a commenter

I got a comment from a post back in April that warrants some discussion, I think. It was in response to a statement about my support of gay marriage and that opposing it is simply non-biblical, though I guess I would have to change that word to "extra-biblical."

Anyway, here is the comment....

pam said...
What do you make of the verse that states homosexuality is an abomination? or how about the one that says, "Verily I say to you (Jesus speaking) that a homosexual shall not enter the kingdom of God." Do we only take as truth that part of the word that we can tolerate or do we take the entirety of the word as truth? I have many good friends who are practicing homosexuals; they are very nice, good people. It grieves me that they are giving up their inheritance.



Me back.

First of all, I think it is the height of arrogance to claim that anyone has lost his or her inheritance. As if the blood of Christ is good enough to wash me or you but not this person over here. Who are you or I to limit God's redemptive power?

But as to the larger point, the bit about homosexuality being an abomination is from Leviticus. We throw out almost all of Leviticus as being irrelevent. We as Christians don't eat kosher. We don't worry about ritual uncleanliness from touching a menstruating woman. Maybe Pam does those things. I don't.

Jesus may have said something like what Pam quotes. However, if so, it is not said in the canonical gospels. I just spent a half hour looking at every quote that was red in the Matt, Mark, Luke, and John, and nary a word was about homosexuality. I don't doubt that Jesus said a lot of things that aren't reported in the four gospels I use, but I don't know what access Pam has that I don't.

If, however, we want to look at what Paul said, then we have some things close to what Pam has reported. However, her report is based on a mistranslation of the Greek. What Paul is talking about is sex that is unnatural in Romans 1, for example. (Same is true in Corinthians and Timothy) When it came time to put together the King James Bible, unnatural sex was translated as sodomy, and later as homosexual sex.

One of the things we have to remember is that "homosexuality" as an orientation did not exist as a concept until the 19th century. The old testament references to homosexual sex are all about rape. The letters of Paul address the context of the communities in which he was writing, in which homosexual relationships between men and boys were commonplace. Certainly, it is possible to distinguish between rape and child abuse versus a lifetime orientation.

But Paul warns us against unnatural sex, and for me, that is a warning against homosexual sex, which to me is unnatural. I like girls. Always have, well, at least since the day I saw down a girl's shirt in journalism class that day in eighth grade. I went from zero to puberty in like 0.4 seconds. But I digress. But what is natural to me may not be natural to everyone else. If you are a homosexual, then heterosexual sex is unnatural, and would be sinful.

John Wesley, who founded Methodism, wrote that we needed to use four things to make religious decisions: scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. This is a framework that makes sense to me. It is what has allowed us to move away from things tacitly approved of in the Bible that are clearly immoral, like slavery. We have to be very careful in reading Paul as a social critic. His eschatology (expectation of Christ's return within a generation) made him unconcerned with changing society as a whole. Why worry about changing the structure of society when it is all about to be ended anyway?

But the main point I would ask Pam to consider is why some sins are outside of the ability of God to redeem. That is a theology that is very sad to me.

my next crush

In an hour, I am off to meet the next woman I am going to have a massive crush on. I just got a call from Katie's first grade teacher, who Katie adores eight days into the school year, to tell me that she is moving into a new classroom because they have brought a new teacher into the school because of the number of children.

So as she is describing the teacher, she says something about her being cute and whatever, and so I jokingly ask, "Single?" and she said yes, been divorced about a year, strawberry blonde, and I basically don't remember a thing about that.

I think pretty much all of us widowed parents develop a crush on our children's teachers if they are the right gender. The fastest way for a woman to crash into my heart is by loving on Katie just a little, and since by any objective measure Katie is the greatest first grader in the world - just ask me - she will get along famously with a teacher who will immediately love her.

First grade parent orientation starts in 45 minutes. Should I go get flowers or would that be too forward? I am off to shave ....

whole

I was talking with a friend today, when she made the comment about a mutual friend not being ready for a relationship until she is "whole."

I have been thinking about that a lot in the mean time, and I am pretty sure she is onto something and yet basically completely wrong. Which is tough to do, when you come right down to it.

What we need is not to be whole but to appreciate our brokenness. The first is to dream an impossible dream. We don't get to go back to Eden; we are stuck here to its East. We may mend, but we can never be as if we weren't broken. It just doesn't get to be that way. (And yet, to argue with myself, isn't this exactly the kind of situation Jesus indicated when he said, unless you can be like one of these children, you will not be a part of the kingdom of heaven?)

But we can learn to appreciate our brokenness. The thing about being broken is that it exposes parts of us to ourselves we never knew we had. We can choose to have a depth about us that enhances intimacy. We can want to know someone to the very depths that we know exist from our own depths. We can speak from the deep places in our lives even when we are not speaking about the deep places, to borrow a phrase from Buechner.

As a practical matter, is there any difference in formulation of "being whole" versus "appreciating our brokenness"? Probably not. But it is a distinction in my mind anyway. I think it is a helpful one.

a busy day

It was a busy day at work; I guess they pretty much all are this time of month. But I did manage to sneak out a little early. Of course, that meant I have been hovered over a spreadsheet here tonight, but that is okay, too.

I haven't been writing much. I have been busy, and that makes it tough. But it is also tough on me not to write. This is the place where I deposit my stuff. I think it is one of the hardest parts of single life after all those years of marriage. What do we do with all the stuff we accumulate during a day? All the stories about goofy things Katie has done or a funny story someone told at work or whether the latest crazy thing done by our pastor is going to close down the doors for good.

So it is what it is, I guess.

the obligatory soccer post....

Katie and I have adopted the Tottenham Hotspurs as our favorite soccer team. We had fun watching the World Cup this summer, and she enjoys me telling her stories of watching soccer with her mother. Becky played soccer as a youth and early teenager, and she was a very good goalie - to hear her tell it, anyway - but she didn't like playing the position because she didn't get to run around. I think she even eventually quit playing because the coach of her team would not promise not to make her the goalie.

So it is funny to me that she always identified with the goalie. She hated penalty kicks as a concept. Not just to decide World Cup games, but anytime. And she always cheered for the goaltender. US could have been one penalty kick away from a World Cup title (as if), and she would have been cheering for a Russian goaltender.

So I have been watching some soccer; we have two whole channels on direct tv that are soccer channels, which is totally cool. I decided on the English league because it is better than MLS, or at least snootier. And I decided on the English league because I can understand the commentators, who are fabulous. First they break out great words like aplumb in their description of the games. Then they crap all over both teams if they get bored watching the game. I was watching one game where the first half was not terribly exciting, and the pace of the game to start the second half was much better. And I know I won't say this exactly right, but the one guy said, "I wonder what the coaches put in the halftime tea," and the other guy said, "I wish they put it in the pregame tea."

That is the kind of commentary you will never hear here because American broadcasters do not trust the games to sell themselves. There was a play later when a ball was kicked well over the head of a player, who as he turned twisted his legs together and fell in a heap, and the commentator says, "A sniper evidently took out Keane."

But enough about the announcers. We have picked the Spurs because we are already Spurs fans. And I have had my first soccer disappointment of the season already - and the first match isn't for two weeks. My favorite Spurs player from the matches I have seen from last year is an Egyptian by the name of Mido, and it turns out he has joined the Rome team this off-season. One of the sparkling midfielders has gone to Manchester United, the Yankees of the premier league. (Or should I say the Yankees are the ManU of of the major leagues?) But any team with Paul Robinson on it will be a threat to put up a clean sheet any time they hit the pitch.

Oh, yeah. I am even getting hip to the lingo.

And Arsenal sucks.

King Lear and preaching

I started (and darn near finished) a delightful book by - who else - Buechner called Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale. My birthday present for myself last week was to purchase the rest of the books of Buechner that I hadn't found yet. It will be months before I can get to them all, but it shall make the next few months delightful.

Anyway, I found this commentary on King Lear - one of my favorite if not my favorite play by Shakespeare - to be insightful as usual.....

Insofar as the word of the play is a tragic word, it rings out in its fullness when Lear comes upon Edgar standing half-naked on the bitter heath and asks for all of us, "Is man no more than this?" and then gives the answer to his own question. "Thou art the thing itself," Lear says. "Unaccomodated man is no more than such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art." Then the old king starts to tear off the few rags he has left as if in the awful lucidity of his madness he knows that IF THERE IS EVER TO BE A TRUE HEALING AND HELPING, A TRUE SHELTERING AND CLOTHING FOR ANY OF US, IT IS WITH OUR NAKEDNESS AND HELPLESSNESS THAT IT HAS TO START. Almost the last thing he says as he is dying is "Pray, you, undo this button," of all incongruous and enchanted words, as if of all the moments of his life the one he relives there at the end is the moment when in his nakedness he was the most kingly, when in his helplessness he was his most invincible, in the madness of his despair the most lucid. Shakespeare strips his characters bare and, great preacher that he is, strips us bare along with them as the high school seniors were stripped bare in their classroom. Beneath our clothes, our reputations, our pretensions, beneath our religion or lack of it, we are vulnerable both to the storm without and to the storm within, and if ever we are to find true shelter, it is with the recognition of our tragic nakedness and need for true shelter that we have to start. Thus, it seems to me that this is also where anyone who preaches the Gospel has to start too -- after the silence that is the truth comes the news that is bad before it is good, the word that is tragedy before it is comedy because it strips us bare in order to ultimately clothe us.