Several entries down, you can find some of my sketchy reflections about sexuality. I encourage, whether or not you plan on attending the forum on Sunday, to think about what I’ve written. In some respects, Luke Timothy Johnson’s Commonweal article makes some of the same arguments, in more developed fashion. For me, trying to think about homosexuality inevitably relates to two other issues: How we approach scripture, and how we make moral decisions. Most people, most of the time, think that moral decisions are simple questions.  There is right and there is wrong, and scripture spells out clearly what is right and what is wrong. But in fact, we don’t do that, in our personal lives or in the church. Take divorce for example. We don’t have a problem with it. We accept divorced and remarried people as full members of our church; we recognize that while it may not be a good thing, sometimes it is the only option. Yet scripture is unequivocally clear that divorce is a bad thing, a sin. Jesus said it, Paul said it. Whoever divorces and remarries commits adultery.

Our experience, as a church, as a culture, and as human beings has taught us that the clear commands of scripture, in this case, are not the last word. Some Christian groups take other scriptural texts much more seriously, and much more literally than we do. For example, the groups who practice, or have practiced community of goods, because that’s what the early church did in Acts. There are groups that expect their members not to serve in the military because Jesus says “Love your enemy” and “Turn the other cheek.” If we come to a different decision than members of those groups, it is not because we take scripture more or less seriously than they. It is because we make different conclusions about morality and ethics than they, that we make a different decision about what it means to follow Jesus Christ.

But it is important, not simply to say, that’s their opinion, or they’re wrong. It’s important to examine how they come to make those decisions. I said in my earlier post that homosexuality is not primarily about the authority of scripture. It is about our cultural values and expectations. Divorce is OK today because we live in a culture that views divorce as acceptable. That wasn’t the case fifty years ago. We don’t think Jesus literally meant that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God, because our culture thinks it’s OK for people to accumulate wealth.

We bring our values to the text, and look in scripture for arguments that will support our values. It is important that as people who want to be faithful to God we recognize the degree to which we read scripture through the lens of our culture. Instead, we need to allow ourselves to be transformed by scripture, rather than transforming scripture to make it of  palatable to our cultural biases. In fact, most of our moral and ethical choices are based not in scripture but in our culture’s values. Indeed, for the most part, we have reduced ethical and moral questions to questions of personal behavior, and above all, sexuality. Those aren’t the priorities of scripture, either of the Old Testament or of the New. But more on that some other time