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.