Go team!

It seems almost quaint today, but in its time, the TV sitcom Seinfeld broke new ground in the way it addressed how straight people misunderstand gays and lesbians. In a 1995 episode titled "The Beard," Elaine decides she wants to start dating an attractive man she knows. Only problem: He's gay. Undaunted, Elaine has a plan. She talks it over with Jerry at the coffee shop:*

Jerry: Not conversion. You're thinking conversion?

Elaine: Well, it did occur to me.

Jerry: You think you can get him to just change teams? He's not going to suddenly switch sides. Forget about it.

Elaine: Why? Is it irrevocable?

Jerry: Because when you join that team it's not a whim. He likes his team. He's set with that team.

Elaine: We've got a good team.

Jerry: Yeah, we do. We do have a good team.

Elaine: Why can't he play for us?

Jerry: They're only comfortable with *their* equipment.

Elaine: We just got along *so* great.

Jerry: Of course you did. Everyone gets along great when there's no possibility of sex.

Elaine: No, no, no, I sensed something. I did sense something. I perceived a possibility, Jerry.

Jerry: You realize you're venturing into uncharted waters.

Elaine: I realize that.

Jerry: Are you that desperate?

Elaine: Yes I am.

Elaine manages to seduce the guy into "switching teams" ...

... but it doesn't last.

Jerry: He went back? What do you mean he went back?

Elaine: He went back.

Jerry: I don't understand it. You were having such a great time, the sex, the shopping.

Elaine: Well here's the thing. Being a woman, I only really have access to the, uh ... equipment, what, thirty, forty-five minutes a week. And that's on a good week. How can I be expected to have the same expertise as people who *own* this equipment, and have access to it twenty-four hours a day, their entire lives?

Jerry: You can't. That's why they lose very few players.

Elaine: Yeah, I guess I never really stood a chance.

Jerry: Well, there's always a place for you on our team.

No, Elaine never really did stand a chance. And neither do churches and preachers and others who think they can do what Elaine was trying to do, whatever the motivation.

Not a matter of choice

But Jerry and Elaine were misguided in their reasoning, and enlightened people understand that today. It's not a matter of preference -- the idea that gay people simply are more skilled at "equipment handling." If that were the case, an experienced prostitute or porn star could convert anyone.

This is why the phrase "sexual preference" has been supplanted with the more accurate "sexual orientation." Gay people are not gay because they like gay sex better, they like gay sex better because they are gay.

I know many Christians whom I love and admire and have served under have a difficult time accepting this as true. They think people choose to be gay. The reality is, for most LGBT people, just as for most straight people, it's not a choice. It's just reality. I never made a conscious decision to be straight; I just am.

Why is it so hard to accept that a certain percentage of people are born gay, just as a certain percentage are born lefthanded, a certain percentage are born with red hair, and a certain percentage are born with dark skin? Clearly, these differences occur naturally in a portion of the population, are not a matter of choice, and are no better or worse than any other characteristic.

It is instructive to recall that the Christian Church once firmly believed lefthandedness was demonic. ("Sinister" is the Latin word for "left.") Believers even could produce Scripture to back it up, and lefthanded children were beaten and humiliated into grasping quills and swinging hammers in a way that did not come naturally to them.

ou.org

Based on a nearly universal but nonetheless flawed understanding of God's Word, the Church placed the great physicist Galileo under lifelong house arrest for teaching that God's crowning achievement, Earth, was not the unmoving center of the solar system and universe. After all, that's the way it was described in Scripture. Galileo  and other thinkers like him suffered persecution for centuries until mathematicians demonstrated beyond all argument that they in fact were right. The Church at last had to admit it was wrong, and that its interpretation of Scripture had been wrong all along.

The Church has been wrong about other things too, and not always in the ancient past. Just 150 years ago, a significant percentage of American Christians firmly believed the Bible endorsed slavery. When that heresy was finally subdued through enlightenment and bloodshed, its bastard child segregation took its place (and not just in the South). Our parents' generation and even my own have had to fight Jim Crow, a culture construed to be justified by the "curse of Ham." There are still ministers in our midst who refuse to conduct interracial weddings.

The current generation battles the Scripture-backed lie known as the Prosperity Gospel.

If the Church has been wrong -- clearly and inarguably wrong -- about these things that once were accepted as ordained by God in his inerrant Word, then honest Christians must at least entertain the possibility that the Church could be wrong about homosexuality as well.

Overcoming error

Most Christians I know find the Westboro Baptist Church's "God Hates Fags" demonstrations deplorable. But I don't hear many contradicting the WBC's biblical arguments on the subject. So the conclusion to be drawn here is that their message is right, it's just the method of delivery we find unacceptable. Take away the professionally lettered placards, the bullhorns and most of the U.S. flags, and what you have is a pretty typical sermon that could be heard in a lot of Christian churches on any given Sunday, including the one I ambivalently attended until recently.

One weekend around the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, my former pastor candidly acknowledged the racism that surrounded him and imbued him as he was growing up in the South. Railroad tracks divided his hometown into the "white section" and the "black section," and never the twain did meet. This was just the way things were, he said, and no one in his family, including himself, ever questioned it.

http://mtrott1126.tripod.com/rasthedestroyer/segregation.htm

That is, he said, until one man -- Martin Luther King Jr. -- came along and showed them how wrong they were.** King was a Baptist preacher whose understanding of Scripture could not be denied, and my pastor and many other white Southerners were persuaded.

Today that pastor who came to understand the sinfulness of segregation leads a church in Georgia that is dedicated to cultural reconciliation and remarkable for its diversity. I admire and applaud him for this great and ongoing achievement.

I fear, though, that this good disciple of Jesus has a blind spot that keeps him from seeing the parallels between the error and discrimination of his youth and the anti-gay attitudes and preaching of today. Will it take one remarkable person to change his mind and heart about this subject?

Familiar arguments

We've all heard most of the arguments before: Leviticus calls homosexuality an abomination; well, it also calls shellfish an abomination, and I've seen an awful lot of righteous, straight Christians chowing down at Red Lobster. Jesus never said a word about homosexuality; was that because it was a settled matter or because it wasn't an issue worthy of addressing? He never talked about slavery, either, but that was hardly a settled matter in his day. Jesus did talk about divorce, but you don't hear too many preachers today -- especially divorced ones -- railing about that.

I am not a preacher and I did not attend seminary, but I have sat under some excellent preaching and teaching and I have read the Bible cover-to-cover at least 15 times and I have received the Baptism of the Holy Spirit. This doesn't mean I'm right, but it does mean I could be right.

What if -- just what if -- the word translated as "homosexual" in the Bible doesn't mean what we think it means? What if it carried a different meaning at the time of its writing or the time of its transcription or the time of its translation than it carries today?

I believe it's possible that the words and phrases in Scripture that appear to condemn all homosexuality could in fact be condemning only certain practices by certain people.

For example, God famously destroyed the city of Sodom. Because of the sequence of the storytelling, many believe the city was destroyed as punishment for its men demanding to have sex with the two angels disguised as men who were staying at Lot's house.

patheos.com

But God had already vowed to destroy the city before that incident happened. In the previous chapter, God had told Abram he would spare Sodom if he could find just 10 righteous people living there. Can anyone make the argument that there weren't even 10 straight people in the entire city? If so, how did they sustain the population?

No, God destroyed Sodom (and Gomorrah and the surrounding towns) for another reason. Deuteronomy 32 suggests they were destroyed because they worshiped other gods. Isaiah 3:9 indicates they were destroyed for being generally unrepentant. And in Ezekiel 16:49-50 he spells it out plainly, using feminine pronouns: "And look at the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters were proud, sated with food, complacent in their prosperity, and they gave no help to the poor and needy. Rather, they became haughty and committed abominable crimes in my presence; then, as you have seen, I removed them." The "abominable crimes" are not defined; for all we know, they ate seafood.

In Jeremiah 23:14, the Lord accuses Jerusalem's prophets of sins greater than those of Sodom and Gomorrah: "adultery, living in lies, siding with the wicked." No mention of homosexuality.

New Testament

A New Testament passage that is often cited is 1 Corinthians 6:9-10: "Do you not know that the unjust will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators nor idolaters nor adulterers nor boy prostitutes nor practicing homosexuals nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God." Various versions use the term "sodomites" or "sexual perverts" or "the sexually immoral" rather than "homosexuals." Paul's original Greek word is arsenokoites, a combination of arseno, which can mean male or strong, and koites, which can mean bed or intercourse.

archaeologicalmuseum.jhu.edu

Numerous writers make a persuasive case that Paul meant something other than homosexuality when he used that word, which appears nowhere else in Scripture. There were several common Greek words in Paul's day that denoted homosexuality, but Paul chose (or perhaps coined) this obscure word. Mennonite blogger Ryan Robinson argues the word more likely refers to pederasty (child sexual abuse) or male temple prostitution. (The Bible doesn't seem to have a big problem with female prostitution.)

Regardless of how that one word is translated, it is buried in a long list of sins that covers pretty much everyone. And it is followed by a big "but": "Some of you were once like that. But you were cleansed; you were made holy; you were made right with God by calling on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God."

In other words, everybody is messed up, but calling on the name of Jesus and working with the Spirit makes anyone described above OK. Does that mean people have a free pass to go on sinning? No. But it does mean that you, straight person with your own favorite sins, are no better or worse than someone whose sins differ from yours. "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23).

It was not my intention to get into a long exegesis. I apologize. The point of all this is to show that the Bible is open to interpretation, and things don't always mean what we at first think they mean. And sometimes things don't mean what we thought they meant for hundreds of years.

Jesus told us that the first and greatest commandment is "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul and all your mind," and "A second is equally important: Love your neighbor as yourself." If we keep this in mind at all times, we'll figure out how to live together in harmony.

No matter which team anyone plays for.


*Thanks to http://hedo.blogspot.com/ for the transcript.
**Obviously, King didn't end segregation by himself; his effectiveness was the culmination of 400 years of work by countless others, of all races, who came before and alongside him. But this is the way my pastor described it.