Thy Word, Re-imagined

October 18, 2015

Genesis 3:1-16 (selected verses)

Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, ‘Did God say, “You shall not eat from any tree in the garden”?’ … ⁶So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. …  ¹³Then the Lord God said to the woman, ‘What is this that you have done?’ The woman said, ‘The serpent tricked me, and I ate.’ … ¹⁶To the woman God said, ‘I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.’

I Peter 2:9-3:6

But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

Beloved, I urge you as aliens and exiles to abstain from the desires of the flesh that wage war against the soul.  Conduct yourselves honorably among the Gentiles, so that, though they malign you as evildoers, they may see your honorable deeds and glorify God when he comes to judge.

For the Lord’s sake accept the authority of every human institution, whether of the emperor as supreme, or of governors, as sent by him to punish those who do wrong and to praise those who do right. For it is God’s will that by doing right you should silence the ignorance of the foolish. As servants of God, live as free people, yet do not use your freedom as a pretext for evil.  Honor everyone. Love the family of believers. Fear God. Honor the emperor.

Wives, in the same way, accept the authority of your husbands, so that, even if some of them do not obey the word, they may be won over without a word by their wives’ conduct, when they see the purity and reverence of your lives. Do not adorn yourselves outwardly by braiding your hair, and by wearing gold ornaments or fine clothing; rather, let your adornment be the inner self with the lasting beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is very precious in God’s sight. It was in this way long ago that the holy women who hoped in God used to adorn themselves by accepting the authority of their husbands. Thus Sarah obeyed Abraham and called him lord. You have become her daughters as long as you do what is good and never let fears alarm you.

This is the word of the Lord.

“Women should remain silent in worship.” “Wives be submissive to your husbands.” “Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor.”

As I noted in the e-blast last week, about 20 years ago, Cheryl and I sat in a Presbyterian church in Kentucky as passages such as those were read. She leaned over to me and whispered, “these are not my favorite parts of the Bible.”

We were brand new to that congregation, and had never heard the pastor who was stepping to the pulpit to preach. We squirmed, and glanced about surreptitiously to see if anyone else was obviously sharing our discomfort. What had we walked into? I’ll tell you in a bit.

Given the hymns that we have already sung today, I doubt that any visitors this morning have had a similar experience. Nevertheless, these texts, taken together, reflect the patriarchal culture out of which all of scripture came, and, moreover, they have been used to perpetuate patriarchy in many subsequent cultures for more than 2,000 years.

They are, by any contemporary reading, “difficult texts.” That makes them perfect for this season of struggle, as we continue our wrestling with scripture.

Years ago, a colleague and I were talking about one of the frustrations common to ministry, and, in truth, lots of other kinds of work: we rarely see the results of our efforts. We pretty much agreed that on many days we’d just as soon be the grounds crew or the custodial staff because those folks can see results immediately. As we continued the conversation, I observed that, in fact, a lot of the time I do feel like the janitor – the theological janitor – because I spend so much time cleaning up the theological garbage that others have dumped on people in my circles of concern.

I cannot tell you how many times I have sat with young gay men who asked me if I thought they were going to hell because they were gay. I cannot tell you how many times I have sat with women deeply wounded by churches that consigned them to second-class status based on gender, and preachers who told them what their place was and tried to keep them in it.

You need not look far to understand why this matters in concrete terms. The list of ways that women and girls are demeaned, devalued, and discriminated against around the world remains unfathomable and unconscionable, and men around the world appeal to religious traditions and religious text to justify the situation. I sometimes wish I could sue for theological malpractice. The problem, though, would be tracking down all the right defendants. Obviously, patriarchy’s roots run deep in scripture, and those roots have been carefully tended for a long, long time by men – and it’s almost always men – who have used and abused scripture to justify oppression.

Just taking stock of those roots that shoot up into our own little branch of American Christianity, we find Cotton Mather’s 1692 advice for women entitled, Ornaments for the Daughters of Zion, of the Character and Happiness of a Vertuous Woman,[1] in which we learn that “The ‘female sex’ was to complement the male role by its radiant silent presence.”[2]

Not much had changed by the middle of the 19^th century, when much of the Presbyterian piece of the American Christian scene was shaped by the teaching of theologian Charles Hodge. Hodge taught at Princeton Theological Seminary for 58 years, and directly influenced more than 3,000 seminarians – more than any other American theologian of his century. Hodge’s instructions regarding the role of women are captured in his line from a book review in which he “used the analogy of the necessary subordination of women to defend slavery: [writing] ‘there is no deformity of human character from which we turn with deeper loathing than from a woman forgetful of her nature and clamorous for the vocations and rights of men.’”[3]

But even as Hodge was presiding over more than a half-century of theological education, the intellectual foundations of that theology were beginning to shift beneath his feet. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species created a crisis in theology that dominated the late 1800s and early 20^th century in what came to be known as the split between modernists and fundamentalists. The fundamentalists relied greatly on Hodge’s work, but they lost their hold on the Presbyterian church by the end of the 1920s, and as their influence waned in its place grew a much broader and more nuanced way of reading scripture.

We stand now as receivers of a century of intellectual development, of sophisticated hermeneutical work, of deep historical exploration, of remarkably creative theological imagination, which basically means there is simply no excuse for reading the passages we opened with as if they came from the mouth of God, as if they are the totality of the witness of scripture, as if they are the only “word of the Lord” regarding gender.

But these passages remain within the canon of scripture. We do, from time to time, read them, and, when we read them in worship, some people will still announce, “this is the world of the Lord.”

So, how ought we to hear a word from God in these ancient, troubling texts? I will freely confess that there’s a large part of me that still feels like we ought to simply chuck them altogether – at least insofar as it comes to worship. Even this morning, I feel like this material is much better suited to a classroom than to the pulpit.

So, how do we read these texts, in worship, and call them, somehow, the word of the Lord? I asked that question last spring at the Sprunt Lectures at Union Seminary in Richmond. Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza was the lecturer. She is one of the most important feminist theologians of the 20^th century, and she was taking us through two days of lectures focused on the passage from 1 Peter that I read of bit ago.

My question derailed the entire last morning, and it was during the 45 minutes of community conversation that erupted after I asked the question that I decided I wanted to preach this fall on the difficult texts. In particular, it was the response from a woman who happened to be sitting right next to me in the pews that compelled me. She said something to the effect of, “look carefully at the text; it undoes itself so quickly that I suspect the author knew it all along.”

As she pointed out, the opening verse of the third chapter of First Peter says, “wives be subject to your husbands.” Then down in verse six, the author offers up an example: “thus Sarah obeyed Abraham.” After laughing out loud, the woman next me said, “Sarah is the worst example possible of obedience. She was a trickster through and through.” In other words, she suggested, perhaps this entire passage was written tongue in cheek. If read that way, it’s more about deconstructing patriarchy than about reinforcing it.

Fiorenza, in her own reading, had pushed us to consider what else was at stake in the passage, and to consider how the behavior being suggested – obedience – was not a moral code for all women at all times, but rather a strategic suggestion to a particular group of women on whose shoulders would rest the fate of the faith in their historical context. As aliens among the Gentiles, the letter of First Peter is urging a particular community, to behave in a way that attracts converts – especially by marriage – but does not attract the attention of the oppressive civil authorities.

Such a reading could have something to offer the church in North America, where we might productively consider ourselves resident aliens in a imperial culture marked by mass consumption and hyper-capitalism.

In other words, there’s always more going on in the text than a surface reading reveals – especially when that surface reading has historically been put in the service of maintaining an oppressive status quo. This is true whether or not the “author” intended it, and whether or not the institution authorized to interpret the text agrees. That, indeed, is among the watchwords of the Reformation. When the Reformers said, “solo scriptura” – scripture alone – they were liberating the word from the institution of the church.

They were not, however, saying “anything goes.” That is to say, we are a particular community with a distinctive set of values and commitments. Such values and commitments frame the way that we interpret the texts at the center of our lives.

The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has been, for my entire adult lifetime, committed to following common guidelines in interpreting scripture, and those guidelines are codified in our Book of Order. These principles for interpretation include interpreting individual passages of scripture in terms of the whole of scripture, committing to serious study, and following the ‘rule of faith’ – that is to say, acknowledging a particular history of interpretation. Taken together, these three guidelines alone demand of us more than “proof-texting” – that is to say, they demand that we not take one verse, “wives be submissive to your husbands,” for example, as if that is all that the Bible or the church has ever had to say about gender roles.

This was the heart of the sermon that Cheryl and I heard preached in Lexington all those years ago, and it rested on the ongoing challenge to contemporary readers to take the task of reading seriously enough that we distinguish 1^st-century Palestinian worldview from eternal truth.

Eternal truth comes in the principle of interpretation known simply as the ‘rule of love.’ The ‘rule of love’ in interpreting scripture goes back to St. Augustine, and rests on Jesus’ two-fold commandment to love God and love your neighbor. Accordingly, any reading of scripture that demeans God or debases a fellow human being should be called into question.

We also acknowledge, as a principle of interpretation, our reliance on the Spirit, and, indeed, the movement of the Spirit is what opens us to fresh insights and new interpretations. In other words, the Spirit calls us to change – especially when old interpretations support systems and structures that debase human beings.

Fundamentally, our Presbyterian way of reading scripture begins with the conviction that, for us – that is to say, for Christians, Jesus is the center of the whole story. Thus we recognize that the teachings of Jesus are the lens through which we must read the rest of scripture, or, as Jack Rogers succinctly puts it, “Jesus’ teachings and attitudes should be used to interpret the Pauline teachings, not the other way around.”[4]

That conviction lies at the root of Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza’s entire feminist theological project – and makes me suspect that though she is a lifelong Roman Catholic, she’s a Presbyterian at heart. Professor Fiorenza gets the last word this morning. She concludes In Memory of Her, a book that many critics consider her most significant contribution to contemporary theology, this way:

In historical retrospective the New Testament’s sociological and theological stress on submission and patriarchal superordination has won out over its sociological and theological stress on altruistic love and ministerial service. [In other words, both submission to patriarchy and service based on radical love are present in the text.] Yet this ‘success’ can not be justified theologically, since it cannot claim the authority of Jesus for its own Christian praxis. The writers of Mark and John have made it impossible for the Christian church to forget the invitation of Jesus to follow him on the way to the cross. Therefore, wherever the gospel is preached and heard, promulgated and read, what the women have done is not totally forgotten because the Gospel story remembers that the discipleship and apostolic leadership of women are integral parts of Jesus’ ‘alternative’ praxis of agape [self-emptying love] and service. The ‘light shines in the darkness’ of patriarchal repression and forgetfulness, and this ‘darkness has never overcome it.’[5]

Amen.

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[1] Cited in Jack Rogers, Jesus, the Bible, and Homosexuality (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2006) 27.

[2] Ibid.

[3] ibid. 28.

[4] Jack Rogers, Reading the Bible & the Confessions The Presbyterian Way (Louisville: Geneva Press, 1999) 32.

[5] Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York: Crossroads, 1983) 334.

Thy Queer Word

Leviticus 18:21-23; 20:13

You shall not give any of your offspring to sacrifice them to Molech, and so profane the name of your God: I am the Lord. You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination. You shall not have sexual relations with any animal and defile yourself with it, nor shall any woman give herself to an animal to have sexual relations with it: it is perversion. […]If a man 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.

October 11, 2015

We celebrated the wedding of Chris Roman and David Byers in worship here yesterday. We didn’t read from Leviticus.

We did, however, read from scripture. Rather than wrestle with the offspring sacrificed to Molech, we read these words:

Love is patient, love is kind, love is not jealous or boastful, it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.

Hold on to those words, because we’ll come back to them.

But first, let’s take an overly quick look at the so-called “clobber” passages – so-called because they’ve been used to beat queer folks over the head for a long, long time in way too many corners of the world – including, most sinfully, in the church.

I’ll begin this survey with this disclaimer and this reminder. Disclaimer: there is a ton – probably literally one ton – of writing on the things we’re going to talk about this morning. There is a long, rich, and deep vein of scholarship, theological reflection, and pastoral ministry standing behind everything that I will say here. So, as if my own ordination and education and decade-and-a-half in pastoral leadership are not enough, I’m standing on the shoulders of the finest minds and richest souls of my generation.

The reminder is this: we’re building on exegetical and hermeneutical work named in prior sermons in this series on difficult texts, and I’m not going to drag us through that again. It’s posted on line and you can read it there if you missed it here.

So, let’s dive in. To begin with, how many of you have ever heard the Bible quoted in support of discrimination against gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender persons? Any particular “favorite” passages come to mind from such experiences?

I’m particularly fond of the bumper sticker theology that tells us God created Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve. I’m not going to waste our time unpacking the baggage that comes with literal readings of scripture beyond posing the first question that always pops into my mind when I read that bumper sticker: so, you’re saying that the Bible is perfectly OK with incest? I mean, literally, the next generation had to come from somewhere, right?

To be fair, most theologically serious conservatives move beyond the bumper sticker reading of Genesis 1, but their reading of other stories from ancient Israel’s prehistory myths, for example, the Sodom and Gomorrah story from Genesis 19, is generally not any more sophisticated. The sin in that story is not sexual behavior, but rather the failure to treat strangers justly. If the story was about sexaul morality then we’d have to conclude that the Bible seems just fine with Lot offering up his virgin daughters for the men of the town to have their way with.

Other passages sometimes cited, including verses from 1 Corinthians and 1 Timothy, include “sodomites” in a laundry list of “sins” where the sexual morality in question seems more likely to have been a lack of honesty, commitment and mutuality than the gender of the partners.

That leaves a handful of passages that, on the surface, appear unambiguous in their condemnation of same-gender sexuality. The reading we heard a few moments ago from Leviticus actually combines two passages separated by a couple of chapters, but both of them come from the middle of the so-called purity codes.

Those two passages are often cited, chapter and verse, when calling homosexuality “an abomination.” When I hear that I have two reactions: first, I am saddened that conservatives’ use of this passage is the only possible explanation for why teenagers in America actually know the meaning of the word “abomination,” and, two, I recall the famous scene from The West Wing, where President Bartlett engages a conservative talk radio host in a bit of Bible study saying:

“I’m interested in selling my youngest daughter into slavery as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. She’s a Georgetown sophomore, speaks fluent Italian, always cleaned the table when it was her turn. What would a good price for her be? My chief of staff, Leo McGarry, insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly says he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself or is it okay to call the police?”[1]

The point, obviously, is that there are all kinds of instructions in scripture – Old Testament and New – that we do not accept as binding on our behavior. This is neither a liberal nor a conservative position, but rather simply, as President Bartlett showed us, the way things are – even among fundamentalists. Thus, we can either toss the Bible out altogether, or confront the central challenge of the text. We can, at the same time, appreciate the significance and, perhaps even the wisdom of rules that held together a society formed around mores we no longer follow even as we aspire to devise rules with wisdom for our time and culture. In other words, the great challenge of scripture, as always, lies in separating ancient Middle Eastern worldview from eternal truth.

As Walter Wink wrote decades ago:

The crux of the matter […] is simply that the Bible has no sexual ethic. There is no Biblical sexual ethic. Instead, it exhibits a variety of sexual mores, some of which changed over the thousand-year span of biblical history. Mores are unreflective customs accepted by a given community. Many of the practices that the bible prohibits, we allow, and many that it allows, we prohibit. The Bible knows only a love ethic, which is constantly being brought to bear on whatever sexual mores are dominant in any give country, or culture, or period.[2]

That human beings have regularly looked to scripture to support the mores of their own culture is nothing new under the sun. That we have tended to look for support in times of transition is also nothing new under the sun. Jack Rogers, who served as moderator of the 213^th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) – back in 2001 – began his life as a conservative evangelical. Indeed, in the introduction to his book, Jesus, the Bible and Homosexuality, Rogers recalls being voted “Most Perfect Boy” at the Nebraska State Fair of 1935.[3] In other words, he was an all-American boy from the great Midwest, steeped in the cultural expectations of the conservative Christian world.

Rogers went on to become a Biblical scholar at the conservative Fuller Theological Seminary in California. All of which is to say, Jack Rogers was never anybody’s idea of a flaming liberal. He is, however, a serious scholar who has never been afraid of following where his scholarship leads, and as he studied the ways that Christians have used scripture in times of great decision, he found that people have relied on certain texts to support the status quo in remarkably consistent ways throughout American history.

In his studies of the process of change within the church on slavery, the role of women in the church, the question of divorce and remarriage, and racial desegregation Rogers found “a pattern of misusing the bible to justify oppression.”[4]

From our 21^st-century vantage point, where these are long-settled questions, we can look back and see the error of our forebears’ ways, but that misses the point for Rogers. As he says, “The issue is not what we now think about slavery and women. The issue is, What did American Christians think about these subjects for more than 200 years when the accepted view was completely different than what we now think? What did Christians believe about these issues when they believed what almost everyone in the general culture believed? How could most Christians for more than 200 years accept slavery and the subordination of women with not a hint that there was any other view in the Bible?”[5]

In studying the ways that our forebears addressed the issues of their time, Rogers found that, in each case, Christians “accepted a pervasive societal prejudice and read it back into Scripture.”[6]

The apostle Paul, in his letter to the Romans, captured well the challenge for us, whether we are talking about sexual ethics or, really, any other aspect of our lives. Paul warned the Romans not to “be conformed to this world, but, instead, be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God – what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Rm. 12:2).

Let’s linger for a moment with Paul, and, as we linger, go back to where we began, with Paul’s great riff on love that, as I noted, we read at a wedding yesterday. Reading that passage, from the Corinthian correspondence, is about the most traditional thing possible at a Christian wedding. How many of you have heard those words – love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things; love never ends – read at a wedding?

It is an incredibly common reading. The thing is, Paul really isn’t talking about human beings there, and, if we think about our own lives for even a moment we recognize that. Our love is never perfect, no matter how good it is. That may well be why humans in every time and place build up a structure of laws and customs around intimate human behavior. As Walter Wink puts it, “rules and norms are necessary; that is what sexual mores are.”

But, he goes on to say, these rules tend always to be put in service to an always unjust status quo, and thus serve not to liberate human beings into the fullness of their potential but rather to gather us into easily controllable categories. Wink goes on to say:

“So we must critique the sexual mores of any given time and clime by the love ethic exemplified by Jesus [who, need I remind you, had absolutely nothing to say about same-gender love]. Such a love ethic is non exploitative (hence, no sexual exploitation of children, no using of another to their loss), it does not dominate (hence, no patriarchal treatment of women […]), it is responsible, mutual, caring, and loving.”[7]

That is the foundation for an authentic Christian ethic of human sexuality, and, you’ll notice, it has nothing to do with the gender of the partners. What is does have, at its heart and soul, is a commitment to the character of the relationship. For me, this is not only an ethical imperative, it is also a theological one.

This theological imperative has come to be, for me, the unshakeable foundation to my commitment not only to believe in GLBTQ justice but also to work for it even when such work is costly. You see, this is not an abstraction; it’s a relation, which is what all Christian truth should be.

Truth is not relative, for Christians, it is relational. How do we understand truth about God? It’s not as an abstraction – the unmoved mover, the first cause, the ghost in the machine. We understand the truth about God through a relationship with Jesus.

That relationship is mediated through the gospels – the stories of Jesus’ live that tell us who he was, and, thus, in faith, what God is like. Jesus broke bread with the broken. Jesus proclaimed release to the captive, new sight to the blind, good news to the poor. Jesus reached with compassion to those on the margins. Because we know Jesus, we understand that this is also the nature of God.

Therefore we know that the place we are most likely to find God is right there among those most marginalized by any given culture at any given time.

I used to wrestle with a question I would regularly be asked in church governing circles when I would be advocating for inclusive polices. “What if you are wrong? Don’t you grant that possibility?” Because I value intellectual openness, I used to answer that question by saying, “yes; but I would rather be wrong while opening the door than wrong while barring the gate.”

In time, though, I came to a different place. If we know the truth about God through a relationship – if, indeed, truth is always manifest through relationship – then I know the truth about God’s word for queer folks through face-to-face relationships.

I know that the word of the Lord for the people of God is love, because I have seen it written on the faces of the children of God. In their faces I have seen the face of God shining through. I have seen the face of God shining through tears as I gathered in deeply sad worship services with More Light Presbyterians after coming up short in votes at General Assemblies past. I have seen the face of God shining through determined looks as I sat with my lesbian sisters and gay brothers as they were denied marriage licenses at county courthouses in Virginia. I have seen the face of God shining through tears of joy on the steps of the United States Supreme Court when the justices handed down decisions for equal rights. And I have seen the face of God in a backyard in Maryland as Mike Newsome and Scott Horton wowed us with their “Nae-Nae,” in a vineyard in Haymarket when Heather Murray and Lisa Prillaman became “unlawfully wedded wives” a half dozen years ago, and here in this place as Ron Bookbinder and James Fisher beamed at each other to the strains of Bruno Mars’ Marry Me.

After all of that, all I can say is this: Love is the word of the Lord; thanks be to God. Amen.

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[1] The West Wing, season 2, episode 3, “The Midterms,” aired originally Oct. 18, 2000.

[2] Walter Wink, Homosexuality and the Bible (Nyack, NY: Fellowship of Reconciliation, 1996) 11.

[3] Jack Rogers, Jesus, the Bible, and Homosexuality (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2006) 3.

[4] Rogers, 17 (from the title of chapter 2).

[5] Rogers, 18.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Wink, 11.