Sermons

Words are "slippery," say academics interested in the nature of language and its usage, or "Gumby-like" which is what they mean by it. As a kid, I watched "Gumby," the cartoon character that savvy marketing turned into erasers and all sorts of other pliable things for my parents to buy and me to use. Gumby was notable for being, shall we say, flexible, very flexible. Gumby had this elastic body that twisted and turned in a number of differing, often inconsistent, ways.
 

Words strung together can have this same differing and inconsistent character. The same words can (incredibly enough), depending on what their interpreters bring to them, both argue for and against something. The Scriptures are no exception, in fact may be an excellent example.
 

But before I take this further there is something else so obvious it is misleading, most Christians understand Paul's letters to be Scripture, including the one to the Romans. May be so now, certainly weren't thought so then. The Scriptures at the time of Jesus and Paul was the Torah, the Jewish writing of the Law given by the Lord. The Prophets were helpful but not even Holy Scripture at the time. Paul's epistles were simply letters, nothing holy or mystical about them. They bear no secrets for generations of future Christians. Paul doesn't see much of a future in this world for Christians or anyone else actually; Jesus, Paul believes, is coming back and it will be soon.
 

So whatever Paul says in his letter to the Romans is not written as a code for the future but as a warning for the present. I bring this up because it makes a difference for how we understand Paul in our New Testament lesson this morning.

Differing and inconsistent interpretations of this passage have come from the Christian Church for over a generation now. One camp finds Paul's views as the standard for how Christians should view homosexuality now. If it is a "degrading passion" to Paul, these folks reason, Paul's letters are a part of the Holy Word and so his words are controlling. "Degrading passion," it is. Never mind, as I say earlier, Paul's letters are simply letters not a coded message for later Christians and Paul didn't think there would be any later Christians. Still even though it is only 2 verses - 26 and 27 - that deal with the specifics of sexual orientation, this camp's point is still well taken that it is what Paul says if even for just his contemporaries.
 

In the centuries that Paul does not anticipate happening, another camp has appeared and has become especially convinced otherwise and is quite vocal. They are committed to righting social discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation wherever it is found and to do so retroject (interpret the past in light of present understanding) their modern values that God made all lovingly just the way they are so no sexual orientation is different from another.
 

It is fair to ask how they arrive at this place in light of what Paul says. Do they ignore it? Some yes, others go further and say Paul is a bigot and misogynist too, for good measure.
 

Others use what appear to be ingenious arguments that really aren't. John Boswell, professor of history at Yale University, in Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality writes that "the persons Paul condemns are manifestly not homosexual; what he derogates are homosexual acts committed by apparently heterosexual persons." [1] Paul hasn't a problem with "real" homosexuals, says Boswell, just homosexual activity by those that really are not homosexuals.[2] Paul's problem is with people who go against their nature, whatever it is. O.K.; but how does one decide who has which nature? Now to answer this question would be a truly valuable contribution to the "publish or perish" mandate of the modern university.
 

There are even those who say that Paul comes out strongly against homosexuality to hide his own. These are not crackpots either; the former Episcopal Bishop of Newark, John Spong, has intimated as much.[3] But such views are really more the output of imaginative minds than the endpoint of evidence. I am inclined to agree with A.N. Wilson's conclusion in Paul: the Mind of the Apostle: "So, was [Paul] gay? Perhaps, if it pleases you to think so. The fact is we do not know enough about Paul to be able to psychoanalyze him in this way."[4]

So anti-gay, not anti-gay but not pro-gay either, gay himself there are many ways that later agendas color what Paul says in Romans about sexual orientation.

As for me, there are not many times that you will find me in agreement with our fundamentalist/evangelical brothers and sisters - but this is one of them. I cannot rehabilitate Paul from the position he makes very clear. Paul finds homosexual sexual orientation as being "given up by God to degrading passions." Is this a reaction to his gay-ness? I have no reason to believe that Paul is gay and it really doesn't make much difference whether he is or not because it is not really the point, in spite of others who have made it the point of this passage.
 

Homosexuality is a common practice of Europeans, i.e. Romans in the ancient world. Aristophanes' interpretation of Plato's myth circulated in Greek/Roman culture. As he told it in Symposium the human race originally consisted of three four-legged sexes: male, female, and a mix of the two. The gods divided humans in half, so that the halves would spend their lives looking for their partners rather than creating trouble for the gods. The half all-male would search for its male counterpart, the half all-female would search for its female counterpart, and the mix of the two - what becomes heterosexuals - would search for its opposite partner. In a culture where this "origin" story was told, it is easy to understand why the Romans would not believe sexual orientation, of whatever kind, is an issue for their gods.
 

Not so with Jewish thinking, and Paul being a Jew first, he reflects Jewish perspective. Sexual orientation matters in Judaic tradition; it marks a clear difference between the European mind and the Jewish one. But it is only one among many expressions of, what Paul calls, the "debased mind" and the many things arising out of it that should not be done, e.g. wickedness, evil, covetousness . . ." just to get the list started. It is a long list and we might well see traits of ourselves on the list, which is Paul's point.
 

Still Paul's verdict on humans isn't because of their moral choices - sexual or otherwise. There is something more basic, more to the root that Paul finds separates God's people from others and puts either on the path that results in "due penalty for their error" - a life of joyless "gathering and heaping" - or blessings - a life full of "wisdom, knowledge and joy." 
 

We learn next week what Paul understands to lie at the foundation of whatever life we build for ourselves and the source from which he may have gotten the idea. I will try to answer the question asked by A.N. Wilson: "Why is there a natural discrepancy between human desire and achievement, an inevitable tendency of human schemes to rebound upon themselves and human beings to undermine their own best interests,"[5] or as I might put it, why do we get in our own way so much?

This is how I see it; Paul's verdict is in, but we don't as yet know how he reached it or just how far the verdict reaches into the human family. Amen.

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