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Sunday, January 31, 2010

How The Church Has Misunderstood Same-Sex Identity
Fifth in the Series on Love, Relationships, Marriage and Sexuality: Insights from the Bible

By Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz

Leviticus 19:31-33; 20:10-13; 19:19 New Revised Standard Version

 ³¹ Do not turn to mediums or wizards; do not seek them out, to be defiled by them: I am the Lord your God. ³² You shall rise before the aged, and defer to the old; and you shall fear your God: I am the Lord. ³³ When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien.

 ¹⁰ If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbor, both the adulterer and the adulteress shall be put to death. ¹¹ The man who lies with his father's wife has uncovered his father's nakedness; both of them shall be put to death; their blood is upon them. ¹² If a man lies with his daughter-in-law, both of them shall be put to death; they have committed perversion, their blood is upon them. ¹³ If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death; their blood is upon them.

¹⁹ You shall keep my statutes. You shall not let your animals breed with a different kind; you shall not sow your field with two kinds of seed; nor shall you put on a garment made of two different materials.

Today’s topic is one of the most emotional and controversial, and I believe misunderstood, subjects we could possibly address in a worship service.  I have prepared this sermon, as I did a similar sermon two years ago, with much prayer and reflection.  It has always been my experience that there is so much fear and misinformation about sexual identity that most of our discussions can generate far more heat than light, and what I would ask us to pray for, is that in the next few minutes, we gain more of God’s light and truth on this question and less of our emotion and unexamined presuppositions.

Let us pray for that for a moment in silence together.

I want to begin by asking, have you ever changed your mind about something that you had believed for a long time?  This might be something you might have been taught since you were young and then you had to rethink it when you had different information or when you had met some different people.

I had to do that about the civil rights of persons of color.  I was taught to be prejudiced and bigoted against Hispanics and African Americans when I was a child.  I grew up in Texas in the 1950’s where there were separate drinking fountains for some.  This was the time when minority people could not be served in certain restaurants because our culture taught they were inferior to white people.  People in my family were particularly prejudiced against Hispanics.  I went to a high school which was almost all white, and I had already begun to reexamine and rethink the prejudices I had been taught when I was in high school.  Then when I entered the university setting I began to be in class with fellow African American students and served on the student council with minority students and my mind was changed.

I had been taught something that I later learned was wrong.  I had been taught that some people were, by birth, inferior to others and I learned for myself how sinful that prejudice was.  I had been taught as a child that people of different races should not associate and certainly should never marry.  That was the American culture in the 1950’s and that bigotry was wrong-just as wrong as other things I was taught and later changed my mind about, such as the notion that there are very rigid roles in a marriage, that it is not a partnership and the husband is always the person in charge, who makes the decisions, instead of the partnership relationship that we talked about last week.

I learned and decided differently as I gathered factual information on my own and as I began to rethink my own relationships and my personal experiences.  I changed my mind, and now I have some “used to thinks.”

What important issues have you changed your mind about?  What are some of your “used to thinks?”   Everyone has some of those, if they have matured at all, and reexamined the world in their own mind instead of just holding on to everything they were taught early in life.

The church universal has changed its mind about a lot of things.  There are some things we used to teach, some things that we used to hold onto that don’t seem as important now.  It may be that we have reexamined our relationship with Christ and asked if those old teachings really match up with what we know from geology and cosmology and from using the life and teaching of Christ as our benchmark.

Most of us have reexamined how we understand the Bible.  Many of us used to be literalists and have seen that to be inadequate.

There is a passage in Psalm 137 of the Bible that was written during a very painful time in Israel’s history.  The Jews were in exile in Babylon.  The temple had been destroyed.  The city of Jerusalem had been torn apart.  Thousands of people had been taken captive and taken off to Babylon.  They were emotionally shattered.  Psalm 137 was written during that very painful time.  If you remember any of the songs from the musical, Godspell, you may know this song based on Psalm137.  “Our captors say to us mockingly, sing us one of the songs of Zion.  How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”

What we don’t hear read in church very much is the last verse of that Psalm: this verse says, it would be a good thing to take the babies of our enemies and kill them. I don’t think we want to follow that part of the Bible.  We have already decided not to follow that by using our reason and by measuring that revenge motive against the mind of Christ and we have decided to follow the mind of Christ.

Be careful when someone starts to quote some parts of the Bible to you, “the Bible says…”—because there are some parts of the Bible that are not consistent with the mind of Christ. There are some parts of the Bible that we have changed our minds about.

You can think of other examples. The church used to think, used to teach, that women were property. The Bible was written in a very patriarchal culture. Men made the decisions and the women were passive, or even considered property. The book of First Timothy says that women are not to wear gold or pearls or expensive clothing. They are to have no authority over men and are to keep silent and be submissive to their husband.  

You heard that passage quoted two weeks ago by one of our church members who went to the pastor of her church, not this church, when she was being abused by her husband. Her pastor told her to just bear it because the pastor believed this patriarchal bias in the Bible should still be followed even though it is contrary to the mind of Christ. I don’t think anyone here would want to advocate for that very destructive image of male and female roles today.

There are other examples of things the church used to teach that we have changed our mind about. The church used to teach that slavery was permissible. There are quotes from the author of Ephesians and Colossians that say, “Slaves obey your masters.” So that part of the Bible was quoted in America in the 1840’s and 1850’s to counter the movement to abolish slavery.

There are parts of the Bible that could be used to demonize Jewish people, and I am ashamed to say, that has been done over the last 2000 years. The parts of the Bible that demean women were used in the early 20^th century, in our country, to try and deny women the right to vote. There are parts of the Bible that seem not to permit divorce and those verses have been wrongly used in some churches to shun anyone who is divorced.

So far, none of these abuses are the position of the United Methodist Church except for the one we are about to deal with this morning.

Let me remind us, I do not mean to undermine the Bible. I believe the Bible holds the Word of God, AND, the Bible contains some things that are not the word of God. The Bible tells us some things that we have rethought and re-decided because we have measured them against the mind of Christ and the teachings of Christ and found them lacking. We have used our reason and experience to make some new decisions about what is lasting and what is not lasting in our Bible.

The heart of the Bible is Christ and we are to look to his teaching and example as we understand the rest of the bible.

What does the Bible say about homosexuality? Not much. There is not much when we really look. There are six or seven passages, the “clobber passages” some scholars call them, that literalists have tried to use to demonize gay and lesbian citizens. Some of the best known are in Leviticus 18 and Leviticus 20 where the text says that if two men lie together they are to be killed. I have only heard one church leader in our country argue for literally following Leviticus. That church leader was one Colorado pastor, north of Denver, during the Amendment 2 controversy in 1992, who wanted to deny basic rights of housing and jobs to anyone suspected of being gay.

The way that these extremists have talked about homosexuality is to use a word that shows up 70 or so times in the Old Testament, in the rules Jews use, about being Kosher.  It is part of the purity code for ancient Israel and it includes some practices that, if we are consistent, must be followed – all of them! The word is “abomination” and it applies to a whole variety of behaviors from same sex relationships to adultery, (also punishable by death of both persons), wearing clothing of two different materials, planting two different crops in your field, eating shellfish, and handling the skin of a dead pig. So, next Sunday, if you are sitting in front of your TV wearing pants or blouse made of Dacron and cotton, eating crab dip, and watching football, that involves handling the skin of a dead pig, you have already broken the Leviticus purity code three times!

Those six or seven “clobber” passages in the Bible have been misused to exclude and demonize, over the years, the five to ten percent of all people who are attracted to persons of the same gender.  These passages are explained in Dr. Vic Furnishes paper on “What Does the Bible Say About Homosexuality?”

In fact, let me tell you how dangerous that demonizing has been. About a year ago, three American pastors, fundamentalist pastors, went to Uganda for three days preaching against gay and lesbian people, calling them a threat and denouncing their basic rights as citizens. They thought they were just criticizing what they said to be, “the whole hidden and dark gay agenda.” I think it was hate talk, and hate talk has evil consequences when it is allowed.

What has been happening in Uganda?  Shortly after the preachers sowed their hate seeds and left the country, one politician introduced the Anti Homosexuality bill that threatened to hang all gay persons. The preachers have had to try and repair their damage, and the government is now saying that they are just considering life in prison for any gay man. But it has become a prime example of what happens when people try to take a 2500 year old Bible passage, from a different culture, and ignore what Christ says and what science says.

By the way, the mayor of Moscow was quoted last week in the New York Times as being opposed to civil rights for gay people.

We mentioned medical science as a resource. What does medical research tell us about same sex behavior? What I have read is that five to ten percent of all persons are oriented to the same gender and not the opposite gender. This occurs across all biology and not just in humans.

Our sexual orientation/identity is inborn and not a choice. This is critically important. Our identity is not something we choose but is a given, just like our eye color or skin color. We know a lot more about biology and genetics than was known 2500 years ago when Leviticus was written.

And we are wrong to use the Bible as a science book. The Bible is for our spiritual guidance and our relationship with God, and the science in the Bible is very old and inadequate. Church leaders misused the Bible in Europe in the 1600’s to torture and even kill astronomers and scientists who were using their new telescopes to observe the planets and were saying that the earth is not the center of the solar system.  The sun is the center and the planets revolved around the sun.  Scientists were imprisoned by church leaders for that. Remember Copernicus and Galileo? One of my heroes in history is Galileo who still stood up to the church powers who tried to oppose him.  It was a sacred moment for me three years ago to visit Florence, Itlay and see the grave of Galileo whose courage and faithfulness to his belief is a model. Galileo, also did not lose his faith in God. His understanding of God was larger than those around him.

What we learn from science about homosexuality is that it is a given, just as the heterosexual orientation of the majority of us is not something we have chosen.  It is a given.

We do not believe that all persons are heterosexual as was believed by the people who wrote the Bible. The conclusion I am citing is the conclusion of the professional organization of Psychologists in our country as well as the American Psychiatric Association who warn in your bulletin insert sheet about the dangers of so called “Reparative Therapy” an approach that is useless and harmful.

We have looked at what the Bible says and what medical science tells us. But, what has the United Methodist church said?

We have taken a divided stance about this emotional issue. On the one hand we say, (see the back page of your green insert sheet), that we believe that all persons are of sacred worth and that basic human rights and civil liberties are due all persons and that we are committed to supporting those rights and liberties for all persons. By the way, do you know that American business has led the way for all of us in the inclusion of all persons? A few years ago, 94% of Fortune 500 companies had policies of non discrimination in their personnel policies for all persons, gay and straight.

Our church is a bit behind in that inclusiveness and openness, because while the Book of Discipline says that we believe that all persons are of sacred worth and we do not want to exclude or discriminate, we actually practice that discrimination because our church has identified the practice of homosexuality as incompatible with Christian teaching. This is the only behavior that our Book of Discipline identifies as incompatible even though the list of incompatible behaviors from Jesus, which does not include homosexuality because Jesus never mentioned it, is a lot longer. Jesus’ list includes apathy, greed, envy and self righteousness, adultery, deceit and pride.  Mark 7 

And, in United Methodism, in our highest church court, our judicial council members supported the decision of a pastor to deny church membership to a new person who had joined the choir and was a gay man. Let me emphasize, he was denied membership because the man was gay.

We do not practice that exclusionary attitude at St. Andrew because we believe it does not match up with the mind of Christ.

By the way, when we talk about what “the church” has to say about homosexuality, we need to listen to the Methodist bishops, who, over the past few years are changing their mind about gay and lesbian people. They are saying we need to be inclusive of gay members and gay pastors because it is the right thing to do. Retired Bishop Jack Tuell wrote a sermon seven years ago entitled, HOW I HAVE CHANGED MY MIND, and we have copies of his sermon for you.

We have looked this morning at what the Bible says. We have looked at what medical science says and what the church says. We have tried to look at how Christ treats all persons and how he gets in trouble for including and welcoming people who are seen to be different, seen to be lesser than others.  Let me conclude by asking you. What does your heart say?

Has your mind changed on this issue over the years? One of our church members talked with me about that last week, about how his mind is changing about including and welcoming all people into the community of faith and not trying to differentiate who is better than someone else or more holy than someone else.

What does your heart say as you have gotten to know people who are not like you?  What does your heart say if you have had family members and relatives and friends who have finally felt free to tell you who they are? Have you been so frightened that you rejected them? Have you done what so many of us have done as we reexamine the beliefs and stereotypes we were taught for a long time and began to see what was wrong with those old beliefs?

What does your heart say?

When we sent out an Email earlier this week with some resources that we hoped people would read and think and pray about, one of those resources was an exceptional sermon by my friend and colleague Dr. Mike Dent who is Senior Pastor of Trinity Methodist Church in downtown Denver. Mike has provided excellent leadership in that congregation and has helped turn it around and revitalize it.

His sermon on this topic is a resource for us to ask-What does your heart tell you?

Mike tells about one of his church members, a leader in Trinity Church, who wrote this painful and hopeful Email:

Dear Pastor Mike

I found the strength to come out at Trinity.

I guess in some ways when I admitted to being gay, the aftermath was like getting a terminal illness.  Why me, God?  Couldn’t you give me something else?  I’ll do anything to make this go away.

I have spent many a tear filled night asking why?  One concept helped that I learned on the Emmaus walk.  I learned…that in some way we are all born broken in some way.

Then this sentence: I know that my church loves me and accepts me as I am.

What does your heart say?

Dr. Lewis Smedes taught at Fuller Seminary in California for many years. Fuller is a more conservative theological seminary. Dr. Fuller became a leader in including all people in the church. It was a position he came to over some time and one he had to change his mind about because of what he had been taught.

He writes a chapter in the book, Homosexuality and the Christian Faith, by Dr. Walter Wink.

He says this. Homosexuality is a mystery. But then heterosexuality is a mystery too.

Are you willing to keep learning and thinking and listening to your mind and your heart? Are you willing to do what Jesus tells us in Matthew 25, to welcome and sit down with people who are different and just listen and learn?

Are you willing to honor what we said from scripture last week; that promiscuity is wrong for any of us, gay or straight?

Are you willing to live by that powerful quote from John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement, who said, WE DO NOT HAVE TO THINK ALIKE IN ORDER TO LOVE ALIKE?

Are we willing to let the mind of Christ be our guide, the Christ who commanded us in Luke’s Gospel: BE COMPASSIONATE JUST AS GOD THE FATHER IS COMPASSIONATE.

Are we willing to live as best we can by the parting words from St. Paul in I Corinthians 16: LET ALL THAT YOU DO BE DONE IN LOVE.

If we are willing to do these things together, then we will become even more truly the Body of Christ.  Amen.