(Note: The reports on the educational series, A Conversation about Gay Unions, on the following pages are abbreviated versions of all presentations. The rector's reflections have been mailed to all parishioners and full texts of the entire series are on the parish Website at http://www.thechapelofthecross.org/2005/GayUnions.html.)

Synopsis of the Rev. Gray Temple's book on gay unions

Barbara Day

Gray Temple, Gay Unions - In Light of Scripture, Tradition and Reason (2004), New York: Church Publishing Inc., 445 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016 ISBN 0-89869-457-4. (http://www.churchpublishing.org)

Temple's book makes several important contributions:

• It demonstrates that the assumption that all people in all times and places have thought about sex and sexuality in more or less the same way that we do is just not so.
• If we do not understand the ancients' assumptions about sex and sexuality, then we cannot adequately interpret the biblical texts that are often at the center of controversy in discussions of sacramental equality for homosexual persons.
• The book makes careful consideration of the biblical passages most often cited by conservatives and liberals alike. Temple shows the supporters of sacramental equality that they need not shy away from the Bible, but rather reclaim the Bible as the essential common ground upon which conversations about sacramental equality take place.
• In the chapter on reason where arguments against sacramental equality of gay and lesbian persons are taken up and refuted, Temple expands the notion of what reason encompasses to include an account of the experiences with God and others that led him to understand differently. He observes that people do not usually change their minds in response to arguments; change comes from direct personal experience. We only change our minds after our hearts change. Sacramental equality is not about abstractions, but persons.
• Conservatives and liberal readers will both wince at all-to-accurate observations of how they come across to one another, but both will learn much and be challenged to think more deeply.

While some Episcopalians want to talk more than others, Temple says that for more than 30 years we have been talking about the sacramental equality or inequality of our gay and lesbian fellow worshipers. By sacramental equality/inequality, he means that, like the rest of us, gay and lesbian church members are entitled to Baptism, the Eucharist, Confirmation, Penance, and Unction, but their access to Ordination has been restricted to the celibate until quite recently, and the church as a whole has not officially changed her mind about that access yet. Holy Matrimony is still officially, if no longer uniformly, denied by the church to gay members. As long as homosexual members are not equally entitled to seek these two latter sacraments they are not sacramentally equal to the rest of the church.

Temple considers Scripture, citing it as coming in for the severest misuse these days. He acquaints the readers with recent research in several fields that indicates that our whole apprehension of sex and sexuality has undergone so radical a shift in recent centuries that we simply no longer get what the biblical writers thought they were talking about discussing sex.

Temple examines the political nature of Tradition - who decides what it is and what it is not and why. Giving particular attention to the connection between tradition and privilege, he examines some essentially Anglican traditions that Temple believes we are in peril of jettisoning. And in discussing Reason he proposes to be gently inserting developmental considerations into the differences between liberals and Evangelicals and offers suggestions about how both sides might meet one another on a common level of values and maturity.

Temple asks: "So how can people say they favor the Episcopal Church's move toward sacramental equality for gay people in the face of what appear to be clear, uniform, and unambiguous biblical prohibitions of same-sex genital relations?" He explores two answers:

• To look freshly at passages that appear to mandate a heterosexual norm and to prohibit any and all homosexual behavior. The standard canonical interpretation of the few passages do not survive close scrutiny. These writers thought they were talking about something other than what we either seek or fear. (Study Genesis 19, Leviticus 18 and 20, Judges 19, Romans 1, 1Corinthians 6, and Timothy 1; we see that they do not pertain to any gay or lesbian churchgoer we know personally.)
• To recognize that there are passages we pass over more rapidly that leave room for acceptance of same-sex relationships than our canonical interpretations suggest. (i.e., The complicated love between David and Jonathan of which Saul appeared jealous; Matthew's (but not Luke's) account of Jesus' healing the centurion's sick servant, a man likely his sexual companion; various positive passages promoting human intimacy, which in principle apply to gay unions as neatly as to straight.)

We are in danger of abandoning an Anglican tradition, a treasure God has entrusted to us until the rest of the Church universal is mature enough to claim it...it is our identity as a via media, a middle way. We are a sacramental church and the formulae for membership as an Episcopalian are in our prayer book. Temple warns that "if we get pulled off the middle path, something essential will be lost...and the Holy Spirit will reforge it elsewhere at another time among more faithful people. At the General Convention of 2003 in Minneapolis the Episcopal Church embraced the profoundest tradition Jesus left us: the tradition of the Cross, the tradition of laying down our lives for our friends. That's a tradition worth preserving."

Further, says Temple, the Spirit has re-presented to the Episcopal Church what the authentic Church tradition has always been: so to love one another as Christ has loved us that we lay down our lives for each other, contemplating denominational extinction if need be in service of God's truth. "The Holy Spirit is introducing an alternative to us: to sit at the table with one another until conviviality produces a new community where partisanship had previously estranged us from each other,...God's gift to us takes the form of new friends and colleagues to treasure."

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