Jeremiah 31:31-34, Hebrews 5:7-9, John 12:20-33
Good morning, friends.
The Vatican II document Lumen Gentium says:
[T]he chosen People of God is one: “one Lord, one faith, one baptism”; sharing a common dignity as members from their regeneration in Christ, having the same filial grace and the same vocation to perfection; possessing in common one salvation, one hope and one undivided charity. There is, therefore, in Christ and in the Church no inequality on the basis of race or nationality, social condition or sex, because “there is neither Jew nor Greek: there is neither bond nor free: there is neither male nor female. For you are all ‘one’ in Christ Jesus.”
This statement should perhaps be understood as aspirational. Lumen Gentium is a dogmatic constitution of the church, and as such holds the highest teaching authority of any conciliar document. It remains for the people of God—that’s us—to see to it that the Church lives up in practice to the teaching.
The great Protestant theologian Karl Barth is purported to have said, “Preach with a Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other.” Well, in a year filled with bad headlines, this past week has been particularly rough. On Tuesday Robert Aaron Long, a twenty-one year old white man, murdered eight people, six of whom were of Asian descent, in a shooting rampage he attributed to a sex addiction. This horrendous attack, culminating a wave of anti-Asian violence stoked by the former president, horrifies us all and has stricken the Asian American Pacific Islander community with newfound terror. As many of you know, Shannon and I have three kids, two of whom are partly of Asian descent. So, this act hits particularly close to home for us.
A day earlier, on Monday of this week, Pope Francis approved a statement from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) which stated that the Church cannot perform same-sex unions, stating that it is “impossible” for God to “bless sin.” This statement dashed the hopes of LGBTQ+ Catholics who had hoped that the previous welcoming words and actions of this Pope would perhaps produce a change in doctrine regarding gender and sexuality. I imagine many of us, on the ropes as Catholics as it is, are asking ourselves right now whether we can in good conscience continue to claim this Church as our own.
Today, with a Bible and a newspaper at hand, I want to suggest that these two terrible headlines are not unrelated; that they are both rooted in 800 year-old theology that is inadequate to contemporary science and sociocultural understandings; and I want to invite us to begin discerning as a congregation how our God is calling us to respond.
In the reading from Jeremiah today, the voice of God says of his chosen people: “Deep within them I will plant my Law, writing it on their hearts. Then I will be their God and they will be my people.” The idea that God has written a piece of the divine wisdom upon the hearts of all human beings forms the basis of the most prominent tradition of Catholic moral theology, called Natural Law. Now I have done a bit of learning about this tradition, because as my mentor Emilie Townes once told me, “You can’t critique what you don’t know.” Natural law ethics receives its first systematic presentation in the work of the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas. For Aquinas, God knows everything, and the totality of God’s wisdom Aquinas calls “Eternal Law.” But God has given human beings an imprint of the divine nature, namely our ability to reason and to learn from our experiences in the world how we are supposed to live. This imprint, this divine spark, this little piece of God-given good sense, Aquinas calls “natural law.” We don’t know everything—God alone does—but we have been granted by God the capacity to learn about the world around us, to develop a moral conscience, to train our desires and to form good life habits—virtues like prudence, temperance, courage, and justice. The idea of the natural law is potentially a subversive idea—because when our conscience stands opposed to a human law, that human law has no force. An unjust law is no law at all, Aquinas says, and Martin Luther King Jr. would quote him from a Birmingham jail cell, centuries later. Human beings have authority to make laws—but those laws do not trump the authority of a rightly-formed conscience.
Over the centuries, though, the idea of the natural law changed. Particularly after the Council of Trent, the Catholic magisterium begins to assert that it alone is fully competent to interpret the natural law (as if the natural law were a book of spells tucked away in a musty corner of St. Peter’s rather than written onto our hearts). That this development coincides with the Council of Trent is no accident—the Church was asserting its authority in the face of critics like Martin Luther whose conscience drove them to condemn clerical abuses and challenge doctrines. Catholic moral theology after Trent, according to Richard Gula, became “rooted in an unchanging vision of an objective natural order which could be known largely by reason.”
The Second Vatican Council enacted a profound shift within Catholic theology and ecclesiology, signaling an openness to lay participation in the church, historical-critical interpretations of scripture, an explosion of ministries, and a commitment to interreligious dialogue and social justice. There was real hope among many that these developments would also produce changes in the Church’s stances on gender, sexuality and the priesthood. However, the retrenchment was swift: Pope Paul VI issued the papal letter Humanae Vitae in 1968, which overrode the recommendations of a council of papal advisors to proclaim that “artificial contraception” is contrary to the natural law. The Pope wrote:
No member of the faithful could possibly deny that the Church is competent in her magisterium to interpret the natural moral law. It is in fact indisputable, as Our predecessors have many times declared, that Jesus Christ, when He communicated His divine power to Peter and the other Apostles and sent them to teach all nations His commandments, constituted them as the authentic guardians and interpreters of the whole moral law, not only, that is, of the law of the Gospel but also of the natural law. For the natural law, too, declares the will of God, and its faithful observance is necessary for men’s eternal salvation.
According to the Magisterium, God has designed the natural order such that sexual intercourse is solely for the purpose of procreation. Therefore sex outside of the fruitful union of marriage is opposed to the natural law because it is concupiscent, lustful, and sinful. Contraception is contrary to the natural law because it is not open to the gift of life. Same-sex partnerships are contrary to the natural order—“intrinsically disordered”—because they do not lead to procreation.
On this basis the Catechism of the Catholic Church concludes:
Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that ‘homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.’ They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.
Now as many theologians have commented, these arguments rely on questionable logic. As Margaret Farley points out in Just Love, a book which the CDF condemned, making it an instant best-seller, same-sex partnerships are fruitful, in that they provide nourishment to the partners in relation and their communities; and of course many gay couples do have children. Moreover, the Church’s alternative to “artificial” birth control, Natural Family Planning, might also reasonably be considered a birth control technology. For Farley, same-sex partnerships should be judged by the same ethic as straight partnerships, and they are justified when they involve respect, mutuality, commitment, fruitfulness, and justice.
Brilliant though Thomas Aquinas undoubtedly was, he lived at a time when scientists thought the earth was flat and that diseases could be cured with bloodletting and leeches. And he accepted Aristotle’s view (from 1,600 years before that) that women held defective rational capacities and were less endowed with the natural law. So one question before us is this: should we really base our ideas of gender and sexuality on notions of an unchanging natural order, when times have changed? Is it not the task of the church—was it not the explicitly stated task of Vatican II—to respond to the signs of the times? If Lumen Gentium affirms that there is no inequality in the Church on the basis of sex—and if the U.S. Supreme Court was correct in its 2020 decision that protections on the basis of sex extend to LGBTQ+ persons—do the People of God have a right and an obligation to faithfully dissent?
This is of course more than an academic question. To return to the other grotesque headline from this week: Robert Aaron Long, the murderer in Atlanta, is a conservative Baptist who was taught from childhood by his parents and pastors these same truths: that sex outside of marriage is sinful, that sex between persons of the same gender is sinful. Now I cannot pretend to comprehend the psyche of this person or to understand fully how the racial and gender dynamics interact here, but by his own admission and by his pastors’ accounts, Long had struggled for years with what he called a “sex addiction” problem and he was deeply ashamed of the fact that he visited massage parlors for sex. He killed these women, he says, because he wanted to remove the source of his temptation. There is some deeply troubling theology at work here, and it is not only deeply troubling but deadly.
So, another question before us is, how do we respond? St. William is a welcoming and witnessing community. The very idea that kept this parish alive a half-century ago is the Vatican II insight that the Church is the People of God. Not only the Pope, not only the CDF, not only the magisterium, not only the Archdiocese, but all of us. And each one of us is created in the image of God and is precious and beloved of God just exactly as we are, in all of our particularity—in our raced, and gendered, and sexed, and sexually oriented, and religious, and abled diversity—and that because of this we carry a sacred charge to encounter one another with reverence, or at the very least with respect. Because, with all respect to the authors of the Catechism and of the most recent statement from the CDF, how is it possible to treat people with respect and dignity while simultaneously affirming that their lived identity as a human being is an affront to God?
I know that many on this call and in this community are hurting right now. Are angry. Are confused. Are disgusted. And I feel this way, too. On behalf of the pastoral team, I thank those parishioners who have reached out to us this past week, who have insisted that we must not remain complacent and silent, that we must not be complicit in this violence. We have crafted and signed a letter making clear that the statement from the CDF does not reflect our values, that it strikes at the core of our commitment to “God’s creative diversity,” and that we honor and bless “the many ways we live and share love and raise families and [honor] loving relationships as holy.” Further, just as we did when the allegations of David Haas’s serial sexual assault were made public, we are invoking the Vatican II principle of subsidiarity which says that those who are most impacted are empowered to lead. We therefore invite those among our community who identify as LGBTQ+ who are willing and able to form a group to guide our parish’s response. If you feel called to join this group, please reach out to a member of the pastoral team.
To return again from the newspaper to the Bible. What kind of law is God writing on our hearts at this moment? To what new covenant is this community being called? In John’s gospel for today, Jesus says this: “I tell you most solemnly, unless a grain of what falls on the ground and dies, it remains only a single grain; but if it dies, it yields a rich harvest.” What needs to pass away for this Church (big-C, and little-c) to yield a rich harvest?
A little later, Jesus says, “Now my soul is troubled. What will I say: Abba, save me from this hour? But it was for this very reason I have come to this hour. Abba, glorify Your name!” Friends, reading the signs of these troubling times is difficult. We have every reason to ask to be spared from the wicked challenges we are facing. But perhaps it was for this very reason that we have come to this hour. Perhaps together we can find a new way to glorify the name of the divinity which, across the spectrum of gender and sexuality, speaks through us all.
Andrew Stone Porter 
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