Pastor Glusenkamp Report to Church Council 6/25/13
On this date in 1530 the Augsburg Confession was presented to Emperor Charles V at the
Diet of Augsburg. Many scholars understand this event as being the “beginning” of the
Lutheran Church as opposed to the nailing of the 95 Theses on the Castle Church doors
on October 31, 1517. Due to the “vogelfrei” ban placed on Luther at the Diet of Worms
(1521) Luther was unable to attend the proceedings in Augsburg. Consequently, Phillip
Melanchthon was the primary representative of the reformers. It is important to note that
he was never ordained. So, the most important document for Lutherans (after the Holy
Scriptures) namely the Augsburg Confession was written by a lay person. So,
Melanchthon was a living example of the “priesthood of all believers.” Today we at
Bethany attempt to follow in these footsteps by emphasizing “lay led-staff enhanced.”
There was an amazing amount of change unfolding transpiring during this time in history.
I think our days today are fairly similar to those days back in the 16th century. As you are
most likely aware the Supreme Court is scheduled to release an opinion on the following
two cases: (1) Prop 8-California's constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. (2) The other
is on a provision of federal law that prevents legally married gay couples from receiving
a range of tax, health and pension benefits. At this writing (early on Tuesday the 25th in
the morning) the opinions of the Court have not yet been released.
However, I’ve put the following together for you to peruse as leaders of our
congregation. Consider them to be “talking points” or maybe “listening points” as we
continue to work through “transforming congregational culture.”
Article XXIII (23) of the Augsburg Confession is about the highly controversial issue of
the Marriage of Priests. While we in the Lutheran tradition resolved this 500 years ago,
our sisters and brothers in the Roman Catholic tradition have not been able to move as
quickly or as comprehensively as we have. But, for the sake of the “back story” and
history, here is a bit of the reasoning that the reformers put forward to support marriage
of priests:
“The old canons also state that it is sometimes necessary to relax severity and rigor for
the sake of human weakness and to prevent and avoid greater offense.
In this case relation would certainly be both Christian and very necessary. How would the
marriage of priests and the clergy and especially of the pastors and others who minister to
the church be of disadvantage to the Christian Church as a whole? If this hard prohibition
of marriage is to continue longer, there may be a shortage of priests and pastors in the
future.”
Those words are quite prophetic when you think about the situation today in the Roman
Catholic Church in regards to clergy. Lutherans have moved beyond the question of
celibacy for clergy. So, now here we are at a juncture where many things are changing in
our culture. The next article from Sunday’s NY TIMES seems to frame or name current
trends related to marriage.
As someone who is spending quite a few weekends this spring and summer officiating at
weddings I found this article to be helpful. I commend it to you.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/opinion/sunday/coontz-thedisestablishment-of-marriage.html?pagewanted=all
The Disestablishment of Marriage- NY Times - June 22, 2013
By STEPHANIE COONTZ
AT first glance, the prognosis for marriage looks grim. Between 1950 and 2011,
according to calculations by the University of Maryland sociologist Philip Cohen, the
marriage rate fell from 90 marriages a year per 1,000 unmarried women to just 31, a
stunning 66 percent decline. If such a decline continued, there would be no women
getting married by 2043!
But rumors of the death of marriage are greatly exaggerated. People are not giving up on
marriage. They are simply waiting longer to tie the knot. Because the rate of marriage is
calculated by the percentage of adult women (over 15) who get married each year, the
marriage rate automatically falls as the average age of marriage goes up. In 1960, the
majority of women were already married before they could legally have a glass of
Champagne at their own wedding. A woman who was still unwed at 25 had some reason
to fear that she would turn into what the Japanese call “Christmas cake,” left on the shelf.
Today the average age of first marriage is almost 27 for women and 29 for men, and the
range of ages at first marriage is much more spread out. In 1960, Professor Cohen
calculates, fewer than 8 percent of women and only 13 percent of men married for the
first time at age 30 or older, compared with almost a third of all women and more than 40
percent of all men today. Most Americans still marry eventually, and they continue to
hold marriage in high regard. Indeed, as a voluntary relationship between two
individuals, marriage comes with higher expectations of fairness, fidelity and intimacy
than ever.
But marriage is no longer the central institution that organizes people’s lives. Marriage is
no longer the only place where people make major life transitions and decisions, enter
into commitments or incur obligations. The rising age of marriage, combined with the
increase in divorce and cohabitation since the 1960s, means that Americans spend a
longer period of their adult lives outside marriage than ever before.
The historian Nancy F. Cott suggests that recent changes in marriage could produce shifts
similar to those that accompanied the disestablishment of religion. Most American
colonies, following the British model, had an official church that bestowed special
privileges on its members and penalized those who did not join it. Residents were
sometimes fined or whipped if they failed to attend the established church. After the
American Revolution, states repealed laws requiring people to belong to a particular
church or religion to qualify for public rights. When the official churches were
disestablished, new religions and sects were able to function openly and compete for
followers. And the old church had to recruit members in new ways.
An analogous process is taking place with marriage. Many alternatives to traditional
marriage have emerged. People feel free to shop around, experimenting with several
living arrangements in succession. And when people do marry, they have different
expectations and goals. In consequence, many of the “rules” we used to take for granted
— about who marries, who doesn’t, what makes for a satisfactory marriage and what
raises the risk of divorce — are changing.
Until the 1970s, highly educated and high-earning women were less likely to marry than
their less-educated sisters. But among women born since 1960, college graduates are now
as likely to marry as women with less education and much less likely to divorce.
And it’s time to call a halt to the hysteria about whether high-earning women are pricing
themselves out of the marriage market. New research by the sociologist Leslie McCall
reveals that while marriage rates have fallen for most women since 1980, those for the
highest earning women have increased, to 64 percent in 2010 from 58 percent in 1980.
Women in the top 15 percent of earners are now more likely to be married than their
lower-earning counterparts.
Similar changes are occurring across the developed world, even in countries with more
traditional views of marriage and gender roles. The demographer Yen-Hsin Alice Cheng
reports that in Taiwan, educated women are now more likely to marry than less educated
women, reversing trends that were in force in the 1990s. High earnings used to reduce a
Japanese woman’s chance of marrying. Today, however, such a woman is more likely to
marry than her lower-income counterpart.
Until recently, women who married later than average had higher rates of divorce. Today,
with every year a woman delays marriage, up to her early 30s, her chance of divorce
decreases, and it does not rise again thereafter. If an American woman wanted a lasting
marriage in the 1950s, she was well advised to choose a man who believed firmly in
traditional values and male breadwinning. Unconventional men — think beatniks — were
a bad risk. Today, however, traditionally minded men are actually more likely to divorce
— or to be divorced — than their counterparts with more egalitarian ideas about gender
roles.
Over the past 30 years, egalitarian values have become increasingly important to
relationship success. So has sharing housework. As late as 1990, fewer than half of
Americans ranked sharing chores as very important to marital success. Today 62 percent
hold that view, more than the 53 percent who think an adequate income is very important
or the 49 percent who cite shared religious beliefs.
Two-thirds of couples who marry today are already living together. For most of the 20th
century, couples who lived together before marriage had a greater chance of divorce than
those who entered directly into marriage. But when the demographer Wendy Manning
and her colleagues looked at couples married since 1996, they found that this older
association no longer prevailed. For couples married since the mid-1990s, cohabitation
before marriage is not associated with an elevated risk of marital dissolution.
In fact, among the subgroups of women facing the greatest risk of divorce — poor
minority women, women who have had a premarital birth or were raised in single-parent
families, and women with a history of numerous sex partners — cohabitation with
definite plans to marry at the outset is tied to lower levels of marital instability than direct
entry into marriage. America may soon experience the transition that has already
occurred in several countries, like Australia, where living together before marriage has
become a protective factor against divorce for most couples.
All these changes make it an exciting time to research marriage — and a challenging time
to enter it. But it’s not that we’re doing a worse job at marriage than our ancestors did.
It’s that we demand different things from marriage than in the past. And marriage
demands different things from us.
Stephanie Coontz, a guest columnist, teaches at The Evergreen State College in Olympia,
Wash.
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The ELCA adopted the Social Statement, Human Sexuality-Gift and Trust in 2009.
We have continued to live our way into this statement. I continue to read it every couple
of months because I find it helpful in articulating what is the (1) church’s position and (2)
how might we as people of God navigate and communicate what we understand to be a
faithful response to all that is going on around us.
In the following section, it specifically talks about marriage and then begins to describe
the idea of civil unions for same gendered persons. Once again, I commend these words
to you.
“Both the couple's intent in their lifelong promises and the civil requirements for
marriage are important. Mutual promises of enduring care and fidelity, made
before God, allow a couple to open themselves to each other. They permit the
sharing of profound and tender affection as well as deep vulnerabilities and
anxieties. The legal contract creates a public arrangement within which a couple
may safely and equitably share their assets and resources, arrive at joint
decisions, anticipate children, protect and nurture them, and plan for a shared
future. The church's historical experience supports its confidence that solemn promises,
made before a company of witnesses who ask for God's blessing on a man and a
woman, have the power to create a unique framework within which two people, a
new family, and the community may thrive. Consistent with that experience, this
church has confidence that such promises, supported by the contractual
framework of civil law, can create a lifetime relationship of commitment and
cooperation. Recognizing that this conclusion differs from the historic Christian tradition and
the Lutheran Confessions, some people, though not all, in this church and within
the larger Christian community, conclude that marriage is also the appropriate
term to use in describing similar benefits, protection, and support for samegender couples entering into lifelong, monogamous relationships. They believe
that such accountable relationships also provide the necessary foundation that
supports trust and familial and community thriving. Other contractual
agreements, such as civil unions, also seek to provide some of these protections
and to hold those involved in such relationships accountable to one another and
to society. Lifelong, monogamous, same-gender relationships Within the last
decades, this church has begun to understand and experience in new ways the
need of same-gender-oriented individuals to seek relationships of lifelong
companionship and commitment as well as public accountability and legal
support for those commitments. At the same time, public debates and
deliberations have continued regarding understandings of human sexuality in
medicine, social science, and corresponding public policy about same-gender
relationships. We in the ELCA recognize that many of our sisters and brothers in same-gender
relationships sincerely desire the support of other Christians for living faithfully in
all aspects of their lives, including their sexual fidelity. In response, we have
drawn deeply on our Lutheran theological heritage and Scripture. This has led,
however, to differing and conscience-bound understandings about the place of
such relationships within the Christian community. We have come to various
conclusions concerning how to regard lifelong, monogamous, same-gender
relationships, including whether and how to recognize publicly their lifelong
commitments. “
http://www.elca.org/What-We-Believe/Social-Issues/Social-Statements/JTFHuman-Sexuality.aspx#Table%20of%20Contents
My intention (as stated earlier) is to provide you with “talking points and listening
points.” We, church, society and culture are in the midst of a big “conversation.”
I pray that we are equipped and empowered.
Blessings,
Pastor Ron