God and the Gay Christian Part II

Gen I9:5, Lev I8:22/20: I i, Rom l:26-27, l Cor 6:9, l Tim:10, Taught by Pastor Tom Lacey at Church on the Hill, March 5, 2023

Can someone do me a favor and count the number of verses the six texts total? I get seven, but that can’t be right. Surely, there must be more to this. Seven verses and millions and millions of lives have been altered, impacted, reduced, damaged, ruined over centuries in almost every known family, tribe, town, state, and country on the globe. How could only about nine sentences exert such an outsized impact in humankind's history? Should they have? Must they still? On the face of it, the obvious answer is of course not. It's unjust/unfair to let so few sentences have so much say. To let so much power rest on so few words speaks of the capability for good or bad that humans have to build political and social frameworks that rise, in this case, in favor of those in power and are exerted to the detriment against those who have less say, much less in fact.

I would underline this by bringing you back to the third text! Leviticus 20. Directly above 20:13 is 19:33-34, which says, "When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God." Three long sentences. A reasonable explanation for why this command is given-"for you were aliens in the land of Egypt." Then, to finish off this commandment with the highest regard for its importance, it's as if God signs it when the text ends, "I am the Lord your God." All this, and yet, this commandment has been tossed aside for the last 2,500 years as if it were written merely on papyrus and not set in stone, unlike the six texts regarding same-sex relationships. Somehow, after all the fancy words, the rationale for it given, and God personally autographing this commandment, resident aliens still aren't treated as citizens nor loved within their adopted country far too often. And yet, the verse sitting there on the page continues to receive highest regard, institutional sanction, and legal framework.

So here's the thing for me. Today, more than any other Sunday message, I want you to remember something from this message. It doesn't matter if I help you discover how amazing Matthew Vines' book is or if I impress you with how much scripture stuff I know. I'm after only one thing: That after this message, you remember for yourself and are able to tell others the essential point, the thing that changes the picture for you, on the issue of same-sex relationships, and issues of sexual minorities that we highlight when we talk about the LGBTQ community. It would be great if you could recall this essential point not just for this afternoon or tomorrow, but next week and next year, and in the years to come, so that whenever this issue arises, whether with family, among friends, at a social get together, or at another church, you would remember the thing that convinced you that we are not understanding well enough these scriptures when we use them to vilify same-sex relationships.

But I am well aware how hard it is to remember one thing let alone two, three, or four things from a message, or a paragraph, of solidly reasoned scripture analysis. So, if I don't focus on giving you one thing that you can carry away with you from the next fifteen minutes, then more than likely, this may all sound well and good but you won't recall the thing that made the difference, if there is such a thing. Well, unfortunately, there isn't one such thing. LOL. Sorry, but there are two! Can you remember the two fundamental things for accurately understanding these six scriptures? Let's give it a try.

The first is this: Sexual orientation did not exist back then. I don't mean there weren't what we call gay people and straight people, but there was no concept of sexual orientation, of someone being gay or someone being straight. It wasn't conceived of nor talked about. It wasn't a thing. Here's how you both know this is true and the example you can use to remember it and tell others: No ancient language had words that meant "gay” or "straight." If it had existed, if people thought about others or themselves in these terms, there would have been words to speak of it. The Inuits, the Eskimos, have like 35 different words for snow. Something that's important or at least talked about is expressed in words. It's part of the language. Zip, zero, nada for sexual orientation because it didn't exist for people back then. How we conceive of same-sex relations is nothing like how they thought of them. Basically nothing alike. Now what did exist was sexual excess, a central idea that really influenced the New Testament writings from Paul, but something we don’t have time to get into. Honestly, it's a bit too much to take on in a worship service, as you might imagine as the idea is called sexual excess.

The second thing that you want to remember for all time is this: the biblical world and all surrounding societies were fiercely patriarchal and outrageously, even disgustingly, misogynistic. Women were worth almost nothing. How bad was it? Aristotle, the most important philosopher of all time, most historians would contend, argued that girls were born only when something went wrong in the womb. Had the fetus truly reached its potential, Aristotle believed, it would have become a boy. I'm not joking. Aristotle was a genius, but he was patriarchal, misogynistic, and someone for whom the worst thing a man could be was to be anything like a woman. Same goes for in the Hebrew Scriptures and among Jewish people, and the Romans, and the Egyptians, and on and on and on, ad nauseam. It's all over the place. When the worst thing a man can do is give up his manliness, and lie with a man like a woman, as Leviticus says, there were in their eyes huge problems with this man and the man who does this to him-but it has everything to do with him not being a man in their view and not with him being with another man. If you take away the worthlessness of women, if you remove the patriarchy and misogyny of those times, as we have to a large extent especially when compared to former times, things are fundamentally different. The two all-time takeaways this morning are: One, sexual orientation didn't exist back then and, two, misogyny, disgust with women, was so high, the worst thing a man could do or be was to be "womanly" in their thinking.

Reading Leviticus 1B:22 now, you can hear it more clearly: "You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination." Turning a man into a "woman" is an abomination. By the way, this also speaks of something we won't get into this morning other than to say this. Sexual relationships were and, of course, still are often power relationships. Or as we might say today, sex was weaponized for some more than with others. Slaves were in all societies. Children were what we would now call abused and violated in all societies, and that included boys, with boys more than girls because girls needed to be saved for dowries and marriages. Boys, well, boys didn't have economic value like that. I told you societies back then were vastly different than ours today. With this in mind, look again at Leviticus 78:22 "You shall not lie with a man as with a woman." It's directed as a commander toward whom? We think one thing-and we'll talk about that in a minute, but this meant something very different than what we immediately, reflexively take it to mean. This verse commands a male slave owner not to demand sex from his male slaves. Why do I say this? Because unlike in other societies back then, where the negative view of male same-sex sexual relations attached to the "womanized" man, our command is directed at the active partner. That's because he is the one with the power to choose whether to lie with another man like a woman.

The Bible here is unsurprisingly ethical for its day. It did something no other writings did: it pointed the finger at the powerful man and not at the weaker one, the slave, for being forced into this position. This commandment says the powerful are not in the right when they do the wrong thing; and that includes in sexual relations. In other societies, the powerful got away with what they wanted and the weaker were shamed. In fact, the Greeks believed a slave deserved to be enslaved, and got whatever they got, because a fully developed man would have chosen suicide over slavery. Obviously, this exonerates entirely any act toward such dehumanized, emasculated men.

I wish I could give you the fullest picture of how much the biblical world and the surrounding societies' view of women and men, sexual relations, slavery, and same-sex relations differed from ours. They saw things so unlike us that we car barely imagine what they were saying. The fact is, the Bible, not even knowing anything like same-sex relationships and the love that men and women feel toward their same-sex partner, has nothing directly to say about it-just like they don't have anything directly to say about the composition of the moon or the sun. Indirectly, like all relations, of course the ethics and morals that pertain to all pertain here.

Last week, it was the telescope that made everyone look again at scripture verses that declared the earth stood still while the sun went around it. What Galileo said about scripture became the norrnative view: Those verses are figures of speech. They no longer determine astronomical discussions. This did nothing to damage the Bible's reputation or hurt humanity. Does the Bible have a shelf life? Apparently in some cases it does. The debate is which verses no longer command our obedience. The fact is that hundreds of verses with their commands have been pushed to the side for a wide variety of reasons. We were required to understand astronomy differently than how it was expressed in the Bible, and we no longer view God as accepting slavery, as the biblical God clearly did. The question before us is with a fuller understanding of the way people viewed same-sex relations in their time can these verses still determine such discussions. That's for you to decide.

I want to say this though. It's very obvious to me that the vast distinction between them and us makes what they said about same-sex relations entirely out of bounds for the relationships that gay men and women want to create for themselves today, for the love they feel and want to live from with their partner. They're talking about two different things, or not talking about the second of these two different things. So how do we say they are talking about something when they're not? We shouldn't. It needs to stop. We want to free ourselves from an erroneous, incredibly damaging, and dehumanizing view of same-sex relationships,

relationships based in same-sex orientation that the Bible doesn't conceive of and therefore declares nothing concerning them, other than what it says to all of God's children.

As a final note, when someone rules that the Bible declares some to be less than God's children, less than they themselves are, boy, I tell you, those folks better have an airtight argument with them when they rise to meet the Maker of those children on that day. Saying the Bible told them so won't cut it either. Progressives and Open and Affirming churches like Church on the Hill, good people throughout the world, biblical scholars, people of all faiths and no faith, the Holy Spirit, and Christ's ministry itself have been advising, inviting, and pleading with them to look again, to listen anew, to love those who are just like they are.

Just so you know, on that day when I'm in line before the Pearly Gates, I promise I'll try not to snicker too much when I inadvertently let out a "I told you so," if I get the chance. Let us always choose as our default path kindness, empathy, compassion, love, acceptance, boldness, and companionship with all on this journey, the path that Christ showed and lived. Let these gifts be our argument when we meet our Maker, the one God and Creator of all, before whom all stand equal in dignity, equal in poverty, equal in beauty, equal in need. Actually, there won't be any argument at all because it'll be just like heaven LOL!

Can this rightly and proudly Open and Affirming church say Amen?