Ten years ago today, the Obergefell decision was handed down, making civil marriage legally available to same-sex couples nationwide. It just so happened that this decision arrived within a day or two of the General Convention of the Episcopal Church taking a vote on redefining the marriage canon of the church to include same-sex marriages. In addition, the appointed scripture readings for that Sunday included the story of David and Jonathan, a story about deep love between two men that has long been embraced by gay Christians. For me, these three things coinciding felt like a divine occurrence.

At the time, I was the rector at The Chapel of Saint Andrew in Boca Raton. The congregation was fairly politically diverse and so it felt right and proper to have a series of discussions on the changes that were happening in society and the Church. Those discussions prompted me to write a five-part series on the blog of The Chapel (now lost to ether of the internet…). I’ve long maintained that one can be a “traditionalist” Christian while also being open to things like same-sex marriage in the Church. So I saw these discussions as a catalyst for articulating a Biblical and theological (and ecclesiological) view of Christian marriage that is in continuity with the tradition but recognizes that God might be leading us to do “new things” as so often is the case in the scriptural tradition.

On this tenth anniversary of the decision, in the year 2025, renewed attacks on same-sex marriage have arisen. The Obergefell decision seems less secure. The Southern Baptists have reiterated their opposition to same-sex marriage, following a wider “spirit” of Christian hostility to the idea. And so, it seems appropriate to republish some of my series here. Others, back in 2015, found it helpful and so I hope you might as well.

What follows are the first two parts of my series: how we Episcopalians read the Bible and what the Bible itself actually says about same-sex marriage. I also include material from the last post of the series, made up of my own personal reflections. Keep in mind that these are being represented as they were written in 2015. My writing has probably improved in that time and some of my theology may have changed. Please be gracious.

—Fr. Charles+

THE BIBLE AND EPISCOPALIANS

In discussing same-sex marriage in/for The Church one is obligated to be aware of “what the Bible says.” The Bible (and a particular reading of it) dominates the conversation.

It is true that so-called “progressive” Episcopalians are put at something of a disadvantage on this topic because, as the so-called “conservative” Christians will quickly assert, the Bible is clear that homosexuality is a sin in the eyes of God. This is, for many, something that is non-negotiable.

One can point to the Bible and say “here’s what it says.”

I’m reminded of a former class-mate of mine in college who was an Evangelical Christian. She and I got into a discussion about the Bible and I made mention of “gray areas.”

“There are no gray areas in the Bible,” she stated without hesitation. “The Bible is black and white. There are only those parts of it that you disagree with that you want to interpret away.”

Her words are pretty consistent with what many of us hear in this conversation.

Before we get into the discussion of the Bible itself, I think it is important to talk first about how we read the Bible.

We are Anglican Christians. This means that we have a distinct way of being Christian. The past several decades have seen a shift away from denominational distinctiveness in favor of a loose commonality in an attempt at Christian unity. The result, however, has largely been to allow Evangelical Protestantism to dominate all non-Catholic ecclesiologies. This is a troubling trend.

Evangelical Protestantism tends to understand the Bible as a book that is to be taken literally, at face-value, a book containing everything we need to know about life. This is expressed in a bumper-sticker I’ve seen more than a few times: The B.I.B.L.E.—Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth.

A point that many Christians are quick to forget or not notice in the first place is that the Church has never had a universally recognized doctrine in regards to the Bible. Indeed, most (if not all) “doctrines” on the Bible are products of the late Protestant Reformation-era (at the earliest).

Martin Luther, the German Reformer, gave us the popularly known term “sola scriptura” which means “scripture alone.” It was this notion that created the context for a key component in Protestant Christianity: the Bible is the final and ultimate source of authority for the Church.

 Following Luther, John Calvin and, later, Ulrich Zwingli, provided their own spin on sola scriptura. Calvin, an unordained lawyer, believed that the Church, led by the scriptures, had an obligation to govern society. Zwingli, further, put this into practice and laid the groundwork for what is often called “the radical Reformation.” And the Radical Reformers are the ancestors for the Baptists and Evangelicals we see today.

Luther tended to believe that the Bible held primacy for the Church and that the Church is obligated to conform to what is written therein. If the Bible is silent on a matter, then the Church has the authority to do what it wants, so long as that action does not contradict something written in the Bible.

The radical Reformers, on the other hand, believed that the Bible held primacy for general society and that people are obligated to conform to what the Bible says—sometimes going so far as to declare the Bible prescriptive in the sense that one must do only what is written in the scriptures; if the Bible is silent on a matter, then that is to be taken as indication that the Bible does not endorse that matter.

The Reformation Era is the context in which Anglican Christianity came of age.

Unlike the rest of Europe, Henry VIII did not seek to reform the Church. Instead, he moved to take the Church in England out from under the political and ecclesial authority of the pope. This put Anglican Christians in a unique situation—as well as subject to a number of conflicts and controversies.

During Henry’s lifetime, the Church in England remained mostly identical with wider Catholic Christianity. It was under his son, the short-lived Edward I, when the European reforms began to affect the Church—under the leadership of Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury under Henry’s reign. Upon Edward’s death, his sister Mary (the famous “Bloody Mary”) re-aligned the Church in England with Rome and had Thomas Cranmer executed. After her death, her sister Elizabeth I reversed the move to Rome and, with the help of the theologian Richard Hooker (among others), developed what has become known as “The Elizabethan Settlement.”

The Settlement sought to address the changes and challenges of Christianity on England. England was a realm filled with, by this point, Radical Reformers, Lutherans, and Catholic Christians. The work of the Elizabethan Settlement, in addressing these disparate Christian movements, has given us Anglicans a defining term: via media, “The Middle Way.”

Often mistakenly referred to as “the middle way between Catholicism and Protestantism,” The Settlement tends to find a way between Lutheran and Calvinist/Radical Reformation-ism. It gave us what is known as The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion (found on pages 867-876 of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer). Among those are two Articles that speak directly of the Bible.

The key teaching on Anglican views of the Bible is found in Article VI of the Articles of Religion:

 Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation.

This teaching is further reinforced in Article XX:

The Church hath power to decree Rites or Ceremonies, and authority in Controversies of Faith: and yet it is not lawful for the Church to ordain any thing that is contrary to God’s Word written, neither may it so expound one place of Scripture, that it be repugnant to another. Wherefore, although the Church be a witness and a keeper of Holy Writ, yet, as it ought not to decree any thing against the same, so besides the same ought it not to enforce any thing to be believed for necessity of Salvation.

So, to break this down, Anglican Christianity affirms that the Bible, primarily, contains what is necessary for salvation (this article is titled “Of the Sufficiency of the Holy Scriptures for Salvation”). The context here is that the Church cannot declare something NOT found in the Bible as being necessary for one’s salvation (this addresses a particular Reformation-era controversy surrounding Roman Catholic indulgences). However, if the Church does discern that something extra-biblical is necessary for salvation, then that thing must be “provable”—based in or in harmony with—by the Bible.

Further, the Church’s authority is limited by what is contained in the canon of Scripture. It cannot teach something that is “repugnant” or contrary to what is written in the Bible.

This teaches us that matters of salvation take primacy for us Anglicans in interpreting The Bible. The only “requirements” we have in regards to the Bible are in matters concerning our salvation (which includes the nature of sin, death, the divinity of Jesus, the nature of the sacraments, the bodily resurrection, etc.). We probe the scriptures in search of what saves us, helps us in our salvation life, and how to lead others to experience that salvation. We Anglicans, then, understand the Bible as a cross-oriented book—we read all of it in the shadow of the Cross.

The Bible, for Anglicans, then, is not Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth. It’s not a rule book or life-manual. It contains the story of our salvation. It is a book about Jesus, revolving around Jesus. And we don’t read this sacred book dryly. We enact it, live it, dramatize it. The Book of Common Prayer is 80% scripture (more or less). We put our very lives in its pages, trying to align ourselves with the stories contained therein.

All of this is to say that the reading of the Bible that tends to dominate the discussions of same-sex marriage is a reading we Episcopalians do not endorse.

THE BIBLE AND SAME-SEXUALITY

 Please Note: This particular entry will be dealing with explicit statements on human sexuality and sexual practice.

Now that we have addressed how we Episcopalians read the Bible, the next logical step for us is to look at what the Bible itself says on the topic of “homosexuality.”

This will be divided into two sections: The Old Testament and The New Testament. The relevant passages themselves will be posted, followed by commentary.

Before we proceed, I hope you will notice the sparse amount of material here. The Bible doesn’t really say all that much on this topic. As you will see, much of even this is a degree of “reading in” to what is on the page.

What follows is everything the Bible has to say on the matter:

OLD TESTAMENT

The first place to start is with the famous story of “Sodom and Gomorrah.” Indeed, it is from this story that we get the term “sodomy”—which itself has served as the basis for an antiquated term for homosexual males: “sodomites.”

Genesis 19:1-11

The two messengers entered Sodom in the evening. Lot, who was sitting at the gate of Sodom, saw them, got up to greet them, and bowed low. He said, “Come to your servant’s house, spend the night, and wash your feet. Then you can get up early and go on your way.”

But they said, “No, we will spend the night in the town square.” He pleaded earnestly with them, so they went with him and entered his house. He made a big meal for them, even baking unleavened bread, and they ate.

Before they went to bed, the men of the city of Sodom—everyone from the youngest to the oldest—surrounded the house and called to Lot, “Where are the men who arrived tonight? Bring them out to us so that we may have sex with them.”

Lot went out toward the entrance, closed the door behind him, and said, “My brothers, don’t do such an evil thing. I’ve got two daughters who are virgins. Let me bring them out to you, and you may do to them whatever you wish. But don’t do anything to these men because they are now under the protection of my roof.”

They said, “Get out of the way!” And they continued, “Does this immigrant want to judge us? Now we will hurt you more than we will hurt them.” They pushed Lot back and came close to breaking down the door. The men inside reached out and pulled Lot back into the house with them and slammed the door. Then the messengers blinded the men near the entrance of the house, from the youngest to the oldest, so that they groped around trying to find the entrance. (see also Judges 19:16-24 for a nearly identical story)

So here is the classic story that forms the basis of much Christian thinking about homosexuality.

The “sin of Sodom and Gomorrah” is famous even within the pages of The Bible as an example of profound, unspeakable wretchedness committed before God. In the passages prior to this, Abraham (Lot’s uncle) is visited by God and told that the two cities are on the chopping block. Abraham is told that “their sin is very serious” and serves as the basis for their destruction. 

But this all raises the key question: what is the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah?

That the men have sex with men (are “homosexual”) is often understood as the wickedness that causes God to burn with rage at the two cities. But what does the Bible itself say?

Our first reference to the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah comes just before the passage we read above: Genesis 18:20 says, “The cries of injustice from Sodom and Gomorrah are countless, and their sin is very serious! I will go down now to examine the cries of injustice that have reached me” (from the Common English Bible).

So, it is “the cries of injustice” that cause God to be angry. What is that injustice?

Later on, Ezekiel the prophet, speaking the Word of God, will say of Sodom and Gomorrah: “This is the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were proud, had plenty to eat, and enjoyed peace and prosperity; but she didn’t help the poor and the needy. They became haughty and did detestable practices in front of me, and I turned away from them as soon as I saw it” (Ezekiel 16:49-50 NRSV).

The “sin” listed here is failure to help the poor and needy in spite of wealth. They were arrogant (“haughty”). Yes, there’s a mention of “detestable” things that folks could use to fuel the “homosexuality” angle, but we’ll look at that in a moment.

Even Jesus, in the gospels (in a story recorded by Mark, Matthew, and Luke), speaks of the sin of Sodom. But He does so in terms of hospitality, telling the disciples He’s sent out that any city that does not welcome them will face a harsher sentence than what was experienced by Sodom and Gomorrah:

“If anyone refuses to welcome you or listen to your words, shake the dust off your feet as you leave that house or city. I assure you that it will be more bearable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah on Judgment Day than it will be for that city.” (Matthew 10:14-15 CEB)

And given that Jesus is our final authority in how we read the Bible, we are left with the realization that the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah is not “homosexuality” but inhospitality.

A little context here goes a long way:

Sodom and Gomorrah are first mentioned in Genesis 13, when Lot moves there. Even then they are mentioned as “very evil and sinful against the Lord.”

Next, they are depicted in Genesis 14 as having been conquered and ransacked by a coalition army comprised of soldiers from five kingdoms as part of a civil war. Abraham comes to their assistance to free Lot and winds up helping them achieve victory and a return of their wealth.

So Sodom and Gomorrah are a people who ought to know the importance of assisting people in need. But instead, they use their power to abuse people by raping them as a form of domination (much like is seen in some forms of prison culture today).

What clearly happens in Sodom and Gomorrah is not exemplary of two people of the same sex being in love with each other and desiring a life together before God. This isn’t even categorically “homosexuality.” This is rape. Men raping men rather than expressing peace and hospitality to them.

And that systemic culture of raping foreigners in their midst is the detestable act that God speaks of in the beginning. Which all of us would most certainly understand as profoundly evil.

So this is not a passage about “homosexual orientation” (meaning, a person romantically and physically attracted to a person of the same sex), but about an astounding culture of violence and domination.

We must remember that in the ancient world there didn’t exist Hyatt Hotels or Motel 6. When people travelled they needed to rely on the hospitality of strangers. Travel was already dangerous enough with thieves on the roads. This is why the Torah places an emphasis on welcoming the stranger, saying “remember that you were strangers in Egypt.” God is interested in God’s people creating a trustworthy society where travelers can sojourn without fear of exploitation or abuse.

This underscores the great evil of Sodom and Gomorrah. Here was a people who had experienced the violence of inhospitality themselves and who were given an opportunity to change, but wound up becoming more wicked than before.

Leviticus 18: 19-24

Here we have the go-to passage on homosexuality. This one serves as the clearest example of “the Bible says this is wrong.” I’ve put the passage in a bit of wider context to show how it plays in a larger category of sexual sins in The Torah:

‘Also you shall not approach a woman to uncover her nakedness during her menstrual impurity. You shall not have intercourse with your neighbor’s wife, to be defiled with her. You shall not give any of your offspring to offer them to Molech, nor shall you profane the name of your God; I am the Lord. You shall not lie with a male as one lies with a female; it is an abomination. Also you shall not have intercourse with any animal to be defiled with it, nor shall any woman stand before an animal to mate with it; it is a perversion.

‘Do not defile yourselves by any of these things; for by all these the nations which I am casting out before you have become defiled. (see also Leviticus 20)

How are we to interpret this?

The first issue that any Christian using Leviticus for this discussion has to account for is what St. Paul writes in Ephesians 2: “[Jesus] canceled the detailed rules of the Law so that he could create one new person […]” (Ephesians 2:15). This means, as St. Paul writes elsewhere, that we are “no longer under the Law.” The Law forbids the eating of shellfish, the wearing of mixed fabrics. It also requires that parents stone to death overly disobedient children and that victims of rape marry their assailants. 

There are many things in the Law that Christians are quick to say “this no longer applies.” But on issues like homosexuality, they will point at the Law and say, “see?”

But that is a discussion for another time. For the purposes of debate, we will consider what the Law says here.

If we can learn anything from the rabbis it’s that every word of scripture counts.

So, to begin with, this law speaks only to men. Indeed, there is only one verse where lesbian activity is even discussed (see the New Testament section below). Which means that this law is not speaking of “homosexuality” in categorical terms. Rather it is condemning a practice that applies specifically to males—namely, that a man cannot “lie down” with another man as that man would “lie down” with a woman. 

The Hebrew word “shakab” means “to lie down” and has a wide range of connotations. It is frequently sexual, but not exclusively—in the Bible it most often refers to sleeping. Context clues us in to the fact that it is sexual (since this prohibition appears in a list of sexual sins). So, a man cannot have sex with another man as he would with a woman. That is the literal reading of this law (so far). Now we have to determine what “as he would with a woman” means. And this is where things get tricky.

For starters, it is impossible for a man to have sex with a man in the way he’d have sex with a woman because men, in general, do not have female genitalia. However, one can easily make the jump to see that, perhaps, the Law is talking about anal sex. A male using the male body as though it were a female’s body. This reads a bit euphemistically, but it seems sound.

This gives us two possible interpretations. The first should be clear: the Bible is forbidding male anal sex. This is the common take-away for many interpreters and the basis for anti-gay views in Christianity (and some parts of Judaism). However, this interpretation doesn’t seem to be as nuanced as the text. Because a woman also has an anus and the law says nothing about forbidding anal sex with a woman. So, it seems that there’s something else going on here. Further, anal sex is not an exclusive practice of male same-sex relationships (contrary to what much popular culture would indicate). So, even if this law is condemning a particular practice, that condemnation does not necessarily apply across the board to “homosexual orientation” and/or practice.

Now, the fact that the law specifies “as with a woman” suggests something emasculating. This is a major concern in the Torah. Indeed, a man who’s been rendered “infertile” is not allowed to come into the Lord’s presence (see Leviticus 21:17ff, Deuteronomy 23:1). The concern seems to be more about a man’s “maleness” than it does with sexual activity. To treat another man as though he was a woman, to emasculate him, is what is considered “abominable” (the Hebrew word which, incidentally, is also used in reference to non-kosher foods in Deuteronomy 14:3).

But there is another aspect to this that deserves further investigation:

In the ancient world it was believed that children came from men. Their semen was seen as a seed (which is why this is the word used in Hebrew) to be planted in the fertile “soil” of the woman’s womb. So the law is very concerned with how semen is used.

As was mentioned above, men were the primary “givers” in procreation, women only serving as the soil for the seed to take root in. Even past the invention of the microscope, people believed that a man’s semen contained a tiny, fully formed human. This speaks also to the Law’s prohibition on bestiality. In a world where people believed in half-human/half-animal beings (like satyrs), the concern was that an animal’s seed might impregnate a woman and create something inhuman.

So this Law is concerned with responsible use of one’s body for the purposes of procreation. We will talk about this further in the next part of this series (on marriage). So, if anything, this seems more in line with a condemnation of abortion than it does homosexuality in that the passage seems to concern itself with what one does with their bodily fluids considered to be very seed of a human life.

This aspect is also partially understood in the Torah’s cleansing rituals. If a man has a nocturnal emission, he is to ritually purify himself. Same if anyone touches blood. Both of these fluids are tied to life, the shedding of life. And the shedding of life always carries with it, in the Torah, a need to for purification.

Ultimately, however, the final verse provides the context we need: “Do not defile yourselves by any of these things; for by all these the nations which I am casting out before you have become defiled.” The giving of children over to Molech, male prostitution, bestiality, these are all examples of idolatrous practices. So the Law is interested here (and elsewhere) in providing the means for Jews to define themselves over and against the idolatrous peoples they are going to encounter and remove from the Promised Land.

Again, the concern here is not categorical “homosexual orientation.” It is, rather, the responsible use of the tools for life and the defining markers of cultural uniqueness.

NEW TESTAMENT

Now that we’ve looked at what the Old Testament has to say on the subject, we turn now to the New Testament.

The first passage for our consideration is another one that is commonly cited by opponents of same-sex marriage: 

Romans 1: 25-28 (CEB)

They traded God’s truth for a lie, and they worshipped and served the creation instead of the creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.

That’s why God abandoned them to degrading lust. Their females traded natural sexual relations for unnatural sexual relations. Also, in the same way, the males traded natural sexual relations with females, and burned with lust for each other. Males performed shameful actions with males, and they were paid back with the penalty they deserved for their mistake in their own bodies. Since they didn’t think it was worthwhile to acknowledge God, God abandoned them to a defective mind to do inappropriate things.

There’s a lot here to wade through.

Firstly, this passage is unique in all the Bible because it is the only place where female same-sexual practice is referenced. Secondly, Paul’s arguments hinge on the concepts of a few key words here: “natural,” “traded” (other translations say “exchanged”), and “lust.”

To begin, let’s look at “lust.” Lust is a clearly condemned sinful practice that happens among all sexual orientations. There’s nothing explicitly “homosexual” about lust. That these women and men are acting out of lust is clearly a sinful thing and lust is something that all Christians (whether “progressive” or “conservative”) will agree ought to be condemned.

So here, as we have seen in the Old Testament, what Paul is condemning is not mutual love but lust-based actions. And lust is always going to be selfish and wicked.

Indeed, this lust is of such potency that it causes women and men to make an exchange. They give up sexual desire for the opposite sex and turn it toward their respective sexes.

Many Christians will see this as a prescriptive statement about homosexual orientation, evidence that people “choose” to act according to their forbidden and sexual desires. However, reality does not fit in with this notion.

The experience of LGBTQ people, backed up by psychological science, tells us that they do not “choose” their sexual orientation any more than someone chooses their gender or their race. While the precise “causes” of same-sexuality (as well as bi- and asexuality) is still not known, researches are in agreement that it is something human beings are born into—it is something not of one’s choosing.

At the same time, this fact does not diminish Saint Paul’s condemnations. Because while he might not be condemning “homosexuality” as we understand it today, he is clearly still condemning a perversion. Because he is speaking of people making a choice to perform certain acts with their bodies, choices rooted in lust rather than love.

Following this, Saint Paul is clearly claiming that what these women and men are doing is “unnatural.” But what exactly does Paul understand “natural” to mean?

This is particularly tricky because “nature” has been (and remains) a fluid concept. For many in the Ancient World, “nature” referred to something ordered. Today, we tend to view “nature” as being something wild, un-contained, somewhat disordered (or having its own order over and against human concepts of order which are often seen as means of containing and controlling).

Paul uses “nature” to describe something a couple of key places in his writing. In I Corinthians, he writes: “Does not nature itself teach you that if a man wears long hair, it is degrading to him?” (I Corinthians 11:14a NRSV).

This reveals to us the differences between how we understand “nature” and how Paul understood it. Because, for us, long hair is “natural”—meaning, hair naturally grows, therefore long hair can only happen by virtue of hair doing what comes naturally. So, Paul’s concept of “natural” is an iffy concept for us today.

But Paul speaks of “nature” in another place in Romans: “If you [Gentiles] have been cut from what is by nature a wild olive tree and grafted, contrary to nature, into a cultivated olive tree, how much more will these natural branches be grafted back into their own olive tree” (Romans 11:24 NRSV).

So Saint Paul acknowledges that God does something “unnatural,” something “contrary to nature,” in bringing the Gentiles into the Promises of salvation.

And all of this really helps drive home Saint Paul’s larger point in Romans 1 and 2. You see, we’ve gotten far too caught up in the particulars of what Paul writes here that we’ve lost the big picture of what he’s trying to do. He’s not actually interested in condemning particular sins or people—indeed, Paul is quite wary of risking the creation of a new Law so much so that he often avoids precise language in instances where he does condemn particular behaviors.

Paul is, instead, building a crescendo in order to hit an arrogant church with a dose of humility.

Saint Paul is writing to a church made up of a mix of Jewish and Gentile Christians, at a time when Gentiles were relegated to second-class status in The Church. He opens his letter playing to the Jewish Christian elitism (and maybe even a degree of general Christian elitism shared by both Jews and Gentiles in The Church). The description we get in Romans 1:18-32 is something that clearly describes the Roman and Greek pagan aristocracy. He is hitting a number of Jewish beliefs about idolatry: that it willfully ignores the revelation of God of Israel and is the result of self-imposed spiritual blindness, even somewhat mocking the Greek philosophers (“claiming to be wise they became as fools”). In Jewish thought, idolatry is conceived of in terms of adultery and sexual immorality (largely due to the fact that many ancient religious practices involved temple prostitution) and that the worship of idols will lead people to debased sexual practices (this is indicated by the life of Solomon in I Kings 11, who turns to idols due to his love of “foreign women”).

So one can easily read this passage as Paul whipping his crowd up. It is important to keep in mind that Paul’s letters were meant to be listened to, not read on a page. They were written for his assistants to read to the churches, performed somewhat like a sermon.

Here’s Paul saying, essentially, “you all know how wicked those pagans are; how ugly and twisted their practices are.” And Paul’s audience is nodding along. They’re thinking “alright alright, Paul’s really giving it to those disgusting pagans! I like this guy!”

And this builds and builds and builds… until Paul drops a bomb in Romans 2:1—“So every single one of you who judge others is without any excuse. You condemn yourself when you judge another person because the one who is judging is doing the same things.”

So Paul’s using biases and generalizations to drive home a particular point: all have sinned and fallen short of God’s glory (Romans 3:23). And God has demonstrated an enormous and scandalous grace in doing something contrary to nature by bringing in the Gentiles, a people seen as unclean and detestable by “the faithful.” 

So these first two chapters of Romans aren’t exactly about condemning same-sex love. They’re about reminding a self-righteous Church that they are as dependent on God’s grace as “those people” that they want to condemn.

Now the next two passages  will be discussed in tandem, because the issues in them are something they have in common:

1 Corinthians 6:9-11 (NASB)

Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of God. Such were some of you; but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.

1 Timothy 1:8-10 (ESV)

Now we know that the law is good, if one uses it lawfully, understanding this, that the law is not laid down for the just but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for those who strike their fathers and mothers, for murderers, the sexually immoral, men who practice homosexuality, enslavers, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine.

Looking at these passages it seems things could not be any more clear. After all, the word “homosexual” shows up. It is obvious that the Bible condemns this as sin.

The things to look at here have to deal with translation, particularly the words “effeminate” and “homosexual.”

“Effeminate” is the English translation of the Greek word malakia which means “soft.” Interestingly, this word is sometimes omitted in English translations of the Bible, seemingly subsumed into the phrase “both participants in same-sex intercourse” (as in the otherwise excellent Common English Bible translation). 

Bishop Gene Robinson has argued that it refers to people being morally weak. The antonym of this word in Greek is karteria, which means “patient endurance.” So, rather than saying that someone who is “effeminate” will not enter into the Kingdom of God, it appears that Paul is referring to someone who is “soft-willed” rather than “enduring with patience.” To put this in concert with one of Jesus’ parables, this would be the seed that falls on rocky ground (see Matthew 13:20-21).

In regards to “homosexual,” many translations, use this word to translate the Greek word arsenokoites,which is the combination of “men” and “bed” (arsen referring to “male” or “man” and koites meaning “bed”—it’s where we get the word “coitus” used in English).

The first edition of the New International Version of the Bible (in 1973) was the first English translation to translate arsenokoites as “homosexual.” Prior translations, like the King James Bible, used phrases like “abusers of themselves with mankind” (in 1 Corinthians 6:9) and “them that defile themselves with mankind” (1 Timothy 1:10).

The problem with using the word “homosexual” to translate this term has to do with the fact that, like with what is read in Leviticus, arsenokoites, in its literal sense, refers specifically to males (whereas “homosexuality” is a gender-neutral term). Secondly, “homosexual” was a word that was invented (in German) in the late 1800s for use in a psychological dictionary when homosexuality was considered a mental disorder. So “homosexual” is already a loaded word referring to something that is likely quite different from what Saint Paul is talking about.

The other major problem with using “homosexual” here is that, from what we can gather, arsenokoites is a word Saint Paul invented. It shows up nowhere else other than the Greek New Testament (and, of course, ancient Greek Christian commentators quoting it). What, precisely, Paul was referring to here is lost to us. (It has since been pointed out to me that “arsenokoites” is a kind of combination word that uses the Greek terms from Leviticus 18 in the Greek translation of the Old Testament—the version of the Old Testament Saint Paul would have known and read. I’m adding this note here in order to be transparent. I’ve not done a lot of theological or scholarly reflection on this since learning about it, to be honest. —ed.)

One can easily make the case that it refers to male sex slavery/prostitution. Koites can also refer to a bed-chamber, suggesting perhaps one being a “kept man.” So the case could be made that Paul is condemning a practice of engaging in abusive and exploitative male same-sex relationships.

But we don’t actually know for sure.

***

Now that we’ve looked at all the Bible has to say on the matter, I want to reiterate a couple of key points:

—The Bible only ever explicitly condemns sexual acts between males (lesbian activity only really alluded to).

—What the Bible does condemn turns out to be somewhat vague, or at least not what we’ve popularly interpreted/translated it to mean.

—The term “homosexual” is a bad term to translate a vague Greek word.

—What the Bible condemns is something that does not look like mutually-shared, mutually offered same-sex relationships.

This last point is crucial. The Bible is clearly condemning something, and something wicked. What precisely that condemned thing is, is not completely clear.

Or is it?

How are we to know?

Jesus tells us that the Law is summed up in this statement: Love God with all your heart, mind, and soul and love your neighbor as yourself.

Elsewhere we are told that love is defined this way: Jesus gave Himself for us. (Romans 5:8; I John 4:10-16)

So this means that the Law, as Christians are to understand it, is to be read through a lens of love—a love defined by the actions of Jesus Christ.

This goes back to what we discussed in the beginning: Anglican Christians read the Bible primarily through Jesus, understanding scripture to be about our salvation more than anything else.

The former rector of The Chapel of Saint Andrew, The Rev. Steve Zimmerman, in his own essay on human sexuality in The Church (entitled Authority and Sex in the Church and written in 2000) writes of Anglican understandings of the Bible:

“[Martin Luther] expressed his view of scripture by saying, ‘The Bible is the manger, in which the Christ child is laid, in which there is also, much straw’ […] The Anglican view of the character of the Bible’s authority also comes closer to Luther’s, than to Calvin’s and the Reformed tradition [in that Anglicans] agreed with Luther that the Bible’s authority lies in its witness. Anglicans, however, emphasize scripture’s witness to Christ, not just to the gospel of justification by faith. Scripture bears witness therefore to a person, Jesus Christ, the living Lord, not a message.”

So what this means for us is that the conversation is primarily about this question: does the love of two men or two women look like the love Jesus Christ embodies?

In light of that, we can hold those kinds of same-sex relationships up to what is written in the Bible, in the passages above, and can clearly see that those relationships—rooted in Christ-like love—are not reflected there. Indeed, those kinds of same-sex relationships help further reveal the kinds of evil being condemned in scripture.

We’re not talking about relationships based on lust or exploitation or violence. We’re talking about relationships based on the mutual offering and receiving of love, in like manner to Jesus Christ. And now the question becomes: are those relationships compatible with Christian views on marriage?

AND IN THE END...

(NOTE: The third and fourth parts of the series looked at the history of marriage and then got into the weeds on the actual marriage canon itself. I’m not including that in this because it doesn’t seem as relevant to the current discussion. But if you disagree, let me know on Mastodon and I’ll happily post those! —ed.)

To conclude this series I felt it was helpful to offer my own personal thoughts on the matter (at least more so than I have throughout this series).

One of my friends, after the House of Deputies vote made the new resolution on marriage official, said “alright, now we need to teach this.” What he meant by that was that The Episcopal Church reaffirmed marriage (which itself is amazing and praiseworthy—we could have caved to the wider culture and made marriage completely arbitrary, but instead we reasserted it). Because we reaffirmed marriage, we need to start talking to people about why they get married.

This means saying that, as a Church, we believe that sexuality is reserved for the marriage relationship.

We can no longer just sort of turn a blind eye and act like anything goes. If we’re going to reaffirm and expand marriage, then that means we need to start having difficult conversations about the relationships among the people in our congregations.

Now, here’s the part where I’m going to come across as contradictory from what I just said above:

I think that we’ve largely gone about this the wrong way from the get-go. The same-sex marriage conversation, in The Church, has never been adequate. Indeed even the words of Immorten Joe (from Mad Max: Fury Road) come to mind: mediocre.

This is because we got caught up in sexuality.

In perhaps the most basic terms possible, the same-sex marriage discussion has really been about whether or not it’s okay that people act on the stirrings in their genitals.

Growing up in a fundamentalist Southern Baptist environment and then becoming an Anglican Christian in college (while attending an evangelical university), I’ve talked far too much about sex.

As a teenager the question was always some degree of “how far is too far?” Then it became “when is it really sex?” After which it was “is sex like being married to someone?” And finally “if I love them I can have sex with them, right? The intention was marriage so…”

Every person of my age and background has had these conversations. We went to youth camps where they were discussed. We were force-fed books that talked about this.

It was all, really, “I want to have sex, but I want to have sex correctly in the eyes of God.”

The way we’ve approached same-sexuality in the Church is no different from this. We’ve been asking, for thirty years or so—regardless of sexual orientation—“is the sex people want to have okay with God?”

And, so, for that entire time the Church has been obsessed with sex. Ironically we criticized TV shows for focusing too much on sex while never once acknowledging that we talked about it just as much and with as much focus.

Sexuality is a psychological term, the product of the 20th century. Perhaps the most famous writers on the subject are Freud, Kinsey, and Foucault. It is defined nowadays, more or less, as the brain-chemical process one experiences when they look at or interact with another person.

This notion of “sexuality” gave us the psychological concepts of “attraction” and “orientation.” Some people are attracted to members of a different sex (or, more archaically, “gender”), while others are attracted to members of the same sex. Still others found that they were attracted to both.

That attraction was defined under the umbrella term of “sexual orientation.” People attracted to members of the same sex or gender are homosexually oriented. The same logic follows for heterosexual orientation and bisexual orientation.

The problem with all of this is that human beings are in danger of being reduced to a process of brain chemistry. That the kind of person that I am is largely defined by what my brain does when I’m around a particular human being.

The result of all this talk of orientation and attraction is that it permitted a couple of key phenomena:

Firstly, one could distinguish between orientation and action. This is expressed in the Catholic Church’s teachings on same-sexuality, that acting upon one’s orientation is the sin but the orientation itself is not sinful.

Secondly, and following the above bifurcation, a focus on brain-chemistry-as-personhood-definer does not provide a satisfactory case for the acceptance of same-sex persons for the Church. Because one could easily argue (and have argued) that orientation might be the process of a chemical imbalance. Therefore, one’s sexual orientation might be akin to a handicap or a disease that needs to be cured or corrected. And from here we find ourselves in a circular argument destined to go no where.

Instead, how the Church ought to be talking about this is in terms of love. Case in point: David and Jonathan.

In the Bible is a story of same-sex love. Whether or not it was romantic or platonic is still a matter of (significant) debate. What is not up for grabs here is whether or not the story reflects two men sharing love for each other. This latter notion is made explicitly clear throughout the story, where we are told no less than four times over a number of chapters and in two books, that David and Jonathan share love for each other.

Many Christians get uncomfortable with this story because it’s been made a matter of sexual orientation. In short, we don’t know the sexual orientation of either David or Jonathan. All we know is what the story tells us. We can speculate, sure (which is what makes studying the Bible fun), but we can only walk away with what the story says.

And the story gives us love. And not only that, but the Bible endorses this story of love implicitly—by including it in the canon of scripture.

So the question for us Christians becomes: can we bless love between two men or two women?

And this is a much more honest field for discussion and thought and prayer. Because sex is a very small part of marriage. Sex and sexuality are only a small part of what makes us who we are, as people.

Are there Christian teachings and views on sex? Sure. But that’s not what is being asked when a couple comes to the Church seeking a blessing on their marriage. What IS being asked is a blessing on their love for each other and the life they want to share with each other.

If marriage was a matter of blessing sex, then every pre-marital counseling series needs to include an investigation into what kind of sex a couple is interested in and then it needs to be held up to what the Bible teaches. To be blunt, these conversations would need to address things like: Can BDSM be part of a Christian marriage? What about role-playing (is it effectively adultery since you’re pretending to be someone else)? Toys? Can one use toys? Any positions that might be problematic?

Is there a place for this? Yes. It’s for married couples to discern and pray and discuss. Because it is in marriage, for Christians, that sexuality finds its fullness. But Christian marriage is not simply a blessing of one’s sexuality. It is the blessing of a relationship. It is a celebration of love, putting that love in concert with the love expressed by Jesus toward the Church—incidentally, described as a wedding at the end of the book of Revelation, one that ostensibly involves multiple people of all genders marrying Jesus.

So, again, the question remains: can we, ought we, bless love between two men or two women?

Because we have canonized the story of David and Jonathan we’ve already given a resounding YES to this question.

Love utterly changes the conversation.

When we approach this topic through a lens of love, we begin to see a redefinition of our old interpretations of things. The old proof-texts get a new gloss. Leviticus 18, Romans 1, etc. maintain their traditional integrity because what they reflect is not love—and is, thus, truly sinful. Comparing their contents to the example of faithful same-sex love—David and Jonathan love—reveals their intent. The Bible will always condemn lust, abuse, perversion.

But Scripture always affirms love.

As one of the wedding readings for Episcopal Marriage liturgies says: “I am now taking this kinswoman of mine, not because of lust, but with sincerity” (Tobit 8:7).

We’ve always condemned blessing lust. We’ve never blessed lust. We recognize that lust has no part in Christian marriage or morals. Love reveals the evils of lust.

Leviticus 18, Romans 1, these are not speaking of David and Jonathan. They are speaking of lust. Of perversion.

No one is asking the Church to bless what’s discussed in Leviticus 18 or any of the other proof-texts. Instead, we are asked to bless love.

And so our task, as the Church, is to affirm what is already affirmed in Holy Scripture: love can be found between two people of the same sex. And that love is honorable and to be remembered and celebrated.

What’s cool, to me, in this, is that scripture is always true.

We aren’t required to do any crazy interpretive gymnastics with the Bible. What the Bible says remains true. What is condemned by Paul in Romans, I Corinthians, I Timothy remains condemned—we don’t say “well, Paul was wrong here and we now know better.” No, instead we get to better understand what it is that Paul is condemning.

When this is about love we can hold things up to the Bible and see what the Bible is saying. And we then get to affirm something new and profound while letting the Bible speak its truth evermore!

When two people come to the Church with their love, we bless it. We bless it and send them on their journey—supporting them with our prayers and the hope that God is working transformative things in their lives together.

It was never supposed to be about just sex.

It’s always been about love.

#Christianity #Jesus #Episcopal #Anglican #Marriage #LGBTQ #SSM #Bible #SameSexMarriage #Equality

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The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

When it comes to the parable known as “the Good Samaritan,” we tend to do some weird things. First, we call it “the Good Samaritan” oblivious to the implication that we’re basically calling this “the parable about ‘one of the good ones’” (change “Samaritan” to any other ethnic designation and you’ll see what I mean). Secondly, we conflate the care shown to the unnamed victim with the Samaritan as though Jesus is telling us to extend care even to people we find “unclean.”

The story begins with a lawyer doing a very lawyer-y thing: attempting to clarify terms. This lawyer (in this case, a person dedicated to the study and interpretation of Jewish religious law, perhaps with a focus on its social dimensions rather than its ritual/religious ones) is said to “tempt” or test Jesus by asking Him how he can attain eternal life. Jesus replies with the summary of the Torah that He elsewhere calls “the greatest commandment”: love God with everything and love your neighbor as much as you love yourself.

To which the lawyer asks: “who is my neighbor?”

Jesus then gives a parable about a guy traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho (there’s nothing in the gospel to tell us where Jesus is when He delivers this parable, so I’d like to believe He’s in Jericho and is making a sly reference to the likely-from-Jerusalem lawyer who traveled just to pester Jesus with these questions). The guy gets robbed, beat-up, left for dead. We’re told that a Jewish priest crosses to the other side of the road and ignores the guy. This is followed by a “Levite” (from the historical priestly caste themselves, given prominent roles in the temple) who does the same. Then comes a Samaritan.

Now, I’m not going to assume that you know what a Samaritan is (and I say “is” here because Samaritans are still around). It’s a bit complicated, but they trace their roots to pre-kingdom Israel. They rejected the establishment of worship outside of Mount Gerizim as illegitimate, following developments began by the high priest Eli (the one who adopted Samuel). As a result, they reject many religious and cultural developments during the Kingdom period—including any “scriptures” written beyond the Torah (the “legal” books, the first five books of the Old Testament). This fostered centuries of animosity, made all the more pronounced by the fact that Samaritans never faced the exiles that the two kingdoms of Jews experienced. This led to them being treated as akin to “Gentiles” in many cases. But the two groups share the Torah and many cultural traditions. They also have their own priesthood and interpreters of the Law. Which means that it’s possible Jesus’ fictional Samaritan is a member of the Samaritan clergy, being held alongside his “peers” in the Jewish religion.

What this means is that all three figures who encounter the victim are subscribers to the same legal injunctions. They all would agree that “love God; love neighbor” is the most important commandment. They would also all likely agree that caring for an injured person takes precedent over other ritual/legal issues.

See, the common interpretation of this story is that the priest and Levite are ignoring their obligations to help a person in need because it risks rendering them ritually impure by exposure to blood, etc. And I think that this is where we see the conflation with the victim and the Samaritan because we are conditioned to focus on the “uncleanness” aspects of the story. The Samaritan helps the “unclean” bloodied person because he is already “unclean” himself—he has nothing to lose! But the Samaritan holds to the exact same ritual purity codes as the other priest and Levite. Though those two see him as unclean, he does not. Rather, he’s the one who’s doing a better job of following the Torah’s teachings about mitzvot.

We can only speculate about the reasons for the other two guys’ refusal to help the victim. They could be concerned about ritual purity, but Jesus depicts them as leaving Jerusalem, implying that their ritual duties are over. Martin Luther King, Jr. notes in one of his speeches that this road was a dangerous road and it would not be out of the ordinary for robbers to leave a bloodied victim in order to lure more people into a trap to be robbed. If this is the case, then the priest and Levite are (perhaps justifiably?) concerned for their safety and following a sort of conventional wisdom. Regardless, both views underscore that the Samaritan assumes a degree of risk to help this guy—either ritual purity or personal safety.

He cleans and dresses the guy’s wounds, loads him on his own animal, and takes him to an inn (risking derision by entering a Jewish city to do so). He pays and then offers to pay more until the guy is completely well.

This is when Jesus puts a question back to the lawyer: which of the three was a neighbor?

Notice that Jesus isn’t asking “can you stomach caring for an unclean person?” He’s instead getting the guy to see an example of neighborliness that goes beyond the artificial categories of “priest” and “Levite” and “Samaritan.”

Notice also that Jesus never once uses the word “good.” This isn’t about how to be a good neighbor. This is a story about how to just be a neighbor. There are no degrees when it comes to neighborliness.

Jesus adds the layer of “Samaritan” to the story in order to challenge the guy who claims to know “the rules” but these “rules” have a tendency to bias him toward certain people. And this challenges us because we tend to slap descriptors and adjectives on people in some bullshit quest to define them as deserving of our love and care. Jesus exposes that labels are just labels; actions are what define a person.

The priest and the Levite are guys who are supposed to know the rules better than anyone else. The Samaritan? He plays fast and loose with the rules—to the mind of the priest and Levite and even the lawyer himself, if he took the rules seriously he’d not be a Samaritan. But the priest and Levite, using some unknown excuse, abdicate their responsibility to help a person in need whereas the Samaritan actually takes the rules seriously—he is the one who manages to see himself in the victim and thus fulfill the commandment to “love your neighbor as yourself.”

Who was a neighbor to the victim? “The one who demonstrated mercy toward him,” says the lawyer.

***

I’m writing about this parable because it’s been on my mind since reading about the number of supposedly “Christian” educational institutions expelling kids for various LGBTQ-related things. Either refusing them diplomas days before graduation because they came out or brought a trans-person with them to prom. So many “Christian” individuals and institutions fail to follow Jesus’ simple command about neighborliness. I mean, according to the linked story about the girl expelled for bringing a trans boy to prom, the Georgia Baptist school she attends “claims its core values are “love for God, neighbor, and self” and “respect for people, property, and ideas.” But these are presented as simply a pile of words. Like the lawyer, they seek to define “neighbor” in ways that fit their preconceived notions rather than hear Jesus’ challenge to our arbitrary definitions.

Seriously, swap “Trans-person” in for “Samaritan” and re-read the story. Hell, make it a story about a pastor and a Christian school principle as well. The meaning still stands: who is the neighbor?

The one who demonstrated mercy.

“Go and do likewise,” Jesus says.

#Christian #Theology #Bible #Episcopal #Church #trans #faithfulness #LGBTQ

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The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

I am deeply blessed to have had the Rev. Dr. Kate Sonderegger as a theology professor in seminary. A woman who is both rigorously academic and richly spiritual is less common than many might think. Her thinking and writing about God is rooted, more than anything else, in her voluminous love for God.

In her long-awaited series Systematic Theology, she articulates something that forever changed my relationship with God. She begins her work from a similar place as the Nicene Creed, though drawing from the supreme commandment of the Hebrew shema: the confession that God is One. But she notes that God’s “One-ness” isn’t simply referring to the number of “gods” in the heavens—it is referring to the fact that God is singularly unique and that this uniqueness indicates something radical. She writes:

Radical oneness, radical uniqueness, demands thought beyond any class, any universal, any likeness. This is an annihilating concreteness. (p. 25)

She goes on to say that God’s radical uniqueness means that He is radically free:

The Lord’s radical Uniqueness frees Him from all comparisons, all genus and likeness. The One God is free from His creatures; more, He in his Unicity is Himself freedom. (p. 27)

And

God is free not so much as being over against another, not so much as being hidden against all that is manifest, not so much as being undetermined by all creaturely rules; but rather God is free simply as being One, this very One. (p. 35)

She also notes the challenge that comes with this uniqueness by writing

This confession of the First Commandment annihilates our thought: we cannot think the absolutely Unique. God is Mystery, Holy Mystery. (p. 25)

So, to try and put this in more everyday terms: God is His own Be-ing. God is His own is-ness (Sonderegger uses the term “Aseity” to refer to this quality). This uniqueness makes God radically free, if for no other reason than God has no peer which means He is never at risk of being obligated to anything or anyone. As I often put it in sermons: God is free to do what God wants because God is God. If God had an equal, then God could have a rival—a second will that might inflict itself upon the will of God, thus rendering God not free. But this radical uniqueness and freedom means that we humans lack the capacity to fully comprehend God, because our minds are limited to think of things in terms of metaphor and comparison. Consider the Avatar films (which I deeply love): James Cameron has spent actual decades developing a uniquely evolved ecosystem, but the creatures and plants—as fanciful as they are—are still pastiches of things we see in our own world. Something truly alien would either be inconceivable (as Kevin Vandermeer suggests in his excellent Southern Reach books), or drive us insane (as H P Lovecraft would articulate).

Even the scriptures themselves acknowledge this reality at times. “No one can see me and live,” says the Lord God to Moses. Prophets are shown hands and feet and hems of robes—bits and pieces of God—because the human mind is not capable of grasping God in God’s Aseity (again, His is-ness).

At the same time, as our scriptures testify and the Christian faith confesses, God chooses to relate to us and His creation and wants for us to related to Him in return. So does this mean that God is setting us up for something futile? Something impossible?

No. It simply suggests that God, being singular and unique, relates to us and the creation in ways that are themselves singular and unique.

God is His own relation to the world, to us.

Think about it this way: we have relationships with all kinds of beings. We relate to our fellow humans in particular ways, ways unique to us as a species. We also relate to various plants and animals in particular ways. And they, in turn, relate to us in their own particular ways.

A sermon illustration that I tend to use too often comes from what Cesar Milan, of The Dog Whisperer fame, says about dog behavior. Cesar frequently notes on his shows that “bad” dog behavior often stems from dog owners treating dogs like people. Dogs don’t know how to be people. They know how to be dogs. Treating them like people fosters anxiety and other mental health issues. And so dog owners need to learn to think like a dog and try to relate to their dog(s) on dog terms—to the extent that they can.

I tend to use this illustration when speaking about sin because, as I see it, sin involves us thinking that we are God, not human, and so we find ourselves afflicted and anxious in a world impacted by us trying to be something that we are not. But this illustration also works to help us think about how God relates to us in that, just as any other being we know has its own means of relating to us, so does God. We just need to learn to see it.

Part of our problems when it comes to belief in God, or even our ideas about God, are rooted in thinking of God as being like us, just writ large. “We are in little what God is in big,” writes the mystic AW Tozer. But that is a one-way street. God is not an “in big” version of us. Perhaps a good way to think of this is in terms of a seed and its tree. A seed and a tree have different relations to the world, even though one grows into the other. A bird, for instance, views a seed and the tree it came from in quite unique terms (eating one and nesting in the other).

The unknown author of the medieval meditation manual known as The Cloud of Unknowing writes

He whom neither men nor angels can grasp by knowledge can be embraced by love.

In other words, God might not be knowable by our minds, but we can touch Him through love. As the ancients and the scriptures teach, God is love. I John 4:16 says “God is love, and those who remain in love remain in God and God remains in them.”

In Hawai’i we have a ubiquitous word: aloha. It often gets mis-understood as only a greeting or farewell. But the word itself means something akin to love and grace and mercy—sometimes all at the same time. Frequently, aloha is seen as equivalent to the concept of love. All things exist in a web of aloha, a relationship of reciprocal offerings. The ‘ō’ō bird’s aloha for the nectar of the ‘ōhia lēhua flower helps spread the seeds. Those seeds are small enough to fit into the tiny holes in freshly cooled lava, where they find protection and a space for capturing rainwater, allowing them to sprout, take root, and begin tilling the lava into dirt. Other birds nest in its branches, dropping guano and other seeds, helping to foster the formation of soil, enabling other plants to sprout and giving rise to the Hawaiian islands themselves. The energy (for lack of a better word) that draws all these things together is aloha, love. And we Christians hold the idea that God is that energy.

God is aloha.

This means that God is always and constantly relating to us, able to be experienced by us. It’s just on terms quite unique to God—but not terms entirely unknown or unknowable to us.

God is His own Being. God is always to be found. Let those who have eyes to see, see.

—

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed. He also “painted” the header image using ProCreate.

#Theology #Bible #film #Godzilla #Jesus #Episcopal #Church

Yesterday at the Hands Off demonstrations in downtown Honolulu, I had (at least) two encounters that felt like they might be blessings from God. One was when I was handed a trans pride flag (which I wrote about already). The other was when a guy wearing a Trump hat yelled at me (and my clergy colleagues) something about illegal immigrants and then told me to “go back to the mainland.” I know that last one probably doesn’t sound much like a blessing to you. So, let me try to explain.

I’m trying to shift my understanding of the concept of blessing. In the Matthew Beatitudes, Jesus notes that blessings do not always skew toward what we might consider “positive.” For instance, Jesus refers to mourning and persecution as blessings. He says things like:

Blessed are people who are hopeless…

Blessed are people who grieve…

Blessed are people whose lives are harassed because they are righteous…

Blessed are you when people insult you and harass you and speak all kinds of bad and false things about you, all because of me… (see Matthew 5:1-12*)

So having people wave and be welcoming to see a priest carrying a trans pride flag is a great thing and feels like a “typical” blessing (even though this is the sort of thing that Jesus cautions us about in Luke 6:26). But I have to consider the possibility that being yelled at is also a kind of blessing. I mean, consider the words of Job:

Shall we indeed accept good from God and not accept adversity? (Job 2:10, NASB)

In the Hawaiian Bible, this verse reads:

Eiʻa, e loaʻa anei iā kākou ka maikaʻi mai ke Akua mai, ʻaʻole anei e loaʻa iā kākou ka ʻino kekahi?

I put the two key words in bold. Maika‘i is a word that means “good, handsome, delightful.” It is the root for the Hawaiian term for “blessed,” pōmaikaʻi (the word pō is a word that refers to “thickness” and works here as an intensifier, indicating a “state of goodness,” thus “blessed”). The other word, ka ‘ino, (ka is the article, so “the”), is a word often used for “evil” and “wickedness,” also used for “spoiled” or “gone bad.” It is also a word used to refer to a storm. In this sense, we get an interesting read from Job: do we accept only the good, maika‘i weather as being from God? Do we not also have to accept that He sends ka ‘ino, stormy weather as well? Or as Jesus Himself puts it, right after He gives us the Beatitudes:

[God] makes the sun rise on both the evil and the good and sends rain on both the righteous and the unrighteous. (Matthew 5:45 CEB)

Both clear weather and stormy weather can be both “good” and “bad”—even at the same time. So it is my (and our) duty to accept both as blessings, to find the blessedness in even what we might call “bad.”

So what’s the blessing in having an angry Trump supporter yell at me to “go back to the mainland?” Well, before I get to that, allow me to unpack the baggage of that statement for haoles (a Hawaiian term for “foreigner” that has turned into a phrase and sometimes epithet for exclusively Caucasian people). Hawai‘i is one of the few places in the United States where Caucasians are not a majority and don’t hold outsized cultural power, and, thus, one of the few places where they can experience the sort of discrimination usually experienced by people of color in other parts of the country. So being haole is already a touchy thing. It carries with it an assumption that one does not belong here. Darker skinned Hawaiians will sometimes call light-skinned Hawaiians “haole” as an insult. As a Caucasian myself, there is the automatic assumption that I am on vacation, or am clearly from somewhere else—frequently expressed as being given a fork and spoon at a restaurant and not chopsticks**. One of my friends once referred to a guy as “he wasn’t a haole, he was a local-looking guy”—as though there aren’t “local” haoles. So, being told to “go back to the mainland” is about the closest I can get to the experience of being told something like “go back to Africa.” It’s telling me that I do not belong here. That I belong on the “mainland” of the United States (what we here prefer to call “the continent” since, from the Hawaiian perspective, the Hawaiian islands are the mainland).

This is something of which I’m very sensitive. While I am from the continental US, I’m here in Hawai‘i by invitation—I was invited by the Saint Mary’s to be their priest. I never held dreams of living in Hawai‘i, never once vacationed here. My first time ever on Hawaiian soil was for a job interview. Further, the Episcopal Church here in Hawai‘i has its roots in the Hawaiian Reformed Catholic Church, which resulted from King Kamehameha IV and Queen Emma inviting Church of England clergy to come and establish a church here in Hawai‘i because they felt that it offered a vision of Christianity better reflective of the Hawaiian people. So, I am not following a colonizing trajectory. But I also understand that I look an awful lot like the sort of people who have colonized this place. So, while it hurts to be lumped in with the people who continue to pillage this place for profit, I do understand the reasons why it happens. Doesn’t make it any easier, though.

Now, this guy said his piece after reading the sign I was holding. Which, I must confess, was not my choice. A friend asked me to hold his sign while he was taking care of something else. It said “Hands Off!” followed by a list of things that included public lands, Social Security, and immigrants. We were standing adjacent to a pedestrian crosswalk and the light was red. This guy was staring us down, and I saw the red Trump hat on his head. So I gave him a shaka. His eyes scanned my sign and that’s when he yelled something about illegal immigrants. I couldn’t really understand him, except when he yelled about “going back.” Which leads me, finally, to talk about how this is a blessing.

The guy saw on my sign and in my Caucasian appearance something that, to him, screamed “mainland” and not, to him, “Hawai‘i.” I am going to assume that this guy might have been “local.” One of the interesting quirks about Hawaiian politics is that, one, we are a very “blue” state, but tend to skew “conservative” on some issues. And, second, the Native Hawaiian (Kanaka Maoli) population leaned heavily toward Trump in the last two elections. Why? Because the Democrats in Hawai‘i have had political dominance since the end of World War II, but Native Hawaiians have continually been marginalized in their own homeland. Their sacred lands are being used for various military, scientific, and recreational purposes. They continue to be priced out of the housing market (to the point where Las Vegas has become a sort of second home for Hawaiians). And their cultural concerns are treated as obstacles to be overcome rather than legitimate issues to be listened to and honored. Further, there are ten times more tourists on the islands per year than residents, but residents are taxed in order to support the tourist industry and not the other way around—on top of the plague of “income properties” that are built here for tourism purposes while beach parks are rife with Native Hawaiians living in tents and barely making ends meet. Because of this, the logic among many is to either “give the other guys a try” or to vote for someone that they think will break the system so that something better might be built from its ruins. As a Kanaka Maoli friend of mine put it at the protest: “That’s the logic. It’s not great logic, but that’s what they’re thinking in supporting Trump.”

So I have to wonder: did this guy see the sign I was holding and see it as reflective of trying to maintain a status quo that has continued to marginalize local people? Are these positions signaling to him a desire to further a kind of political system that will continue to offer soaring rhetoric about being on the “right side of history” while quietly lining the pockets of (different) billionaires who see Hawai‘i as a golden goose to squeeze of all it can offer to people who only want to take take take?

That is the question we all have to ask. And this is why his anger was a blessing to me: it’s causing me to ask what I’m aiming to do as part of such demonstrations. We’re all mad right now. What we’re doing at the moment is collectively yelling A‘ole!, no!

A‘ole to gutting the government programs that the poor rely on.

A‘ole to ignoring our environment and the unabashed pillaging of Earth’s resources.

A‘ole to sending human beings to what are effectively gulags and concentration camps.

A‘ole to disappearing students for no reason other than their political views regarding the genocide happening to the Palestinian people does not line up with the preferred narrative.

A‘ole to the path toward fascism this administration is on.

But that a‘ole cannot simply be about putting things back the way they were. We must demand something more. As a Christian, I want to see something that more closely resembles the Kingdom of God—where no one is lost, all have enough, and we reject the mechanism of death—used to provide a sense of “peace” to our people at the expense of others. To do that, we have to put a stop to what we see happening now—while also advocating for something better to be built in its place.

Hands off, yes. But also, hands on to the tools and materials for making a better world to come.

Blessed are people when they are handed pride flags, they are giving hope to often hopeless people.

Blessed are people when Trump-supporters yell at them to go back to the mainland, it gives them pause to consider how a better future is possible through Christ Jesus.

—

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

_*Note: This is from the Common English Bible translation, which follows an odd modern English translation custom to change “blessed” into something like “happy.” It reads weird and doesn’t exactly correlate with what Jesus is recorded as saying, so I correct the translation to “blessed” for that reason._

**Note 2: My wife and I refer to this as “getting haole-d.” I can’t express to you, reader, how awesome it feels to have someone just give us chopsticks without asking first.

#Theology #Bible #Jesus #Episcopal #Church #Politics #HandsOff #Hawaii

I just sat at my desk after an eventful day. In the Episcopal Church in Hawai'i, our custom is to observe the annual Chrism Mass and Renewal of Ordination Vows on a Saturday about two weeks prior to the start of Holy Week (this is typically a Holy Tuesday observance throughout much of the Church, but given that we are spread among an island archipelago, moving to the aforementioned Saturday works to better accommodate “neighbor island” clergy). This also just happened to coincide with the April 5 “Hands Off” protests/demonstrations. The service is held at the Cathedral of Saint Andrew, which is practically across the street from the state capitol building—where the demonstrations were taking place.

A number of us clergy (and laity) decided that being present at the demonstrations only made sense, given the spirit of renewing our commitment to minister to God’s people and to participate in the proclamation of the good news of liberation, especially among people feeling the squeeze from those who claim the name of Christian as they support genocide, cuts to aid starving children both home and abroad, etc. etc. And so we walked over to the capitol building to “come and see” what was going on.

A view from the event

Now, I’m a rare (read: weird) Episcopal priest in that I pretty much always wear a black cassock (the fancy name for long black dress that you sometimes see priests wearing: I look like Neo or Snape or Kylo Ren, depending on your generation). So I stood out. People wanted a few selfies. Some thought it was a costume and were genuinely surprised that an honest-to-God priest was out there among them. I gave people blessings (including the Trump hat wearing dude in a car that tried to cuss me out and told me to “go back to the mainland”). Mostly I was there to be a presence, to minister and pray. I learned from my participation in the George Floyd demonstrations back in 2020 that folks are warmed to seeing representation from the Church—which speaks to the idea that (some) folks want the Church, but often feel like it is concerned with things quite disconnected from their lives.

We call this the ministry of presence, and is something we clergy also offer in times of hurt and anguish (like an illness or loss of a loved one). This refers to those times where we’re not going to offer answers, just responses, and trust that the Lord God is working through us simply being there.

While walking among the crowd, a little subset of three people saw me and said “here, now you have a sign” and handed me the trans pride flag that appears at the head of this post. I said “mahalo” and carried it with me as I walked. Something about a cassock-clad priest holding a trans pride flag garnered a few responses and I caught a number of people taking sneaky pictures of me.

Here’s the thing: that flag ministered to me.

I grew up deeply Southern Baptist, leaning toward Independent Baptist (these are the fundamentalists who think that Southern Baptists aren’t “conservative” enough). I was incubated in a very Queer-phobic environment. Our attention was mostly on gay men, but all the other letters of the alphabet were just there, slightly off camera. My views on same-sex attraction and Queer love changed while in my twenties. I was attending an Evangelical university in West Palm Beach at the time, while also working retail to help pay my bills. I had gay co-workers and I came to realize that homophobia is an exercise in abstraction. Once I met actual, open, flesh-and-blood gay people it caused me to reconsider many things. And I was doing this while part of a Biblical Studies program at my university. I began the process of trying to reconcile my religious convictions with what I was seeing “on the ground” as it were. And this all was happening alongside my conversion to the Episcopal Church.

But that’s probably a story for another time.

Suffice it to say, my journey from hating Queer people to seeing compatibility between traditional Christianity and Queer “identities” was a hard-fought battle. But along the way I continued to wrestle with reconciling Trans identities and some aspects of Christian belief, as I understand them. And, to be completely honest, I’m still doing this work (but given the current state of things, I won’t be sharing this at this point—I worry that my thinking will be misconstrued and potentially used for hateful purposes by those with ill-intent; there’s nuance there that I don’t think we’re in a place to appreciate at the moment). But one thing is absolutely certain: Trans people are human beings, created in the image of God. They are gifts, blessings to the world, and to deny them this is to deny a work of God.

I needed this reminder. It is easy to get caught up in the abstractness of ideas and beliefs, and removing them from the flesh-and-blood people that are affected or reflected by these ideas and beliefs. But people aren’t just ideas and beliefs. People live. People sweat in the heat and come home tired from work. People go to protests, or roll their eyes at protests as they drive by. People fall in love and break-up. People want to be free to pursue happiness.

When I was in seminary, a little axiom came to me one Sunday: the minister is always on the other side of the altar rail. From the perspective of the laity, the minister is the one at the altar, or giving communion. But from the perspective of the clergy, the ministers are those who sit in the pews and who come up to receive communion. This is the balance of the ministerial life. God speaks to me through the wider community as I am ordained to try and allow God to speak to you all through me.

In the midst of ministering, I was ministered to. It came in the form of a small polyester flag with marker writing on it. And so now, through these words, I hope to minister to you all in return. Trans lives are human lives. Trans people aren’t just an abstraction, aren’t just an idea. Whatever we might think about them, they are flesh-and-blood people wanting what everyone wants: a life where they are free to pursue happiness and discover who they are in the grand web of the earth and universe, who they are in light of the God who lovingly made them.

—

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

#Theology #Bible #Jesus #Episcopal #Church #TransRights #Politics #HandsOff

I am a Godzilla fan and have been since childhood. Godzilla is for me what Star Wars and Star Trek are to others (though I am a fan of both of those franchises as well). My office is replete with Godzilla toys...

Proof!

… and I used to be a subscriber to a variety of Godzilla-related fanzines, the most famous of which (in North America, at least) is G-Fan. Older Godzilla fans like myself may recall a years-long debate that took place in the Letters section (which I believe was called “G-Mail” now that I think about it) regarding the mechanics of time travel in the 1990 film Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah.

This movie is preposterous and amazing at the same time

The film’s plot involves a convoluted plan concocted by people from the future to travel back in time in order to ruin Japan’s economy, because Japan has become too rich in the future and other, notably Western, countries want to put a stop to this. As you can imagine, this film was a bit controversial in its day.

This plan involves the “Futurians” traveling first to 1990 to let Japan know that there are time-travelers and that they want to help Japan solve its Godzilla problem. Which then involves the Futurians taking a handful of 1990 Japanese with them to the Bikini Atoll in the late 1940s, where they encounter a “Godzillasaurus” (Godzilla before he is mutated by atomic bomb tests—and who helps entrenched Japanese kill a bunch of American soldiers), and teleport the Godzillasaurus to a different location so that the dinosaur will never turn into Godzilla. The Futurians then secretly leave behind three critters called “Drats.”

These things

Which are then exposed to the nuclear radiation and become the fearsome, three-headed golden dragon known as King Ghidorah. Thus granting the Futurians their own city-destroying monster that they can control.

The implications of this is that the original 1954 Godzilla film never happens, and thus none of the previous films in the so-called “Heisei Era” happened either.

not even the one where Godzilla fights a Monsanto creation

Given that later films in the series will refer back to Godzilla having been around since 1954, Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah is notorious for being a lore-breaking film. Which inspired one of those great nerd pastimes: writing letters to fan publications attempting to patch plot holes and make sense of the lore.

Basically, the debate surrounded the “rules” of time travel. Much like the discussion in the film Avengers: Endgame, different movies and stories were cited as the basis for the “rules” of traveling through time, Back to the Future being the most common one. The debate went on for a few months and then vanished for a couple of years, until one letter-writer chimed in and made a claim that has affected my thinking on a lot of things over the years:

Given that we have never seen a real-world example of time travel, we have to assume that time travel “behaves” as depicted in the film as presented.

In other words, claiming that Back to the Future or The Terminator or The Time Machine serve as “the rules” for time travel is to import a narrative framework onto a film like Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah, as silly as it is, thus refusing to accept the story on its own terms. It is to insert an outside set of rules into a story, thus affecting the understanding of the story and attempting to view it according to a different standard.

It’s a refusal to let the story be. It’s an attempt to view one story through the lens of another, thus rendering it as a different story altogether.

Two other examples come to mind: the first is James Cameron’s reaction to the infamous discussion about whether Jack could fit on that floating door with Rose at the end of Titanic. In an interview, Cameron once said that the reason Jack couldn’t fit on the door with Rose is that “on page 147 that Jack dies. Very simple.” In other words, this is the story that Cameron wanted to tell: the grand ship as a symbol of class-divide and hubris is reduced down to a single piece of wood which becomes the catalyst for an act of self-sacrificial love.

I think I just wrote my Good Friday sermon.

The other example comes from the theologian Gerard Loughlin. In his excellent book about reading the Bible, entitled Telling God’s story, he challenges the “liberal” reading of figures like John Shelby Spong who deny the virgin birth of Jesus on the grounds that it doesn’t make rational sense, who argue that we are left with a choice between a Mary who was raped or who conceived by way of “parthenogenesis”. To this, Loughlin writes:

Of course the choice is not between parthenogenesis or rape; it is between the story we have, which mentions neither, or some other story. (see footnote 48 on page 121, emphasis mine)

Loughlin, like Cameron, invites us to consider stories on their own terms and merits. This includes the Bible. For Christians, traditionally, the scriptures present the story of the world. In those writings were/are the connective narrative tissues that reveal the meaning and purpose to what we see happening in the cosmos around us. But even in the Church, Christians have seemed to forget this relationship and now see the story of the Bible and the story of the cosmos as two separate stories, often inverting the relationship. As Loughlin later writes

The biblical story is to be fitted into the story of the world, rather than the world into the story of the Bible.

When we consider the long arc of the Bible, we see that the Bible tells us that God called forth a creation out of chaos, thus establishing a trajectory, a narrative. In the course of that creative work, something gave shape to nothing (as in, nothing being the place beyond the boundaries of something), and thus the possibility of us humans opting for an alternative trajectory—moving toward the nothing.

The Chinese theologian and spiritual writer Watchman Nee speaks of this, in his tiny but rich book Sit, Walk, Stand:

Since the day that Adam took the fruit of the tree of knowledge, man (sic) has been engaged in deciding what is good and what is evil. The natural man has worked out his own standards of right and wrong, justice and injustice, and striven to live by them.

What Nee is getting at is that, as a result of humanity’s giving into temptation in the garden, we fostered a trajectory that moves apart from God’s trajectory, thus giving space to impose a different narrative onto the world. The reason why the world feels so given to “wrong” and injustice is because we are experiencing the long-gestating outworking of a sense of rightness and justice that comes from an ultimately empty narrative—“some other story.”

Nee goes on

Christ is for us the Tree of Life. We do not begin from the matter of ethical right and wrong. We do not start from that other tree. We begin from him; and the whole question for us is one of Life.

Nee builds on this to say that we have a tendency to seek out even good things like love, but defined apart from Christ Jesus, thus rendering them lifeless and void. “If we only try to do the right thing,” he writes, “surely we are very poor Christians. We have to do something more than what is right.” Elsewhere he puts it “With [Christ] it is a question of his grace and not of right and wrong.”

This notion of grace is crucial because grace, by its God-defined nature, is effortless. Grace is the fabric of creation, the force that guides the trajectory of the cosmos. When we attempt to impose our own narrative, we deny grace and wind up doing violence to the story of the universe.

This explains, I believe, how we got ourselves into the mess we see today. People professing the name Christian are embracing fascist ideas because they’ve allowed another story to be the definitive story, a story rooted in the void of chaos, the nothingness that exists beyond the bounds of the something that God called into being. And it is this story—not the story rightly told in the scriptures—that has stirred the ire and rage of people who now hate Christianity. Because it is some other story, told under the banner of Christ.

Nee writes

Nothing has done greater damage to our Christian testimony than our trying to be right and demanding right of others. We become preoccupied with what is what is not right[…] But that is not our standard. The whole question for us is one of cross-bearing.

Those in the MAGA movement who use the title Christian got that way because they came to believe that theirs was a story of being right. Being right involves drawing lines in the sand and building walls and closing borders. Being right involves deporting those who don’t look or act the way one has determined is “right.” But the actual, biblical story is one of grace. A story of love.

A graceful story is a story that is open to emergence, of allowing things to unfold and being open to the discovery what comes next.

Once, about twenty years ago, I had gone snorkeling with friends in Fort Pierce, Florida. It was early in the morning and we were riding the outgoing tide alongside the jetty at the state park there. I was taking lead. The water was fairly clear, but there was still a limit to our visibility—which was maybe fifteen feet or more. As the current pulled me along I saw a large, dark shadow immediately in front of me. It was oblong and gray, at least seven feet in length. My mind went to exactly one place:

Shark.

I tried to slow my movement, but the current was strong. I was moving inexorably toward a tooth-filled death, helpless.

As I got closer, things began to come into focus. The gray creature was awfully still, and definitely more rotund than any shark I’d ever seen. Plus I couldn’t make out a dorsal fin. Then suddenly, everything became clear and I realized:

Manatee.

*Sup?*

In front of me was not God’s perfect seafaring killing machine. It was instead maybe the most gentle creature on earth. We all watched in awe as it rolled over on its back and swam alongside us before departing into the murk.

Was I “right” in thinking this was a shark? When I only had limited knowledge, sure. My fear and rising panic were entirely justified because I was working off of both limited data—which in turn caused me to impart a different story onto what I was seeing. But grace allowed the story to unfold, to emerge, and I received new data and the realization that I didn’t need to panic. If I had stopped moving and jumped out of the water, claiming that this was a shark, I would have been “right” so far as anyone knew. But my “rightness” was exposed as “wrong” as more things unfolded in the story.

What has happened for a lot of us in the world is that we’ve determined was is “right” or “wrong” based off the experience of the world as we see it. We foster a note of willful ignorance because our being right has maybe served us.

But grace moves us past arbitrary lines of “right” and “wrong,” and allows us to accept the story as it unfolds. It lets the story be. Having to be “right” risks us telling some other story, of foisting the rules of a different story onto the story as it is.

The world is God’s story. Let the story speak.

—

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

#Theology #Bible #film #Godzilla #Jesus #Episcopal #Church

People sometimes call me a techie. There was a time where this was true, and is something that I’m getting back into.

See, what I’ve come to realize about the phrase “techie” is that it often means “uses gadgets.” Using an iPad for preaching, or wearing an Apple Watch, knowing my way around social media or the features of my phone, these have garnered the techie designation, but, really, this is just me being a consumer who uses purchased products. Yes, they are “tech,” but my utilization of them was pretty much in accord with standard use. To use a microwave is a “techie” as using a tablet or phone in this case.

But being a proper “techie” is, to me, someone who navigates the concepts around their devices, who seeks to grasp an understanding of their innermost parts, to turn a biblical phrase. In that sense, I was a proper techie in my younger years, when I was learning computing from Mrs. Vincent, my math teacher. This extended into my late teens when I discovered 2600 magazine (which turned me on to the political dimensions of technology) and began to understand hardware integration and decided that I wanted to develop video games. So I convinced my mom that we needed a new PC and that me building one was an important educational opportunity. I acquired the parts (including an ASUS motherboard that I thought was legit but I’m pretty sure turned out to be stolen—I discovered this when I went to boot my machine for the first time and was greeted with an HP logo where there shouldn’t have been one; if not for Mrs. Vincent teaching me about BIOS and DOS, I would have been completely lost) and assembled my machine while watching Hackers, a machine that I would later try to learn C programming on (I wrote a calculator!), even if my ulterior motive was to have a gaming rig that could support the brand new VooDoo 2 graphics card so that EverQuest would play better. I even attempted to use chat rooms as a means to evangelize (which one pastor at the time said was not legit) and I even talked about the possibility of sticking a webcam in the church and streaming the sermon with a chat box underneath the stream (which people didn’t seem to understand then—now every church is doing this!) But my time as a techie began to fizzle out shortly after, the moment my grasp of BASIC vanished during a class at the local community college. After that, I just became a gadget-consumer.

I’ve since gotten back into my techie interests thanks in part to my dropping big-corporate social media in favor of the Fediverse, followed by the installation of Ubuntu Linux on an old mid-2011 Mac that has breathed considerable new life into that machine (as well as me). I’ve since started this blog, where I’ve actually learned a degree of coding through the use of MarkDown and CSS, and I’m now very much into the Free Open Source Software movement that is absolutely suppressed by the big corporations.

All of this is simply a prelude to say that, as a priest, I’ve begun reflecting theologically on technology and our (Christian) relationship to it. If being a proper techie is to seek to understand the conceptual and philosophical underpinnings of technology, then it is inevitable that one will bump up against the theological aspects of technology as well.

God And The Machines

Popularly, the term technology is often applied to gizmos. Things with integrated circuits that utilize electricity. We often fail to remember that things like bread and windows and legal pads and gel pens and roads and chairs and cast iron skillets are all forms of technology. According to Wikipedia technology is “the application of conceptual knowledge to achieve practical goals, especially in a reproducible way.” Technology is, more simply, the practical application of ideas (in addition to also being a term applying to the tools or results of that application). This definition is, to me, an interesting thing to consider in regards to humanity’s relationship with technology in the Bible.

The first piece of technology that humans make, according to the mythological account found in Genesis, is a form of rudimentary clothing. The story goes that Eve and Adam, the first people, were naked and unashamed. But the moment they decided to listen to a talking snake and his advice about whether or not to eat a piece of forbidden fruit, the couple become aware of their nakedness and get to work using fig leaves as means to cover up (there’s a very funny old English translation of the Bible called the “Breeches Bible” because it says that Eve and Adam used the fig leaves to make “breeches” for themselves—leafy britches!). This is technology. Eve and Adam had the conceptual knowledge—the idea—that they were naked and so went about making use of resources to apply that knowledge in a practical way. Then God, once He confronts them over their disobedience (which He figures out because they’re wearing the aforementioned britches), He introduces the technology of hide-based clothing, by killing two lambs and using their skins to cover Eve and Adam.

This story sets up the complicated relationship we have with technology. It is both borne out of our foibles and limitations, as well as being evidence perhaps of divine mercy. Both death and life are intertwined in the advent of human ingenuity.

At the same time, technology becomes a means of mediating God’s own self-revelation to humanity. God gives a law to His people through the use of the technology of writing, in which He also instructs them to build a box that symbolizes His presence among them, to be kept housed in a tent that is designed for portability. Later, that tent is upgraded to a building called a temple, itself situated amidst the technology known as a city, the language of which God also uses to refer to His own home/realm. Once we get to the beginning of the Common Era, we have Jesus (God incarnate) utilizing a whole range of technologies as a means to both communicate things about God, but also to serve as mediators of His presence and grace. The manger, the fishnet, bread, wine, a cross and a tomb are but a few of the technological examples put to use by God Incarnate to reveal His full plan to the world. And in the case of the bread and wine, these are said to become the body and blood of Jesus—and not in some notion of symbol or metaphor, no these are God-ordained technologies of grace, what we today call “sacraments.”

In a sense, these sacramental signs are a kind of machine, things that use power to perform a specific action. In this case, it is both the power of God and the power of the entire creation that is behind these technologies, mediating God’s grace and moving us toward the restoration of the world. As the Orthodox theologian Michael J. Oleska writes:

Eastern Christians believe in sacred materialism. God uses physical objects and visible elements to communicate with His People. The created universe is the means by which we enter into communion with Him. He chose food as the most perfect way to enter our lives. And what is the bread? Flour, yeast and water, baked to a certain temperature? No, it is much more, for to create bread, one needs the whole world. The earth must turn, the rain must fall, the soil must be fertile, the sun must shine, night must come, the wind blow. If all this is in harmony, and humans interact with it appropriately, tending the garden as God originally planned, bread can be baked, communion with God restored [...]

It is all Christ. He chose to make water into wine as his first miracle, but He is always doing that, every vineyard since time began [...] The Word made Flesh only does in His Incarnate Form what the Word, embodied in the whole creation, has always done. (from “The Alaskan Orthodox Mission and Cosmic Christianity,” The Chant of Life: Inculturation and the People of the Land p. 188)

We Are God’s Technology

I have to admit, the idea that technology is “applied conceptual knowledge” sounds a bit like what Saint John the Evangelist writes in his gospel:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God [...] The Word became flesh and made his home among us.

The “Word” there is the English rendering of a Greek concept known as “Logos.” It’s a fairly difficult concept to translate directly into English, to be honest. The best I’ve come up with is that the “Logos” is akin to the “kernel” in a program like Linux, the core element around which everything else is built/based.

Honestly, this image is probably the actual best representation of what “the Logos made his home among us” means. (from the Perry Bible Fellowship)

Basically, the idea is that God looked out at timeless time and decided that He wanted to create a universe where He would come to live, and so He built a universe around the “kernel” of Himself as human. So when Genesis says that humanity is made “in God’s image,” we Christians are saying that we are built to look like what Jesus (that is, God-in-flesh) is. Yes, I understand that this does not make sense when we think of time linearly—but there’s really nothing that says time is linear; plus we Christians affirm that God does not exist within time as we comprehend it.

Anyway, Saint John speaks of this notion as “Everything came into being through the Word, and without the Word nothing came into being.” The “Word” (Logos) is the anchor around which everything exists. One of the Episcopal Church’s Eucharistic prayers puts it as “In your infinite love you made us for yourself.” In other words, we are made by God to do what God intends us to do.

Which means we are God’s technology.

This might sound weird at first. Especially if we still associate technology with machines or gadgets. But when we recall that we are “fearfully and wonderfully made” (as the Psalmist declares) we realize that our “being made” is a confession that to be created means that we fall into the realm of technology. Saint Paul articulates this when he writes that we are “God’s building.” This is overt technological language, applied to us as created beings. We, and the whole universe, are an application of God’s conceptual knowledge—indeed THE conceptual knowledge—reproducible and with particular intention.

And what is that intention? To love God.

I know that sounds selfish on God’s part. Is God so insecure that He felt the need to create an entire universe so that it could foster sapient life on (perhaps) a single planet with the express purpose of giving Him worship and adoration? When we think of God as lacking in love, then yes it does sound like He’s insecure. But when we consider that God is a complete and perfect Being lacking in nothing, then it changes the idea of why God created.

God did not need to create, not in the sense of an obligation (as in filling a lack). Instead God chose to create as an outgrowth of His ever-flowing love. Love demands an object. And if, as Jesus tells us, God is Love, then the only logical conclusion we can reach is that the universe was created to be an object of that Love, borne as a consequence of an eternally radiating love emanating from a complete Being who has love to spare. And if that Being is the originator of all that is, then the love poured into us finds its most worthwhile expression when directed back at the One who graced us with everything that is—out of His love.

But notice what Jesus says about how we apply that love ourselves. He doesn’t tell us to do what all of the other religious practices of His time were doing, which was to direct love at God/the gods in order to win their favor, as though God needed this love. No, Jesus tells us that our love of God is demonstrated best when we love our neighbor—which Jesus defines as everyone and anyone. We are to mediate God’s love among ourselves and in so doing it is directed toward God, who is the One most worthy of receiving love. This is what He designed us to do.

This post is long enough without getting into the programming bug we know as sin (I’ll take that up in a later post). Instead I’ll leave us here to ponder what it all means that we are God’s technology of love, given the gift of technology ourselves that can serve as a mediating factor for receiving God’s love in order to spread it around—by which we show God how much we love Him in return.

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The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

#Theology #Technology #Linux #Computers #Philosophy #Christianity #Bible #Church #Jesus

What is a Christian?

This seems like it should be a simple question. “Christian” means “little Christ” or even “like-Christ.” So, anyone who attempts to be like Christ is a Christian, yeah? I mean, I’ve had this stated to me outright more than a few times over the years whenever I try to challenge one’s definition of Christianity.

But this is incorrect, even from a biblical standpoint. Because while, yes, the Bible does note that there’s a moment where these followers of Jesus’ disciples are called “Christian,” there is a broader bit of context to consider.

The people who would one day become known as “Christians” were originally called people of “the Way.” “Christian” was a later term applied to them, by the people of Antioch (with plenty of folks out there postulating that this might have been intended as an insult). So they were branded with this name, which they later embraced. But it was not the term that they first applied to themselves—nor was it a term Jesus gave them, at least not in a direct sort of way.

This is all to say that, in order to understand what it means to be “Christian,” we first have to consider what it meant to be people of “the Way.”

For starters, what was “the Way?” Perhaps the most concise answer to this question is provided by Jesus Himself: “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one gets to the Father, except through me.” Now, the term “way” was already a loaded term for Jesus. As a Jew, He would’ve been taught that the Torah was “the way” to God. Following the commandments given by Moses and expanded by scribes and religious teachers continues to be the means by which Jews understand their life and relationship to God. Keeping these things puts them on the path (or, “way”) to God.

Regardless of what one might think about the theological claims about Jesus, He was very clearly a religious reformer/revolutionary. In the gospels, we see Him taking umbrage with the labyrinthine interpretations of the Law that were foisted upon every day people; we see Him opposed to a predatory financial system rooted in the Temple’s religious customs; we even see Him willing to buck deeply held notions around women and non-Jews. Jesus is very interested in expressing a different way of not only being Jewish, but also a different way for non-Jews to have a relationship with the God of Judaism (who was believed and proclaimed as THE God). Jesus lays out—in two sermons, acts of healing, and various parables—an alternative way of living, an actual practice, which He Himself embodies. And so when we get to that famous line in John’s gospel about Him being “the way” what He’s effectively saying is: “go where I go, live a life like mine, and you will see God, you will achieve what the Torah is all about.”

But Jesus’ followers came to see Him as more than an ethicist or reformer. Beyond those dimensions, indeed the soil from which those dimensions sprout, His followers see Him as God, living in human flesh. Which means there emerges a theological dimension to both understanding and following Jesus. And this is the thing that Christians spend their first 300 years or so hammering out, resulting in the Apostles’ and Nicene-Constantinoplian Creeds.

Today, it’s easy for us to look at those theological arguments and wonder what the big deal was all about. But try and consider things from the perspective of the ancients. They were trying to understand precisely who it was they were following and why they should follow Him at all. Because if He’s fully God as well as man, or a simply a human endowed with spiritual power, or even a sort of demigod, there are ramifications to what it means to follow Him.

The kernel of these ideas were held by those first people, articulated as “the Way.” So, this movement later rebranded as Christian carries with it pre-existing theological baggage that continues once the new name for the movement takes hold. It’s not simply a movement of people trying to live an ethical life akin to the one Jesus did. It’s a group of people who do this while also worshipping Jesus as God. Which means that “Christian” is a term that carries particular meanings rooted in both a way of life and a way of worship.

Theology requires a grammar. The conventional term for this grammar is “doctrine.” Misused, “doctrine” is about lines in the sand that separate degrees of faithfulness and rightness before God. But the correct view of doctrine is that it provides the boundaries for what makes a particular theology or religion definably itself. Further, those doctrines inform practices meant to embody what that theology or religion has to say or mean for its adherents.

Dance is a helpful example. There is a clear grammar to dance—whether hula, or ballet, or modern, etc. But once that grammar begins to be stripped away we begin to see something other than dance: perhaps floor gymnastics, or a form of martial arts. This is not to say that dance cannot innovate. It simply means that we have to either review the grammar of dance, or delineate when something ceases to be dance because it has strayed into a space where it uses a different grammar.

Consider the phenomenon of the modern smartphone. Many of us continue to refer to the device as a “phone” but it is completely unrecognizable from the device that Alexander Graham Bell first invented. Now, the “phone” portion of the device is a piece of software and part of what is actually a small personal computer. There is a clear line of recognizability from the wall-mounted telephone of yesteryear and the cellular telephone (today referred to as a feature phone). But the modern smartphone is built more from the design language (that is, “grammar”) of the personal MP3 player than it is the telephone.

Christianity is like this. The doctrines of the faith are what make it definable, following a trajectory of development where we can see certain commonalities in both belief and practice. At the same time, we have also seen a certain degree of disruption (to use the term in its tech-industry, startup sense), largely in the form of the Protestant Reformation, that has affected this notion and has lead us to a place where we have multiple things calling themselves “Christian” while only a few can be accurately identified by that term.

Which leads me, finally, to answer my initial question: what is a Christian?

A Christian is a person who follows Jesus as He has been understood by the Church. By this I mean that Christians believe in Jesus as He is articulated in the Creeds (particularly the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds), and both worship and follow Him in the particular ways defined by the heritage of the Church. Christianity is practiced, not simply “believed.” It is the result of the out-working of what it means to follow Jesus and who Jesus is, placed amidst a trajectory (tradition) of continual out-working. Christianity carries continuity—of both practice and belief.

This is not to say that Christianity is something frozen in time. Rather, it is to suggest that innovations within Christianity (say, the ordaining of women to the priesthood, or same-sex marriage) have to carry continuity with what came before, either through a form of historic recovery (in the case of women’s ordination) or integration into that continuous stream (in the case of same-sex marriage).

The Creeds, as a source of Christian grammar, offer flexibility. They are “what” statements, not “how” statements. This means that there is wiggle-room in how these things are understood. However, there is not wiggle room in regards to the “What” being stated about Christian belief. For instance, we can differ on what it means when we say that we “believe in the resurrection of the dead and the life everlasting” (Saint Augustine of Hippo to Pierre Tielhard de Chardin offers a pretty solid range), but if we say that there is no resurrection of the dead and/or life everlasting then we have broken the boundaries of Christian grammar and are now speaking a different theological language. Similarly, the moment we elevate the Bible to a place traditionally occupied by Jesus, seeing it (and not Him) as the “authoritative Word of God,” we’ve also crossed a key boundary of Christian grammar and are now speaking a different religious language (the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy is probably the most notable instance of this, and held as the standard statement on “Biblical inerrancy” throughout much of Evangelicalism—interestingly, the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 seems to have amended its wording to better reflect that Jesus is the main revelation and the Bible is merely a testament to that fact; so not all Evangelical denominations are created equal here, it seems).

Additionally, there is a continuity of Christian practice that constitutes this grammar: gathered together as people who have been baptized, to share in bread and wine, informed by the reading and expounding of the scriptures and the singing of hymns and psalms, all assembled in an ordered fashion. And from this gathering emerges a way of life, an ethic, itself reflective of a particular grammar of action.

So, to be “Christian” is to be a particular thing. This is why Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons cannot rightly claim the name “Christian.” Yes, they profess Jesus. But their understanding of who Jesus is resides outside the grammar defined by the Creeds (which, by the way, are themselves a kind of summary of what the Bible is all about), by rejecting His divinity. They might be cousins to the Christian faith, but they are cousins removed (akin to the relationship between Muslims and Jews—both claim the same God, but they each have a unique grammar in regards to that God). “Christianity” loses coherence when we fail to assert these facts—which has led us to where we are today, with neo-fascists espousing abhorrent ideas and calling them “Christian.”)

Lastly, let me be clear about another point: saying that someone is not “Christian” is not the same thing as saying that they are headed for damnation. Jesus saying “no one gets to the Father apart from me” is, in my faithful estimation, Him saying that He’s the one who decides the ultimate fate of human souls in the afterlife. I tend to believe that, in time, everyone is welcomed into the always-open gates of the New Jerusalem. But, ultimately, Jesus is the one who saves. Not me. Not any particular institution. Rather, the Church is the place that gives us the language for what it means to be saved, to live into what Jesus has already done. Christianity is, as far as I’m concerned, this profoundly beautiful thing that allows us to live with the freedom that comes with being saved by Jesus. It gives us the language by which we can live thankfully in the light that we no longer feel we have to save ourselves, making it all up as we go along.

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The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

#Christianity #Church #Jesus #History #Politics #Bible #religion #theology