I just got back from The Catalyst where I saw Mike Ness of Social Distortion play a solo show. Two of the Social Distortion band members are in his solo band. It is quite fun as he does mainly all cover songs of old country songs and other classics in a Mike Ness style. Social Distortion is one of my favorite bands that still are together and play. The Clash is probably my all time favorite band I would say.
Before the Mike Ness concert, earlier in the evening was the Vintage Faith Church Sunday night worship gathering. We are in week 4 of the Sin City series going through 1 Corinthians. Tonight and this morning, I was teaching out of chapter 7. The issue in that section of the letter was divorce and marriage. I said the same thing last week as I started, and that is I feel like what I am teaching in this part of the series is going almost entirely against current culture. This section of 1 Corinthians talks about sex, adultery, divorce and marriage. Tonight I spoke about what the covenant of marriage is. Last week I taught about human sexuality and why sex in the context of marriage is the way we were originally meant to experience the beauty and joy of it. I addressed the topic of homosexual marriage briefly tonight, as that obviously in California where I live is a big issue now that is legal and marriages are happening. I taught a theologically conservative position on the biblical covenant of marriage being designed for a man and a woman.
Tonight we also had a post-worship gathering open forum on this topic. The room was packed and the questions turned in were great ones. We had as open and honest and blunt a conversation as I could have ever hoped. And the topics ranged from someone who was broken hearted about losing their virginity recently and wondering how to experience God's forgiveness, to questions about pornography, marital trouble issues etc. I was so impressed with the level of questions, vulnerablity and open dialog that we had. I absolutely love open forums and think tanks.
A question that came up in a later discussion I had tonight, which I now am thinking about at 1:50 AM has to do with gay marriage. This is the question for churches who hold a conservative viewpoint on the practice of homosexuality and biblical covenant of marriage, as our church does - the question is this:
If a homosexual couple gets married legally - and then sometimes afterwards this couple studies Scripture and determines that the practice of homosexuality would be considered sin - would the church endorse and recommend that they get divorced, if the same church holds that a couple shouldn't get divorced unless there was marital unfaithfulness etc. and in this case, they were faithful to each other in their gay marriage.
*This scenario could be if the couple were Christians who interpreted the Scriptures as being pro-gay theologically at first, but then after further study changed their position to see it as sin - or that they weren't Christians who then became Christian and as they studied the Scriptures they determined it was sin.
That is an interesting question ..... and I bet we will be having to think through all types of questions like more commonly in the future - not just as a "what if.." but in real life as something like this most likely will happen.
