FROM THE BOUNDARY: To thine own self – Part 10

Perhaps you’ll remember that last week I mentioned the press conference of church leaders in which, in various shades, it was agreed that LGBT people were ‘children of God’. You’ll note that they didn’t say they were not sinful in their ‘-ism’. Dr Orlando Seale said that he took the “biblical position” on the issue of their sin. Well, we all know what that’s supposed to be, so it’s this so-called ‘position’ I want to explore briefly in this my last ‘To thine own self’. You’ll remember that I’ve already suggested that the story of Sodom and Gomorrah is an affront to reason and to God.

I wonder how many actually listen and reflect upon the ‘This is the word of the Lord’ readings at divine service. During my July pilgrimage at beloved St. Basil’s chapel, two readings particularly caught my attention. The first, in Genesis 29, was the story of how Jacob came to marry his Uncle Laban’s two daughters, Leah, the unprepossessing elder, and then the younger, the beautiful Rachel. If you remember, Jacob had already worked seven years for Laban to acquire Rachel, but then Laban told him that custom required the elder be married before the younger. So Jacob married Leah and then, after a week, Rachel, though this required him to work another seven years for Laban. Thereafter, the story records how Leah, unlike Rachel, was very fertile and gave Jacob many sons because God had seen how much she was hated. Both wives gave Jacob their maidservants as proxy wives and they bore him children too. Now: what’s the point of this story? Is it just a sliver of ‘history’? What does it say about the sacrament of marriage as God is supposed to have ordained it? Is this somehow the “biblical position” to be taken ever-so seriously? And what of the maidservants? Were they just chattels to be used and abused? Remember what happened to Hagar?

The other reading, in Matthew 19, records how Jesus affirmed God’s position on divorce despite, as he noted, Moses’ relaxing the rule. In other words, Jesus recognised that there were two sources of legislative authority, God and Moses. Then consider Matthew 15 where Jesus refers to the penalty, death, for disobeying God’s commandment to honour father and mother. But the “elders” modified this tradition, Jesus says, and so added a third legislative source – quoting Isaiah, the “precepts of men” taught as if “doctrine”. Do all biblical texts, then, represent inerrantly and exclusively the ‘word of the Lord’?

How do the LGBT texts fit into this framework? We all know that Leviticus declares in two places (18 and 20) that gayness is an “abomination”, the penalty for which, like adultery and cursing parents, is death (20). Is that ‘God given’ or a “precept of men”? Well, it’s actually attributed to God through Moses, but was probably written during the Babylonian exile by the priestly writers in the latter part of the 6th century BCE. It forms part of the so-called ‘holiness code’, which assisted the captives in Babylon to remain discretely separate from the practices of their captors. In other words, it was about national identity.

It was not God given, nor legislated by Moses. It was merely the “precepts of men”. Why then should WE observe it? What moral authority NOW is guaranteed by it?

Move to St. Paul in Romans 1. Those who do not honour God sufficiently, he says, God makes gay or (the first Biblical reference) lesbian. Obsessed by the idea that “nothing good dwells within me, that is my flesh”, and probably gay himself, how on earth would Paul KNOW what God does? And IF Paul’s right, what kind of God would He be? Is THAT what we’d want? Why should we be the residual legatees of Paul’s fanatical struggle with his own nature?

In 1 Corinthians 5 and 6, Paul fulminates against all kinds of sinners from fornicators and the effeminate (malakos) to drunkards, as also arsenokoites, a Greek compound word whose meaning is uncertain but which the King James Bible translates as “those who abuse themselves with mankind”. It might refer narrowly to male prostitutes or to sexual perverts, including gays, generally. There’s a like reference in 1 Timothy 1, but Pauline authorship is doubted. Does God speak authoritatively, then, when he speaks ambiguously? There are two other biblical references – in the Epistle of Jude and 2 Peter – but these are in the context of the Sodom story.

And that’s it. Even taken together, how can these scattered references, with their different pedigrees, be used conclusively as the inerrant “biblical position” to condemn LGBT people for all time for their nature as distinct from the silly things they do – just as heterosexual people do? How can they be used to justify our prejudices and ignorance? How can they be used to diminish the Law of Love? No. I’m for Paul’s teacher Gamaliel. It’s here, this LGBT-ism, as it’s always been. The tide is set and its salt has long savoured the estuaries and rivers and little streams of the world. So LGBT people, little flock, never fear whatever is thrown at you. “It’s your Father’s good pleasure to give you the Kingdom.”

Go safely, then – until the next time.

Curtain on De Profundis from the boundary: “Jesus took the entire world … of pain, as his kingdom.” He chose the oppressed “as his brothers” and became the “very trumpet through which they might call to heaven”. (Oscar Wilde)

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