August 5, 2001
Ninth Sunday after Pentecost
Based on the book The Bible Tells Me So ~ Uses and Abuses of Holy Scripture
By Jim Hill and Rand Cheadle
While we have carried out conversations over the past year, considering whether or not to declare ourselves to be an Open and Affirming congregation, welcoming gays, lesbians, bi-sexual, transsexual and transgender people into our church, we have not been alone. There have been churches and denominations consistently in the news dealing with this issue in the past week. The Boy Scouts were on the front page of Newsweek Magazine again, discussing the issues of whether or not gays are welcome in that organization.
Those who are against homosexuality find strong support in a variety of scripture passages. There are about a dozen different scripture passages in the Hebrew Testament and four to six passages in the Christian Testament that have been used against homosexuality. There are those who start with a very simple premise, found in the Book of Genesis. A definition of what we are to be about as humans.
(28) "God blessed them saying, 'Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth".
Some who argue against homosexuality say that it cannot be natural because it cannot result in children. They would suggest that whenever a sexual encounter takes place it should be for the purpose of creating a child. There are many of us who are not gay who would have some difficulty with that definition about what it means to be a human. None the less, it is sometimes used as a way of pointing out that gay relationships are not a natural thing.
The most popular passage that is used against homosexuality is again in the Book of Genesis. The story of the towns of Sodom and Gomorrah. Whenever we hear the names of these two towns, we think about the issue of homosexuality. If you remember, Lot was approached by two angels. Angels that appeared to be of the male gender. They came to visit the town and Lot offered them hospitality.
(4) "But before they lay down, the men of the city, the men of Sodom, both young and old, all the people to the last man surrounded the house; (5) and they called to Lot, "Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us, so that we may know them." (6) Lot went out of the door to the men, shut the door after him, and said, "I beg you, my brothers, do not act so wickedly."
To change their minds he offered them his two daughters and said:
(8) Take my daughters instead and leave these men alone who have come to stay at my house.
That's a pretty jam-packed story, with lots of different things going on. The phrase "that we may know them" generally refers to "knowing" in a sexual sense. The scripture passages, even though they appear to be clear on the surface, have long been debated by scholars. While many assume that the issue is homosexual behavior and associate the sins of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah with homosexuality, in other places in the scripture the charges against the cities are that they are inhospitable to strangers and that they don't pay attention to the needy people in their own midst. There are many who see this story as being about hospitality, not a story commenting on homosexuality. In the Mid East, hospitality was a very critical issue. People were expected to receive guests warmly and to provide for their safety. Lot was concerned that he protect those two angels that were guests in his home. He challenges this crowd of men that have come from the city. He challenges them by offering his daughters. If these were homosexual men, they would have not much interest in those daughters. Instead, if it is an issue of hospitality, with the men of Sodom and Gomorrah seeking to do violence to the guests that were visiting Lot's home, then Lot's offer makes a little more sense in the context of the times.
If you move aside from that passage about Sodom and Gomorrah, you find some particular passages from the Book of Leviticus, sometimes known as the "holiness code." There are three of them which pretty clearly condemn homosexuality. Leviticus 18:22 states the principal.
"You (a masculine 'you') shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination."
The second in Leviticus 20 adds the penalty:
(13) If a mans lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death; their blood is upon them."
Walter Wink, a biblical scholar, has these comments on the verses.
Such an act was regarded as an "abomination" for several reasons. The Hebrew pre-scientific understanding was that male semen contained the whole nascent life. With no knowledge of eggs and ovulation, it was assumed that the woman provided only the incubating space. Hence the spilling of semen for any non-procreative purpose - in coitus interruptus (Gen. 38: 1 - 11), male homosexual acts or male masturbation - was considered tantamount to abortion or to murder, because the life was included in that semen as they understood. Now because of this, female homosexual acts and masturbation were not very seriously regarded because they were not having an impact on the possibility of creating a child. One can appreciate how a tribe struggling to populate a country in which its people were outnumbered would value procreation highly, but in our world today, where a concern for the environment and overpopulation are primary concerns, this preoccupation with needing to create children and increase the population is not an appropriate concern.In addition, when a man acted like a woman sexually, male dignity was compromised. (Again, this was in a time when the males had all the power, and all of the respect. The women were the property of the males and held a much lower status in the society.) It was a degradation, not only in regard to himself, but for every other male. The patriarchalism of Hebrew culture shows its hand in the very formulation of the commandment, since no similar stricture was formulated to forbid homosexual acts between females. On top of that is the more universal repugnance heterosexuals tend to feel for acts and orientations foreign to them. (Left- handedness has evoked something of the same response in many cultures.)
We can debate about all of these passages from the "holiness codes" but the fact of the matter is that we make decisions constantly about which of these old laws we are going to follow and which ones we are going to ignore. If you remember throughout the summer, particularly in terms of Capital Punishment, the death penalty was required by the "holiness code" for a variety of transgressions, including people who worked on the Sabbath and for children who cursed their parents. It's clear we make choices about which ones we are going to follow and which ones we are going to ignore.
Those who want to argue against homosexuality will say, "Well, we do some picking and choosing, but the way that we pick and choose is if an Old Testament law is repealed by the New Testament, then it no longer applies. But, if an Old Testament law is affirmed by the New Testament, then it continues to have validity for us. Those who claim that the New Testament affirms their stance point to some of Paul's writings in the Book of Romans, from First Corinthians, and from First Timothy:
(Romans 1:27) In the same way, the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion.
Paul is speaking in the context of his times and his culture.
When the laws of Leviticus were written, they were written to define the people of Israel apart from a relationship with those other groups of people who were living in the Promised Land at that time. Many of those groups were involved in male and female prostitution in the Temple. The Jewish laws were written to separate the people of Israel from those in the Temple around them.
In much the same way, when it comes to the issue of sexual orientation, Paul is assuming that it is natural to be heterosexual. So, anything different from that must be unnatural. Paul, along with all the people of his time, had no idea about what we now call sexual orientation. It's a psychological understanding that has only developed within the last 100 years. To condemn homosexual acts in the context of a culture is a much different issue than to understand that homosexuality can be a natural thing. If it is a natural thing, if it is a God created thing, then the situation changes. The condemnations from the Hebrew Testament don't carry the same weight. There are many studies being done today that indicate that homosexuality is a natural occurrence, that people are born with a homosexual orientation. If that's the case, then it is not unnatural as Paul suggests, but instead it is living out a natural expression of God's creation. For someone with a homosexual orientation, a sexual relationship with someone of their same gender is a natural love, just like the love that we express for those people who are important in our lives.
Jimmy Creech is the former senior pastor of First United Methodist Church in Omaha, Nebraska. Some of you might remember reading about him in the news. He was the official at a number of gay marriages and the denomination took away his ordination, his standing. During the trials, he shared this conclusion about his understanding of the issue.
"...there was no understanding of sexual orientation in the culture and time when scripture was written. There was not even a word for homosexuality or homosexual in Hebrew, Greek, or Aramaic, the original languages of scripture. There are biblical references that condemn same-sex sexual behavior, but they are all within contexts related to violence, idolatry, promiscuity, and exploitation. Careful reading within the historical setting reveals that it is the violence, idolatry, promiscuity, and exploitation that is condemned, not the same-sex sexual behavior. The same condemnation is given to opposite-sex sexual behavior that is violent, idolatrous, promiscuous, and exploitative."
So when we take an approach, when we try to use scripture to address homosexuality, and take those passages out of context, and apply them to a different kind of situation, we come out with an unacceptable answer. If you are going to condemn promiscuity, if you want to condemn idolatry or violence in a relationship, then there are scripture passages that speak to that. But, there is not evidence in the scriptures to speak against a loving relationship between two people of the same gender.
There have been many people who have asked, not only in this congregation, but in many others, why we, as a congregation, have to say anything to the gay community? Gay people are welcome to come to our church; there is no reason weshould have to say anything at all about the issue. Just be nice when they come. But in all that Ihave just shared, if gay people know anything about the church, they know that they are condemned by Christians. If you have any question about that, you can look at some of the things that are on the Internet, both against and in favor of homosexuality. On a page called Independent Gay Forum, Paul Hornell writes,
"It can scarcely be doubted that the primary and perhaps the only sources of our cultures anti-gay hostility are the Christian denominations." Those are pretty condemning words. "When most anti- Gay zealots are pushed very hard, they do not come up with sociological or philosophical reasons for the hatred. Instead, they usually retreat to citing Leviticus, or the Epistle to the Romans or ancient Palestinian myth of Sodom. As the bumper sticker says, "God said it. I believe it. That settles it." People read the scripture, and find reasons for their hatred. "Several years ago novelist Betty Greene, who writes young adult fiction, interviewed more than 400 gay bashers as part of her research for The Drowning of Stephan Jones, visiting jails in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Tennessee and Washington State. "I tried to find out where the hate comes from," she told Boston's Bay Windows in 1992, "and one of the places that it came from was the pulpits of America."The point here is: No one is born hating gay people. They learn that hatred somewhere - from the culture and form its predominant moral influences. And the primary institutions teaching right and wrong are? The religious denominations.
Betty Greene is blunt: "If there's one problem we can end in a hurry, it's antigay violence. We just have to start preaching that it's wrong." Not preach "hate the sin, not the sinner." That is a factitious distinction. You cannot denounce one without denouncing the other. You cannot punish one without punishing the other. You cannot beat up one, without beating up the other. So we need to encourage ministers and priests and rabbis and bishops to speak out from the pulpit against anti-gay violence and gay bashing. We need them to speak out against hostility. But we need to go further than that. We need to assert to everyone that our sexuality is not sinful at all. There is nothing wrong with homosexuality, nothing immoral.
Our Sexual behavior is just as moral as anyone else's, with the same capacity for love, closeness, relatedness and harmless pleasure. Nor should we let " moderate" religious people get away with condescendingly saying, 'Well, the church welcomes gays because, oh, we, aren't we all sinners, after all."
That is just another way of saying that homosexuality is sinful, but they are too squeamish, too "moderate," to say so explicitly. We need to smile and say, "Speak for yourself- The sin is not homosexuality, but homophobia."
I would also agree with those words. There are some people, again from our congregation and from others, who say, "Well, can't we just say we are open without saying that we are affirming?" What Varnell has just said is that you cannot say that you are open if you are not affirming. Then you are saying that, "Your lifestyle is a sin. I welcome you as a sinner, but I don't approve of the way that you live." I don't think that that is the appropriate place for us to end up on this conversation.
The scriptures condemn violence and exploitation. The scriptures speak often about love, even describing God as love. If anyone has a loving relationship, then that love is of God. That love is God. We will continue to talk as a congregation; our society will continue to talk. I believe that the important part of scripture are the words that call us to love one another and to share God's love with each other.
May God's Spirit be with us. Amen.