The Good Book and Gay Marriage

I also think, like myself, you pick and choose your texts. There are certain passages that I love and return to. I don't find everything in the Book of equal value to my life and heart, though as a discipline, I try to attend to it all. I think that's true for you as well. And I'd actually invite you to be honest about that. From a standpoint of doctrine, you contend that it is all superintended by the Spirit and equally valuable. But, since Jesus is entirely silent on homosexuality, you have a proclivity of Pauline passages.

You do mention his denouncing of sin and telling people to stop sinning—and I don't think we can come to this conversation without dealing with sin. I take your reference to be the story of the woman caught in adultery. It is actually a marriage controversy, where the sanction of the Levitic code is at issue and Jesus is being put in a calculated political bind. Will he join in the condemnation of her sin? Notice that the man is nowhere around. He's not on the hook here. I should say that this is actually a "text of terror" for LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bi- and Transgendered) folks because it gets used as the classic, love-the-sinner-hate-the-sin example, which actually rejects them yet again. But notice further, he flips the script. Jesus holds the mirror up to their faces—let the one without sin cast the first stone! It's no longer about her, it's about them. It's about us! Our condemnation exposes us. And he does not condemn her either.

Sin, in Paul's writing, is not so much a discrete act as it is separation from God. In league with the Law, in Paul, and also with the Power of Death, it forms a kind of triad of Powers, a social matrix in which we live and move. It is inauthentic existence. It is our complicity with the principalities and powers. All of us are caught in it. "Sins" tend to be violations of the law, not so much separating us from God as violating the rules. Such actually tend to be how the powers that be conform us to them.

I understand the careful distinction you make about slavery and certain homosexual acts. (Though I actually believe there is no greater condemnation of slavery than the Exodus account of God hearing the groans and bringing the Hebrews out of bondage. American slaves certainly understood it; the exodus is central to the African-American cannon in music and text). The way sin figures in, however, has not just to do with slavery but with racism, as well, which devalued and dehumanized human beings.

The same is true here. I'm going to mention homophobia. I'm not suggesting you are engaging in it. But I do believe you would acknowledge the reality of it. In those who suffer it, I wonder if you would also acknowledge how they can "use parts of the Bible to justify their immorality?" I know that's a tougher question.

I think of homophobia as a power, like racism. In the church, it functions as a demon which suppresses charismatic gifts. Where people are called by God to ministry, where they have the gifts and graces, as it were, that call and those gifts can be denied and refused by a church which suffers the demon of homophobia.