Tag Archive - homosexuality

Homosexuality: Silence and Story

January 24, 2012 in Bible Thoughts with 87 Comments

I am grateful to Tony Jones for returning, once again, to engage ch. 9 of Jesus Have I Loved, but Paul?, after first critiquing the chapter last week.

He summarizes my three-fold engagement with scripture:

  1. We can’t run to the OT on this, but need to begin with the NT interpretation of the place of sex within the Christian story.
  2. Jesus is silent on the issue. I take this to be a slight argument against Jesus’ approval of homosexual practice–Jesus was Jew, and where he disagreed with his Jewish contemporaries we’ve heard about it.
  3. This leaves Romans 1 and 1 Corinthians 6 as the principal sparring grounds for our exegetical debates about homosexual practice.

To points 2 and 3, he has this to say:

First, we don’t use Jesus’ arguments from silence to uphold ethical evils such as slavery, racism and rape. So what’s the argumentative force of arguing from Jesus’ silence on homosexuality?

Second, this leaves a couple of verses in the traditionalist camp, hardly enough to exclude one whole segment of society from full participation in the church.

I think that this is a strong counter-argument to a biblicist approach to homosexuality. Having one or two verses in our pockets is not sufficient to create blanket ethical statements for the church. But I’m working from another angle.

Image: digitalart / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Everything we believe and practice as a church has to be integrated into the larger narrative of the God at work in the world through the people of Israel to reconcile the entire cosmos to Himself in Jesus Christ.

In the book, I argued that the larger, redemptive dynamics of that story were sufficient to overturn practices of slavery and of excluding women from pastoral ministry and teaching. This was on the basis of a couple of considerations: (1) the overall trajectory of the story toward social equality and liberation; (2) the indications that inequalities and subjugations entailed in hierarchical relationships are dynamics of a disordered world and therefore subject to redemption; and (3) varied testimony in scripture.

The narrative of scripture undermines the complementarian efforts, for example, to uphold 1 Tim 2:11-15 as universally normative for male-only leadership in the church.

I increasingly feel the weight of the argument that point 1 is a factor in favor of full inclusion of homosexuals in the church.

It was factors two and three that kept me from allowing the trajectory toward freedom and liberation to play a decisive role. What I mean is this: first, whereas the indications in scripture are in favor of subjugation of women and other humans as slaves are distortions of the world as God intended, the narrative within which Paul’s critique of homosexual practice is embedded in Rom 1 is the opposite. There, homosexual desire and practice itself is depicted as an outcome of a world gone astray from God.

Also, there is no counter-testimony on this issue such as there is on so many others such as those pertaining to women in the church or ethnicity and the people of God.

So the bottom line of my response to Tony’s post is that it’s not simply two verses, but how those verses fit within the larger story line of the biblical narrative.

This is why I suggested that a different means of argumentation would have to be offered to convince me that homosexual desire and practice is o.k. within the biblical narrative. One of these is a reconsideration of what the “new creation” looks like that is both making itself felt in the present and toward which we are straining–the new reality that we are to realize in an incipient way within the church.

The second is a compelling work of the Spirit in and among my brothers and sisters (yes, I will call them that gladly) who are practicing homosexuals such that their acceptance by God as they are becomes an undeniable testimony of God that they should be received by the church as such.

To my mind, the call to affirming and embracing is an uncircumcision argument: a plea to recognize that God has accepted and embraced those whom we could never anticipate, based on scriptural exegesis, would be accepted as they are.

Our story has taken any number of unexpected turns. If the embrace and affirmation of practicing homosexuals is one of them, it will be one of those moments that could not have been anticipated beforehand, calling us to reimagine a bit more broadly the place of sexuality in our story.

Based on Tony’s first engagement with my chapter, I think this is where he is, and where I’m not yet ready to go.

To me the issue is less the content of a couple of verses and more the overall narrative withing which those verses find their coherence.

Homosexuality: Identity and Scripts

October 19, 2011 in Book Reviews, Culture with 29 Comments

I’d like your help.

I’m involved in some discussions about homosexuality in the church, and we’re using Mark Yarhouse’s book, Homosexuality and the Christian as our jumping-off point. There are two ideas he puts forward that I would love some broader feedback on.

First, Yarhouse issues a word of caution about quickly embracing the idea and language of gay identity.

Instead, he suggests we think about a three-tiered understanding (probably more like three points on a spectrum) of a person’s sexual predilections: (1) attraction; (2) orientation; and (3) identity.

The difference between 1 and 2 might be persistence over time or strength / prevalence of a given way of being attracted.

The third, “identity,” is something that has literally only become possible over the past century or so. To claim an identity based on sexuality is a relatively modern invention. People before wouldn’t have said, “I’m straight” or “I’m heterosexual” or “I’m homosexual.” Each is a sociological label that tends to carry with it a set of expectations of not only attractions but also practices.

And, since such an identifying label defines “who we are,” those attractions and practices tend to become normative. Living an integrated, healthy life is largely a matter of knowing who we are and acting in step with that.

Yarhouse suggests that avoiding the language of identity is important for giving people space to process how they will respond to attractions, and whether or not they will be in any sense defined or bound by them. Thus, someone might choose to say, “I am a Christian, and I am a Christian who is attracted to other men.”

This point dovetails nicely, it seems to me, with what Jenell Williams Paris wrote about in The End of Sexual Identity. We might do well to resist the notion that our sexuality defines who we are.

Do you think that such a separation is helpful?

The second place I’d like more discussion is on the idea of “scripts.” First, as we talk about scripts, it is important that we not look at these pejoratively. Each of us has an understanding of what it means to act out a part we have been given.

As a professor, I have a certain sense of what it means to faithfully teach or write or get mired in committee work that I perform based on my understanding of what script comes along with the role I’ve been assigned. Similarly, my understandings of what I do because I am husband or father.

Social setting and experience and myriad other factors come together to provide us with scripts. It’s part of life.

What Yarhouse contends in the book is that there is a powerful and compelling script for acting out the role of homosexuality on offer from the gay community, but that there is no compelling alternative coming from the Christian world–and this is a huge problem that we need to address.

Here is how Yarhouse sees the gay script (p. 49):

  • same-sex attraction signals something natural (even God-given)
  • same-sex attractions are the way you really are
  • these attractions are at the core of who you are as a person
  • same-sex behavior is an extension of that core
  • self-actualization in such behavior is crucial for your fulfillment

In other words, the script communicates quite strongly that sexuality is at the core of our identity, and that living in accordance with, and in expression of, that sexual desire is how we live healthfully.

In contrast, Yarhouse outlines what a traditionalist Christian script might look like for someone experiencing sexual attraction (p. 51):

  • same-sex attraction is but one of many distortions of nature that we all experience as part of life that is not the way it is supposed to be
  • [same-sex] attractions are not the defining element of your identity
  • you can choose to integrate same-sex attraction into a gay identity…
  • … or, you can center your identity around other aspects of your experience
  • the most compelling aspect of personhood for the Christian is one’s identity in Christ

I’m curious what you think.

Have we as Christians, both heterosexual and homosexual, bought in too much to the idea that our sexuality is at the core of our identity as persons? Do we all need to put sex on more of a back burner when it comes to who we truly are?

Also, is there a compelling, alternative Christian script–perhaps one that sits less like Yarhouse’s, as a counter-point to the homosexual script, that we should be promoting for everyone alike or for those who experience homosexual attraction in particular?

The End of Sexual Identity

July 14, 2011 in Book Reviews with 8 Comments

Once upon a time I was in the practice of saying that the church has something wonderful for GLBT people–the same thing it has for folks who consider themselves heterosexual; namely, that your sexuality is not the most important thing you have to say about yourself.

Your sexuality is a part of who you are, but you are more than the complex of desires, experiences, abuses, successes, fulfillments, frustrations, satisfactions, brokenness, wholeness, sinfulness, and fidelity that pertain to your sexuality.

Jenell William Paris thinks that an uncritical acceptance of the notion of sexual identity is at the core of the church’s problems in its thinking about sex. In her book, The End of Sexual Identity, Paris uses her training as an anthropologist to help us step back and see that the ways we so easily fall into talking and thinking about sexuality are culturally conditioned. And in this case, the church has too readily adopted our culture rather than creatively developing a more healthy and holy Christian counter-culture.

In laying out the problems with sexual identity, Paris begins with the troubles with heterosexuality.

There are several problems with the idea of heterosexuality. One of these is that it presumes a binary of homosexual / heterosexual, whereas the range of human sexual desire falls along a continuum with several intermediate stages between.

A further problem is that this binary has a particular function. It was created, in the past one hundred years, as a way to distinguish what was labelled “deviant” behavior from “normal” desires and behavior. Thus, it was created to be a label that communicates moral superiority.

This last point has a further implication: the idea of “being” homosexual or “being” heterosexual is new–and is therefore an anachronistic grid for reading scripture. More importantly, it elevates an identity based on sexual feelings to a place that scripture assigns to our belovedness by God.

Who are you? The answer to this question should not be, “heterosexual,” and therefore beloved of and faithful to God; instead, it should be, “beloved of God.” Once we cling to heterosexuality as our identity marker, we then create communities where this is required to the extent that we are not able to tell honest stories of struggle–or of grace.

The book offers a pervasive dismantling of simplistic assumptions about sexuality. In her chapter on homosexuality, Paris reminds us that there are different ways to configure homosexual activity. Though we base the label on desire for a same-sex relationship among equals, in the ancient world there were age and power dynamics that sustained homosexual activity; others who engage in same-sex sex might do so for professional reasons: in some cultures religious reasons in others as professional entertainers or prostitutes.

In place of sexual identity, Paris advocates that we strive for sexual holiness within our fundamental identity as God’s beloved children. Sexual holiness will wrestle with issues of behavior, desire, hopes, histories, choices, relationships, and others as well.

With such a reconfiguration, we are faced with two important outcomes: (1) sexual identity does not become an identity marker for the people of God such that we exclude, include, divide, and the like based on the category of sexual desire; and (2) we are freed to respond to one another, and grow in community together, as people who are all in some ways more and in some ways less healthy, holy, broken, whole, sinful, and faithful in different aspects of our sexuality.

Put differently: if we could stop acting like calling ourselves “heterosexual” meant that we were sexually whole and holy, our sexuality could become a growing and more healthy component of our identity as God’s beloved children in Christ.

Who should read this book? Pretty much everyone. If I were a campus minister, I would read this with my leadership groups, and then have my small groups study it. I think all youth pastors should read this so that they can start thinking about how to transform the minds of their students. I think all pastors should read this so that they can help their churches avoid the pitfalls of reifying notions of identity that cut against the grain of biblical descriptions of identity and wholeness.

I think you should read this so that you can help me continue to think through the issues Paris raises and how her insights clear the way for a better way forward as Christians who celebrate sex as a gift given to us by God and yet have found it very difficult to integrate sexuality into our understanding of our selves as those beloved children of God who were created good, but have fallen, and are now being restored in Christ.

Gentiles and Homosexuals (pt. 6)

July 11, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Church, Culture with 16 Comments

Since I will soon be returning from vacation and have to deal with the firestorm created by my position on Christians and gay marriage, this will be the last in the series!

In essence, I have argued that we need to be able to separate what we are called to do as the people of God (the ethical norms God wants us to uphold in our communities) and how to posture ourselves toward those who do not hold to these norms–largely because they are not part of that community. In other words, on this particular issue, to hold to a traditional Christian position that homosexuality is not God’s intention for human sex is not yet to answer the question how do we love our gay neighbor as our heterosexual self?

There is good reason to think that the answer to the latter is to be agents of extending the life-giving blessings of marriage even to those whose marriages do not conform to our understanding of the Christian norm: God’s healing power is freely given to outsiders and even enemies; God’s power to feed the hungry is given to outsiders; Jesus condemns Law-keeping as an excuse for not loving neighbor; Jesus calls us to love and bless the evil and the good even as God our Father does; James warns us that religion is not about believing the right things but a doing of the right things which includes caring for our neighbors’ needs.

Photo: Eastern Illinois University

Let me speak now to those who object to this, and take up a few of the more frequent objections along the way.

First, we should be aware of how much marriage guidance there is in the NT, and how little of it we either follow ourselves or demand to have written into law. For example, Paul says that a Christian can only marry another Christian. Should we demand that the laws of the U.S. fulfill this standard? Note that this is much more significant in terms of the Christian narrative than hetero- versus homosexual sex. This is about whether a person who is a member of Jesus’ own body will join that body to someone who is not in Christ.

If we don’t want the state to enforce other Christian marital standards, why the requirement of heterosexuality?

Second, people have drawn attention to the fact that once gay people can be married, the sorts of opportunities that open up to them include adoption. It seems to me that this should be one of the driving forces behind Christians getting in line to support gay marriage. One of the quintessential characteristics of a just society is one in which the orphan is cared for. The moving of a child into a stable home, rather than being raised in an orphanage of some type, shuttled about to various foster families, or even aborted would seem to be a tremendously Christian reason for supporting gay marriage.

The simple fact is that most of us Christians who are married and capable of having our own children do not adopt. We neglect our duty to love the orphan, and also want to close down an avenue for them to be cared for? The objection to this line of thinking is that being raised by gay parents is somehow inherently bad. But how? I know that the real life challenges of being a heterosexual parent create at times tense environments and moments that will be the subject of my and my friends’ children’s therapy visits. Are committed homosexual couples going to have an inherently more challenging home life? Is there any evidence for such an idea?

Third, what about other moral issues concerning sex and marriage? What about pedophilia or polygamy?

Pedophilia is easy: there is a minor to be protected from the coercive power of the adult. That is an entirely different category.

Polygamy is challenging in that it has some biblical precedent. The idea that two people become one in marriage did not stop Jacob from becoming one with Leah and also becoming one with Rachel. But here I have a similar concern as with the pedophilia case, though it’s not as cut and dry. Polygamy tends to thrive where there is a significant power dynamic in favor of, usually, men who accumulate various wives for themselves. I can see monogamy laws as a form of protection to a wife who has been promised in marriage the affections, care, and single-hearted devotion of her husband (and vice versa).

Finally, I do want to keep asking: Why is this particular Christian standard the one we think our civil society should uphold for all? Is not worship of God more important? Why not mandate church attendance? Is giving to the poor not more important than, or at least equally important as, whom we choose to have sex with? Why not mandate a more extensive system of food banks and extend welfare programs? Why not require people to adopt childless parents?

I know that these are not the kinds of debates in which people’s minds are changed overnight. But at the end of it I want, as much as anything, to ask that we recognize that the issue of gay marriage is difficult, because our calling to live in a certain way does not thereby define whom we are called to love or how. The love of God cannot be contained by laws or within certain communities. And we are called to take that love, and God’s blessings, into all the parts of the world in which God has placed us.

Gentiles and Homosexuals (pt. 5)

July 9, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Church, Culture with 16 Comments

Inasmuch as I’m still on vacation, and still not able to get any sort of access to the internet, I figured I’d keep putting up posts on how God’s desire to bless the whole world might mean that Christians should participate in such blessing without requiring, first, that people act like us. The God who causes the rain to fall and the sun to shine on the evil and good alike, I’m arguing, wants us to work toward extension of God’s blessing to all around us–even when we believe they are acting outside of and even against the will and work of God.

In other words, the New Testament itself demands of us that we not only assess what we are supposed to do as God’s obedient and faithful people, but that we not require of others that they so act before they receive God’s blessings from our hand (or God’s). (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.)

In short, the argument has been that if we want to know how we who believe homosexual activity is sinful should treat our gay neighbors, we can do little better than looking at how Jesus treats Gentiles and other outsiders. Jesus enacted, and proclaimed, the love of God that brings rain and sun on the evil and the good alike–without demanding, first, that the evil become good. And he calls us to do the same: to be children of our heavenly Father who so showers His blessings.

A recurring apprehension I hear when I suggest that this applies to advocating gay marriage in the state is that it undermines our responsibility to uphold the standards of God. Is it not our duty to shine our light by living differently and calling people to something different rather than blessing their sin?

Image: Michal Marcol / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

There will be no mercy in judgment for anyone who hasn’t shown mercy. Mercy overrules judgment. My brothers and sisters, what good is it if people say they have faith but do nothing to show it? Claiming to have faith can’t save anyone, can it? Imagine a brother or sister who is naked and never has enough food to eat. What if one of you said, “Go in peace! Stay warm! Have a nice meal!” ? What good is it if you don’t actually give them what their body needs? (James 2:13-17, CEB)

What is the faith that God will approve? It is a faith that puts belief into action by caring for the people who are around us. While we are tempted to spiritualize this, deferring to “taking care” of people by calling them to repentance, the NT consistently looks at material provision, caring for people as they are embodied and part of the social world around us, as the means by which such care is to be extended.

These passages, altogether, frighten me a bit. They tell me that the very things we are most prone to look to as indicating and expressing our faithfulness to God are the things that are most strongly preventing us from exercising the law of love that shows us to be children of our Father in heaven.

Why would I rather approve of homosexual marriage in the state than enforce a Christian heterosexual standard? Because I would rather be found guilty of extending the blessings of divine provision for human flourishing (marriage, stability, comfort, healthcare, inheritance) beyond their proper bounds than of hoarding them for the people of God alone to enjoy. These passages together suggest to me that such indiscriminate dissemination is what it means to be a child of the one true God.

Gentiles and Homosexuals (pt. 4)

July 6, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Church, Culture with 5 Comments

Since I’m on vacation and away from internet access, I continue my series on how we should be reading the New Testament and its implications for how we handle issues such as gay marriage. For those of us who believe in Jesus as the revelation of God’s saving power, Jesus as the resurrected Lord over all, taking up the NT is taking up our book, the stories and letters written for our communities, addressing us as the insiders, telling us what it means to faithfully follow God.

Too infrequently do we realize that this means that the characters in the stories with whom we bear the greatest similarity are the Jewish people whose understanding of God’s work is getting reconfigured. Thus, the story of Jesus’ sermon in Luke 4 tells us as much as them that God’s blessing cannot be confined to us as the insiders; Jesus’ healing the centurion tells us as much as them that God’s blessings and Jesus’ authority reach beyond the people of God even to those who could rightly be labelled “enemy”; and the parable of the Good Samaritan warns us that faithful keeping of the Law of God can keep us from seeing the neighbor whom we are called to love.

In all of this, there is something to be learned for Christians who hold to a traditionalist view of marriage as something God has ordained to be between a man and a woman. Once we have said this much, we still have not yet said what it means for our posture toward those who disagree, whom we would see as not practicing what falls within the sphere of God’s instruction for humanity.

Perhaps I can now put it more strongly: these stories together demonstrate that what God wants of us is not to restrict God’s blessings to the people of God, but to participate in showering these blessings indiscriminately among the people of the earth.

And, this blessing does not mean simply calling them to join the people of God, a “spiritual” concern above and before anything else, but means a true extending to them of all the blessings that come from the authority of Jesus, the mercy we have in our power to extend, the food with which we can feed the hungry, the medicine with which we can feed the sick–all the blessings that God bestows upon the world.

Today I want to add one more NT passage to the mix, to show that all this is not merely hermeneutical trickery on my part. Jesus tells us directly: it is not our business to restrict the blessings of God to those whom we love. This is not the character of God whose children we are.

“I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who harass you because of your faith so that you will be acting as children of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes the sun rise on both the evil and the good and sends rain on both the righteous and the unrighteous… Therefore, just as your heavenly Father is complete in showing love to everyone, so also you must be complete” (Matthew 5:44-48, CEB).

The blessings of God indiscriminately shower down upon the earth. And if we are truly God’s children, we are to be agents of such showering in our own world as well. The gay marriage issue is difficult because it is easy to point to the Bible and say that homosexual lifestyles are wrong. But it is even more difficult because God demands that we not restrict the fullness of life and blessing of God to those who do what is right, to those whom we love, to those whom we can address as brother and sister.

Love is not about demanding that people act like we do or believe like we do before receiving the blessings of God that we can help bring about in the real world. Love is about bestowing the blessings of God so that the people around us will see our good deeds and glorify our Father in heaven–this is exactly what it means to be, as the church, the light of the world. It’s not about keeping God’s Law so people will see how pious we are, it means loving our neighbor, truly, as ourselves, so that they will know themselves loved by our God and Father.

Being part of the in crowd is not, can never be, prerequisite for someone being the recipient of our love, of the blessings of God.

Gentiles and Homosexuals (pt. 3)

July 4, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Church, Culture with 4 Comments

In Part 1 of this series I illustrated the danger of thinking that we as the insiders can contain the blessings of God–we might find ourselves attempting to throw Jesus off a cliff. In Part 2, I continued with a story that shows how these blessings come even to those who stand against the very purposes of God–a Roman centurion receives the blessings of Jesus’ authority.

The point of this is to show through a series of engagements with NT stories that we must not only consider how we are to act in order to please God in our standing before him, but must also consider how we must act toward our neighbor who will not so act if we are to truly please God. In all, it seems that upholding our moral standards, or obeying God more generally, as a barrier to extending the fulness of God’s blessings to the world around us is a crucial mistake that might make us more the outsider than we realize.

The quintessential example of failure to extend blessing due to adherence to the Law is the parable of the Good Samaritan.

Image: therubicon.org

The Lawyer comes to Jesus, and correctly enumerates what must be done to obtain eternal life: love God, love neighbor. Like us, he knows that both are crucial, and that the doing of one cannot be an excuse to not do the other. And, like us, he is keen to make sure he knows who this neighbor is. How far does love extend? What must it look like?

The story that ensues is familiar. But too often, we fail to dig deep enough into the failure of love that is illustrated.

The man is beaten, and lays within an inch of his life. In fact, for all that someone can tell by looking at him, the man is dead. Why is this important? It’s a crucial factor because priests were forbidden to contract corpse impurity for any but their closest relatives. In other words, for a priest, and perhaps a Levite, to leave an apparently dead man unattended to was nothing less than upholding the Law of God.

Was the man who loved his neighbor the one who kept the Law of God and thereby kept himself pure to act on the people’s behalf in the Temple service?

Was the law-keeping obedient one the person who did what was necessary to obtain eternal life by loving neighbor?

No.

The person who was neighbor to the man, and therefore acted with the love that leads to eternal life, was the non-Law-keeping Samaritan, the half-Jewish “other” who bound the man’s wounds, entrusted him to the care of the inn keeper, and paid for him to come to full health and strength.

When we wrestle with how the ordinances of God might impact our status toward outsiders, we are too often in the place of the priest and Levite–upholding the Law of God and thereby claiming that we are loving neighbor even while we leave our neighbor without food, without healthcare, without a true participation in the blessings God has given us.

These NT stories are merely about legalists who don’t really understand God’s Law. They are about people who understand all too well the Law that differentiates them and separates them from the world that lies beyond the people of God. But Jesus takes hold of the biblical storyline that demands we recognize God as the God of all–and that we extend the blessings of God as far as God’s own Lordship itself extends.

These are stories that call us to love the outsider, that demand of us that we set aside the law of God–not as a means by which we live faithfully, but–as a means by which we determine who is worthy to receive the good things that God has bestowed upon God’s people, the good things by which God pushes back the brokenness and fallenness of the world.

Love is not depicted in any of these stories as demanding that someone enter the people of God, it is depicted as a realization that God’s blessings burst beyond the people of God, enveloping even those who will not place themselves within the space marked off by that God’s rules and people.

Gentiles and Homosexuals (pt. 2)

July 2, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Church, Culture with 5 Comments

On Thursday I began a series in which I want to develop an interpretive framework for wrestling with issues of homosexuals in civil society for those Christians who do not believe that homosexual practice falls within the realm of acceptable Christian action.

In short, the hermeneutical move is this: Christians reading the NT are now more in the place of the first century Jews than the first century Gentiles. We are the “insiders” who know what God has done to redeem and reconcile a people and what it means, at least in general, to faithfully follow this God.

In short, what we find at several key moments is that the blessings of God are not confined to the people of God–and that these blessings overflow and come to outsiders even without their agreeing to become insiders. We began with Luke 4, and the reminder Jesus gave of how the power of God to feed the hungry and heal the sick went beyond Israel in the days of Elijah and Elisha–and this enraged his audience.

It presses the question of whether we, too, are not enraged at the idea that our community might not lay exclusive claim to the blessings of God?

The decentering ministry of Jesus is visible elsewhere as well. In Matthew 8, after Jesus comes down from the mount of his famous sermon, a centurion approaches him, asking for a servant to be healed.

Gentiles are outsiders. Uncircumcised, unkosher, Sabbath-breaking outsiders.

But things here are even worse.

The Roman occupation of Galilee and Judea is a potent reminder of the failure of God’s promises in the prophets to come to fruition. The promise of being free in their own land to worship their own God under their own king is daily thwarted by military and political subjugation to Rome.

This Gentile who stands before Jesus is not only a reminder of, but an active agent in the failure of Israel to enter into the civil, religious, and political life that God has promised God’s people.

And he comes to Jesus to ask for healing. And Jesus heals his servant.

This means at least two things. One: the man saw in Jesus, the very definition of the “insider” for the new people of God, something powerful. Two: he saw in Jesus someone who would be wiling to share that power for the good of even a Gentile centurion.

He had faith in that power, in Jesus’ authority, and that it could and would be used for him.

Here, we might say, is an example of an outsider coming “in” in order to receive the blessing. But did he? Yes, he had faith in the work of Jesus. But Jesus commends him as an insider without demanding that he actually become an insider first. He blesses him, heals his servant, without the man joining himself to the Jewish people–and without the man leaving his post as one who stands against the freedom of the people of God or leaving his life behind to follow Jesus in his mission.

Questions that present themselves to us: do outsiders see anything in the church that they would want part of for themselves?

When they do see something that looks like a good–a blessing bestowed by the power and authority of God–do we willingly give to them out of the abundance of what God has given us? Or do we demand that they become like us first, enter into the community of faith in order to know the blessings of God?

Will we give outsiders our money for their food? Our medicine for their healing? Our marriage for their comfort and security? Or are these things only for those who first drop all that they have and then enter into the kingdom of abundance?

Note: I am on vacation and will be mostly away from the internet. Please feel free to have constructive conversation amongst yourselves, but I am not likely to participate!

Gentiles and Homosexuals (Pt. 1)

June 30, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 18 Comments

In Saturday’s post about homosexual marriage I made the suggestion that Christians need to develop the habit of asking two separate questions, without predetermining what the relationship between them might be. The first is, “What does God require of us as God’s people?” and the second is, “What does this mean for our life in civil society populated by people who do not, and will not, agree with us?”

I want to pick this back up today, once again focusing on those of us who are Christians and who believe that homosexual sex is sinful. I realize that there are Christians who disagree with this position, and that is its own debate. I want to keep pushing here the “so what?” question for those of us who uphold heterosexual normativity as part of our constellation of Christian belief and practice.

There is a strand of NT teaching that pushes me to keep the two questions I’m asking distinct, if not entirely separate. Why should we ask both what does God demand of us in our posture toward God and then, separately, what does God demand of us as an act of love toward neighbor?

That strand of teaching is the posture of the Jewish insiders with respect to Gentile outsiders in the NT.

In the history of interpretation, the church has made a number of mistakes in assessing the exclusivist posture of the first century Jewish community to the Gentile outsiders.

Perhaps most often the problem of early Judaism has been seen as legalism. Yes, the law was good, but early Jewish people were keeping it legalistically; or, they were keeping it because they thought that if they did they would merit God’s eternal favor and eschatological salvation.Gustav Dore, Jesus Teaching in a Synagogue

But the admonitions of Paul and the actions of Jesus point in a different direction: a surprising superabundance of grace that overflows the people of God even as that people is rightly adhering to the law that God has given them.

In Jesus’ famous sermon in Luke 4, he proclaims a jubilee year: freedom to the captives, good news proclaimed to the poor, light to those who are in darkness.

And the Jewish people marveled at the gracious words falling from his lips.

They knew themselves to be captives in need of deliverance. They knew themselves to be blind in need of light. They knew themselves to be poor in need of good news.

They were ready to sing “Amazing Grace.”

But then Jesus explodes their understanding of who the grace of God is for. There were many widows in the time of Elijah, and many lepers in the time of Elisha–but they were sent beyond Israel, beyond the people marked out as pure and holy and faithful, to feed the widow and cleanse the leper (without first demanding adherence to the Law of Israel’s God)–of non-Jewish, non-YHWH-worshiping outsider Gentiles.

And then the people were filled with rage and attempted to murder Jesus.

How are we to read this? On the one hand, we can recognize that most of us are gentiles and therefore happily included in this great surprise of God–that grace comes to us without our becoming Jewish.

And this is true.

But as those who now occupy the place of the “insiders,” the embraced and, by God’s grace, faithful people of God, we must also reappropriate this text from the point of view of its insiders. We must place ourselves not merely on the periphery as those to whom the word would come despite all apparent obstacles. We must place ourselves in the role of the insiders and be willing to hear that God’s grace will not be contained by us, and God’s blessings cannot be cordoned off to the faithful.

Of course, this is not an argument for gay marriage, but it is an argument about how we need to posture ourselves toward those we deem “other” if we are going to be faithful children of our Father in Heaven. Come back Saturday for part 2.

Gay Marriage in New York

June 25, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Culture with 151 Comments

New York’s state legislature has approved a gay marriage bill, and governor Andrew Cuomo has signed it into law.

Photo: Pat Arnow, Wiki Commons


As the states take up this issue one-by-one, I’ll keep working out my thoughts on the issue. I think that this is a complex issue for Christians. Here’s what it comes down to for me:

As long as the state is in the marriage business, Christians should support gay marriage as an embodiment of our calling to love our neighbor as ourselves.

First, I understand that there is a strong religious argument for the “definition” of marriage being the joining of one man and one woman. However, the state is not in the business of adhering to or adjudicating religious principles.

Second, to my mind, the best possible scenario is this: (1) the state does not marry anyone or recognize anyone’s marriage; (2) the state performs civil unions for any two persons who wish to join their lives for mutual support; (3) these civil unions are performed by civil servants, not ministers of the churches; and (4) churches can marry before God whomever they deem fit to marry in accordance with their religious convictions.

However, since this is not the case, and since the state has chosen to assign certain rights and privileges to married couples, people with religious convictions have to figure out not one problem, but two.

First, what do we think about homosexuality within the context of our religious community of faith?

But then the second, related but separable question is, What do we think about homosexual marriage within the state in which we find ourselves?

Here’s where, historically, Christians have done poorly: we have failed to realize that our answer to Question 1 does not determine that we attempt to enforce that answer as we take up Question 2.

I want to suggest that even those of us who do not support gay marriage within our faith communities have an obligation to support it in civil law as an expression of our calling to love our neighbor as ourselves.

It’s difficult for Christians to imagine a world where we are truly in the minority and subject to the power of people with alternative religious convictions. Perhaps a couple of examples will help.

What if there were a law that schools could only teach evolution and had to teach evolution in Biology class? I don’t mean that public schools had to do this, but all schools and educational programs had to adhere to this. What if we didn’t have the freedom to enact our wrongheaded desire to deny evolution and embrace creationism as an alternative?

If we want the freedom to make our own religious decisions about education and our view of the world and how to best educate our children, we are required to secure for those who disagree with us about every religious decision the freedom to enact their irreligious or non-religious or differing religious understanding of what a fruitful life here on earth looks like.

Similarly, what if our law-makers increasingly enacted provisions of sharia law? Do we want people determining what we can and can’t eat based on religious convictions with which we don’t agree? We’ve grown to anticipate that our representatives in various state legislature will enact laws for justice that do not infringe on our own free practice.

As Christians, we need to learn how to hold our own religious views while seeking liberty and justice for all–not just those who happen to believe as we do. In part, this will mean that we free people to do what we would believe is wrong.

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