Many people are upset, and rightly so, about the decision of the California Supreme Court to grant the legal right of marriage to homosexual couples. Now the Governor of New York has announced that his state will recognize such marriages that take place in the two states that allow them – California and Vermont.

 
There are many reasons to be upset. (1) From the perspective of political philosophy many are alarmed that such massive change is accomplished, not by changing the laws through the elected representatives of the people, but by the decision of the judicial branch of government and the executive branch in New York. (2) From the perspective of societal and cultural survival, there is reason for concern, because of the potential destruction of the family, which is already under plenty of pressure from divorce, the acceptance of cohabitation, and the prevalence of the single parent family. (3) From the perspective of natural law, it is clear that there is only one relationship between the sexes that brings together persons whose “parts” are complementary and who have the potential of reproducing themselves. It is this relationship that is sanctioned by the institution of marriage. (4) Of course, for us Christians, much of this is made clear and certain by revelation – by what God tells us in the Bible. It is God who made man and woman and established the one flesh relationship between them. It is God who told them to be fruitful and multiply. And, it is God who through the Apostle Paul warned that the acceptance and approval of homosexual practice is an indication of the wrath of God on people who refuse to acknowledge and worship him.
  
However, I want to focus on the challenge and the opportunity for the church.
  
Challenge. The challenge is that we are going to have to work all the harder to teach our children how God wants them to live. We already have to do that with regard to other matters related to relations between the two sexes. In a society that is accepting of sexual relations before marriage and of cohabitation and childbearing without marriage, we have to teach them how God wants them to live in relation to sex, marriage, children, and family.
  
In a society where civil laws and church standards regarding divorce are not the same, we have to teach God’s people that God says not to put asunder what he has joined together, and that the righteous justifications for divorce are those allowed by the Bible. It means that, as the church, we are not so concerned about what grounds for divorce are listed in legal papers as we are that Christians seek the guidance and approval of the church for divorce, and that churches should approve divorce among Christians for biblical grounds only.
  
In all this we have to swim upstream and the current is getting stronger. We are likely more and more going to have to be God’s “holy people” – that is, the people whom God has called and set apart from the world, the people who are called out of the world together into the church, the people who think and live in a decidedly different way. But, Israel was always a tiny nation that lived by different standards than other peoples. And, the new Israel, the church began and thrived in a world that was idolatrous and immoral. Our situation is not much different from Israel of old, the church of past times, and our brothers and sisters today who live in places unaffected by Christianity.
  
Opportunity. The opportunity we must seize is to attract people to Christ and his church by the kind of lives we live. People need to see us as different – not weird, but different. They need to see our young people and our married adults bearing the fruit of the church’s teaching in their lives. They need to see us living by and upholding biblical standards in our own community regardless of what the world does. They need to see the impact of the gospel on our lives. We do not need to go off somewhere that we can be left alone to do what we think is right. We do not need to be strident in speech or harsh in conduct. We need to be graciously holy.
  
Now there is a problem here. It is that at present the statistics do not reveal us to be what we’re supposed to be. For instance, the divorce rate among evangelical Christians is not much different from that of society at large. That yells to us that something is very wrong with the church. We are going to have to “get different” both to survive and to seize the opportunity. When people who don’t know how to live and find their families, marriages, and lives falling apart, see Christian singles living chastely, when they see Christian couples sticking together come what may, when they see in the children of Christians the results of Christian childrearing, then they may come and plead with us to teach them the truth and ways of God.
 
But there is one other thing, and it’s a very important one. The world needs to see us repenting, forgiving, restoring. The church will never be perfect in this world. Neither will any Christian individual, or marriage, or family. The difference is that, when we sin and fail, we repent of our sins, we forgive one another as God in Christ has forgiven us, and we restore with gentleness those who fall.
  
Let’s not wring our hands in dismay. Let’s not get self-righteous or disdainful. But let’s turn to God and tell him we want to be and are willing to be different. Let’s ask him to show us where we’re wrong, to enable us to repent, and to make of us what he wants us to be.
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The Rev. William H. Smith is pastor of Covenant Presbyterian Church in Louisville, Miss.