A few years ago a member of the church I then served asked me to preach a sermon addressing the question, “How the Bible Says it is Okay to be Gay.” I was stumped. The Bible says things are beautiful or idolatrous, sinful or wondrous, evil or holy.  Terrible is a biblical category.  So is wonderful.  But “okay” isn’t a biblical category. Fair-to-middling doesn’t make an appearance in scripture.

The common assumption is that in the debate over homosexuality, the Christian Right have the rules on their side, a Bible that says homosexuality violates God’s will.  And liberal America has a political philosophy which holds that the autonomous, self sufficient, free person is able to do whatever he or she pleases.  Okay is a liberal word.  It refuses to pass judgment.  I’m okay and you’re okay. It is okay to be gay.   It is okay to be straight.  You do your thing and I’ll do mine and so long as no one gets hurt, what’s the difference?

The theologians I love have taught me to be suspicious of this kind of liberalism.  Not because I am conservative, but because I am a Christian.  And any ideology whose bedrock assumption is that people should be free to do as they please flies directly in the face of the Christian doctrine of sin.  A doctrine which holds that we are flawed creatures who, when set free to do as we please, will do the selfish thing, subjecting ourselves to what Stanley Hauerwas of Duke Divinity School calls the “tyranny of our own desires.1”

But you’re not reading this blog for a civics lesson or to agree or disagree with my politics.  You are here, I hope, to listen for God’s word.

Which speaks a wonderful truth to my parishioner’s question.  For while liberalism makes a good argument for the fact that homosexuality is acceptable, the Bible goes one step further to say quite clearly that gay people are good.  Not all right, but beautiful.  Not tolerable, passable, okay.  But wonderful, beloved, glorious.

This might sound absurd, even to those who wish it were true.  For despite the fact that Jesus mentions homosexuality as often as he mentions frequent flier miles, organic food and diesel engines (which is to say, not once) if conservative Christianity has taught America anything it is this: the Bible opposes gay people.

Let’s move quickly to prove them wrong.  Unlike a previous generation’s psychology which followed Freud to believe that homosexuality was some sort of disorder (and in a toxic combination of both misogyny and homophobia often blamed it on a gay person’s mother) today’s thought accepts that a person’s sexual orientation is an essential, ingrained dimension of who you are.  Homosexuality is no more a choice than is heterosexuality.  If you’re a straight man, ask yourself, “when did I first decide I would be attracted to women?” It is a ridiculous question.

But in the Bible’s most infamous comment on same-sex activity, Paul presumes that those who engage in gay sex engage in isolated acts of deviation from a universally shared heterosexual norm.  “Women,” Paul says in the first chapter of Romans “giving up natural intercourse exchanged it for unnatural .  .  .  And men, giving up natural intercourse with women were consumed with passion for one another”. In this understanding, homosexual activity is a choice heterosexuals make.  Like a truth-teller deviating from honesty in order to tell a lie, a person engaged in same sex activity momentarily departs from the morally preferable universal standard.

This was Paul’s first-century Jewish worldview, and it is one adopted by contemporary Christians who label homosexuality a “lifestyle” and try to convert gays and lesbians “back” into heterosexuality (as if they ever left in the first place).  To my mind, subscribing to a first-century sexual anthropology that modern understandings of human sexuality have refuted makes as much sense as believing the earth is flat because the ancient Hebrew cosmology assumed it so.  The earth is round.  You don’t learn to be gay.  You’re created that way.  Neither of these realizations diminish our appreciation for the Bible.  In fact, both can enhance it.

I like this metaphor.  Life is a long road trip.  You don’t have your CD collection or your i-pod.  Just a broken radio.  The only station you can find is playing the most amazing piece of music you have ever heard.  It soars, it ebbs, it reaches crescendos that make you want to floor the pedal and race through the beauty, it affirms you, it convicts you, it makes sense of existence.

But your radio is broken.  And while the music is occasionally clear, there are interludes of pure, unlistenable static.  Much of the time you hear both at once, this wonderful song, slightly obscured by the hiss and the fuzz of a broken receiver.

The stories of Israel and Jesus are this piece of music.  A piece that God composed.  And the authors of the Bible are our broken radio. Sometimes they give us the story in its pure form.  Other times God’s beauty is hidden in the static of ancient politics or prejudice.  And sometimes as is the case with this unfortunate reading from Romans, the signal is lost altogether – all we get is an ugly hiss.

The question before us is this: Are we going to listen to the Bible carefully, straining to hear the gorgeous melody of a nonviolent lamb who conquers by giving his life for ALL people, or are we going to listen indiscriminately, confusing the static for the symphony itself?

Let me take a brief detour here.  If blog entries had footnotes this would be one.  The approach I just suggested opens itself to the charge of “selective literalism” whereby we accept those aspects of scripture that we agree with as the word of God, and reject the rest.

Now, on some level I think everyone reads the Bible this way.  Neither Ralph Reed nor James Dobson has taken a public vow swearing that never again will they eat shrimp scampi.

But, I don’t think the accusation applies in this instance.  There are Biblical themes that I don’t like.  The second coming for instance. The claim that God will conclude history totally violates my modern perspective.  But, this belief is shot right through the New Testament.  Jesus mentions it frequently and it pervades Paul’s thought.  So, I place my questions and my doubt and my dislike underneath the doctrine’s pressure.  I try to believe it, or at least accept it.  I hope it shapes me.  I don’t ignore it.

Homophobia is not one of the Bible’s major themes.  Sure, it makes the occasional appearance.  But so does the justification of slavery.  So does the demand that women wear hats to church.  Even on 100 degree days! Most every Christian in America has rejected these latter two teachings as absolutely opposed to scripture’s primary theme: the truth of God revealed in Christ.

Back to my main point: we need to be clear in stating that our belief that homosexuality is natural, is not primarily a negative response to the Christian right.  Instead, first and foremost, it is a positive theological conviction.  God creates some people gay, and because God declares creation good, homosexual people must therefore be good.
Genesis doesn’t say that God made straight people on the sixth day and gay people two weeks later.  We are all children of the same creation, same creator.

Paul picks up this theme from Genesis in First Timothy when he says, “everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected.” The true meaning of the Greek word used in this context is “beautiful.” The meaning here, Karl Barth argues, “is that everything created by God is good, [in that it] is right, is well-ordered and therefore is beneficial.”

Barth suggests that when Paul says humanity is “beautiful” he means something other than the Genesis claim that we reflect the image of God in its pure power.  For of course Paul believes that we need to be saved, and we need to be saved because we have fallen, and in the fall, Paul thinks, the image of God was wiped from us.  We are broken and imperfect creatures, not God-like, but human – in desperate need of salvation.

So, how can we say that we are beautiful, beneficial even? Creation is the most important act in the Bible.  But after creation, comes the Fall and our ensuing radical distance from God.  This makes the redemption of creation, the salvation of creation, the work of Jesus Christ, the most beautiful act in the Bible.

Barth wants to argue, and I love this argument, that while we no longer reflect God’s perfection, we are called to reflect the work of the one through whom we were created.  We are beautiful not because we reflect God’s power, but because we reflect God’s mercy. We were all born through Christ to do the work of Christ: to love God, and to save each other.  And we all have a role to play in salvation.

This means then, that by rejecting gay men and lesbian women the church has stymied the work of Christ.  For if Paul is right, and all are a part of God’s salvation drama, gay people must have a unique role to play in that story.  What could that role be?

Well on one level (the most important level) the answers to that question are countless.  For every gay individual brings a distinct and personal self to the church.  The next time you’re in church ask yourself, who here has helped save me? Who helped me move? Who held me up? Who has modeled good parenting, committed love, joyful singing, a commitment to peace, an active faith? Who helped save me? My guess is the answer has almost nothing to do with that person’s sexual orientation.  Before we fall into any category, we are individuals crafted and created by God with individual gifts that no one else has.

But, of course we also fall into categories.  And if you worship in a church  faithful enough to fly directly in the face of dominant Christianity, a church Christ-like enough to unapologetically welcome gay and lesbian people, you are blessed to be saved by the beautiful category of homosexuality.

How?

Well, we all have doubt.  We all have reasons (good reasons!) to stay away from church, to abandon our childhood faith.  To write the church off as a disappointing institution, and Christianity off as an ancient and confusing myth.  We all have hurdles to clear in order to worship on a Sunday morning.  But, not all of us have heard the Church say “you are not welcome here.” Not all of us need to ask their pastor to preach a sermon in order to challenge two-thousand years of liars who twist the truth and smile as they tell us we are not “okay.” Not all of us have been told we are beyond the pale of salvation.

It is only gay and lesbian Christians who have to clear those hurdles in order to sing a hymn, teach Sunday School, feed the hungry at a Christian soup kitchen, share a cup of coffee in the church basement and praise the God who made them.  And in leaping into God’s embrace over the obstacles our religion has placed in their path, our gay sisters and brothers teach the rest of us how petty our excuses are, and just what it means to be faithful.  In their brave response to grace, we see faith that has the power to save.  And so we learn to be faithful.  And in our faith we are saved.  And so I thank God for my gay brothers and lesbian sisters in the church.

1. This is a paraphrase of a quote from the book Exilic Preaching reviewed in the magazine Christianity Today, March 2004 2. Stanley Hauerwas, The Hauerwas Reader

In his essay, “The Evangelical Love Affair with Enlightenment Science,”1 noted religious historian George Marsden debunks the popular conception, often conveyed in the mainstream media, that the American conservative evangelical tradition is, by its very nature, hostile toward modern science. According to Marsden, nothing could be further from the truth. American conservative evangelicalism has, in fact, placed such confidence in the unity of biblical and scientific truth that this presumption often forms the basis for its apologetics, which explains why the movement is, for instance, so invested in intelligent design theory at present.

In his March 2, 2007 blog, the president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Dr. Albert Mohler, Jr., took the evangelical “love affair” with science to the next level. In an effort to brace the conservative evangelical world for the prospect that the “gay gene” may one day be found, Mohler suggested that such a discovery, rather than prompt one to reconsider the classification of homosexuality as a sin, might instead provide parents of children with this gene an opportunity to use science to counter its impact, presumably to keep them from falling into sin and possibly eternal damnation. “If a biological basis [for homosexuality] is found,” Mohler wrote, “and if a prenatal test is then developed, and if a successful treatment to reverse the sexual orientation to heterosexual is ever developed, we would support its use as we should unapologetically support the use of any appropriate means to avoid sexual temptation and the inevitable effects of sin.”

More often than not, conservative evangelicals cite divine grace as the best remedy “to cure” those with same-sex attractions. And while I personally disagree with the notion that grace is to homosexuality what chemotherapy is to cancer, such a stance at least avoids Mohler’s theologically unfortunate insinuation that science might, in the case of homosexuals, serve as a proxy for the justifying power of divine grace. Could Pelagius himself have said it any better than Mohler has here?

In a subsequent blog, prompted by angry correspondence from both the right and left wings of the theological and political spectrums, Mohler stated that he “never even mentioned genetic therapies or germ-line experiments” in his earlier blog and that he is “adamantly opposed to genetic therapies of such a sort.” An article in Christianity Today,  however, reported that Mohler indicated he “would be open to a hormonal treatment” and believed that “Christians should support treatments that would spare a child from a lifetime of struggle.” In that same article, Wheaton College provost Stanton Jones was quoted in support of Mohler stating, “Our starting assumption is that the homosexual condition is not God’s creational intent for humanity, so if we have the opportunity to influence its occurrence, we should be open.”

Just when we thought humanity had already come up with a comprehensive list of ways to make ourselves righteous before God, Mohler and Jones have given us a preview of the next chapter in the sordid history of self-justification: justification by hormonal therapy. What’s next? The establishment of the kingdom of God through genetic engineering? The dawn of the new creation in a Pfizer research lab?

Ever since Paul’s encounter with the Teachers in Galatia, Christians of all stripes have been united in the belief that justification is an unmerited gift from God, not something human beings have to earn the right to receive. Surely Paul, not to mention Augustine and Luther, are up in heaven pulling the hair out of their beatified heads in response to Mohler’s comments. What’s different this time, as the conservative evangelical “love affair” with modern science takes what is perhaps its strangest turn yet, is that Orwell and Huxley are, no doubt, doing the same as well.

1George M. Marsden, “The Evangelical Love Affair with Enlightenment Science,” in Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1991), pp. 122-152.