Matthew 7:15-20

The Bible doesn’t have a lot to say about sex or gender. The law, the prophets, the teaching of Jesus and the early Church, all say a great deal more about justice, about faithfulness to God, about community, and ultimately about the way we relate to one another.

As we approach the small handful of verses that do, or seem to, speak to these issues, we need to be very aware that the authors weren’t talking about the sorts of relationships that we are actually interested in.

We want to know what the Bible has to say about committed, exclusive, long term, same sex relationships.

But whatever the texts are describing, it isn’t that sort of relationship. Because the Biblical authors had no such concept. Relationships like that just weren’t in their worldview, so they can’t possibly have been writing about them. We have to do more cultural translation than ever to get from the text to a meaning for today.

As we look at the handful of passages of scripture that have been used to deny freedom to queer followers of Jesus we may be left feeling we cannot say for sure what they mean.

When we aren’t sure what part of the Bible means, we come back to reading it through the lens of the life of Jesus, and ask ‘how can I read this in a way that makes sense, given what Jesus has made known about God.

So my aim today is not to show that these texts can’t be read as excluding and condemning. All I want to do is to show that they can be understood in a way more consistent with “the whole law, summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’”

So let’s deal with the verses. There aren’t all that many, and since Stuart has dealt with Genesis and Matthew last week, I’ll cover the rest in four sections:

The story of Sodom, the Levitical law, the ‘degrading passions’ in Romans chapter 1, and two strange words found in 1 Corinthians and 1 Timothy

This will obviously be a brief overview of each – if you want to follow up, individually or in a group, please chat with me, or use the feedback forms. There will also be some resources in the resources centre and the email list in coming weeks.

So first – Sodom and Gomorrah, from Genesis 19.

Two men, angels, actually, come to stay with Lot, Abraham’s nephew, in Sodom. And that night, we read “the men of Sodom, both young and old, all the people to the last man, surrounded the house; and they called to Lot, ‘Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us, so that we may know them.’”

What they are asking bears no resemblance to committed, consensual, same sex relationships. The people of Sodom are seeking to degrade and humiliate these strangers through a mass gang rape. Rape as a weapon of war, as an expression of power, the power of the city over the stranger.

In the previous chapter, these same visitors had come near to the tents of Abraham. He had gone out, invited them in, baked bread, and killed and cooked a lamb to feed these strangers. When they arrived in Sodom, Lot had done similarly, inviting them to stay at his home, showing hospitality.

The two chapters contrast the generous hospitality that is to characterise God’s people, with xenophobia and othering.

The prophet Ezekiel wrote “This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy.”

So we turn to the other Old Testament references, found in the Levitical law.

Leviticus 18:22 reads “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination”, and the words are repeated in Leviticus 20:13. Well, that seems clear enough, right? It’s not only wrong, it’s an abomination.

Well, I’ve mentioned more than once the difficulty of translation, but in this case we’re not tripped up by the translation from Hebrew to English, but by the English itself. Mirriam Webster gives this definition of abomination: something regarded with disgust or hatred. And that’s actually a good translation of the Hebrew toevah; a word that isn’t about whether something is fundamentally, objectively, wrong, but about whether it is seen as unacceptable.

In the food laws, in Deuteronomy, unclean foods are referred to as toevah, abominable. The people could not eat them – but they could serve them to, or sell them to, foreigners with good conscience. For they were not wrong in the absolute; they were wrong for, and in the eyes, of the people, the community.

A lot of the Levitical law revolves around preserving the distinctiveness of the community of God’s people. When the people were taken into exile in Babylon, and recognising that their very identity could easily be lost, certain practices became central to remembering who they were. The food laws, the festivals, circumcision. Deviating from these expectations of the community and becoming more like the pagan nations around them, was an abomination because the community of God’s people needed to preserve a sense of who they were; and to do that, they had to be different.

So we know, for example, that a good Jew would not eat pork. To do so was an abomination, because it was transgressing those cultural boundaries. It was no longer acting like one of us. And copying the sexual practices of the surrounding culture was ruled out on the same basis – it would be an abomination, because it would be acting like them, not like us.

On the basis of the Levitical law, therefore, we have no more reason to reject same sex relationships than we have to reject bacon.

In the early Church that question was settled by Peter’s vision in which God declared all food acceptable, saying “What God has made clean, do not call unclean”.

Cultural abomination was no longer a barrier to inclusion in the people of God. Because that’s not how Jesus’ people are called to be different.

So we turn to the first of our New Testament passages, Romans 1:26-27, in which we read:

For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.

The book of Romans is often treated as an abstract, universal, statement of theology, but it was written to a particular group of Christians – to, the Church in Rome, a city which, in the late first century, was famously debauched.

The political elite of Rome had taken to demonstrating their wealth by throwing drunken orgies. Everything about these events was designed to show how rich and powerful you were – the food, the drink, the entertainers, and the sex.

Now any man could buy prostitutes for his guests. Sex with women was a commodity, bought and sold.

But to have sex with a man – to force a man into the position normally occupied by a woman – that was a demonstration of power. Any man could dominate a woman, but you could dominate other men in the same way.

That’s the context in which Paul wrote of ‘degrading passions’, which he described as replacing what is ‘natural’ with what is ‘unnatural’. From the way this language gets used in the ancient world its fairly clear that the idea of ‘natural’ here is all about procreation: natural sex might lead to babies, unnatural sex can’t.

And the language of ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ is, in and of itself, not a value judgement. It’s just a description. The same language was used of the practice of grafting a fruit tree onto a different root stock in agriculture: a perfectly acceptable unnatural process.

So the idea that same sex relationships are wrong because they are ‘against nature’ doesn’t hold water. If it did, we would need to conclude that any sex that could not lead to pregnancy was equally wrong.

But Paul is making a value judgement in this passage. These actions, he says, are ‘degrading’, “shameless”.

Which they were. Sex as entertainment; sex as a demonstration of wealth and power; degrading other men by buying them and having sex with them as a way to increase your social status? That has to be pretty much a textbook definition of shameless and degrading.

But it has absolutely nothing at all to do with the sort of committed, consensual, relationships between equals that we’re interested in.

Paul’s argument in Romans 1 is “Look at the shameless way people are degrading themselves. That’s happening because they have chosen to reject God. God is letting them bring shame on themselves, in the hope that seeing what they have become might bring them to their senses.”

And Paul says, “don’t be like them”. The followers of Jesus are called to be different, to not bring shame upon themselves by indulging in degrading passions.

But, and forgive me if I’m belabouring the point, a modern day same sex couple is not a Roman orgy. Sex in a committed same-sex relationship has nothing in common with the shameless, degrading use of sex that the Roman church saw around them.

So yes, the people of God are called to be different. Called to not become just like everyone else. God’s people were always called, are still called, to be distinctive, to be different. To show an alternative.

And Jesus told us how we, his people, were to demonstrate a different way of living. By this, people will know that you are my disciples… if you love one another.

So we come to the final two verses:

1 Corinthians 6:9 and 1 Timothy 1:10.

Both those verses are parts of lists of people that God actually has a problem with.

In Timothy: we read of those who kill their father or mother, murderers, fornicators, arsenokoitai, slave-traders, liars, perjurers

And then in Corinthians: adulterers, malakoi, arsenokoitai, thieves, the greedy, drunkards, slanderers, robbers”

As I read those lists, you’ll have noticed that I left some words in the Greek – malakoi and arsenokoitai. Because its these two words, particularly arsenokoitai, that have caused so much confusion and grief.

Malakoi, first. Coming from the word for soft, when applied to a man in that heavily patriarchal society, it took on a derogatory meaning – effeminate, a man who acted like a woman – and thus became a term that could be used as a slur to describe a male prostitute – a man who acted like a woman in bed. At least that’s probably what it meant – it’s only used here in the whole Bible, and uncommon in other writing, so it’s hard to know what Paul was saying with certainty.

Arsenokoitai is even rarer. These two references in the writings of Paul are the earliest recorded uses of the word – either Paul made it up, or it was a relatively new word that he adopted – and it isn’t found very often in other writings. It’s a portmanteau of the Greek words for ‘man’ and ‘bed’, which is why, in the middle of the twentieth century, as the idea of sexual orientation became more widespread, it started to be translated as ‘homosexual’.

But this was more a projection of the worldview of the translators than a translation based upon a clear understanding of the original language.

When arsenokoitai is found in other writings, it is normally in the context of exploitative sex – male prostitution, or paedophilia. Occasionally it gets used in a non-sexual context, describing economic exploitation. As if the meaning it had taken on was more to do with power and exploitation than it had to do with sex.

Looking at the words around arsenokoitai in our two lists – adulterers, thieves, the greedy, slave traders – reading it as being primarily about the abuse of power, the exploitation of others, makes a great deal of sense.

And again, in such a patriarchal society as Paul’s, exploitative sex with another man is a far greater abuse of power than exploitative sex with a woman. In much of the ancient world, the penalty for raping an unmarried woman or girl, was to marry her. If she was married, of course, it was a much greater offense – against her husband.

So in the most likely reading of these passages, the sexual activity they described is not condemned because it is between two men, but because it is abusive or exploitative.

And that’s it. All the references in the Bible that even might be about homosexuality.

None of them is actually about what we see in modern day, egalitarian, same sex relationships; each has an alternative reading that is at least as likely.

Against these, we weigh the witness of Jesus, welcoming and accepting those declared to be abominations. We weigh the declaration that the Spirit grants us freedom from the letter. And we weigh the summary of the whole of the law in the command to love one another.

Leaving us with the question: What is more consistent with the gospel, with the life and witness of Jesus, with the grace of God?

Affirming and celebrating the love seen in healthy same-sex relationships, welcoming all God’s children as equal members of God’s family regardless of sexuality and gender identity?

Or rejecting queer believers or seekers, telling young people that their sexuality or gender identity is a perversion unacceptable to God – and continuing to cause immeasurable harm to them, and to the credibility of the good news, on the basis of a few verses which are far less clear than they seem?

The defence rests.

Amen.