Lutherans and Sexuality

Don't, unless you do

Garrison Keillor, Star Tribune

The ELCA had the good sense to issue its report on sexuality the week before a major snowstorm and so the church's new guidelines on blessing same-sex relationships and ordaining people in an SSR didn't arouse the storm and fury one might have expected. People were thinking about shoveling their sidewalks, a life-and-death issue for those of us in the coronary stage of life. And when you imagine toppling over into a snowbank with chest pains and your last thought before expiring is "Boy, she was right, I shouldn't have," then the whole issue of whether Pastor Sandvik should bless the union of Bruce and Kent -- it's just not that big a deal. Up in Stearns County, you've got Catholic priests blessing snowmobiles, for crying out loud, and on the Feast Day of St. Francis the Episcopalians are bringing cats and dogs and hamsters and newts and amoeba in to be blessed, so what's the harm in blessing two young guys, even if maybe they do fuss over their hair more than a person should?

The report was a lovely example of muddling through, which Lutherans are good at. They are people of great modesty and even greater compassion. And also bravery. The question of SSRs is one that firebrands on both sides are up in arms about and ready to burn villages and blow up bridges. The Task Force was given the assignment three years ago, long before the wave of gay marriages, and it proceeded to hold hundreds of elaborately patient and painfully respectful meetings and discuss the thing to (yawn) death and finally write a report that restated the question in terms you wouldn't understand and took 40 pages to avoid answering it and affirm a policy of Don't ask, don't tell, never mind.

In 1996, the church had said, "Marriage is a lifelong covenant of faithfulness between a man and a woman." It was willing to ordain gay people who were in a chaste, or unconsummated, relationship, a USSR, but not in a sexy one. After due study, the Task Force acknowledged the deep divisions over the whole SSR question, reaffirmed the 1996 position while accepting that people in good conscience might choose to challenge it and asking them to be careful if they do and not make a big show of it but saying that if they do do what they will, probably nobody would give them a hard time about it.

In other words: Nothing has changed essentially, we don't approve, though in a sense we do but probably not, but if you go ahead and do it, don't feel bad about it, we understand.

This is the beauty of bureaucracy. It absorbs and deflects violence and anger by causing confusion and annoyance and writing a lovely amorphous mishmash of sentences like extruded marshmallows and thus the peace is kept. Militants on either side are outraged, but they enjoy outrage, that is their art form. The rest of us are grateful to be spared the sound and the fury and to be able to attend church on Sunday morning without having to wear a badge. As important as sexuality may be, it surely isn't any more important than snow, and if you feel, in good conscience, that God didn't intend snow to be part of your life, then you may want to head for Arizona, which is OK, though we will miss you and I do beseech you to return my shovel before you go, it is hanging in your garage, not that I want to go ask you for it, I don't want to put you on the spot and make you feel bad, though it's hard to understand how you could forget about a thing like that but if you do and you go off to Phoenix, don't beat yourself up over it, we will get along somehow as best we can. This is the Lutheran way.