Dearly beloved, we gather in the sight of God and in the eyes of the world to celebrate the honorable estate of marriage, the defeat of DOMA, and the fact that the gifts and graces of this venerable and evolving institution continue to extend to same gender couples. We gather to celebrate marriage as a vehicle that enables frail, faulty, fickle humans to cling to one another, care and support one another, through thick and thin, for better and for worse.
Marriage equality is of a piece with the same revolutionary fervor expressed by our forebears: a commitment to liberty, to rights and freedoms … a commitment engraved in our state’s Constitution, and asserted in our nation’s Declaration of Independence: all people are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights and that among these are the rights to life, to liberty, and to the pursuit of happiness.
We are witnesses to a moment in history when marriage is changing and adapting. But there is nothing new here. Marriage has been changing and adapting throughout the whole course of human history. Indeed, not even the Bible presents marriage in a uniform way. The Bible provides glimpses into an astonishing array of family configurations. There are patriarchal extended families, like Job’s, where the patriarch owns the women and children, and the male and female servants. There are polygamous families like Abraham’s; female-headed extended families like Rahab’s; matilocal families like those in which Moses and Jacob lived for years with the birth-families of their wives. When Mary was married to Joseph, she was all of twelve or thirteen years old. John the Baptist, Paul, and Jesus lived as single, celibate adult males … not what you’d expect of good, Jewish boys.
Over the centuries our laws, our attitudes, and our churches have evolved and adjusted to reflect tolerance of new configurations and understanding of family and marriage across religions, race, ethnicity, gender , and class. The Supreme Court’s ruling on June 26, 2013, making DOMA (The Defense of Marriage Act) unconstitutional, is surely a part of the continual re-thinking and re-shaping of our collective understanding of this ancient and honorable institution. Marriage itself has evolved to reflect humane and civilizing social progress, and to reflect new appreciations for human and civil rights.
In May of 2004 we had the privilege of witnessing and participating in a decisive evolutionary adaptation as this ancient institution revised itself again for a new day. On June 26, 2013 we listened with bated breath as the US Supreme Court ruled DOMA unconstitutional and marriage took yet another evolutionary leap.
Like many fine things, marriage just gets better with age.