of basic medical care, unjust immigration systems, and the like. Depending on the particular year, I mingled among PhD scientists and engineers, other university academics, or well-paid workers in a production facility.
I remember reading a Houston Chronicle article many years ago about the oppression of undocumented Latino workers who were not paid their wages. They had no recourse to the law because they would get deported. I remember learning about this and other injustices in the world in high resolution, but such occurrences were not in my life’s sphere. I read about poverty, read about injustice of all kinds, and was partially aware of inequities in our culture. Then my world changed. I graduated in 2002 from Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University with the standard preaching degree, a Masters of Divinity, at the age of 57. I was ordained an elder in the UMC at the age of 60. At first, my appointments were as an associate at churches with relatively well-to-do congregants. My refined bubble was burst by pastoral ministry with a more diverse group of people, but the upper middle class nature of the parishes was not all that different from my previous environment. In 2004 I was appointed pastor of a church in the county seat of a rural and poverty-stricken county of Texas. People tend to think of Texas as cattle and oil and money, but none of those is prominent in our town. There is no industry, jobs, or government-provided safety net. We have been abandoned by offices that once included social security, SNAP (food stamps), medical care for the indigent, employment assistance, aid for the aging and disabled, and the like. People are without much recourse.
On September 23, 2005, our town and surrounding community were hit hard by Hurricane Rita. Since we were a rural area, and New Orleans was still reeling from Katrina, we were pretty much ignored by state and federal governments and agencies. Our city and county governments did a yeoman’s job of putting back the pieces, but many, many people suffered for a long time. I had the distinct honor and privilege of helping host the Mennonite Disaster Service (MDS) that provided enormous help in rebuilding homes damaged by the hurricane. However, after the first few weeks of reviewing damage and starting projects, these legendary servants of Christ were confounded. Their mission was to restore homes to pre-hurricane condition; that is, to fix the damage from Rita. There were a lot of damaged roofs, but when they stripped the shingles and plywood, they found that entire houses had pre-existing structural damage from years of zero maintenance and/or initial substandard construction. MDS resolved this issue at the management level and started rebuilding houses as needed. Over the years they even built a lot of new homes for the economically disadvantaged of our community.
The last vestiges of my previous life exploded early in the rebuilding process when we visited a woman whose home had some hurricane damage. She also showed us a bathroom problem. The wax seal around her commode had been leaking for an extended period of time and the floor around it was rotted and the commode halfway fallen through the floor. That is bad, but what we observed next was worse. The drain underneath the commode was not connected and, when it was used, the waste simply went under the house that was up on concrete blocks. Since that day I have observed people living without running water, electricity, air conditioning, heating, furniture, and so forth. This is reality in parts of America. What does this have to do with homosexuality? There is a great amount of potential ministerial time wasted on fighting a hot-button issue like gay marriage when there are so many needs that the scriptures teach us to address in an active way. People are going hungry; people are homeless; the gap between the rich and everybody else keeps expanding; we have substandard medical care for the poor; our mental health system sucks; food stamps (SNAP) were cut recently; the minimum wage is far removed from a living wage; and social justice in America is in the pits.
We are all too familiar with the divorce rates and collapse of heterosexual marriage. I actually dislike doing many weddings because I can tell that the focus is on the wedding and not the marriage. Virtually all couples who are getting married are already living together, and many are living together (we used to call this shacking up) without any benefit or thought of ever getting married. Heterosexual commitment is disappearing. In my own parish, single mothers with children are common, and fathers are not supplying any financial support. Sexual violence against women is widespread. A recent article in Time magazine highlighted the epidemic of rape in university campuses across the US,17 where the extreme assault problem makes college the most unsafe place for young women to be, and these are heterosexual acts of violence towards women. What is the church teaching our young men as they are growing up? The church’s responses to heteroeroticism may not create a great amount of controversy, but our responses are woefully inadequate.
One of my motivators is the church’s lack of emphasis on what we should be doing as a church and individual Christians. There are Christian works being done, but how much more ministry could we do if we were not as concerned with boundaries as the Pharisees were in Jesus’ time.
Another motivator is my acquired understanding of human nature that leads to scapegoating. From 30 years in the secular, business world I learned that people try to feel good about themselves by putting others down. Stuck in a boring job with an overbearing boss and little room for self-esteem or hope, people tend to elevate themselves psychologically by playing on the foibles of others. This may require the metaphoric knife in the back, a subtle dig, a bit of one-sided gossip, or just watching with enjoyment as someone else slowly twists in the wind… hung up by the idiosyncrasies of the working environment. When this put-down of others becomes directed at a minority group, it becomes scapegoating: “It’s not our fault that the project failed, it was those bean counters. They screw up everything we try to do!” I think that our culture and the church have been involved in scapegoating the LGBT community.
I grew up in a fundamentalist church. During a formative time in my life, I heard a disproportionate number of sermons on the evil of alcohol consumption. I was a teetotaler so I could feel pretty smug about myself on the railroad to heaven. By focusing our energy on the LGBT community we can hide our sins from ourselves by heaping hot coals on the heads a minority that certainly does not deserve the derision and oppression they have received. Then there are those who turn honestly to the Bible to discern the very few scriptures that seem to relate to homosexuality, and that is why I am focused on the scripture and what others have written about the scriptures.
The Bible has at least 168 texts that relate to the common good, social justice, and the care of others. The Bible is replete with admonitions of loving one another and accepting Christ as our savior. Our savior spent his earthly life addressing suffering, hunger, disabilities, forgiveness, love, and teaching about the wealth gap between the rich and the poor. We tend to sweep those aside as we scapegoat the gay community. The Bible also has nine texts that have been interpreted to castigate the LGBT community. At the very least, the conventional interpretations of these texts are highly questionable! My thesis is that we need to get this divisive red-herring out of the way and turn to our Christ-given mission of loving one another. However, we are going to have a difficult time getting through the issue of homosexuality as long as we adopt polar opposite interpretations of the scripture. One way to bring us to together is to broaden the subject to human sexuality … that includes all of us. We are all sexual beings and our sexual behaviors are moral issues. Some sexual behaviors affect only us as individuals and/or couples and some sexual behaviors affect society. We are all fallible human beings, but scriptures can lead us to better synthesis of our sexuality without disparaging and scapegoating the LGBT community.
A detailed analysis of the various exegetical resources would be tedious at best and boring at worst. Hence, for each clobber text, I adhere to the following format: the text from the NRSV; an overview of the text itself; a brief summary of the salient points from the detailed analysis; and finally, an extensive “exegetical analysis” using the various sources from authors discussed earlier. The reader could easily skip over or skim the detailed analysis and still understand what the exegetical results are.
Part 1: What Do the So-Called Clobber Verses Teach about Homosexuality
1 The UMC Discipline, 304.3.
