If my gay and lesbian peers have the right to sexual union and companionship, why don’t I? If the scriptural passages forbidding homosexual behavior apply only to a particular context, then surely the passages about fornication (sexual behavior outside marriage) and Paul’s praise for singleness are also culturally bound. And so long as marriage ascends into the echelons of existential imperative””you must have this in order to be a complete human being””then my singleness becomes a problem. It is no longer a unique witness to the kingdom, where people “will neither marry nor are given in marriage.” It no longer reveals that the water of baptism is thicker than blood””that an entire generation of Christians could be single, and still God would renew his church. Instead, it becomes a second-class existence.
Very well stated. Singlehood for a variety of reasons is becoming more common, statistically. It is time again for the church to treat it as the vocation it is for some lay people, too.