Next, we examined the Use and Abuse of the Bible in “Part II: A Hard Conversation.” Last Sunday was the Bible and Women in “Part III: Pink Smoke.” (Coming to the UCC-FCC web site soon.)
Today is the Bible and Homosexuality in “Part IV: Invincible Ignorance.” Next Sunday is “Part V: The Bible and Money.”
I’m having a blast with this series; it’s been a lot of fun, even though the subjects have been rather serious.
Let me start off with “Part IV: Invincible Ignorance,” otherwise known as the Bible and Homosexuality.
Back in the days when I was entering adolescence, junior high going toward high school, I had thirteen fish tanks that I took care of in a mini business. I raised all sorts of different kinds of fish and then sold them to local pet stores. They wouldn’t give me any money, but they would give me lots of fish food for my enterprise.
A Home Aquarium, by Aleš Tošovský. PD Wikimedia.
One of the ways to keep fish tanks clean is with snails that eat the algae. There are lots of different versions of aquatic snails, but my favorite is one that’s called an apple snail. It’s a bit of a misnomer because they’re not that big. They are more the size of a walnut, and they come in either dark brown or albino. They are air-breathers, even though they live their lives underwater. From time to time, they make it toward the surface with their long two-inch snorkel.
Hovering below the surface of the water, they send up their snorkel, breathe air for a while, and then tuck it in and go back down for more algae.
The apple snails are very prolific. They lay lots of eggs with hard little shells like an egg shell, but they’re more the size of a mustard seed. They lay 50 to 70 of them very often, so pretty soon the tank is crawling with all these little guys running around.
Pomacea – The Apple Snail, by Stijn Ghesquiere. CC-Wikimedia.
I subscribed to Aquarium Magazine, and sure enough there’s an article about these snails, with advice for people who want to breed them.
The article said just buy two. Don’t worry about whether they’re two boys or two girls. Being pre-adolescent, I perked up at this.
It turns out as I read further that, if you have two males, one of them switches. I don’t know how they make that decision, but if you have two females, one of them will switch. The article used a new word for me — hermaphrodites, meaning that they have the ability to be both, and they somehow make that decision. Well, I was intrigued by that. I didn’t know that could happen in some species.
High-school biology rolls around, and we learn about rabbits. They too have the ability to solve that problem. If you have just female rabbits, they can fertilize an egg with a blood cell. It’s called parthenogenesis, another new word for my growing vocabulary. If you have a bunch of girl rabbits and no males, all is not lost. The next thing you know, you still have baby rabbits coming around.
Later on in seminary, I read in the Greek text that a parthenos shall conceive and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. Parthenos is a virgin in Greek, and so parthenogenesis is when you are able to have babies and still be a virgin.
Open and Affirming Is a High and Holy Goal; Look Out for Half-Heartedness.
Once again, as the hormones began to flow, I was intrigued by these different options that are available in the animal kingdom. So now, a sermon on the Bible and Homosexuality.
In 2009, our congregation, First Congregational Church, became “Open and Affirming.” Almost nine years ago, we adopted this pledge unanimously, and it’s framed and out there in the hallway. (You’ll find that on our web site here.)
The Last Prejudice Is Homophobia; the Big Three Are Rooted in the Bible.
However, the prejudice against homosexuality is pervasive. It has been called “The Last Prejudice,” which, of course, nobody believes, but it is the third of “The Big Three,” racism, sexism, and homophobia.
Like racism and sexism, homophobia has its roots in the Bible. It’s easy to find, and there are five specific places.
Before your eyes blink over, I’m not going to deal with all five. However, I do want to list them so you know what they are:
A Sermon by the Rev. Dr. Arthur M. Suggs
for the First Sunday of Lent, February 18, 2018
This is the first of a new series of sermons on The Good Book. Here is an excerpt from Enlightening the Eyes:
The Rev. Dr. Art Suggs begins this Lenten sermon about the origins, translations and challenges of interpreting scripture with two stories — The second story based on an awkward moment that occurred during a spiritual discussion group gathering in his backyard.
Rev. Suggs begins, though, with “a sweeping story that I’m quoting from Peter Gomes, formerly a chaplain at Harvard, who wrote a book under the title of The Good Book that I have also used as an overall name for this new series of sermons.”
The ‘sweeping story’ points to the original, admirable, virtue-centered intentions of the Puritans coming to create a ‘new model of Christianity’ in this new world.
You’ll find this ‘sweeping story’ in the full sermon (download link below), but for now, Rev. Suggs continues,
“We’re going to be looking at:
• uses and abuses of the Bible,
• the Bible and women,
• the Bible and homosexuality,
• the Bible and money (that will be interesting),
… and core principles. The series will then take us all the way through to Easter, when we’re going to look at the Bible and miracles.
Bible 101
The Bible used by Abraham Lincoln for his oath of office during his first inauguration in 1861. PD image by Michaela McNichol, Library of Congress.
Where should I begin? I wrestled with this because it’s logical to start at the beginning, and there are some fascinating stories about how the Bible came to be.
This is particularly true for the New Testament, up to the time of Constantine, when he finally pressed the bishops to get their act together and decide what’s scripture and what’s not. Constantine and the bishops did decide, and that led to the whole issue of Rome and the Middle Ages.”
In the full sermon, the Rev. Dr. Suggs shares more about how the bible came into being, and the various translations of it, about which he adds,
“Translations would be fun to go over in a sermon, but I can tell that you’ve had enough. There are great stories about translation in a different way.
For example, in Hebrew, there’s only one word for both “palace” and “temple.” Try to imagine that for a minute. To get a feeling for how closely church and state were united in ancient Hebrew culture, they didn’t even bother to have different words for the two of them.
Context was the only way that you could tell whether someone was talking about the palace or the temple.
Here’s where it gets tough if you want to know a problem in translation: That is, there is no one word for sexual deviancy. How do we translate that? Somebody came up with the term homosexuality, and that word for sexual deviancy, generalized, became very specifically “homosexuality” for centuries.
A Bible handwritten in Latin, on display in Malmesbury Abbey, Wiltshire, England. The Bible was written in Belgium in 1407 AD, for reading aloud in a monastery. Photo by Adrian Pingstone. PD Wikimedia.
Thus, all the versions of the Bible based upon generalized sexual deviancy continued to use the word “homosexuality,” even though the deviance might actually have little or nothing to do with homosexuality.
For example, what would sexual deviancy have been in ancient Greek culture? Generally, it’s considered one of three things: Somehow or other, it was sex mixed in with violence like rape or bestiality or pedophilia. But no, it was decided that the best thing to do was just to call it homosexuality, therefore creating some of the pain and anger and hatred of the church by the homosexual community for centuries because of unwise and unthoughtful translations.
There’s great teaching about the organization of the Bible. You have the Torah and then the writings and the prophets in the Old Testament.
Saint Paul Writing His Epistles, 16th-century painting, c1618-1620, Valentin de Boulogne, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX. PD Wikimedia.
In the New Testament you have the gospels and then Acts, which is sort of like Volume 2 of the Gospel of Luke and written by the same person, in all probability. Then follow the Pauline Epistles, and the scribes didn’t know whether Paul wrote Hebrews or not, so they tacked Hebrews at the end of what they thought were the Pauline Epistles.
Then it was followed by the general epistles, Titus, Timothy, Peter, James, and John and their shorter letters, followed by the book of Revelations.
We also have the Apocrypha, a whole bunch of other scriptures that come from the latter years but before Christ. These were accepted by the Catholics but generally not by the Protestants. And then, of course, the Gnostic documents came to light in the 20th Century from the discoveries of the Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls.
What Ended My Long Love Affair with the Bible?
To speak personally, I have had a long love affair with the Bible. I have studied it. I have memorized many verses. I learned Greek and Hebrew, and got an A in Greek and 100 in Hebrew, meaning that I did perfectly on every homework assignment and every test. I was the only one. I bought commentaries. I have preached from the Bible faithfully for over 30 years.
One thing I haven’t mastered: Some of my fellow students told me you need to preach with one hand and hold the Bible in the other, and you must buy a very expensive, floppy, leather-bound King James Version of the Bible, and you need to be able to grab it and flip it open. You need to flip it open to the middle, and I can’t do it to save my soul because you open up to the middle, and then you hold it while you’re preaching, regardless what verse it opened to. I never could learn the lesson.
So I’ve had a love affair with the Bible, but the love affair actually ended due to unfaithfulness.
It was all about three forms of unfaithfulness. One had to do with women, one had to do with gays, and one had to do with slaves. It is crystal clear that the Bible treats women in a second-class way.
It is also crystal clear that the Bible believes homosexuality is a sin. There are places where the text doesn’t use the word for sexual deviancy, but they describe it. A man with a man, for example, and they condemn it.
St. Peter Preaching in the Catacombs. Jan Styka, PD Wikimedia.
And it was hard for me to come to this decision, but I have decided that the Bible is just plain wrong. Men and women are to be treated equally, no matter what, and this is especially true in church. Women are not to be kept silent. They are not to have to cover their heads. They are to be treated equally with men.
Science has shown in so many different ways that there is a Bell curve of different types of sexuality, not just in human beings but across the mammalian phyla. Homosexuality is found in well over 400 different versions of mammals, not just among human beings.
And so the Bible is wrong. It’s just plain wrong. I will not preach from those passages ever again.
To Be Fair, the Bible Is a Product of Time and Place. We Divorced, Nevertheless Remain Amicable
Every single culture out of which the Bible emerged — ancient Hebrew, ancient Greece, ancient Israel — was anti-woman, anti-gay, and pro-slavery. So of course, it’s going to reflect that kind of moral compass.
The Second Letter of Paul to Timothy, 3: 16-17 says:
“All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.”
And I have been hit over the head whenever I have expressed my doubts with that verse. “All scripture,” it says, and it’s infuriating. It brings tears to my eyes.
Because what do you think scripture meant at the time that it was written? It meant the Torah. The first five books, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. It might have meant maybe the Prophets as well and things like the Psalms and the Proverbs, but it probably meant the Torah.
I’m being beaten over the head because I expressed doubt about a New Testament document.
A page from the Gutenberg bible. Scanned by Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin. PD Wikimedia.
In that love-affair analogy, we fell in love, we got married, and we had many happy years. But then there was this emerging unfaithfulness, and so we divorced but in an amicable way. We became friends, and we shall remain friends, at least from my end, to my dying day.
I look with amusement at churches in particular that like to venerate the Bible.
For example, some churches have processions in which the Bible is held high, while somebody walks around with it. There are churches that want you to stand when the gospel is read, and you can stay seated for the rest of it, for some reason. There are churches that emphasize the red-letter edition of the Bible because what Jesus says is more important than what other Biblical figures have to say.
There are churches that put the Bible on the communion table and show that it is precious and worthy of being on the communion table. And of course, there are some people who make sure that, in a stack of books, the Bible is always on top.
My present understanding after all these years is that the Bible is a fine tool, but like any kind of tool there are things for which it’s useful and other things for which it’s useless.
The Buddha told a story when some of his disciples wanted to venerate his words. (Find the Buddha’s story in the full version of this sermon – download below.)
I would answer, “Like a makeshift raft, the answer is yes, it does do that, not perfectly, not completely, not always reliably, but yes, it does.”
The passage that Judy Giblin read during the Lectionary was the beautiful and eloquent Psalm 19, verses 1-10 and 14.
Here, she reads again the central portion of it, verses 7 through 10:
“The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul;
the decrees of the Lord are sure, making wise the simple;
the precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart;
the commandment of the Lord is clear, enlightening the eyes;
the fear of the Lord is pure, enduring for ever; the ordinances of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.
More to be desired are they than gold, even much fine gold; sweeter also than honey, and drippings of the honeycomb.”
** *The series title of The Good Book is borrowed from Peter Gomes’ book by the same title.
**The raft parable appears in the “Alagaddupama” Sutta of the Sutta-pitaka (Majjhima Nikaya 22).
Featured Image Credit: The Gutenberg Bible, 1455, Johann Gutenberg; Rare Books Division, the Lenox Library. Image by Kevin Eng, CC-PD Wikimedia.
No matter who you are, or where you are on life's journey, you are welcome here.
Open and Affirming Is
a High and Holy Goal; Look
Out for Half-Heartedness.
