Real Evangelism
A couple of years ago, I was invited to serve on a clergy panel of Equality Texas, a group that advocates for LGBTQI2-S rights, at a Texas Freedom Network conference. I was honored to be asked. Despite the fact that there were several break-out groups and panels, I was astonished at the heavy attendance to our clergy panel.
It was a room full of hurt and pain. There were men and women who’d been raised either Roman Catholic or in a fundamentalist faith, and thought of themselves as Christian, but were ostracized because of their sexual orientation.
Some had been the victims of attempts to “exorcise” them of their ‘gay demons.’
There were parents and family members of LGBT folk who’d attended mainline denomination churches, but found that when their children, who’d been raised in those churches, turned out to be gay, they were denigrated and reviled.
These folks, I realized, were the “unclean” standing at the gates of the city, ostracized from the community because of something they couldn’t help–the exact folks that Jesus would make a special point of reaching out to with acceptance and healing.
As I looked around the room and listened to their stories, I thought to myself, “These are exactly the people Paul would have invited into the church, assuring them that God loves them, and that their faith in God’s goodness and Christ’s love are all that are needed to be saved.”
I realized that, after decades of trying to do “evangelism” to get members into the church, it is at last, at St. Stephen, that I’m doing real evangelism, because we are welcoming people the church has alienated from God back into the certainty that they are loved by God and saved by Jesus Christ. If Paul was here today, I thought, these would be the people he’d evangelize–for the same reasons he evangelized Gentiles 2000 years ago. And with the same message: In God’s eyes, you are fine just the way you are.
Why would I think that? After all, Paul seems to be the most homophobic voice in the New Testament!
Fallen Paul
When it comes to homosexuality Paul is, of course, condemned by his own words. We have Romans 1: 24-26 and other references to deal with. The chart in the previous article is essentially right in maintaining that the terms used for homosexuality would not have encompassed anything like the committed relationships we see today.
But I would not be surprised if, to Paul, the term “homosexuality” naturally meant pederasty, licentiousness, and idolatry. It would be surprising if it didn’t.
Ever since Alexander the Great had conquered the Middle East, including Judea, Jews viewed Greek culture and values as at odds with everything Judaism stood for. They were especially offended by the sexual mores of the Greeks, and their later imitators, the Romans. They found the Greek and Roman stadium games, for instance, offensive because participants were generally naked.
But Jews were especially outraged by the Greek culture’s celebration of pederasty. Men taking young boys as their lovers was considered a kind of mentoring, often praised by Greek and Roman poets. Paul, and any Jew of his day, would have been outraged.
By the time that Paul writes the letter to the Romans, around 54 AD, there had been something of a conservative Roman backlash to this kind of public licentiousness. The emperor at the time, Claudius, presented a more “straight arrow” Rome to offset the offenses of his predecessor, Caligula. Caligula famously had a male lover and was a cross-dresser, but those were the least of his sexual behaviors: he’d also married his sister and was infamous for forcing himself on the wives of senators and generals in their presence, as a way of asserting his power.
The Roman citizens to whom Paul’s letter is addressed were a people fed up with the pecadillos of their ruling class, and perhaps that is why Paul uses homosexuality as a specific example of the fallen state.
Perhaps.
But I doubt that it would ever occur to Paul that homosexuality wasn’t a sign of fallenness. Despite his otherwise free-thinking ways, to see homosexuality any differently would have been simply too much out of his field of experience, as both a Jew and a Roman citizen.
In Paul’s Fall are Saved We All
The thing we know best about Paul is that he was a convert. We read in Acts 9 that he met the risen Christ in His full glory when, under his given name Saul, he was on the Damascus Road, intent on arresting Christians. He was struck blind temporarily and when his eyes were opened, he believed that Jesus was Lord and completely flipped from Saul, a Pharisee and zealot against Christians to Paul, zealot for Christ.
I maintain, based on his other well-demonstrated qualities, that had Paul lived today he’d convert again. He would certainly have become a zealot for inclusion of LGBT persons in the Kingdom of God.
There’s a point where to acknowledge that our heroes have feet of clay becomes either an excuse to dismiss the importance of the lessons they taught, or to justify our own flaws and sinfulness because, “hey, he did it too!” This is one risk of applying incarnational theology to Scripture–we see that the authors had particular agendas, or personal flaws, or were sinners just like us. How can we take anything they taught seriously if we can’t take everything they taught seriously?
But another way to think of it is to see the ways that, despite their feet of clay, they transcended their limitations to discover, and direct us to, new ways of thinking about and serving God and one another. The fact that Jesus never freed a slave didn’t mean that Lincoln wasn’t following Jesus’ example when he freed the slaves. He was, but in a different age and a different cultural milieu.
Likewise, the fact that Lincoln could not have conceived of a black American as his equal doesn’t meant his spirit couldn’t inspire the ground-breaking civil rights message of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. If Lincoln had lived in the ’60s, he would surely have been a vocal white civil rights leader. As the first president to meet a free black man, Frederick Douglass, at the White House, Lincoln would certainly in the 20th Century have recognized black Americans as his equals.
And the fact that Dr. King was unfaithful to Coretta makes him a flawed individual, and a sinner (like the rest of us)–but it doesn’t make his ministry and message less true, or his actions in promoting and defending it less courageous.
Unless You Are Born Again…
The Holy Spirit is still at work and alive in the world and in Christians today.
A few months ago, I received a phone call from one of our church elders, a man well past retirement, to say what a wonderful job another elder, a newly ordained gay man, was doing. He said, “You know, when I was young it would never even have occurred to me that we should ordain a homosexual–and now, all I can think is, look at all the talent we’ve lost because we didn’t!”
I’ve seen that often in the church. Extraordinary conversions–really, rebirths–have taken place, so subtly that we have perhaps not even noticed them. Some of the greatest advocates of LGBT inclusion in the church have been retired military folks and veterans of World War II and Korea who likely would have slugged a gay man in their youth. But they’ve changed. By the grace of God, they have converted.
Don’t you think Paul would have done the same?
Given the differences between 21st Century America and First Century Asia Minor and Palestine, its hard to imagine that Paul would do anything but reach out in compassion and acceptance to gays and lesbians.
I have no doubt that by welcoming LGBT folk “just as they are, without one plea,” I am continuing in Paul’s inclusive, “The Kingdom is here!” spirit.
NEXT: God’s Kingdom of Forgiveness