At first thought the task seemed a little, well, distasteful to me. Frankly, nobody likes to talk about sex in church anyway, but preparing a sermon from a topical starting place is not my normal style. See, as a preacher my discipline is to open the texts assigned for the week and to mine them for a word from God.
And yet, I have to say I think our deacons are correct. It’s time for us, if we say we are serious about following Jesus, to look hard at how we are going to deal with this issue that is dividing almost every Christian denomination today.
I am not talking about the question of whether or not we welcome gay people to worship with us . . . as far as I can tell that is not a question here at Calvary; we’re pretty insistent here about welcoming everyone who seeks relationship with Jesus Christ.
No, I am talking today about the full integration of our homosexual brothers and sisters in Christ into our community of faith on every level of expression. That is, those who live and serve and worship among us, recognized in the full expression of who they are, of who God created them to be.
This issue is a hot-button issue, you can’t deny it. Even those who haven’t cracked open a Bible in years can tell you that tradition, conventional wisdom, everything they ever learned at church makes them think that homosexuality is really bad—in fact, it’s one of the worst sins a person could commit, right? . . . And that when we accept homosexual persons into full expression of life and faith in our community, well, we’re violating certain standards for Christian behavior.
The problem for those of us bound and determined to follow Jesus is that what he asked of us runs head on into this strict exclusion of people. Jesus, as you know, was a radical INCLUDER. Truth be told, a dissonance like this one is uncomfortable, and it calls us to look deeper. So, as we struggle, it’s best for us to start by looking at what the Bible says. If you’d like, take out your Bibles or the pew Bibles and let’s take a look together.
While different scholars hold different views and interpretations, it’s pretty widely agreed upon that there is a total of six passages in the Bible that address homosexuality.
Of the four passages in the Hebrew scripture, two are stories of destruction that include horrifying, brutal sexual violation, some of it homosexual. These passages, Genesis 19:1-29 and Judges 19:1-30, are two of several “texts of terror” (as theologian Phyllis Trible would call them), biblical stories of human evil lived out to its devastating extreme. Honestly, reading these texts is not a happy experience. They detail horrific events, but what they don’t do . . . not at all . . . is address the issue of sexual identity, as some claim that they do. Violence, evil, human pain—yes, they cover those. But they do not sexual identity, heterosexual, homosexual or otherwise.
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