 Transcript of Jack Rogers' address at the Spring President's Colloquium at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary The Layman Online Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Well, Mark has helped us to look at things in a different way. I'd like to begin by looking at the title of this event in a different way. You know, we learn in the political realm the importance of framing. Think of the title of this event. You see "Whom shall we send? And whom shall we not?" Now, let me put the question in a different way. "Should all the members of the Presbyterian Church (USA) have the full rights of membership?" and "Should all the citizens of the United States have the full rights of citizenship?" When you put it that way, the answer really comes back, "Well, why not," you see. Now, if that's the case – that our core values include giving people who are members of an organization, or a community, or a country, the rights that everyone who is a member has – the question is, how did we let something so simple get so complicated and become so divisive in our midst? And I want to give you a this-is-Tuesday-it-must-be-Belgium kind of a quick overview of an alternative way of looking at this matter. But, we have to start with full disclosure and I have to admit that I've changed my mind on this matter. Before 1993, if you would have asked me what I thought about homosexuality, I would have probably been a little awkward, and paused and said, "Well, you know, these people are probably doing something unnatural and it's probably sinful and they shouldn't be ordained to leadership or allowed to marry." I really hadn't thought about it much. I was just responding reflexively as I thought good evangelical Christians should. But, my wife and I worship at the Pasadena Presbyterian Church, a downtown church, and in 1993 a gay man was elected an elder. We didn't know he was gay. He was just an attorney in the community. But he took the occasion to write to the session and say "Why aren't you studying the question of homosexuality and shouldn't you be looking to become a More Light Church?" That is a church that allows anyone – regardless of sexual orientation – to be elected to office. Well, the session was, let us say, terrified. And they responded by passing the buck to the ordained pastors and said, "You guys do something about this." And they decided to set up a task force which would study this question for a year and produce an adult education curriculum to sensitize the whole congregation. And Dean Thompson, now the president of Louisville Seminary, who was then the head of staff, came to me and asked me to be a member of the task force. And I very bravely said "no." I did not want to be involved. Well, Dean put it on a very personal level. He said, "If you are my friend you are going to do this," and I reluctantly said "yes." Well, that was the beginning of a marvelous journey that I am still on. We began with nine months, about once a week, of intensive study of the Bible and prayer and then branching out to look at this issue in all its dimensions. It was an eye-opening experience for me. I had assumed wrongly, as it turned out, that it was an open-and-shut case – there was only one right answer. And the actual study of the Biblical text presented a very different reality to me. Now, I was an active academic at that time and I had a semester sabbatical coming and I thought, you know, what I better do is figure out how the Presbyterian church has dealt with other similarly volatile issues. So, I studied how we dealt with slavery and segregation and the role of women. Well, I discovered a very interesting pattern. For nearly two centuries, most Americans – including most Christians – believed three things about both African Americans and women. One, they are condemned by God in Scripture. Secondly, they are inferior in moral character. Thirdly, they are willfully sinful, usually sexually promiscuous and should be punished for their acts. Now, I am embarrassed to say that sort of thing out loud to you. But, unfortunately, I can give you lists of quotes from our leading theologians that say precisely those things. So we are now ashamed of those assumptions, and yet, it is that same set of assumptions people are using to condemn all behavior by people who are homosexual. Now, there are differences between being African American, being a woman and being a homosexual, but the pattern of prejudice against them is precisely the same. Well, if that's the wrong way to read the Bible, what's the right way? Well, our denomination's northern and southern Presbyterians, just before our reunion in 1983, both adopted guidelines for Biblical interpretation – especially in times of controversy – drawn from our Reformed confessions. The first and most important of those guidelines is that Jesus Christ, our Redeemer, is the central character and the best interpreter of Scripture. The purpose of the Bible is not to bind us forever to the practices of an ancient culture. The Bible is about a surprising revelation. Jesus lived, died and rose again so that we might be reconciled to God; and when we read the Bible through the lens of the redemptive life and ministry of Jesus, we start at the center – love God and love your neighbor – and we do not dwell on the practices of ancient cultures which were merely the context into which this marvelously redemptive message came. Well, what then does the Bible say about people who are homosexual? The debate in the church has to do with, at most, eight texts. None of them are about Jesus. None of them report any of His words. And I have come to the conclusion that none of them – properly understood – apply, as Mark has suggested, to faithful Christian people who are homosexual by their nature. Let me give you just two examples. I've been on a number of radio talk shows as I've moved around the country talking about my book, and when they let people call in, I guarantee you the first question is going to be Sodom and Gomorrah. People are absolutely sure that this is a definitive word against homosexuality. Now, if we're going to be Biblical, we ought to look to the Bible itself for interpretation and there are a number of texts in the Old Testament that speak about the sin of Sodom. None of them having anything to do with homosexuality. The sins of the city are variously described as greed, injustice, lack of hospitality, excess wealth, indifference to the poor and general wickedness. Now, we have a word from Jesus where he speaks of the sin of Sodom and he does so in condemning cities that have refused hospitality to his traveling disciples. The focus on the supposed homosexual aspect of the Sodom story only comes later in non-Biblical literature. Now, I'm not a Biblical scholar by profession, and so I worked very hard to try to understand where is the mainstream on contemporary Biblical scholarship on this matter and have tried to reflect that in my book. But, the interesting thing I have discovered is that many, many scholars, including some who reject equality for people who are gay and lesbian, are willing to dismiss the first seven of the eight texts. But when you get to Romans 1, folks, the discussion gets really serious. So, let's look at that, and again I think there is an enormous gap between the conventional wisdom and the Biblical reality of the text. Paul's thesis statement to the Romans comes in chapter one, verse 16: "I am not ashamed of the gospel. It is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith – the Jew first and also to the Greek." So the gospel Paul is proclaiming in Romans is not centering on sexuality. It focuses on the universality of sin and the free grace of salvation that comes through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. That's the Christian message. Now in Romans 1, Paul is writing to Jewish Christians in Rome, about the Gentile sin of idolatry. Idolatry is, as we know, worshipping – giving our ultimate allegiance – to anything in the creation instead of to God the creator. Now, Paul wrote to the Romans from Corinth, and that Greek city was a seaport and it was notoriously corrupt. And Paul writes very specifically of the kind of idolatry he has seen. He says he has seen Gentiles who, instead of worshipping the true God, worship idols – images resembling mortal human beings, or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles. And he said when people get that low down, God finally just gives up on them, lets them go to any kind of degrading passion including sexual immorality. And you can just hear his Jewish readers going "Ugh, those dirty Gentiles." And then Paul lowers the boom on his Jewish readers, because he lists other sins which occur from not putting God first in our life and he mentions envy, and strife, and deceit, and gossip, and slander, and boasting. Now, he's talking directly to his Jewish readers and of course to us – but, of course, we will pass over them as quickly as possible. These are the kind of sins that even good Jews could commit. Paul's point is that any sin, even our nice white-collar sins, can separate us from God. Paul has two solutions to the problem. One, don't judge other people. Why? Because what you do is just as bad in God's sight as what they do. That's Romans chapter 2, verse 1. Now, I like my sins much better than other people's sins, but Paul says that is beside the point. Any sin can separate us from God. So the second and the real solution to the problem comes in chapter 3. Paul writes we are justified by God's grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, Romans 3:24. We are all sinners. We can all be saved through the grace in of God in Christ Jesus. That's what Romans is about. It's not about homosexual relations among Christian people today. And you're sitting back there saying, you sneaky guy you skipped the two verses that everybody's concerned about Romans 1:26-27 – and I did deliberately, because we take them out of the context that we need to understand. Well let's look at it. Paul says their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural and in the same way men giving up natural intercourse with women were consumed with passion for one another. What's natural for Paul? He's not talking about something like the law of gravity, some order of nature. He's talking about what is normal, conventional and accepted as the way people should behave in first century helenistic Jewish culture. Men were to be dominant. Women were to be passive. It would have been unnatural for a woman to take an active role in sex, as a temple prostitute undoubtedly would do. The text, you know, does not say women had sex with other women. We make that assumption. It doesn't say that. It says women did something unnatural and looking at it from Paul's perspective, that could cover a wide range of things that women ought not to do. But idolatrous women behaved unnaturally, probably aggressively. And, as Mark has well outlined, the best evidence we have in Paul's era was that male-to-male sex was characterized by exploitation: older men with boys, masters with slaves, prostitution. There is simply no concept of egalitarian, loving same-sex relations between equal adults as we know them today. We've got to be very careful about inserting our ideas of natural and unnatural. Paul, of course, says it's unnatural for women to pray without their heads covered, or for men to have long hair. And he even says God does something unnatural in Romans chapter 11: God took a wild olive branch – the Gentiles – and grafted it into the cultivated olive tree of Judaism, and Paul says that was unnatural. Well, it was surprising. It was unconventional. It's not what you expected God to do. So if we read Romans 1 rightly, we need to take account of the culture in which Paul lived and be able to see it in that light. And it's not talking about Christian people that we know in loving relationships, in faithful relationships, in our churches and community. Well, why then did people so quickly jump to the conclusion that everything about homosexuality is sinful? I think there are a group of myths that we've all grown up with that are so embedded in our consciousness that we always start the discussion at the wrong end. Let me give you just a few of them real quickly. Myth number 1: Sexual orientation is a choice – a lifestyle choice. Now, the fact is some people are simply created by God with a sexual attraction to people of their own choice. They don't choose to be that way, and if you just talk to any gay and lesbian people, they'll tell you that they didn't choose to be that, they discovered at the same time that any of us discovered our sexuality, about the time of puberty. It's the normal way for them to express their God-given desire for affection and companionship. David Myers, a respected, evangelical Christian and professor of psychology at Hope College, observes: "Sexual orientation appears not to be a choice. It is neither willfully chosen nor willfully changed." Which speaks to the second myth – that homosexuals could become heterosexuals if they just tried hard enough. Forcing people who are genuinely homosexual to act like people who are heterosexual – sometimes called reparative therapy – is ineffective in changing their orientation and can be damaging to them as persons. The American Academy of Pediatrics says: "Therapy directed specifically at changing sexual orientation is contra-indicated since it can provoke guilt and anxiety while having little or no potential for achieving changes in orientation." Myth number 3: Homosexuality is a mental disorder, a psychiatric disorder or gender identity disorder. I've got a list of about 16 mental health organizations in this country, beginning with the American Medical Association, all of which have come to the conclusion that homosexuality is not a disorder and it doesn't need to be cured. Now, that's over a half-million professionals that certainly span the range of the kinds of people we have in the United States who have come to this as their considered judgment. And over against that we have James Dobson, at Focus on the Family who depends on one fundamentalist, Freudian psychologist who said it's caused by bad parenting and can be cured. That's simply not true. Myth number 4: The Bible contains a model of monogamous, heterosexual marriage in Genesis. Now, if that were true wouldn't you think the heroes of faith in the Old Testament would have caught on? But, they certainly didn't. They had multiple wives and concubines and slaves with whom they had sexual relations. It's taken Western society centuries to develop the model of egalitarian relationship between people based on love. You know, I've been married to the same wonderful woman, Sharon, for 49-plus years. Our 50th is July the 6th, this summer. And inside our wedding rings – hers and mine – we have a Bible verse John 4:19: "We love because God loved us." That's an idea we try to live up to every day of our lives, and I don't see any reason why that idea is not applicable to people who are gay and lesbian just as well as it is to us. Well, one final word. How are we going to solve this problem in the church? Well, we will resolve it when we return to the best methods of Biblical interpretation and quit using methods that have been used to oppress people for centuries. We need to look at the whole Bible through the lens of Jesus' redemptive life and ministry. But instead of being a unequivocal voice against homosexuality, the Bible gives us precisely the right analogy as to how to solve the problem. It's in the 15th chapter of Acts. It's about the church bringing Gentiles into the church. Now, folks, any dirty, rotten thing you've heard people say about homosexuals, Jews said worse things about Gentiles. That's people like you and me. Non-Jews, you know. They were unclean by nature. They were polluted by idolatry. And Jewish Christians from the party of the Pharisees insisted that male converts to Christianity had to be circumcised and everybody had to keep the Jewish law. But then, out there in the mission field, Paul and Barnabas and Peter are stunned to discover Gentiles on whom the spirit of God has clearly fallen. That's great, good news, and it causes a terrible problem for the church. Everybody's all upset about this and they get called back from the mission field to Jerusalem where there's a big, hairy discussion about this. Scholars call it the Council of Jerusalem, I sort of think of it as the first General Assembly. It bears a lot of similarity. And after all the debate, James the brother of Jesus, stood up to give an authoritative interpretation – probably the first stated clerk. Now he notes that what these people – Peter and Paul and Barnabas – have been saying agrees with the Scriptures. God always intended the salvation of the Gentiles but the Jews were so fixed on those texts which talked about the necessity for their being exclusive that they missed it. They didn't see that God's long-range intention was to bring everyone into God's kingdom. But they were now experiencing what God had planned. And so they decided that Gentiles whose hearts had been touched by the Holy Spirit should be accepted in the church without meeting any requirement of the Jewish law, period. Now, James adds a nifty little compromise there for the sake of keeping the peace. He says you Gentile converts please don't do things that upset your Jewish Christian sisters and brothers. And Jews were very concerned about what you ate and who you ate with. So James says don't eat meat offered to idols, don't eat things that still have blood in it, things that have been strangled, avoid sexual immorality, keep the peace – you know, help us out here. But as far as belonging to the church was concerned, there is no requirement except that the spirit of God is manifested in the person's life. Now this is my final word. If the early church, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, could change its mind and change the rules about something so utterly fundamental to their whole idea of what religion was all about, we surely ought to be able to change our mind and change our rules as well, because it would enable us to go back to our core convictions that everyone has been created equally and everybody ought to be treated equally, and certainly everybody who's a Christian – who's a committed follower of Jesus as their Savior and Lord – ought to be given full rights and membership in the church. Amen? Thank you. |
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