Marriage then is not so much about us and what we seek to do as it is about Jesus and what he has done and is still doing. As a man going through the process of discerning a call to ordination in the Church of England this wasn’t ever an issue for me, even though as one attracted to those of the same sex as myself I never thought that I would ever enter into that matrimonial state. Despite this, my homosexuality was never a bar to ordination and never a hindrance to being a fully baptised member of the church and one privileged to administer its sacraments. Very early on in the ordination process I realised from the Scriptures like countless men and women for generations before me that I had absolutely no God given right to have sex, or even to enter into an erotic relationship of my choosing. Even today a decade later, as I have seen God do amazing things in my life taking me from avowed celibacy to being married and having a young son, many gay and lesbian friends and colleagues who were trained and ordained alongside me but are still single have never once felt either rejected or denied some sense of natural justice just because they are not in any kind of committed relationship. Instead some of those same friends are at the most spiritually satisfied points of their lives, because by refusing to let their bodies speak sexually of anything but the union of Christ and the Church in the only way that Scripture calls us to, they have discovered new truths about how we are all called to make our chief intimacy with Jesus.
2:42 pm,
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Notes
