As one can see, Resolution 2015-A054 offers up a veritable smorgasbord of marriage services for all and sundry. If you are an atheist, the Episcopal Church (USA) is ready to meet you and marry you with its “Civil Marriage Rite”; if it is illegal to marry in your State, the Episcopal Church (USA) will still meet you and bless your union with its “Marriage-Lite Rite”; and if you want the full trappings for your same-sex ceremony, well, ECUSA offers it in modern (“Wedding Rite”) and traditional (“Mystical Union”) versions, according to your taste.
But the consequence is necessarily the dilution of Christian marriage into a virtually meaningless smear. The message that ECUSA is conveying with its cafeteria-style offerings is that it does not really stand behind any one of them; they all must be equally valid, liturgically speaking, and so “you pays yer money and you takes yer choice.” Whether you are really married is between God and you; it is not for the Church to say.
Resolutions A036 and A054, as noted, work in tandem to accomplish this goal. The one would be meaningless without the other — indeed, until A054 goes into formal effect and its marriage rites are authorized by diocesan bishops in their respective jurisdictions, the canonical violations described in the first Part of this post will continue unabated and unpunished.
In the next Part of this post, we will take a longer view of the Church’s abandonment of traditional marriage, and the consequences of that abandonment for two Western institutions of paramount importance: the family, and the “one, true, catholic and apostolic church” itself.
It begs the question, why even associate the church with marriage or “marriage?”
Because Christ helped celebrate the Cana wedding with his first recorded miracle?
What I find telling in these proposed rites — as Haley has given them to us — is the absence of the line in the BCP Marriage rite that offers the most succinct logic and theology for marriage: “The bond and covenant of marriage was established by God in creation.” In its behavior (proposing a change in the canons and new rites, not to mention already performing same-sex unions/”marriages”), TEC is demonstrating that it does not uphold this and does not want it to be true. They do not want to be subject or constrained by it. So, they simply write it out.
I suppose anyone can try to convince himself of anything. But God *has* established the bond and covenant of marriage in creation as Jesus himself said he did. And as virtually every prayer book since 1549 has likewise said it. (Inexplicably, it’s not in the 1789 American prayer book).
I find this continued dissolution of TEC both entirely predictable and deeply grievous. It’s like watching a star ship captain say “Full speed ahead!” as his ship is hurtling toward a black hole.
As a commenter noted on Mr. Haley’s blog, this sad development should be called “Four Weddings and a Funeral.”