Beyond the Clobber: Embracing Love
For centuries, the church has blown it when it comes to the subject of same-sex relationships. Instead of following a religion where Jesus identified the most important thing as love, and told us not to judge people, for the most part, Christians have done nothing but hate and judge people with sexual identities that are outside the norm.
People have consistently and unsurprisingly used the Bible to justify their hate and judgment. It’s sickening to see how the Bible has been used to justify every terrible thing people have ever done to each other. People glorified their hate of the other while misusing the Bible as a weapon to justify the holocaust, crusades, slavery, degradation of women and immigrants and poor people. Whenever the Bible gets weaponized against a group of people, it’s an affront to everything Jesus taught us.
Kids are attempting suicide because they believe God rejects them.
At first glance, most people assume that the Bible condemns homosexuality and is contrary to Christian morality. Last week the ONA group showed a poignant documentary, They Know Not What They Do, about the effects that can have on young people. It’s a film that shows what’s at stake and why the ONA process is so important and I hope all of you will follow the links we post to watch it at home.
One teenager coming to grips with his sexuality learned the Bible says he was an abomination–that he was so flawed God rejected him. The kid checked himself into conversion therapy to learn to be straight, but he was who he was and felt so horrible about himself he tried to end his life.
The rate of suicides and attempts by young Christians who feel this way is astronomical compared to every other group. Think about that. Is that the message we want to send to young people–not even God wants you if you don’t stop being gay? It’s the message being received by most kids who grow up in an American Christian church. It’s wrong, and I believe we have a moral obligation to do what we can to counter this wrong.
We need to re-examine what the Bible has to say about the subject.
When my younger brother came out as gay, I was an evangelical, and I condemned him. There came a point where I said I don’t care what the Bible says, I love him, and if I can do it, surely God can too. This is ridiculous.
As someone who takes the Bible seriously, I wanted to see for myself what was going on. I’ve spent the last 40 years examining all of the passages, reading academic biblical journals. The scholarly consensus says the case for the Bible being against homosexuality is weak and misleading.
The Bible pays very little attention to the issue.
For all of the attention this subject gets, you’d think that the Bible talks about it all the time. You’d be wrong. Out of 31,000+ verses in the Bible, only six have anything to say about the subject. It is always buried in lists of things that people assumed were wrong and never selected as a subject by itself. But the Bible has hundreds of condemnations of things like gossip (133 verses) and greed, it talks about what to do with your ox more than 160 times. There are more than 2,000 verses that deal with how we treat poor, marginalized, and immigrant people.
When a subject is really important in the Bible, you see it reverberate throughout the different books of the Bible, but it’s just not there. Jesus never mentions it. Instead, he talks about love and acceptance and how we are all beloved children of God. He only criticized anyone when they were being judgmental against other people.
Sodom and Gomorrah is about hospitality, not sexuality.
Not only are the verses used to condemn homosexuality cherry-picked, but sometimes if you look at the passages cited, we should draw the opposite conclusion from how they’ve been used. Take, for example, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, which is the one most of us were taught reveals God’s judgment against the gay community. (I keep using gay because the Bible has nothing at all to say about any of the other letters on the LGBTQ alphabet).
We find the story in Genesis 19, where there a group of Israelites are hiding in a foreign land. Their presence somehow feels threatening to the townsfolk, so all the males in the town call out to them and tell them to come out of the house where they stayed so they can sexually assault them. In the ancient world, such talk was a common domination tactic to intimidate and humiliate enemies. It had nothing to do with same-sex loving relationships. It was violence.
Jesus brings up this story in Matthew 10 and says nothing about sexuality. Instead, he associates the great sin with lack of hospitality. They mistreated the foreigners living among them.
Do you want to bring up Sodom and Gomorrah? Be my guest, we’ll use it to guide our conversation about how immigrants are treated in this country. And we’ll talk about how important it was to Jesus to show hospitality to those who feel like outsiders and who feel more like outsiders to the church than the LGBTQ+ community.
Two passages from the rulebook Leviticus.
The Old Testament contains two other clobber verses in the book of Leviticus, chapters 18 and 20, which are rules and regulations mostly for the priests. Chapter 18 is a detailed list of people they should not sleep with outside of marriage. Your mom. Your aunt. Your daughter-in-law.
One of the passages says that lying with a man the way you do with a woman not allowed. Some translators used the word abomination. No one translated it that way until the late 1500s. We think abomination means sinful, monstrous, and evil. The Hebrew word is not an abomination, but toeveh. Throughout the Old Testament, toeveh is used in a way that does not imply a sinful nature. In Leviticus, it is toeveh if your ox tramples your corn.
Besides, it is not clear what is being condemned because the oldest manuscripts we have of these passages are missing words in the sentences. If you take a transliteral interpretation, it says something like, “With mankind you will not lie—lyings of a woman couch.” Huh? It’s not clear what is being denounced, but it’s a flimsy basis for a blanket condemnation of people.
Consistency is the big problem with lifting verses from Leviticus because it condemns many things we take for granted. You can’t shave the sides of your face or trim your hair. You can’t have shellfish, wear clothing of two blends or gold. Get a tattoo, pierce your ear. If you move and plant a fruit tree, you can’t eat from it for five years. The list goes on and on.
In the New Testament, Paul says the whole point of Christ is to free us from having to abide by all that stuff. Faith matters, as does being loving and kind.
So, that’s it for the Old Testament. One passage is about hospitality, and two others that are indecipherable. And there is no reason to make a bigger deal out of them than eating shrimp.
Three verses in the New Testament are about exploitation, not loving situations.
There are three obscure verses in the New Testament which are all part of common cultural laundry lists of complaints about other people’s morality. One is found in Romans 1. If you look at the overall argument, the point of what Paul is talking about is to realize that no one is morally superior to another. We’ve all sinned and fallen short. Therefore, it’s just stupid to be judgmental against someone else. The point of Romans 1 and 2 is to do the opposite of condemning people!
The other two passages in 1 Corinthians and 1 Timothy scholars believe are talking about same-sex encounters that are either part of rituals associated with idol worship or exploitation by rich older married guys with vulnerable poor, young males. Whatever they are talking about, it’s not equal, loving same-sex relationships. That wasn’t even a category in biblical times. There is no Greek word for what we think of today as a healthy same-sex relationship.
That’s all they have in the whole Bible. As you can see, the clobber passages against the LGBTQ+ community are inappropriately and dangerously used. Jesus was all about grace and inclusion.
Focus on this, not that.
The passages we should focus on are the ones where Jesus says do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Or judge not, lest you be judged. Or in Christ, there is no longer Jew and Gentile, male and female, slave and free, but you are all one.
The most apt biblical story for this conversation is in Acts 8, where we find that an Ethiopian eunuch was one of the first people baptized into the church. Eunuchs included a much wider field than those castrated; it also included people not attracted to the opposite sex. In Matthew 19, Jesus says some are eunuchs from birth. Jesus was all about inclusion, especially for people marginalized by the rest of society. Because of the laws in Leviticus, the Ethiopian eunuch was not allowed to enter the Jerusalem temple. But they set all that aside to baptize him despite the Old Testament law.
If the Bible could have a do-over.
If you traveled back in time and asked the authors if relationships in the same gender are wrong, their knee-jerk reaction would be to say, “Of course.” But after you explained orientation and what has happened to people because of their words, they would be horrified and take it all back. How could they have guessed all of the acts of violence, homicides, cruelty, shaming, families breaking apart that their words would provoke? Or imagine how many people would hate themselves or how many young people would commit suicide because someone called them an abomination.
If they could see all of this, they would take it back in a heartbeat. They knew that Jesus said don’t be the cause for someone to stumble in their faith and that we should love others as Jesus loved us—unconditionally.
Much of what we have in the New Testament is Paul writing to churches telling people they got his teachings all wrong. I can imagine him writing to the church of the 21st century. Grace and Peace to you all. It has come to my attention that you are using my words to justify being horrible to the LGBTQ community. This is your cease-and-desist letter. Stop it. Now. Do better. Let everyone know they are a beloved child of God fearfully and wonderfully made. To do anything else is an abomination. Grace and Peace to you. Paul.