclaim that of course it is proper to require lifelong celibacy of people as long as the people in question are gay.
This theological amnesia is highly selective. We of course reject celibacy requirements for heterosexual clergy…. Try suggesting sometime that straight people who’ve been divorced should embrace celibacy and not seek to remarry again…
In times like these there is an urgent need for lights shining in the darkness, for voices raised against the prevailing winds of church culture, for biblical proclamation of the Gospel that is good news for all people, gay and straight persons alike.
… This is not a call for the church to adjust its proclamation according to the prejudices of popular culture. It is a call for the church to be courageous in proclaiming the truth we have been given, because the long-term cost of silence is a discredited Christianity and a culture closed off to the Gospel…
Our affirmation and celebration of gay marriage is a consequence of the Bible’s testimony and not its contradiction:
Our question is not whether there is a standard pattern for marriage in the Bible. Arguably there is. Our question is whether the existence of that standard pattern means that God automatically rejects or condemns lives that are ordered differently from that pattern.
We have no evidence that Jesus uttered a single word about same-gender relationships over the course of his ministry. But in a debate with the Pharisees about divorce, Jesus does reference the Genesis 2 statement about a man leaving his father and mother and clinging to his wife.[i] Some critics of gay marriage claim that this reference constitutes Jesus’ own endorsement of heterosexual marriage as God’s exclusively authorized pattern for human life.
But there is a bit of irony in using Jesus’ citation of Genesis 2 to argue for heterosexual marriage as the only acceptable pattern for human life, because this quote comes to us from the lips of a Savior whose own life does not conform to the pattern!
…This is significant, because classical Christian teaching about Jesus insists that in him we see not only “the image of the invisible God,”[ii] but also an image of perfected humanity… It is very hard to claim that the heterosexual union of male and female in marriage is the only acceptable pattern of God’s will for human beings. The Savior’s own life departs from the pattern. So does the Apostle Paul’s…
God clearly chooses to bless a great many people through the ordinary, “Plan-A” route of faithful, committed marriage between a man and a woman. The question before us today is whether God might also allow for alternative, “Plan-B” routes like same-gender marriage to lead to that same destination of divine blessing.
… In Hebrews 13 the apostolic author is trying to help Jesus’ followers make sense of the persecution they are facing from the religious establishment of their day. The Apostle points out that Jesus’ sacrifice, like the sin offerings of old, took place outside the camp: our redemption took place outside Jerusalem, outside the temple, outside the entire structure of the religious establishment prescribed in the Law of Moses.
Note this carefully: God’s redemption of the world through the cross of Christ is a “Plan-B” arrangement that stands dramatically apart from God’s ordinary “Plan-A” religious establishment of the Holy Temple and the Holy Priesthood in the Holy City of Jerusalem.
The early church, the community of Jesus’ followers, is a Plan-B people who have gone to Jesus outside the camp, outside the ordinary structures, outside the religious establishment of the Jerusalem Temple… We have recognized there is no Plan-A structure or arrangement or institution that can match the blessing God has showered on the world through the ultimate Plan-B arrangement of the cross…
This passage from Hebrews is no isolated instance. The entire story of the Bible is one of God bringing blessing outside the ordinary structures of Plan-A arrangements and expectations.
Plan-A at the creation was for Adam and Eve to continue in loving and faithful obedience to God, and to fill the earth with their loving and faithful and obedient offspring. But … Plan-A wound up on the rocks, and from that point on, the entire witness of the Bible is the story of God bringing blessing and redemption and salvation to a fallen world that stands outside the pattern of God’s original intention.
Plan-A expectations would assume that the chosen people would arise from an attractive and vigorous young couple who could get the clan started with a large number of strong and healthy offspring. God ostentatiously underscores the Plan-B nature of the world’s redemption by bringing forth the chosen people from Sarah and Abraham: an infertile, elderly couple who are long past the years of childbearing.
Plan-A expectations would assume that the chosen nation would become strong and prosperous and independent. Yet Plan-A winds up on the rocks as God’s chosen people fall into slavery and captivity in the land of Egypt. The whole story of the Exodus is God’s execution of an alternative Plan-B in order to bring blessing.
In fact, clinging too tightly to our Plan-A expectations can blind us to the working of the God of the Bible. In the time of Christ, the scribes and Pharisees knew perfectly well from their reading of Scripture that the Messiah would rally the armies of Israel and cast off the shackles of Roman occupation. Clinging too tightly to these Plan-A expectations made many of them completely blind to God’s actual redemption of the world through the Plan-B appearance of a suffering and crucified Messiah…
In popular piety Mary’s virginity is a symbol of purity, and rightly so. But … young Mary is an unwed bride-to-be who turns up pregnant long before her marriage is consummated. A dark cloud of scandal and immorality lies thick upon the landscape of her life, and that cloud threatens to turn lethal: Levitical law prescribes death-by-stoning as the penalty for betrayal of a husband-to-be.
… Joseph decides not to press charges, but to send Mary off to fend for herself,[iii] most likely into a life of either begging or prostitution.
The Gospel of Matthew tells us that an angel intervened before Joseph could carry out his plan, but could you imagine a more striking sign of God’s intention to identify with the sexually marginalized? God comes to us, the eternal Logos assumes human flesh, deliberately and dramatically… and scandalously… outside the norms and structures of Plan-A marriage.
… Let us celebrate how the Bible from front to back testifies to a God who delights in bringing life and blessing into situations that stand outside the camp: outside the regular norms and bounds of majority expectations. Let us take encouragement from the Bible as we boldly raise our voices in joyful witness to the life and blessing we see actually poured out upon the covenanted partnerships of our gay and lesbian friends. And let us take the Bible’s testimony as assurance that we stand on the solid rock of Christ and his Word when we acknowledge and celebrate the blessings of our Plan-B God…
Dr. Mark Achtemeier is a Presbyterian minister, writer and theologian residing in Dubuque, Iowa. He may be contacted at mark.achtemeier@gmail.com. This is an excerpt of a keynote address delivered by Dr. Mark Achtemeier at a regional conference of the Covenant Network of Presbyterians in Minneapolis on October27, 2012. The full address can be found at http://covnetpres.org/2012/10/the-plan-b-god/. A second lecture, “The Redemption of Our Bodies,” continued the argument at the regional conference in Kansas City on November 16, 2012; that address is at http://covnetpres.org/2012/11/the-redemption-of-our-bodies/. Both addresses will be part of a forthcoming book by Dr. Achtemeier on same-sex marriage and the Bible.
Copyright 2012, P. Mark Achtemeier. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
[i] Mat. 19:4-6
[ii] Col. 1:15
[iii] Mat. 1:19
© 2012 P. Mark Achtemeier. All Rights Reserved.