November 29, 2015
“May Christ’s words be on my mind, on my lips, and in my heart.”
I’m writing this letter to my family; to my children, in hopes that they will be brought up well in the faith, and to my parents and siblings, that they may know better what I believe on the topic. This letter is not meant to be persuasive, nor even a thorough examination of the the subject. My hope is that it will attempt to speak clearly and faithfully about God.
I don’t think of myself as a biblical theologian or historian. Though I’ve taken many courses on both, I’ve forgotten most of what I was taught. I am a big picture thinker. My mind doesn’t retain details. So, much that should be written here has been forgotten. What is here, are the things that stayed with me over time–varying pieces that I’ve tried to weave together–paradoxes and mysteries alike. Much that I originally wrote has been removed so that it would not get in the way.
Christianity’s holy scriptures are an account of the story of God. The fact that they are divinely inspired is true in that, God doing things within human history inspired them. In addition, Christianity’s holy scriptures are also an account of humans in relationship with God–attempting to fit God and God’s acts into the framework of their lives and cultures. Another way of putting it, is that Scripture is the story of the humans wrestling with the Divine and the Divine wrestling with humans.
Stories were passed along orally, mixed with pagan stories, revised over time to suit differing worldviews and political climates, and finally collected and debated over by a council of Christians until, amid much controversy, they settled on the collection of stories and accounts we have now.
The fact that the Church agreed on this collection should tell us a few things about what what we mean when we refer to “divine inspiration”. Divine inspiration must account for the following:
- Pagan stories
- Contradicting stories
- Revised stories
- And, stories that were an attempt to speak about God from within particular and varying political climates, power structures, and cultural environments.
None of this should cast any doubt on the claim that Scripture is divinely inspired, and I also believe that none of this “weakens” the authority of Scripture. If Scripture is to speak truthfully, and I believe that it can, than it will speak more boldly and clearly if it is understood honestly. The miracle of Scripture is that despite the heavy human hand involved in its writing, revision, and collection, we believe that it still speaks truth about God. It is divinely inspired.
These Scriptures only speak honestly about God over time, and within community. By “over time” I simply mean that any truth about God inspired by the Scriptures, will be shown right over time as it is tested and tried. For example, the theology of the Trinity is not specifically laid out in Scripture. There are things that hint towards it, but it came to be understood originally in the way the church would pray together. It felt right over time. It was debated over many years, and eventually a council of Christians gave it their stamp of approval. Today it stands as an amazing mystery of the faith. Similarly, by “within community” I mean that Scripture should be interpreted, tested, debated, and experienced in community. As humans we are slaves to our cultural bias. It is hard for us to think outside of ourselves or outside of our culture or outside of our particular time in history. Interpreting Scripture in a community of people not like us helps us interpret it honestly.
The Church, as it relates to scripture, is a community of interpreters that stretches across time and cultures. There are many places to point throughout Christian history where Scripture, due to cultural bias, was interpreted wrongly leading to horrible consequences, but over time, these interpretation were deemed wrong by the community–slavery, holocaust, inquisition, crusade, etc., etc., etc.
As interpreters of Scripture, we are apt to get it wrong, but there are things we can do to help us get it right:
- Recognize our cultural bias
- Recognize the cultural bias within the Scripture
- Study scripture within community
- And interpret always within the context of our shared beliefs about who God is.
I need to say more about #4. Due to our cultural bias, we are really good at making idols and we don’t even realize we’re doing it. It’s all too easy, and probably natural for us, to make God fit into our cultures and worldviews. We make gods who prioritize the things cultures believe in–things like the free market economy, the nuclear family, family values, or particular nations, etc. And we use Scripture to justify our god and our beliefs. Our worship, our theology, our prayers, all these things can be used to reinforce our idolatry.
We resist this tendency to worship other gods by intentionally interpreting Scripture through the lens of our agreed upon view of who God is. One place we can look for this is the Nicene Creed:
We believe in one God,
the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is, seen and unseen.
We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one Being with the Father.
Through him all things were made.
For us and for our salvation
he came down from heaven:
by the power of the Holy Spirit
he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary,
and was made man.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered death and was buried.
On the third day he rose again
in accordance with the Scriptures;
he ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,
and his kingdom will have no end.
We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son.
With the Father and the Son he is worshiped and glorified.
He has spoken through the Prophets.
We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.
We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
We look for the resurrection of the dead,
and the life of the world to come. Amen.
In other words, Scripture is the story about a very specific God–the Triune God that we see in the Nicene Creed. This means two things for us:
- Again, we see tradition and community at play; in this case, in the form of a creed.
- In order to understand the story of Scripture, we need a shared understanding about what the story of the Trinity is that we find in Scripture.
But, before I get into this story, I want to say just one more thing, on a personal note, as it pertains to my own communal journey interpreting Scripture. I was raised in a church in which the Bible was central to both faith and how we worshiped. I now find myself in a church in which the sacraments are central to the faith and how we worship. Both churches affirm the role of Scripture and the Sacraments, but they choose a different central focus. One are “People of the Book” and the other are “People of the Sacraments.”
In my experience, both foci have their strengths and their weaknesses, but for the sake of this discussion, I will say this–People of the Sacraments have, at the center of their faith, a mysterious, Trinitarian, communal act, that has as its focus, the grace of the incarnation. Central to their beliefs, is the idea that their Trinitarian God is about the grace of the incarnation–incarnated in simple things like bread and wine. In the church I grew up in, when we celebrated the Sacraments, it focused on the grace of the forgiveness of sins in Jesus’ death remembered in the bread and juice. Two versions of grace (incarnation/transformation and forgiveness/transaction). Two versions of the Trinity (one focusing on God becoming flesh, the other focused on God dying for our sins). Two different ways to interpret the story of the Trinitarian God in scripture. Certainly this isn’t a rule. There are varieties of beliefs about God in both churches (and both churches affirm both forgiveness and incarnation as a part of the story of God), but I do think that the different emphasis tend to shape the people differently. I’m also not saying that one is right and one is wrong. Of course, I’m an Episcopalian for a reason, but in this context, I’m recognizing my cultural bias as I begin to tell the story of God. I err on the side of the grace I see in the incarnation.
Scripture is the story of the incarnation of the Trinitarian God bringing the divine life into creation. And, Jesus is the most definitive glimpse we have in scripture of God’s incarnation. As we follow the movement of God in the incarnation through scripture, it should help us see how God continues working in the incarnation of our own time and place. In effect, we are trying to track the movement of God in Scripture so we can better follow God’s continued moving today. I don’t plan on attempting to summarize the entire story of Scripture, but to just say a few things as I think they pertain to the issue of homosexuality.
Unfortunately, humans don’t like to follow a moving and unpredictable God (a God associated with breath and the moving of the wind). God is clear with his people that God doesn’t want them to build God a “home” (2 Samuel 7:4-7). Where God moved, the Israelites followed. Predictably, the Israelites, insisted on having both a king and a temple despite God’s wishes. It was the tradition of their culture and time. Multiple temples were built, and all destroyed. The curtain of the temple was symbolically torn in two. God goes where God goes. Unfortunately, the building of the temples radically re-shaped Israel’s understanding of God. God went from an unpredictable wind to the epitome of stability. In the Old Testament we build God a house despite God’s wishes. For some Christians, that temple is now a book. Both, if allowed, can leave no room for God to move.
The reason we all wish the bible could be God’s home is the same reason the Israelites wanted a temple. We want a god and religion with clear rules, boundaries, and codes of conduct. In fact, sociologists who study the church tell us that churches who have these tend to grow the most. People are attracted to this kind of god. And it makes sense that this is what we find in the Old Testament purity code. It clearly defined who was in, and who was out, and what you needed to do to cross over the boundary line. Many books of the law are written. In Jesus’ day, Pharisees arose as a reforming movement to make sure that these rules were properly followed. Many people were on the outside of this religion, drunkards, menstruating women, lepers, eunuchs, etc.
But all of this system, whether by God’s design or human design, was the milk that should have given way to solid food. It was old wine in old wineskins. It is a beginner religion, characterized by dualistic thinking. What I mean by dualistic thinking is thinking that includes defined boundaries–holy versus unholy, godly versus ungodly, religious versus pagan, sacred versus profane, saint versus sinner, faithful versus worldly, right versus wrong, insider versus outsider, pure versus impure, Heaven versus Hell, clean versus unclean, sin versus virtue, male versus female, Gentile versus Greek, slave versus free, and human versus Divine. We are attracted to this simplicity and prone to worship this god, but it is not God. God is not contained in this home. God defies all the above dichotomies. The purity code was meant to keep boundaries in place, and God is in the businesses of transgressing boundaries.
We find this displayed in the Book of Job. I think it is one of the most powerful stories about God found in Scripture. Job lives within this purity based religion. When things go well for him, it is assumed he is Godly and will be blessed. When things go badly and he is cursed, his faithfulness is called into question. His faithful friends, as well as local theologians come out to talk with him as he suffers. Their basic assumption is that Job must have done evil. There was not room in their purity religion for a Godly man whose body was so obviously unclean.
Finally, at the end of the book, after hearing opinion after opinion from everyone who believes in a dualistic kind of God, finally God speaks. God asks them where they were when God laid the foundations of the earth. God is making it clear that only God can say who God is. And in the end, God makes the point clear that these binary, exclusionary, dualistic ways of thinking do not contain God. God is far less predictable. Even the duality of good versus evil will not do. We circle around this Mystery, and despite our best efforts, God refuses containment.
Of course, this same story, through another cultural bias, can still maintain the dichotomy of good/blessed and evil/cursed. It can still be a morality tale in which the good man is eventually blessed despite his interim trials. This interpretation, in my opinion, saps it of all of it’s potential grace and power. Of course, it also speaks of a very different kind of god.
We see this interesting pattern in Christian Mystics throughout church history. Their experience of God is so real that their dualistic thinking is no longer adequate to describe (contain) God. Their vision of God expands to include more than their church is comfortable with, and in this they become prophetic gifts to their churches. Dualistic faith, which focuses on sin management or who is in and who is out is no longer adequate. Love becomes a radically inclusive endeavor.
At one point, Jesus is asked to summarize the law and the prophets. Most of the time that Jesus is asked a question like this he responds with a parable that often leaves his listeners scratching their heads or his disciples asking for explanations, but in this instance he chooses to answer this loaded and seemingly complicated question. The law and the prophets are summed up in this–love God with everything and love people who are different than you the same way you love people who are just like you. Jesus gives us a lens here to help us see past some of the cultural bias we bring to our reading of Scripture and who God is. If I’m reading the books of the law and the prophets and what I’m getting does not engender love for God and others, then there is a good chance that I’m missing the point. My reading of the Scriptures is dishonest.
What we find, even in the mundane rules of the law, is all about God’s love for God’s people. For example, many of the laws are concerned with helping to protect from disease. Sure, they are laid out within the confines of a contract similar to those that other peoples had with other gods including blessings and curses, but the fact that it mimics its cultural setting should not surprise or disturb us. The golden thread of truth within it reflects a God that is focused on mothering God’s children. The purity code was in imperfect vessel for God, but our Mothering God used it to try to move God’s people from where they were to where God wanted them to go. This purity religion was the vessel that brought us to God. And it is within this system that Jesus comes.
The Triune God is not arbitrary. We don’t serve a god who says to worship it simply because it is starved for affection. We don’t serve a god who tells us to do things simply because it thinks it amusing or wants to test our faithfulness. The Triune God revealed in Scripture is, from beginning to end, attempting to incarnate the Divine Life into our world. Incarnating into dualistic purity religions; incarnating into pagan contracts with pagan gods, infiltrating despite our efforts to build walls to confine or exclude. God incarnated Godself, even into these binary exclusionary systems and in the process tears down their walls and destroys them. Where there was a system that is life taking (death) God brings life. The Divine Life finds a way.
Dualistic religion was never the goal. It is not healthy. This is true both for the purity religions of the Old Testament and the “holiness” religions of today. By “holiness religions” I do not mean a religion that seeks wholeness, but a religion primarily interested in distinguishing between the sacred and the profane. Dualistic religion isn’t healthy for a number of reasons:
- Dualistic religion diminishes love. Even if you have the best of intentions (for example, saving others from the curse of eternal torture), it still makes it difficult to love people who are not like you when they are labeled “sinner,” or “dysfunctional family,” etc. Labels change our perceptions of others. An “illegal immigrant” is entirely different than a fellow human being trying to provide for their family. Labels dehumanize and dualistic thinking and religion is all about labeling. Empathy for the damned is different than love of the other. This also applies if you don’t believe in the dichotomy of Heaven and Hell.
- Dualistic religion focuses on sin management. The gospel has nothing to do with sin management. God didn’t become incarnate, die, and rise again so that we could resist certain desires. Sin management is good for church growth, but it isn’t good news.
- Dualistic religions are always in danger of extremism–just ask the Apostle Paul. Extremism, by definition, requires two sides–extremism meaning going too far in one direction or the other. Dualistic religion is always in danger of labeling the outsider and fearing that which is different, and I’m not just referring to car bombs and cults.
No, dualistic religion isn’t the goal, and in fact, throughout the Old Testament God’s Spirit is incarnated and speaking through the prophets to call God’s people to a different way. A day is looked forward to when these man-designed boundaries will be transgressed by God’s design for humanity.
So, if dualistic religion isn’t the goal, or saving people from Hell isn’t the goal, or sin management isn’t the goal, than what is the goal? What is the purpose of the Trinitarian God’s movement of incarnation into creation? As the Eastern Church phrases it–God became human so that humanity could be divine. Don’t read that and get scared that we’re talking about a religion where we become gods. No, we’re talking about Christianity–becoming like Christ. In a holiness tradition we would call it holiness or even sanctification. But again, this holiness isn’t about sin management/eradication, it is about becoming like God–not a dualistic god that would ask us to leave our flesh behind and become some sort of ethereal soul. No, God became flesh so that our flesh could be holy. Our bodies. Our scarred, bleeding, mutilated, sexual bodies.
So, if the story of scripture is the story of the incarnation, and if the incarnation is God becoming flesh so that our flesh could be like God’s, then…what is God’s flesh like? Whatever God’s flesh is like, it will be the definitive reference point for what we are called to become. It is the reference point for our discipleship. So, we need to look at the flesh of Jesus. A particular piece of Middle Eastern flesh, born to an unwed mother, a Jew under Roman rule, from a town that no-one wanted to be from. God bore all the wrong labels.
Jesus goes where the established institutional religion of his day told God that God should not go. Of course this shouldn’t surprise us since God should not even have become flesh, but it does surprise us. And so, in Jesus, we see God establish a disturbing pattern of always going to those people and places that a respectable god should not go–sinners, Samaritans, Gentiles, lepers, prostitutes, and the list goes on and on and on. It drives the religious of Jesus’ day crazy. In fact, they kill him for the threat he poses to their religious system and worldview.
In Jesus, not only do we see this pattern of always going to the excluded and those labeled unclean by the religious establishment, but we finally see the destruction of the system that would divide based on purity. Before his death he touched the impure and unclean (in some cases making himself unclean according to the law). Then, when his mutilated and unclean flesh is raised from the tomb it is still wounded, his disciples even place their hands into his wounds. It is still unclean. It is not healed. It is still the flesh that touched the leper. It is not made pure again. God is raised forever as this wounded, unclean, impure flesh. The boundary no longer exists within the Divine Life.
Of course, I would not say that Jesus was disinterested in sin, even if he wasn’t interested in the sin management game. The sins that God in Jesus is most concerned with are:
- The sins of religious institutions and exclusionary religious systems. In order to understand sin as anything that brings death (or takes life), and you need to understand that sin can be communal and structural. Laws can be sinful. Economic systems can be sinful. Religions can be sinful. Jesus is concerned with exposing the death dealers of his day like the Law following Pharisees, the temple sacrificial system, etc. His life stands as a witness against them.
- The sin of money. This is an example of #1 (an institutional sin), but it is important to mention here simply because Scripture from beginning to end is interested in money more than any other topic. God is specifically concerned with inequality between rich and poor. God is particularly sided with the poor and needy. If Christians are interested in sin, than their primary focus should be sins related to money and the economy. Any belief that God is more interested in sins of the flesh than money is wrong. It is either a modern invention or an interpretation still reliant on the Jesus-transgressed purity code.
- Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. This is an odd one to bring up, but I think it’s appropriate. If anyone is concerned with sin, they should be concerned with the sin that scripture claims is the only one that won’t be forgiven. Blasphemy of the Spirit is this–knowing where the Spirit of God is going, and refusing to follow. Even if we don’t believe in an unforgivable sin, the emphasis placed on it should inspire us to be people who are avidly seeking to know where God is going, and doing our best to follow. Assuming the pattern of Scripture holds true, we should be tracking God anywhere people are excluded by religion, anywhere people are suffering, anywhere people are being dealt death, to the widow, the orphan, the enslaved, the illegal immigrant, the unclean, the forgotten, the elderly, the hungry, the dying, the terrorist, the poor.
The movement of God in the incarnation is concerned with justice. If God is being incarnated into creation, then creation itself should be becoming divine. By divine creation, I simply mean “the Kingdom of God.” According to the gospels, the Kingdom of God happens when God reigns in our world. This is the divine life. And in order to bring this kingdom, we need to call for justice–the breaking down of the boundaries (institutional, religious, etc.) that separate rich and poor, one color from another, one sex from another, one culture from another, etc. When we see death being dealt, we must call for life. The creation itself groans with the birth pangs of this justice.
This story of Divine Life/Justice doesn’t end with Jesus’ resurrection. The rest of church history isn’t meant to be lived trying to figure out what God has done in the past. Jesus is alive, and God’s Spirit is still moving. The predictably unpredictable pattern continues soon after Jesus’ resurrection in the New Testament scriptures. When a man named Paul shows up to the disciples claiming that God had moved even among the Gentiles, they couldn’t believe it. Even though they had witnessed the pattern of God’s moving in Jesus (as in the story of the centurion and others), they still had difficulty recognizing it in this new and disturbing situation. It was still natural for them to fall back on the old dualistic religious system. It is like the metaphor Jesus uses referring to the religious system of his day–you can’t put new wine into old wineskins or they burst. This is what even the disciples were attempting to do, but it was bursting. The wine was pouring out on the Gentiles anyway.
As Gentiles, we take this part of early Christian history for granted. We don’t realize how intense the debate over Gentile inclusion was. Again, it challenged everything they knew. In the end, they agreed to disagree. The people who walked with and touched Jesus don’t get it. Peter and Paul agree to part ways. In Peter’s defense, Jesus never said anything definitive on the topic.
And now, this brings us to the topic I’ve been addressing this entire time, though not by name–homosexuality. If I’ve done my work well to this point, there should not be much more to say. God is continuing to do what God has always done–homosexual flesh is holy in the same way that Jesus’ flesh is. And just to be clear, I’m talking even about homosexuals who have sex.
Sex has been given such a bad rap within dualistic religion that its hard for us to even talk about it without feeling a bit taboo. Sex has been associated with flesh and both have been associated with sin. But this simply isn’t true. Again, it is Jesus broken and mutilated body that is raised from the dead. A body that includes wounds. A body rightfully described as unclean–and a body that most likely has a circumcised penis. But scripture tells us that in the New Creation, even the dichotomy of male and female will no longer apply, even for bodies that have penises (circumcised or otherwise) and/or vaginas. This is good news for transgendered peoples as well as those who find themselves struggling with gender identity. Flesh is holy. Fleshly things are holy. Sex is holy.
Again, as we look to the flesh of Jesus to guide us in our discipleship, there is nothing about homosexual sex that would exclude anyone from following the gospel. There is nothing about it that inhibits the call for justice in our world. There is nothing about it that engenders our worship of mammon. I have heard people claim that homosexual sex is selfish since it can’t produce children. While I agree that having children is one valid way to give away my life and follow the way of Jesus, it is not the only way. And indeed, many monogamous homosexual couples have lived out the way of Jesus by adopting the orphans of our world. If homosexual sex is sinful on this basis, then so is sex by a couple who for whatever reason is incapable of having children. Sex is sinful when a heterosexual couple is using birth control. Sex is sinful when a heterosexual couple is not using birth control, but is paying attention to the female’s ovulation cycle so as to intentionally not get pregnant (though I know some couples who do this and claim it is not sinful since there is always the risk they could accidentally make a baby). Blowjobs are sinful. Handjobs are sinful. All kinds of things are wonderfully sinful. There are all kinds of desires to restrain and all kinds of sins to manage.
If I were attempting a thorough examination of Scripture I would need to address one by one every Scripture that claims homosexuality is a sin, but I’m not going to. Let me simply say that I don’t think they represent what God is currently doing in our world. This might not be possible within your worldview.
Everything up to this point has been my own thoughts. What I’m quoting below is from a facebook post by my friend and theological mentor Craig Keen. I hope that I’ve done enough work above to help this biblical narrative (characterized by the eunuch) make sense:
“I wrote this earlier to a bright and articulate and gentle person wondering how to respond to a friend of hers who seems perhaps to be transgender. (It is, by the way, very, very long.)
Big background statement: The tradition of ancient Israel in which all of the NT is to be understood is concerned in a huge way with establishing and maintaining purity. There is no distinction between purity of the body and purity of the heart. A human being is simply to be pure. Being pure is not the goal of life, holiness is. But purity is a necessary condition for becoming holy. And so, periodically in ancient Israel priests examined the bodies of Israelites to make sure that they didn’t have any oozing sores, etc. This becomes a way by which Israel stays alive. “Purity” is “health” is “integrity” is “wholeness.” And a healthy body is a body that survives better than a sick one.
All that changes in Jesus. Jesus is above all the one who becomes impure, who loses his bodily integrity, his wholeness, his health. This happens to him over and over as he contacts the unclean, as the stories of the Gospels show. It happens in an overwhelming way, when he is flayed with a whip, nailed to a cross, and dies. He becomes utterly unclean, utterly impure. When God raises him from the dead still mutilated, bodily impurity becomes no longer an obstacle to the coming of God’s glory, of God’s holiness. He is hallowed—made utterly holy—as he is raised, even though he still lacks wholeness/integrity. And so, this means that others who lack integrity (lepers, those who do unclean work to stay alive, strangers, eunuchs, and many others) are welcomed into solidarity with the God who is pleased to dwell in this Galilean peasant’s mutilated body.
Sexual intimacy is one of those matters that are understood in Israel in terms of the binary “purity/impurity.” Sexual contact is regulated quite a lot. Unless one is sexually whole, one is not to have sex. So, there is to be no sex between a man and a menstruating woman (by menstruating, a woman becomes unclean, i.e., un-whole). Eunuchs, who cannot have sex because they have been castrated, are not and never can be sexually whole, and so they are unclean by definition. Sex is to be between a man and a woman (though in a polygamous culture, the women may take turns) and is to be for the sake of having children. The sin of Oran in Genesis 38 has to do with his having sex without aiming to make children (who would be his dead brother’s children, but whom he’d have to feed and otherwise care for).
With the resurrection of the mutilated body of Jesus marriage is no longer necessary. Paul says quite a lot about that in 1 Corinthians 7. Making babies is no longer necessary. Our “immortality” has nothing to do with making babies or marriage. It has to do with the grace of the God who glorifies dead bodies—in particular those without integrity. Gender distinctions are no longer necessary. Freedom from bondage is no longer necessary. Being a genetic descendent of Abraham is no longer necessary. Eating the right kind of meat is no longer necessary. All that is true, because in Christ integrity/wholeness/health/purity is no longer necessary. Of course, people are still gendered, enslaved or free, genetic descendants of Abraham or Gentile, and there are still pork and shellfish. And there are still poisons. And though all things are lawful in Christ, not all things are helpful (this is another 1 Corinthians reference). There are practical reasons, therefore, for choosing certain courses of action. And so, most people probably would do well to get married and if they have kids they probably would do well to raise them with care and love. It’s probably better to be emancipated from slavery or to be a genetic descendant from Abraham. But not always. We have to learn together to discern the spirits, to make decisions not based on our determination of good and evil (that’s what Adam and Eve did), but concerning what seems right to the Spirit and to us in prayerful interchange.
So, here we are in early 21st century America. It is an amazingly polarized time and place. That’s in part because we find ourselves in the aftermath of the Sexual Revolution of half a century ago. But it’s even more because of the rampant individualism of America and habits and policies that have shattered one social body after another, fracturing social groups into isolated individuals. The extended family, generations living and working together where they live, has been almost completely destroyed. We even celebrate that with our adoration of the nuclear family, as if God made us to live in suburban neighborhoods and have garage door openers, to rush home after work and sit in silence before television screens. We mourn high divorce rates, but without recognizing that glorifying the individual guarantees high divorce rates. What appears to be a marriage between one man and one woman is in fact a kind of legal arrangement with benefits and with more or less passion. Marriage has come to be all about how one man has desire toward one woman and she has desire toward him and they sign a contract working hard for a certain number of years to keep their desire alive and strong. We assume that it is just natural for that desire and contract to be between somebody with XY chromosomes and somebody with XX ones. But desire and contracts are not enough to guarantee such a thing.
And so we bless and praise and hold up for admiration marriages in which desire has stayed alive. Long marriages amaze us because we can’t imagine desire staying alive a long time. But we figure that they must be really strong and have weathered times when the intensity of desire has waned. But we are really distressed when there seems to be no desire left in a marriage. We wonder why they stay together.
Enter your friend. (I’ll say “he” and “him,” since that’s what he seems to want right now, which may, of course, change.) He lives in America where all kinds of communications declare that there are men and there are women, period. We know that there are feminine men and masculine women, but we figure that even they are one or the other, really. We can’t imagine someone really queer, someone neither male nor female, or someone who is both (unless in a kind of Jungian sense, subtly psychologically bearing traits of both genders). If something freakish in terms of gender happens at birth, we treat it like a cleft palate and try to fix it surgically. If the problem is genetic (e.g., XXY or XYY chromosomes) we are just sad, as if this were a child with Down syndrome. But we send our children out into the world as isolated individuals, perhaps (assuming some prosperity) to live alone in an apartment, or sharing it with a casually known “roommate,” going out from time to time to meet with friends. And we say, “Here are the categories: ‘male,’ ‘female,’ ‘marriage,’ ‘nuclear family,’ ‘career,’ ‘weekends,’ ‘retirement,’ and then ‘fading away’” (we try not to mention “death”). The texture of those categories is provided by music, movies, television, maybe sermons, parental guidance, conversations between friends, etc. And if you don’t fit in the categories that are laid out, you work hard to make yourself fit. Some people find that they have never been able to make themselves fit. A shockingly large number of those people kill themselves because of that.
So, what do you do in relation to your friend? You spend time with him. You find ways of talking about the matter, but without imposing “male” vs. “female” on him. You trust in God way more than you trust in the abstractions that have become normative for us. You pray out loud with him and for him, and you ask him to do the same toward you. You stay in close contact and leave the future open, trusting right out loud that the Spirit of the glorified category-transgressing Jesus is greater than the one who is in the world. You make clear that he and you are both to be holy and that being holy doesn’t mean that any of us must first be made pure or even that we must become pure later (except by loving the God of Jesus with everything in us, heart, soul, mind, and strength). Jesus is still mutilated on Easter Sunday. And you act as if the future that God makes is a future that will have made all the pain of these days in his life glorious, birth pangs.”
Elsewhere, Keen continues:
“Purity laws are all about the establishment of boundaries. That’s why a menstruating woman or anyone with a disease that breaks the skin, such as leprosy, is treated so harshly. When blood flow lets the inside out or when skin lesions let the outside in, the boundary between inside and outside is compromised, ambiguated. Identification is all about keeping the inside in and the outside out, It’s why strangers and eunuchs are kept out of the temple. A stranger is an outsider who has somehow gotten in. A eunuch is neither inside nor outside, neither male nor female, perhaps an abomination to the Lord. Impurity, if we wish to identify it (and we do), is a despoiling of integrity, of identity.”
And…
“[Jesus] especially embrace those who are marginalized by sexual rules, among them widows, prostitutes, menstruating and adulterous women, eunuchs, strangers (Gentiles), and others. It is challenging in each generation to determine how to acknowledge the importance of sexual regulations and at the same time embrace and love those whom regulations would push away. The good news is that God through Jesus and in the Holy Spirit has opened especially to those even God’s laws would condemn.”
In conclusion, I pray that if anyone has read this they will find it to be faithful. This is meant to be a beginning point in our conversation. Bring me your questions and challenges. I speak in fear and trembling, trusting in a God who says to not be afraid. I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. I look for the coming of God’s reign, and for all things to be made new. I groan with all of creation. I ask for God’s will to be done.
Triune God, give us eyes to see.
Grace and Peace,
Joshua Hancock
