Rev Len Abrams
14 February 2016

Held at St William’s Church,
Walderslade Village, ME5 9LR

Video of Public Lecture on Inclusive Grace

 

Introduction

Many years ago I was doing compulsory military service in South Africa.  There was a young gay man who had been on AWOL – absent without leave – and was picked up by the Military Police at his boyfriend’s flat.  He was held for two weeks in the detention cells awaiting his trial.  On the morning of his trial I came across him by chance in the Charge Office as he was waiting to to be taken to court.  I wished him luck in passing and that he would get a fair deal.  That evening he came up to me in the pub – he been sentenced to two weeks detention which he had served whilst waiting for his trial.  He wanted to thank me for saying the only kind words he had heard in those two weeks in that hell hole – and for a split second I got to see the world through his sad young eyes.

A Journey – my background

I realise that the issue of human sexuality and the church is complex and difficult.  It is an area which is the cause of great hurt and damage and there are very divergent views.  What I want to talk about this evening is my journey through this issue over many years.  This is my journey and it will necessarily be different to yours.

I became a Christian as a teenager in the early 70’s and started my faith journey in a conservative evangelical environment. In many ways I am deeply thankful for this – I was ‘born’ as a Christian into a tradition which placed great emphasis on the centrality of Scripture and the redeeming work of Jesus.

BUT it was also a world of stark alternatives where everything was right or wrong; light or dark. Homosexuality was an abomination. Initially and for a number of years (about 2 !) I held this belief. Then I entered a sort of no-man’s-land of uncertainty where I basically just avoided thinking about it and did not have an opinion. This lasted for a long time – about twenty years – until it was not tenable any longer.

I had an ever deepening understanding of a radical, transcendent, utterly-disturbing Divine Love, growing realisation of counterintuitive grace which tended to stand all our conventional understanding of who God is on its head.  I could not reconcile this with what I came to find as a myopic, brittle and deadening world view which saw a section of people as irredeemable because of who they had been created to be.  I could not reconcile these differences for myself and I could no longer with integrity remain on the fence.

The Bible

There is now an increasing body of biblical scholarship and opinion regarding the meaning of those passages in Scripture which have in conservative tradition been understood to point towards homosexuality being sinful in orientation and in practice.

How we read Scripture.

How we read scripture is key and it is an issue to which Jesus referred many times – determining what a particular passage of scripture means for us today is not a trivial undertaking and I am not a Biblical scholar – I am merely an engineer Priest.

There are a number of questions which we must ask:-

1. What does the passage mean in context? What did the passage mean when it was written within that particular complex cultural & religious context? – What has been ‘lost in translation’, not just language translation? The culture in New Testament times was highly stratified – Jews and gentiles did not mix, it was a highly male dominated patriarchal culture and slavery was deeply embedded in the economic and social structures of society. It is almost impossible for use to transpose ourselves into a position to understand what life was like then.;

2. What does the passage mean in the context of the overall revelation of the nature of God in the scriptures? Does our interpretation of the passage violate the underlying ‘moral logic’ of the nature of God as revealed primarily in the person of Jesus and what the broad scope of scripture tells us about the nature of God? A God who is moral, loving, just, concerned for the outcast, the poor, the foreigner, relational, who sees the whole of human history in terms of salvation….;

3. What does the passage mean through the over-riding lens of the New Covenant? Jesus demonstrated in his life and ministry that the ancient Law of Moses was made for the people and not the other way round – he condemned the religious hierarchy of his day for being followers of the letter of the Law and not the spirit of the Law.  The Apostle Paul, who came from that religious hierarchy, was absolutely unequivocal that the rituals of the Jewish law did not apply under the New Covenant.  This is critical – if it had not been so, Christianity would have remained no more than a small sect within Judaism.  Our ultimate hope lies in what God did for us through Jesus, not through following the Law.

4. How has the passage been interpreted through tradition? Our understanding of a given passage may be coloured by the Church’s traditional teaching – this may be right or wrong and should not go unchallenged as the historically momentous events of the Reformation show us.  As members of the Church, the Body of Christ, we are both participants in our traditions and makers of the traditions of tomorrow;

5. How is the passage interpreted through the lens of our current social and cultural contexts? We cannot help but to read scripture through the lens of our own social and cultural contexts.  For example, we find it almost impossible today to understand how for thousands of years good God fearing, Bible believing Christians saw nothing wrong with slavery.

6. What is the Spirit of God saying today? God is not static, God is not trapped within the pages of a book written thousands of years ago.  We serve a living God whose Spirit, we believe, is within us.  We seek to learn, through a life of devotion, to hear the prompting of God’s Spirit more clearly day by day – we need to ask the Spirit to guide us in how we understand the meaning of scripture as well.

What we are talking about above is Biblical exegesis.  This is the complex work of scholars and theologians.  But how do we as ordinary people live by the Book day-by-day?  We need to immerse ourselves in scripture, reading it and studying it all our lives, remembering all the time that the written word speaks to us of the LIVING WORD, Jesus Christ.  Faith is a living thing and therefore we have to learn to live with scripture.

It is a bit like last week on Ash Wednesday – a few churches did ‘Ashes to Go’.  They stood outside tube stations and offered ashes and a quick prayer to passers by.  In the US they even have drive-by ashing!  Great – it is faith out there on the streets.  We need Scripture to live by.

Scripture to live by – our moral responsibility

How do we do this?  Can we use the Bible as a roadmap to tell us each and every step of our journey precisely whether to turn left or right, or go straight on?  Is it like a GPS with a little voice “in 200 feet, turn left”?  Or is the Bible more like a compass which shows us the DIRECTION but leaves it up to us to decide how to get there?  This is very important.  When Jesus was asked this very question, which is the most important commandment in all the Hebrew scriptures, ³⁷Jesus said to the questioner, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ ³⁸ This is the greatest and first commandment. ³⁹ And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ ⁴⁰ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” – there is your compass, there is the moral logic of all scripture!   Matthew 22:37- 40 (NRSV)

I believe scripture is more like a compass than a detailed roadmap – a compass which tells me the direction in which to go and requires me to make a responsible decision each step of the way for which I am accountable.    We have been created rational creatures – as a mentor of mine used to say many years ago, “Make up your mind, if you have one!” I can never stand before Jesus at some time in the future and justify how I behaved toward this person or that person based solely on what one or two verses in the Bible say.  I cannot say “the Bible told me so” to justify myself – that is precisely what our Lord accused the Pharisees of – they sought to follow the letter of the law and not the Spirit.  It is an abdication of our responsibility to work out our faith for which we alone are accountable.  So be very careful when you use Scripture to justify yourself!

The 7 passages

Now let us look at the 7 passages in the Bible which allude to same-sex sexual activity.  We do not have the time tonight to ‘unpack’ these fully and subject them to full exegetical analysis – this is available in the literature.

Same-sex rape as an act of violence and humiliation.

Genesis 19 tells the story of the depravity of Sodom where the men of city demanded to rape the male visitors of Lot which would probably have resulted in their deaths.  This was an act of extreme violence and humiliation against both the visitors and the house of Lot, which transgressed the social code of hospitality.

A similar story is recounted in Judges 19 where a Levite travelling with his wife is hosted by a family in the city of Gibeah.  Again the men of the city surround the house and demand that the Levite is sent out to be raped by them, again as an act of violence and humiliation.  Instead the man’s wife is sent out and they rape her repeatedly through the night resulting in her death.

These horrifying events lead to war in the case of Gibeah and the annihilation Sodom.  This was not because they engaged in same sex sexual activity – they never actually did – it was because of their violence and perversity. To use these passages to imply that God views consensual, loving, committed same-sex relationships and intimacy in the same light as he views the violence and rape committed by of the men of Sodom and Gibeah is an exercise of moral myopia in extreme.

Levitical purity prohibitions.

In Leviticus there is set out in great detail the purity laws which are to govern the behaviour of Israel.  The primary purpose was to set the people of Israel apart from the surrounding nations and to prevent syncretism – the dilution of the Israelite’s faith in Yahweh with the surrounding idol based pagan religions.  These purity laws went into great detail and were extrapolated by the Jewish religious establishment into all the kosher and similar rules.  Prohibitions included the eating of shellfish, eating animals with cloven hooves, the eating of animals found dead, the wearing of tattoos and mixing different threads from different sources in the same garment.  Some of these make a great deal of sense in a desert context with no refrigeration!

This established the notion of purity and the need to honour God by avoiding all forms of uncleanness.  The Hebrew culture was also highly patriarchal and, surrounded by hostile peoples, set a great deal of store but procreation in which the “seed” of male issue was seen as very important, and not to be wasted.  A further area of concern was pagan temple rituals which included practices such as child sacrifice and male temple prostitution.

In Leviticus Chapter 18 verse 22 and chapter 20 verse 13, it is prohibited for a man to lie with a male as with a woman – on pain of death.

The difficulty here is the question of selectivity – under the new covenant and in the 21^st century what do we retain and what do we reject as no longer normative as part of the moral logic to be retained as Christians.  We eat pigs and shrimps, we do not need to procreate to survive as a nation, we no longer regard male superiority as needing to be protected as a matter of honour (at least most of us don’t, I hope!)  How does the context of male temple prostitution relate to consensual, loving, committed same-sex relationships and intimacy in February 2016.

If I am accused here of moral selectivity, of picking and choosing which verses of scripture to obey and which to discard, I stand accused.  If you say that we cannot make these choices, then you MUST obey every last dot and dash of each provision – you have to embrace the full range of strict Judaism, lock, stock and barrel!  We all have to choose and we do so all the time – that is what being intelligent moral beings means.  But we must be prepared to be accountable for our choices.

The debauchery of pagan Rome – Romans 1 24-27

Paul here is speaking into the debauchery of pagan Rome – possibly speaking specifically into the extremes of the reign of Emperor Caligula Gaius who was renowned for his lust and depravity.  In the quest for erotic extremes anything and everything went, including heterosexuals engaging in same-sex erotica which was un-natural in the extreme.  The full context is evident in the list of depravity to which they descended, darker by far than just sexual depravity – “They were filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness, etc. etc. etc.”

The question is, can this be honestly extrapolated to include consensual, loving, committed same-sex relationships and intimacy in February 2016?  I think that this is a great risk, especially if you read the very next verse which follows this list in Romans 2 verse 1 “2 ¹Therefore you have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others; for in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things.”  Very risky!

New Testament Vice Lists: (1 Corinthians 6:9 and 1 Timothy 1:10)

In these lists of vices the key issue is to look at the actual Greek words – in each case two or three words are used which clarify for us what is meant by these passages.

In 1 Corinthians the two words are malakoi meaning ‘soft’ or effeminate one, and arsenokoitai which is a difficult word because it does not exist in other Greek texts in the ancient world apart from the Bible, however it is assumed to mean ‘man-bedder’.  The one understanding is that the combination of these two words refer to the widespread practice in the pagan world of older men engaging in same-sex erotic behaviour with younger boys, many of whom were kidnapped and/or traded as sex slaves related to temple prostitution.  This was a highly unequal and exploitative relationship.

In 1 Timothy the words used are pornoi meaning fornicators or male prostitutes, arsenokoitai as in 1 Cor., and andropodistai which means slave dealers or kidnappers.  Many scholars believe that this combination refers to the same practice of male prostitution as in 1 Cor., known as pederasty – older men using boys for sex.  Unhelpfully the NIV translates andropodistai as ‘homosexual’ which is challenged as nowhere in the Old or New Testaments is any indication given of homosexuality as we understand it today as meaning same-sex attraction and consensual same-sex erotic activity.

Reflections on the 7 passages

There are different interpretations of these passages – that must be said.  However it is important to note that there is more than reasonable doubt that the tradition interpretation which holds that homosexuality is an abomination in orientation and in practice can be justified biblically.  These are seven passages amongst 31,102 verses in the Bible.  By contrast love is mentioned 471 times (depending on the translation), the poor and social justice is mentioned more than 300 times.  These you could say are major themes of scripture but, however you do the arithmetic, same-sex sexual orientation is not a major biblical theme and yet it divides the Church.

All the 7 passages relate to same-sex sexual activity in the context of violence, prostitution, lust and depravity.  The bible is silent on same sex attraction, love and relationships. Jesus is not recorded as ever having mentioned it.

Nature

One of the major appeals to reinforce the rejection of gay and lesbian orientation and sexual intimacy is that it is not ‘natural’.  God did not create Adam and Steve, he created Adam and Eve.  The appeal here is to biological complementarity as the natural order.  However there is a confusion here between ‘normal’ and ‘natural’.  In parts of Scandinavia 80% of the population have fair hair.  In such circumstances dark hair is not ‘normal’ statistically but it is no less ‘natural’ than fair hair.  Similarly there is ample evidence that gay and lesbian people have always been part of the human family.  In a recent UK National Statistics survey 1.5% of people self-identified as being gay or lesbian, which translates into about 545,000 people in the country.  Gay and lesbian people may not be statistically ‘normal’ but they are not ‘unnatural’.  They are simply normal people whose natural inclination is to be attracted to people of the same gender.

The appeal to biological complementarity is related mainly to procreation. However it is not the central aspect of relational compatibility, of love and commitment as can be attested to by many many gay and lesbian couples.

Culture

A few weeks ago we had the week of prayer for Christian Unity.  This fell in the week after the meeting of the Primates of the world wide Anglican communion.  To me it was a great irony that the meeting ended with the US Episcopal Church being censured and excluded from decision making in the communion for the next three years.

On two occasions, in response to media questions, Archbishop Josiah Idowu-Fearon, the Nigerian Archbishop of the Province of Kaduna, talked of the frustration in some African provinces of Western cultural understandings of sexuality being “imposed” on their communities.  “There are gays and lesbians in Africa, of course there are and we have always had them,” said Idowu-Fearon. “But generally on the continent of Africa our culture does not support the promotion of this type of lifestyle … If the Western world would just leave Africans within our various cultures, we know how to live together with our various differences …”

I find the Nigerian Archbishop’s comments very telling – it is a ‘cultural’ issue and they should be ‘left alone’ to follow their culture.  Whilst there might be a variety of different interpretations and views on what Scripture says about sexual orientation, the main appeal is not to what the Bible says but to what culture says – the perspectives would appear to be more culturally based than doctrinal.  This cuts both ways of course – in some cultures homosexuals are jailed, banned from forming associations, and generally discriminated against and the church there accepts this as part of their culture.  In other cultures it is discrimination which is criminalised and gay people have the same rights and protection before the law as anyone else and the church seems to be playing catch-up.

As far as the Anglican Church goes I guess we could follow the lead of the Nigerian Archbishop and leave each other alone to follow our cultural interpretation of truth and doctrine, whichever way our culture dictates.  The problem as I see it is that, whatever side of the debate you stand on, the Primates did not follow the advice of one of their most conservative members, the Nigerian Archbishop.  They did not leave the US church alone to work out what the “Good News” means in their cultural context and instead sanctioned the Episcopal Church for not upholding the values of a different culture! If we cannot agree on the issues of human sexuality, then we should at least agree to live and let live. (“Good disagreement” as Archbishop Justin Welby promotes.)  Otherwise there is little point in praying for Christian unity.

A liberation

This journey has been a liberation for me – not that I am gay, but it has been liberating learning that the God I believe in does not exclude people for things for which they are not responsible. I don’t believe this is me twisting the Bible to mean what I want it to mean.  I take responsibility for my interpretation of scripture in this matter.  What if I am wrong and have deluded myself?  Even though my ultimate redemption is secure through what Jesus achieved for all of humanity, I believe we will be called to account for the grace which we have received and on that day I would rather be found wanting for having loved too much or for being naive with regards to this issue than of being so concerned for the law that it trumped love, despite all my protestations that “I loved the sinner but not the sin” – a hollow convenience of the worst kind and a cruel heresy if ever I heard one.

Bottom line – I do not think that a committed, exclusive, long-term relationship between two same-sex people who love each other is different in essence from a similar heterosexual relationship.  I do not believe that sexual orientation should be a reason for exclusion to leadership or anything else in the life of the Church, including marriage.  I do not believe that same-sex attraction is sin in itself – however, just as with heterosexual attraction, how that attraction is expressed can be sinful if it is promiscuous, exploitative, harmful to others, lustful (seeking only self-gratification) etc. Similarly I do not believe consensual same-sex sexual activity within the context of a loving, committed, long-term relationship is sin – I would add “within the confines of consecrated marriage” but the Church of England is not there yet.

My journey continues

I am by no means a Biblical scholar.  I am on a journey of faith as we all are, whatever we believe or say we do not believe.  Quite apart form a formalistic, academic understanding of faith, there is a desperate need for authenticity – to be real and to keep it real.

I believe more and more that it is not enough to have come to a point of personal liberation on this issue.  In order to maintain authenticity as a Christian I am constrained by Jesus’ words at the Sermon on the Mount to “hunger and thirst for righteousness’ sake”, to “DO JUSTICE” and therefore not to remain silent when I believe that brothers and sisters of whatever or no faith are discriminated against, deeply hurt, and treated abominably because of who they are.

We are all on a journey

I recall someone saying at St George’s, Arlington (where I worshipped for a number of years when we lived in the USA) that they felt hurt and uncertain because they were trying to work through their own beliefs on this issue, and were not yet clear in their minds one way or the other, but that they felt threatened if they raised their questions about what the Bible said or what they thought at the present. They felt that even the process of enquiry resulted in them being labelled homophobic.  This either meant that they reacted negatively and reinforced their traditional perspectives or that they could not proceed along a path of genuine rediscovery.

I have to have sympathy with this because it is where I have come from. This does not mean though that I think that the rights of others should be put on hold whilst everyone gets on board.  I belief that the train has already left, that it is being steered by none other than the Holy Spirit, and that there is plenty of room for anyone and everyone to get on board, the sooner the better.

Finally

Honey I shrunk God

May the Lord have mercy on us all …