But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.
One night while I was a student at Eastern Nazarene College in Quincy, Massachusetts, I was seated in the lounge we called "the Fishbowl" in the Student Union. A friend of mine was reading through the Book of Genesis as part of the requirement to fulfill the core course "Biblical Literature and History". Suddenly, out of no where Heather shouted out: "I never knew there was so much sex in the Bible!" Those of us who heard her laughed so hard. To this day it is one of the funniest memories of college for me. I have been known to remind Heather about that time and the hilarious statement she made.
Is it not amazing how much time the Christian Church spends on the issue of sexuality? The Catholics are really no better than Protestants about that one. Every time the Episcopal Church passes a new resolution about LGBTQ people, we get criticized for dealing with the issue of sexuality, again. Every time some advancement of LGBTQ people, or contraception, abortion or women comes up, the conservative Christians get all wound up because of how much we talk about sex. The liberals on the other hand love the talk, and we are more than happy to engage in the discussion.
Yesterday I shared that I have been reading Gray Temple's book: Gay Unions In Light of Scripture, Tradition and Reason. I have needed to read a book such as that because I am in need of a different education about human sexuality than the one I was taught by conservative Christians at a place like ENC, the Catholic church and elsewhere. Incidentally, yesterday was the first time so far that I got a blog comment to a former post I had made from an Evangelical Christian who attempted to tell me that homosexuality is condemned by the Bible and those who live that way will not enter the kingdom of God. I was told by the reader to go read the Bible on a web site, and that the reason the person was telling me this is because she loved me. For the sake of the safety of my blog readers who are LGBTQ and searching for a positive relationship with God, any such comments of that kind that get submitted, are automatically rejected. This blog is not for having religious or even Biblical wars. This blog is for those of us who are LGBTQ to come here with the Lectionary from the Episcopal Church to find God so that we can work towards our full inclusion in the Church and society. All too long the Bible has been misused to spiritually abuse LGBTQ people. My hope is to write about how the Bible actually supports loving, committed homosexual relationships, so does God and so should the Church and our common society.
In Gray Temple's book in the chapter on Scripture that begins on page 35 and ends on page 99, he makes the point that our Biblical ancestors did not even have the same concept of sexuality as we do in 2010. In the time in which the narratives in the Bible would have happened sexuality was to them what violence is to our present time. It was not something for the purpose of building relationships as we think of it today. Sexuality was an action to state and demonstrate who was strong vs. who was weak.
"To begin with, consider that although it's obvious to us that there are two biological sexes, until less than two hundred years ago our ancestors knew for sure that there was only one sex--canonically male--and that women were an underdeveloped expression of it." (Temple, page 46, taken from Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1990, 4 et passim).
On page 51 Temple goes on to say that:
"In the sex-as-violence gender-construction that obtained until recent centuries, the basic axis was "strong/weak," with the "man" regarded as strong and the "woman" as one specimen of weakness. Class and wealth entered into the strong/weak spectrum. What was queer? Not same-sex coupling per se--possibly because everyone belonged the same "sex" anyway. It was "queer" if a man allowed himself to be mounted by a lesser person, male or female--the same as if he had allowed himself to be insulted or beaten by an inferior."
For the most part the writers of the Bible had no such concept as "homosexuality" or "heterosexuality". Those versions that have inserted things such as "homosexual offenders" in say 1 Cor 6:9, did not get that word from the actual translation, it was not there. All of the passages that are so often used to condemn homosexuality such as 1 Cor 6:9, Genesis 19, Leviticus 18: 22 or 20: 13, Romans 1: 26- 27 and 1 Timothy 1: 9-11 really do NOT condemn homosexuality at all. They are only used that way, or translated that way by those who practice Biblical literalism to suggest as much. This is why the spiritual violence done by fundamentalist Christians is so very dangerous and devastating. No wonder so many LGBTQ people say the hell with Christianity. As Gandhi was quoted saying: "I love your Jesus, I just don't like your Christians." Who wants to love a bunch of people part of a religion that promotes so much violence in the name of a loving and inclusive God, when the image of God is so distorted by those who claim to be followers of Christ?
I began this blog with a Gospel verse that is from today's Daily Office, because there was something I read in Temple's book using that verse that I found very interesting and profound.
"I want to suggest one more thought. If we grasp the single-sex/sex-as-violence-between-unequals gender construction, suddenly Luke's and Matthew's insistence on our Lord's virginal conception begins to make urgent existence sense, something the most liberal among us would be fools to part with. That's anachronistic. And it's literarily doltish to ape The Golden Bough and range our Lord's conception alongside pagan simidivinities who are suppose to have been conceived without fathers, Jesus's birth hasn't got anything to do with that. What the first and third Gospels want us to know is that Jesus--and eventually his Movement--represent the destabilization of that gender construction--because at the level of his very tissues, Jesus has no part of it. And to the extent that we allow Jesus's life to be our own paradigm, you and I in our spiritual rebirths are ourselves virginally conceived. The Prologue to the Gospel of John says as much:
"But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God." (John 1: 12-13)
The notion of the virgin birth is not countersexual. It is the beginning of God's healing the world's sexuality in Christ. It is a revolutionary, radical notion; reclaim it from the reactionaries." (Temple, Pages 92-93).
Yes there is a lot of sex in the Bible. Jesus brought a message of sexual revolution along with his Gospel of salvation. It is time that progressive Christians tell the world of the good news that God has liberated all through the love of God's Son, and stand up to all forces that want to put the old Biblical notion of sexuality back into our politics, our churches and our families. If Jesus came to bring a new message of liberating love, then we have every reason to share it with others who still remain in captivity.
Let your continual mercy, O Lord, cleanse and defend your Church; and, because it cannot continue in safety without your help, protect and govern it always by your goodness; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. (Proper 13, Book of Common Prayer, Page 232).
Look with pity, O heavenly Father, upon the people in this land who live with injustice, terror, disease, and death as their constant companions. Have mercy upon us. Help us to eliminate our cruelty to these our neighbors. Strengthen those who spend their lives establishing equal protection of the law and equal opportunities for all. And grant that every one of us may enjoy a fair portion of the riches of this land; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (Prayer for the Oppressed, Book of Common Prayer, Page 826).
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