Family Values

by Louie Crew

Beware of hetero idolatry. It too easily infects the very language Christians use.

Very early on, Judaism contrasted radically with many rival religions in which gods were vaunted for their heterosexual prowess. Yahweh commanded that we make no such graven images.

The Garden of Eden story is the locus not of Original Righteousness, but Original Sin.

If God had wanted to make an icon out of heterosexual marriage, God would not have chosen an unwed girl to mother Jesus.

If God had wanted to make an icon out of heterosexual marriage, Jesus would have married and had at least a dozen children, like the patriarchs of old. That's much less ambiguous than a bachelor Jesus spiking the punch on third day of heavy drinking at Cana. We never hear any more about that couple.

Jesus once asked, "Who are my mother and my brothers?" He dismissed the appeals of his blood kin and proclaimed instead that his real kin are those who do God's will.

For Jesus, families of intent are normative, not genetic families.

God does not beget us; God adopts us. If adoption is second-class, so is our Faith.

Jesus asserted that if we care for family more than we care for him, we are not worthy to be his disciples.

St. Paul viewed marriage as good only for lust control.

For me one of the lowest points of the recent discourse of the Episcopal Church on sexuality was during the 1995 Righter trial when a dissenting bishop spent several minutes describing in detail as the image of righteousness his sexual coupling with his wife. Most in the trial room seemed to be ducking their heads and looking at the floor in embarrassment. I doubt we would get many contributors to preserve that icon in a stained glass window for the cathedral in Delaware.

I value my own marriage immensely. It has been a means of grace for both of us, and several others say for them as well. Yet please do not make an icon out of it, nor out of heterosexual marriage.

Christianity is not about procreation, but regeneration. It is through the Eucharist, not through coitus, that God makes of one blood all the peoples of the earth.

I see nothing grace-filled or charitable, nothing that builds us up as the community of God, in our constantly checking out the plumbing and saying "normative, not-normative, normative, not-normative......" That's reminiscent of a temple CPA checking out the items in Samson's tote bag to confirm his claims that he had killed Philistines, not Jews.

We have much better news and need to be about the business of telling it to absolutely everybody.

[COVENANT, Number 18, October 2004]

Dr Louie Crew is professor emeritus of English, Rutgers University, and a lay member of the Executive Council of ECUSA