Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
April 18, 2004
Introduction. In any discussion in the church, or in our society for that matter, of issues relating to homosexuality, the Bible plays a central role. Those who consider any homosexual act necessarily to be a sin can easily cite any one of several Bible passages in support of their position, and they usually do. There are passages in both the Hebrew Scriptures and in the New Testament that in fact condemn homosexual acts. The most commonly cites passages include Leviticus 18:22 and Romans 1:26-27. The Leviticus passage reads: "You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination."1 In Romans Paul condemns what he saw as the idolatry of the Greek world and says: "For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural; and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women were consumed with passion for one another." There is much to be said about each of these and the other passages cited in opposition to homosexuality; but what cannot be denied is that every reference in the Bible to homosexuality is negative. There are no verses that explicitly approve or accept it. We must be honest about that fact, recognize it, and deal with it.
The Nature of the Bible and of Biblical Authority. Because the discussion of open and affirming issues tends to go immediately to scripture and the citing of scripture verses such as these as authority, those issues inevitably lead us directly into the issue of Biblical authority. What is the Bible’s authority for us as Christians? That question in turn leads to many others: What is the Bible, and what is it not? What are its origins? How, when, and by whom was it written? How did its diverse books become Scripture for us? What does it mean to say that it is Scripture for us?
Most commonly, in my experience, when Christians resort to scripture to justify their condemnation of homosexuality, they say not that the Bible says that it is a sin but that God said that it is a sin. Even more sophisticated conservative Christians, like our neighbor across the street Pastor Michael Hanford, ultimately believe that God condemns homosexuality; and they believe that they know this to be true because the Bible condemns homosexuality. The logic is clear. The folks who take this position believe that the Bible expresses the word and will of God, and they believe that it does this because they believe that the Bible ultimately comes from God. It has it origin in God. It is the Word of God because it is the words of God. 2
The belief that the Bible has its origin in God comes, as Marcus Borg says, in two versions, a hard version and a soft version. The hard version comes very close to the Islamic belief about the Quran. It is orthodox Islamic belief that the words of the Quran are the words of Allah, the words of God. An archangel dictated those words to Mohammed, who first memorized them, then had them written down. It has never been orthodox Christian belief that the Bible originated in this way, but some Christians believe that the Bible comes so directly from God that, while written by humans, the human element in the writings is essentially of no importance. Functionally, the words of the Bible are God’s words. The soft version of the belief in the Bible’s origins in God talks more about "inspiration." In this view, the Bible was indeed written by humans, but those humans were acting under the direct inspiration of God the Holy Spirit. The words may come from humans, but they were directly inspired by God and infallibly reflect the will of God. Many Christians who hold this belief will allow that some human error may have found its way into the books; but on the whole the Bible itself is divine and cannot be questioned. The question of how one determines in this view which parts of the Bible are human error and which parts are the words of God is a thorny one that only the more sophisticated proponents of this view ever tackle.
Most if not all of us who grew up in some church were probably taught some variation of the soft version of the divine origin of the Bible. I want here to present a different view. I recognize that this view, for the formulation of which I am again indebted to Borg, will strike many as quite radical; and you are of course free to disagree with it. I hope, however, that you will at least give it serious consideration.
For me, the Bible has authority, but its authority does not come from its origins. God did not write the Bible. Although the people who wrote the books of the Bible were people of profound faith, they were writing their words, not God’s words. Rather than being, directly or indirectly, the words of God, the writings that became Scripture for us are the witness of human beings to their experience of the word and will of God. Borg says that they are the witness of their experiences of God by two ancient communities--ancient Israel and the early Christian movement. That is a bit of an oversimplification. The Bible actually contains the witness of many different communities at different times and places within those two larger traditions. Borg’s point, however, is valid and important. The Bible is human witness to human experience of God. It is not God’s witness of God’s will to us.
So then, what authority does the Bible have for us in this view? It’s authority, I believe, is this: It is the book, or it consists of the books, that our faith tradition has said are authoritative. It is the book about which our tradition says: Here you will find authentic witness to the nature and will of God. Here you will find authentic witness to the truth of God’s love and grace in Jesus Christ. Here you will find the truth of God’s salvation offered to all in and through Jesus Christ. Our tradition says: These are the books we will use in our public worship and in our private devotion. In these books you will find your guide to life. We will use and be guided by these books because we recognize in the diverse witness of these ancient authorities an authentic expression of the human experience of God that resonates with us and that confirms our own experience of God in our world and in our lives. These books have authority because our tradition says they are our foundational books, and for us they are an authentic witness to God.
This understanding of Biblical authority recognizes, in a way that belief in the divine origin of the books does not, that like every other human writing ever produced these writings were produced by fallible humans (mostly if not exclusively men) who, just like us, come to the task of writing about and understanding the faith from what the Germans call a Sitz im Leben, a place (literally a seat) in life. One’s Sitz im Leben is a particular combination of cultural and religious traditions and understandings and views of nature, of the world, and of the universe. It includes an understanding of what it means to be human as well as a person’s social, economic, and political understandings and agendas. It is, in short, the place we’re coming from in our understandings about everything, including human sexuality.
The Biblical authors all had their own Sitzen im Leben. (Sitzen is the plural of Sitz. I use the plural here because not all Biblical authors came from the same Sitz im Leben.) We have ours, and ours includes the understanding that the things that make up a person’s Sitz im Leben change over time. They change within the lifetime of an individual. If we grow in experience, wisdom, knowledge, and faith over the course of our lives, our Sitz im Leben will change. More importantly for our purposes here, those things change over the course of history and are very different in different cultures. Let me give you one very clear example of how the Sitz im Leben of one of the communities that produced some of the Biblical writings differs from ours.
One important aspect of a person’s Sitz im Leben, or to use another German word you may have heard, a person’s Weltanschauung, is the person’s culture’s cosmology, its view of how the cosmos is put together. The cosmology of the Hebrew world of approximately 2,500 to 2,700 years ago is clearly reflected in the great creation myth of Genesis 13. There we read that "in the beginning" the cosmos consisted only of the earth: "In the beginning--the earth was a formless void...." That void consisted entirely of water: "Darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters." God’s act of creation consisted primarily of constructing a "dome" in the midst of the water, in effect creating space in a giant bubble in the midst of a watery cosmos: "And God said: ‘Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters." To the authors of Genesis 1, the universe consisted of water, and we live in a bubble with water above, below, and all around us.
That is not our cosmology. We know better, or at least we know differently. You don’t hear even those radically conservative Christians who use Genesis 1 to insist that evolution is factually wrong and that God literally created the world in six days saying that we live in a giant bubble in a universe of water. The authors of Genesis 1 simply saw the world differently than we do.
It does not necessarily follow that what they had to say on any particular topic, including homosexuality, is false. It does necessarily follow, I believe, that what they said on any particular topic, including homosexuality, is not necessarily binding on us simply because they said it. They saw the world, human nature, and human sexuality differently than we do. Because their writings are scripture for us, we cannot dismiss their view flippantly, without reflection. Neither can we, however, avoid our own responsibility for doing our own discernment of God’s will for us here and now, in our Sitz im Leben, our historical and cultural context, simply by pointing to what they said about it over two and a half millennia ago.
So, the anti-homosexuality texts in the Bible, just like every other text in the Bible, are the witness of ancient communities or individuals to their discernment of the will of God. They come from ancient times and places, ancient cultures, ancient faiths, ancient worldviews. It is true that the Bible rejects homosexuality. It is not necessarily true that God does.
The Bible, in fact, says a great many things that we do not believe and that we do not consider to be the will of God for us. Consider the following, a satire that has been bouncing around the Internet for several years:
Subject: Questions for Dr. Laura
Dr. Laura Schlessinger is a U.S. radio personality who dispenses advice to people who call in to her radio show. Recently, she said that, as an observant Orthodox Jew, homosexuality is an abomination according to Leviticus 18:22, and cannot be condoned under any circumstance. The following is an open letter to Dr. Laura penned by a U.S. resident, which was posted on the Internet. It’s funny, as well as informative:
Dear Dr. Laura:
Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God’s Law. I have learned a great deal from your show, and try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind them that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate. I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some of the other specific laws and how to follow them:
1. When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odor for the Lord -- Lev.1:9. The problem is my neighbors. They not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?
2. I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?
3. I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual uncleanliness -- Lev.15:19-24. The problem is, how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offense.
4. Lev. 25:44 states that I may indeed possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can’t I own Canadians?
5. I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself?
6. A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an abomination -- Lev. 11:10, it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don’t agree. Can you settle this?
7. Lev. 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle room here?
8. Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev. 19:27. How should they die?
9. I know from Lev. 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?
10. My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev. 19:19 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them? -- Lev. 24:10-16. Couldn’t we just burn them to death at a private family affair like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws? (Lev. 20:14)?
I know you have studied these things extensively, so I am confident you can help. Thank you again for reminding us that God’s word is eternal and unchanging. Your devoted fan,
Jim
And so, we must choose. We cannot avoid choosing. That we choose to accept this from the Bible and to reject that is inevitable. We all do it. Everyone who accepts anything from the Bible does it, for I don’t think anyone really takes it all as literally true and binding no matter how much they may protest that they do. Indeed, I believe that it is our God-given responsibility to pick and choose. Our tradition, which witnesses to and seeks to follow God, has given us this book. God has given us the ability to study it, to apply the tools of the human mind, of human learning to it. God has given us the ability and the freedom to make moral choices; and with that ability and that freedom comes the responsibility to make those choices and to make them in faith, knowingly and responsibly. The question is not do we choose. The question is: What do we choose and what are our criteria for making the choice?
Ultimately, those criteria will be grounded in our understanding of God. At the risk of oversimplification, we can say that there are, essentially, two basic ways of seeing God in our tradition. Some see God as God of law. Law is about requirements, judgment, and punishment for breaking the requirements. Others see God as a God of love and grace. A God of love and grace cares about how we live and how we act as much as a God of law does; but this God calls us to freedom, to live and to act freely out of the love God gives us. The God of love and grace is not about judgment and punishment but about grace and forgiveness. We can choose from the Bible on the basis of what we think God’s laws, God’s requirements are. We can choose out of fear that we may be wrong. Or we can choose on the basis of freedom and on the basis of God’s love and grace for all people. We can choose not out of fear that we may be wrong but in the confidence that if we are wrong God loves us and will forgive us anyway. I choose the God of love and grace as the basis of my deciding.
That being said, let’s take a look at some of the key texts on homosexuality to see what we can discover about them and what, if anything, they have to say to us. There are actually very few passages in the Bible that mention homosexual acts, and none mention homosexuality as we understand it today as a natural variant of human sexuality. Only one text, Romans 1:26, mentions female homosexual acts. All the others refer only to men. There are five or six of them. In the Gospels, Jesus never mentions the subject. All of the references in the New Testament are from the letters of Paul (genuine or pseudo-Pauline) or other Epistles. The subject is expressly mentioned only twice in Hebrew Scripture, in Leviticus 18:22 and it’s companion piece Leviticus 20:13, which prescribes the death penalty for any male homosexual act. Other passages are said to refer to homosexuality but do not, most famously the story of Lot and the angels in Sodom. Here I will look at three classic so-called "clobber texts," Biblical texts used to condemn homosexuality and homosexual people, hoping to show what they actually say and do not say. I will look at Leviticus 18:22, Romans 1:26-27, and the Sodom story from Genesis 19:1-11.
Leviticus 18:22. Leviticus 18:22 is probably the most frequently cited anti-gay text. Once again, it reads: "You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination." It is part of the holiness code (also called the purity code) of the book of Leviticus. Leviticus probably dates from the sixth century BCE, although it may have been written in its present form considerably earlier; and in any event it contains much older material. It is called Leviticus, which means the "priests’ manual" or "book of the Levites" because it deals primarily with the laws of holiness or purity. It was put together from at least two earlier sources known as P and H, for Priestly source and Holiness Code. The P sections limit the laws mentioned to priests. The H sections, including Leviticus 18:22, extend the laws to all of the people and all of the land of Israel.4 It contains a huge number of laws, including many laws relating to sexual behavior. It prescribes the death penalty for most violations, something only mentally disturbed opponents of gay rights advocate today.
One principal purpose of the purity or holiness laws of Leviticus was to distinguish the people of Israel from the other peoples next to and among whom they lived. We see this intent clearly in the opening lines of Chapter 18:
The LORD spoke to Moses, saying:
Speak to the people of Israel and say to them: I am the LORD your God. You shall not do as they do in the land of Egypt, where you lived, and you shall not do as they do in the land of Canaan, to which I am bringing you. You shall not follow their statutes. My ordinances you shall observe and my statutes you shall keep, following them: I am the LORD your God. You shall keep my statutes and my ordinances; by doing so one shall live. I am the LORD. Leviticus 18:1-5
The Priestly authors/editors of Leviticus were greatly concerned with the tendency of the people of Israel to switch from the faith of Yahweh to the religion and religious practices of the indigenous Canaanite people. The laws of Leviticus were intended, at least in part, to build a wall around Israel, demarcating the differences between the Israelites and other people. That was important to the Priestly writers. It is not so important to us. It may help to see the specific laws of Leviticus against that background.
We should also keep in mind that although Leviticus 18:22 clearly disapproves of male homosexual behavior, it was written in a culture that had no understanding of homosexuality as a natural variant of human sexuality. The ancient Hebrews simply did not have the concept homosexuality. They only knew of homosexual acts, and they considered them to be unnatural for all people. That’s why Leviticus 18 not only prohibits male homosexual acts but also prohibits bestiality. Leviticus 18:23 We of course also consider bestiality unnatural. The point is that our modern understanding of human sexuality draws a distinction between a natural homosexual orientation and unnatural acts with animals that ancient Israel simply did not draw.
Although I somewhere saw one author trying to argue that the Hebrew word translated in Leviticus 18:22 as "abomination" is actually not a strong condemnation, I think we have to concede that this passage in fact condemns male homosexual acts. What we do not have to concede is that this passage is the word and will of God for all people in all times and places. It comes from the Sitz im Leben of the Priestly writers/editors of Leviticus at least 2,500 years ago. We understand things differently.
Romans 1:26-27. Paul’s letter to the Romans is the grandest statement in all of Scripture of God’s salvation in Jesus Christ through faith by grace and not by the works of the law. The overarching theme of the letter is that in Christ we are justified by faith and freed from the demands of the law, meaning the Jewish law or Torah. Although Paul has a wonderful theology of Christian freedom, he was, like every other Biblical author, a product of his own time and culture. His writings clearly reflect the beliefs and prejudices of that time and that culture.
Paul begins this great letter by indicting the idolatry of the Greek pagans among whom he lived and worked. He contends that although they did not have the Jewish law, through which God was known to the Jews until the coming of Christ, they nonetheless could have come to know the one true God. He says:
For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made. So they are without excuse; for though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools; and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles. Romans 1:19-23
Paul then launches into a list of vices that presents, he says, not the actual sins themselves but the consequences of the sin of idolatry. He writes:
Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the degrading of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.
For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error. Romans 1:24-27
As with Leviticus 18:22, this passage is a pretty clear condemnation of homosexual acts, in this case by both men and women. There are several things to note about it. First of all, remember that Paul was a Jew. He never stopped being a Jew, and he was thoroughly trained in the traditions of first century Judaism. Elsewhere he describes himself as a Pharisee, and the Pharisees were zealous above all about compliance with the purity code of Leviticus. Note Paul’s reference to "impurity" in verse 24, a clear echo of Levitical ethics.
Second, note that Paul assumes, as do the authors of Leviticus, that only heterosexual acts are natural for all people. He expressly refers to homosexual acts as "unnatural" and, for men, as "giving up natural intercourse with women." For Paul, all people were what we would call heterosexual. For him, anyone who engaged in a homosexual act was acting against their true nature. In our modern understanding of sexuality, this is not necessarily true. For some people, homosexual acts are as "natural," that is, as consistent with their true nature, as are heterosexual acts for others of us.
Third, remember that Paul’s only experience of homosexuality was what he saw in the Greek cities that he knew. In Greek culture of the time it was common for men to have sex with young boys. Those acts indeed strike us as unnatural, and worse. They are exploitative and harmful to the young person being used for the gratification of an older person. Paul knew nothing of committed, covenantal, long-term, faithful relationships between persons of the same gender. He simply isn’t talking about that kind of homosexual relationship. We can understand Paul, at least in part, as condemning practices that we too condemn as inconsistent with God’s law of love and respect for all people.
Genesis 19:1-11: The Story of Sodom. The story of Sodom isn’t about homosexuality. Unfortunately, it has often been read as being about homosexuality, and the word "sodomy" has come to mean male homosexual activity. That is a most unfortunate development. It grossly distorts the meaning of this story, which goes like this:
Abraham’s nephew Lot was residing in the city of Sodom. Two angels, who apparently appeared simply to be men, came to the city. When Lot saw them he invited them to come stay the night at his house. Lot here was simply obeying the ancient law of hospitality, which said that the residents of a city had a sacred duty to provide shelter to traveling strangers, a law that is still followed in much of the Middle East today. At first the two men/angels declined, saying they would sleep in the town square. Lot however prevailed on them at last to accept his hospitality. He took them in and fed them. Genesis 19:1-3
Then, the men of the city of Sodom, both young and old, "all the people to the last man," surrounded Lot’s house and demanded that Lot bring the two men out to them "so that we may know them." Genesis 19:4-5 The common understanding, reflected in the notes in the Harper Collins Study Bible and the New Oxford Annotated Bible, is that the phrase "know them" here means have sexual relations with them. In this context, it means in effect "so that we may rape them." Lot tried to dissuade them: "I beg you, my brothers, do not act so wickedly." Genesis 19:6-7
Then the story takes what to us is an even more appalling turn. Lot says to the mob: "Look, I have two daughters who have not known a man; let me bring them out to you, and do to them as you please; only do nothing to these men, for they have come under the shelter of my roof." Genesis 19:8 The point is clear. The law of hospitality to the stranger was so strong (note his statement "for they have come under the shelter of my roof"), and women were considered of such little value, that for Lot it would have been better to have his young daughters gang raped than to surrender his guests to the mob.
The men of the mob, however, will have none of it. They continued to demand that Lot surrender the strangers and threatened Lot with retribution for not doing so. The visiting men, who recall are really angels, then take care of the situation by striking the men of the mob blind so that they cannot find the door to Lot’s house to break it down and take the men by force. Genesis 19:9-11
Once again the lesson is clear. The sin of the men of Sodom is not that they wanted to have homosexual sex with the strangers but that they wanted to violate the sacred law of hospitality and to do violence to the men. Of course we all condemn rape, whatever the gender of the victim. Of course we believe that all people, especially the vulnerable, be treated with dignity and respect. We condemn the men of the mob here, but not because they were gay (which presumable they weren’t; the assumption again is that everyone is straight) but because they wanted to commit gang rape. This story simply has nothing to say about homosexuality as we understand it today.
Jesus and Homosexuality. In the Bible, the four Gospels are the books that talk directly (which is not to say always historically) about Jesus, about who he was and about what he said. Nowhere do the Gospels quote Jesus as saying anything about homosexuality. The closest they come, and it isn’t very close, are the numerous references in the Gospel of John to the otherwise unknown "disciple whom Jesus loved." See, for example, John 20:2 and 21:20 Some say these passages refer to someone with whom Jesus himself had a homosexual relationship. I consider that inference to be nothing but speculation. In any event, the more important fact is that Jesus simply never said anything about homosexuality or homosexual acts. Beyond that, his message was, I believe, inconsistent with a blanket condemnation of homosexuality or of homosexual people.
It is fair to say, I think, that all of the Bible’s condemnations of homosexuality are grounded in the Levitical notion of purity. The problem with homosexual acts is that they violate the purity laws. Paul’s reference to purity in Romans 1:24 is no accident. Impurity is the problem. Yet we must understand these condemnations against one overriding fact: Jesus was above all else an opponent of the purity system. We all know of how Jesus ate with "tax collectors and sinners." What we may not realize is that the "sinners" weren’t necessarily people who had committed what we would consider sins. Rather, they were people who had violated the purity system. They may have violated it by failing to pay the Temple tax, for example. Most poor people did not pay the Temple tax because if they did they couldn’t feed their families. They were therefore unclean. They were sinners. Or they may have violated the purity system by engaging in certain occupations that were considered unclean. One didn’t have to be a prostitute or a functionary of the heathen Roman occupier like a tax collector to be in an unclean profession. Shepherds, for example, were considered unclean simply because they were shepherds. Thus, when Luke has shepherds being the first to hear the news of Jesus birth he is announcing right at the beginning of his Gospel a rejection of the purity system. Let me now illustrate this thesis further with a discussion of two stories from the Gospels, the story of the women with the flow of blood and the parable of the Good Samaritan.
The story of the woman with a flow of blood is found at Mark 5:25-34. In that story, a woman "who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years" approaches Jesus in a crowd, reaches out, and touches his clothes. Her hemorrhage is immediately cured. Mark 5:25-29 Jesus notices and asks who touched him. The woman comes to him "in fear and trembling" and admits that she touched him. The story ends: “He said to her, ‘Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.’” Mark 5:34
It is not apparent to us, but this story is about the purity code of Leviticus, specifically about Jesus’ rejection of purity as the basis for ethics. In the purity code, blood is impure, unclean. A person who is bleeding is impure, unclean. A women who is experiencing her menstrual flow of blood is impure, unclean. The hemorrhage in this story is probably such a flow that could not be stopped (although it must have been fairly minimal to have gone on for so long without the poor woman bleeding to death). In any event, this woman is ritually impure, unclean. Unclean people were to have no contact with the pure. When an unclean person touched another, the one touched also became unclean. Moreover, she was a woman; and although woman were not per se impure they were to have no contact, and certainly no public contact, with a man who was not their husband. By reaching out and touching Jesus, this woman violated several different provisions of the purity code.
According to the purity code, Jesus should have been outraged. He should have condemned the women on the spot and run off to the Temple to be purified himself; but he wasn’t outraged, and he didn’t condemn the woman. Rather he called her "daughter," praised her faith, and confirmed her healing. He could not more clearly have rejected the purity code. Anyone reading this story at the time it was written would have seen it as a rejection of the purity code. We don’t see it that way simply because we have lost the story’s original context.
The same is true of the parable of the Good Samaritan, found at Luke 10:25-37. In this parable, a man is beaten nearly to death by robbers and left for dead on the side of the road. A priest and a Levite are going down the road, see the man, and pass by on the other side. The priest and the Levite are officials of the Temple in Jerusalem. They are the guardians of the faith and of the purity code that was considered the heart of the faith at the time. We usually think of them as hardhearted and uncaring. We think that’s why they don’t try to help the beaten man. In fact, the reason they do not stop to help the man is the purity code. According to that code, a dead body is ritually unclean, and anyone who touches one becomes himself unclean. They cannot go to see if the man, who looks dead, is still alive and needs help because under the code they can’t touch him. He is bloody and may be dead. So they pass by on the other side. A Samaritan, that is, an alien, a non-Jew who doesn’t follow the purity code, comes by. He doesn’t live under the same legal limitations as the priest and the Levite. Being a man of compassion, he stops and helps the beaten man. He is the one Jesus praises. The parable ends with the instruction to us to "go and do likewise." The story is about having compassion for those in need, but in its original context it is about more than that. It is about rejecting the restrictions of the purity code then those restrictions interfere with our acting with compassion towards our fellow human beings.
We cannot say for sure what Jesus would have said about homosexuality if asked. Our sources don’t tell us. All we can do is try to infer from what we know about him what his position would be if he were here among us in the flesh today with our contemporary understandings of human nature and human sexuality. We know he rejected purity or holiness as a basis for ethics. Instead, he preached an uncompromising ethic of compassion. For me, that ethic means accepting my homosexual brothers and sisters as fully equal children of God, just as they are, with their gift of sexuality. Their sexuality is different from mine. I cannot, however, conclude from that fact that it is less than mine, that it is unnatural for them, or that God, who after all created us all, rejects them or their sexuality.
Conclusion. The Bible rejects homosexual acts. There is no doubt about that. It does not reject homosexuality as a natural variant of human sexuality because the Biblical writers had no such understanding of human sexuality. It does not necessarily follow from the Bible’s rejection of all homosexual acts that God rejects homosexual people or all homosexual acts. The Bible was written by men and at every turn reflects the cultural understandings and prejudices of those men. The Bible is our book. It is our guide to live and to the love of Christ. It does not follow that everything in it expresses the will of God or is binding on us. Jesus said nothing directly about homosexuality. The Bible’s rejection of homosexual acts is grounded in notions of purity that Jesus emphatically rejected as a basis for ethics. We have a God-given ability and duty to do our own discernment and to make our own decisions. If we ground those decisions in God’s law of love and grace, we will, I believe, reach a different conclusions than the Biblical writers did. Humans wrote the Bible, and humans make mistakes. God, Who didn’t write the Bible, doesn’t make mistakes. God creates some people gay. Who are we to say that God is wrong?
1
The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
2
For this analysis I am deeply indebted to Marcus Borg in his books Reading the Bible Again for the First Time and The Heart of Christianity. If you have not read these books, I highly recommend them to you.