By Dr. David Tiede
No matter what I say, many of you may be upset, perhaps hurt or disappointed. But this is a time for testimony. The hurt and misunderstanding and anger will not go away among us by silence or talking only with people with whom we agree. This is a conference of Christian believers, of sinners of Christ's own redeeming. If your argument is with me, fine and good. But if your argument is with the testimony of the Scriptures, then you are up against the commands or the promises of God. Some of you will find the law of God too repressive and others may find the gospel too inclusive for your taste.
Let me begin with three convictions:
The Bible offers no judgment on "homosexuality" as an orientation or disposition, but it does condemn many sexual behaviors, reserving to marriage God's blessing on genital sexual intercourse.
The ELCA has taken the right course in setting boundaries for appropriate sexual behaviors for those to whom the public office of ministry may be entrusted. Furthermore, the law of the state and the moral standards of the community will both continue to require especially modest sexual behavior of the ordained, lest they cause scandal or present a danger to the vulnerable.
We have too long been on the defensive from those who insist that the issues are merely sexual rights or liberation from repression. The public good has been damaged by the attack on morality in our sexually exploitative and permissive culture.
Sexual behavior is fundamentally a matter of responsibility to one another; the welfare of the neighbor takes priority over my freedom.
The word homosexual is a modern diagnostic term. Sometimes such quasi-scientific terms seem to say more than they actually do. I have had people tell me, "I am a homosexual." Sometimes 1 have responded by saying, "Well I am a heterosexual." But in fact, most of us have had a host of surprising sexual feelings and predispositions overtake us ever since the endocrines started dumping into the bloodstream.
Of course the Biblical writers didn't know anything about the endocrine glands. They had never heard of Freud either. They had not even heard of anyone having a sexual identity.
The modem analytic categories of homosexual and heterosexual may be more confining and rigid than our own sexual responses. They certainly do not tell all that is to be said about any of us. A few years ago a very troubled student came to talk to me. After talking almost an hour, he blurted out, "Did you know I am a homosexual?" Taken aback, I said, "No, and tell me why I should know." I only knew what he had in mind when he said, "Well, are you going to get me thrown out?"
I said to him, "Did you know that I am a heterosexual?" He looked perplexed, so I added, "You probably are not very interested in my personal responses, nor need you be. But there are behaviors which would disqualify me from the ministry, and we both know what they are. Years ago, my supervising pastor said directly, "Keep your pants zipped and your hands where they belong."
God sees the heart, and Jesus warns against even the sin of looking at another person with lust on your mind. None of us is exempt. But those matters are for God, beyond the law of the community. There is no text of Scripture which calls for community sanctions against anyone's sexual identity or orientation. But many passages set firm boundaries for sexual relationships. Most of them focus on relationships between men and women, Some deal with same-sex relationships.
The Blessing of Sexuality
The testimony of Scripture begins with the hearty affirmation of bodily existence and the blessing of sexuality. So we read that God created humankind, male and female. God blessed them and said, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth." Adam and Eve were in the blessed business of reproduction.
By the time this story was written down, Israel found herself surrounded by cultures and cultic practices which were preoccupied with fertility rituals and copulating gods and temple prostitutes. The Torah set Israel apart, cursing all idols of fecundity and phallic monuments. Israel'sGoddoesn'thavesex with people. The blessing of sexuality is for the blessing of families and the community.
Ted Koppel once said, "When Moses came down from Mount Sinai, the tablets of stone contained the ten commandments, not the ten suggestions." The Jewish writer Dennis Praeger has described "Judaism's Sexual Revolution" implicitinthegivingoflhelaw. "The Torah's prohibition of non-marital sex made the creation of Western civilization possible...and began the arduous task of elevating the status of women." His argument is also a defense of the strong Jewish aversion to same-sex genital behavior. He concludes: "The Torah was simply too different from the rest of the world, too against man's nature, to have been soley man-made." (in Ultimate Issues, Apr-June 1990).
What is really important is to mark the close protection of the family as the central social unit within which sexual activity belongs.
The biblical understanding of human sexuality is that it is good for children. It normalizes both human reproduction and the nurture of children in the family. Husband and wife are given the blessing of becoming "one flesh."
Obedience to the Torah was unnatural to Israel's neighbors, Imagine their objections: "How can you make the crops grow if you don't participate in the fertility rituals?" "Why should mere slaves, children, animals and women be preserved from sexual usage?"
But Israel was not merely against such practices. The Torah was for the preservation of all life as a trust from God. The religious taboos on human behaviors listed in Leviticus 18 set Israel off from the nations around her with carefully marked boundaries of holiness. Israel's identity as God's chosen was at stake.
Serving the Creature, Not the Creator
Now turn to Romans 1-2. Let me make three general observations. First, let me remind you where this passage fits in the Letter. The major theme has just been sounded in verse 16: "For I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith." The major the me of the letter is the saving righteousness of God at work in the gospel. But the section we discuss is not about God's saving righteousness, but about God's wrath, about the consequences of sin, especially the sin of idolatry.
Second, Paul's argument about God's wrath is filled with traditional convictions from Hellenistic Judaism, most of which were even more emphatic in their denunciation of the sexual practices of the Greek world, including same-sex intercourse and pederasty. The Greek and Roman moralists were also fond of long lists of sexual abuses; it is sometimes difficult to tell whether they were bragging or complaining. Sexual excess has been selling books for centuries.
Third, Paul interprets this long list of moral offenses theologic ally. No one is especially singled out, and no one escapes the force of his argument that the moral decadence of the world is a symptom and indictment of idolatry. As in I Cor. 6, where the idolaters and greedy are classified with the sexually immoral (same-sex and opposite sexual preferences included) the point finally is that the law of God convicts all. Only the power of God's righteousness at work in the gospel will be able to save any of us, Jew and Greek.
Luther once described the difference between the theology of the cross and a theology of glory in terms of the temptation to call evil good and good evil. This is the serpent's way of saying to the man and the woman in the garden, "You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil" Or remember his lying claim to Jesus that all the world is his, "and I give it to anyone I please." (Luke 4: 7-8).
"You can have it all. Put away all of that repressive sexuality which you learned in Sunday School. It is a sexist, racist, bourgeois plot to keep you in bondage. What the Judeo-Christian tradition calls evil is actually the key to self-transcendence, self-actualization. You shall be like gods."
Paul launches a frontal attack on those who twist the truth of the law of God, who exchanged the truth about God for a tie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator."
In the Church Too
Paul has not singled out a specific sexual practice, same-sex or opposite-sex. This is very helpful to all of us today since we need to discuss not merely homosexuality, but sexuality. I do not need to tell you that we are now, right now as a church, suffering the results of a generation of sexual misbehavior by our clergy. In Minnesota we have a new statute on the books (148a). It requires that every pastor and associate in ministry must be certified as free from a history of sexual impropriety before being hired to a new post in the church. Talk about repressive. 1 have had to fill out these documents of inquiry on some of the most modest women and men you can imagine. The burden of proof is on them. This is an injustice to them, wrought of the fact (hat we have hidden our dirty linen at the expense of vulnerable victims too long. Now we must play the stern rules of the state. The legal department of the ELCA is flooded with suits against clergy for sexual abuse, same-sex and opposite-sex. The law insists that vulnerable people have a right to be able to trust their pastor.
Paul moves beyond sexuality. The issue is idolatry, worship of the creature rather than the Creator. In our society it is narcissism, worship and adoration of the self – the classic definition of sin, "incurvatus se," to be turned in on oneself. "I am the center of the universe, the captain of my destiny." Or to quote Shirley McClaine, "I am god."
The new hedonism is a classic example of Paul's point, "claiming to be wise, they became fools." Never has a society existed where self-indulgence was so democratized, marketed, and possible for so many. And it is killing us. In the words of Deuteronomy, we have "chosen death rather than life" – and our children with us.
Paul moves into his discussion of what he calls "degrading passions" in verses 26-32. These are the effects of the sin of idolatry: obsessive sexual passion, covetousness, gossip, slander, boasting, rebellion toward parents, ruthlessness. In Romans 6 Paul will argue again that the wages of sin is death. But here he maintains that the consequence of worshiping the creature rather than the Creator is more sin – then death.
Paul emphasizes destructive, unnatural, unhealthy behaviors. He is documenting the depth of human depravity, of "shameless acts" and "consuming passion." His outcry cannot be discounted as mere phobia. The list of degrading passions is long, and the truth is told.
We too must tell the truth that the sexual freedom so eagerly touted in our society has become destructive in its excess. The law of God is given to direct us to life rather than death; it will also reveal when we have chosen the way of death rather than life. We too have worshiped the creature, ourselves, rather than the Creator, and we are now reaping a harvest of disease and death.
We must never be surprised that inappropriate and often destructive sexual behaviors continue among us. But as a church we will honor healthy monogamous marriage as the setting for genital sexual intercourse.
God's Kindness and Repentance
Paul will surely tell us to confess our own sins instead of our neighbor's, as we see in Romans 2: "You have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others." God is inclusive. God shows no partiality. The wrath of God has plenty of justification for death and destruction for all of us.
Amazingly, Paul takes a second step. All of this indictment is already tinged with hope: "Do you not realize that God's kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?" Or as in Romans 6: "The free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord." That's the gospel truth of the power of God's righteousness at work in our behalf.
I believe this is the fundamental testimony which all of this talk about degrading passions is for. This is all a divine strategy of mercy, once again showing what God's determined purpose is for every one, I know that my righteousness, and especially my self-righteousness, is a garment of rags. So is yours. God invites you and me to anticipate the cloak of divine righteousness bestowed in Christ. Paul leads us to shed our preoccupation with ourselves, our needs, our righteousness, our rights, and to be saved and transformed by the self-giving righteousness of God, perfected to the point of death and life in Christ Jesus. Thanks be to God.
*This article is excerpted by permission from President Tiede's address to the Sierra Pacific Synod workshop on human sexuality, given at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary, June 1, 1991. Dr. Tiede is president of Luther-Northwestern Theological Seminary, St. Paul, MN.