The State of the UMC: Homosexuality and Separation

“The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.” – John 17:22-23

Much can be said about where the UMC is right now in the context of disagreement and conflict over homosexuality. Much is being said about where the UMC is right now. Some is true. Some is untrue. Some lacks nuance. Some is purposefully misleading. First of all, we are a people of diverse opinions and holding different stakes in the conversation. It is difficult to hear each other among our differences of opinion, experience, history, and emotional responses to words that trigger uncomfortable reactions and strongly held positions.

It is common for us to downplay a position that is contrary to our own. Landlubbers once held strongly to the conviction that the earth is flat, while seafarers were ready to speak of the world as round. Many have clung to concepts of illness being of spiritual origin as the only Biblically allowed understanding of illness. Many have held to notions that the only appropriate day for worship is Saturday, the Sabbath of the Bible. In Romans 14, we find Paul discussing conflict over the correct day of worship and eating meat sacrificed to idols as issues tearing the church apart. He calls them down, however, saying there were more important issues at hand which should bind Christians together amid disagreement over matters of strongly held opinions.

The state of the Corinthian church is rather much where the UMC finds itself right now. There are some in two camps who are clinging strongly to positions that are antithetical to each other. Voices in either camp are claiming that one cannot belong to Christ while holding a position contrary to their own. As in Corinth, both sides claim to serve Christ. As in Corinth, both sides claim allegiance to Scripture. As in Corinth, neither can conceive of the other as being faithful to Christ and Scripture. Some place emphasis on one set of texts, while others emphasize a different set of texts. Paul would tell us something different. He would tell us that there are matters of interpretation on which there is room for disagreement, even as we continue to serve Christ and take the Bible seriously, despite our differences.

The easy route for us to take is to allow our disagreements over one matter or another to become the cause of separation, schism, and breaking fellowship. Jesus was pretty clear in John 15 that we are to be united in our faith. We are to be united to the extent of Jesus’ own unity with the Father.

That is a high bar for us to attain. It requires accepting that we can disagree among ourselves on matters we deem very important, still be servants of Christ Jesus, and still belong to one another. As Wesley reminded us, we are to be united on the essentials and offer one another grace on issues that are of secondary importance. Our biggest problem with this has always been on determining what is essential and separating that from what is secondary.

There are voices in our past and our present claiming that marriage is not a partnership between equals, but a relationship akin to the purchase of one person by another of higher standing and importance. That was the state of marriage in Ancient Israel. Isaac never went to his wedding. Instead, a servant traveled weeks to purchase him a wife from among his mother’s relatives. Rachel was selected, bought, paid for, and then taken to her husband in a faraway land. There she finally met Isaac, the man for whom she had been purchased as a wife. This was no relationship among equals, partners in a marriage deemed to be one flesh, each completing the other to the same degree. It was a joining of unequals in which Isaac held all the cards.

Some today would claim this as the standard for marriage that should extend into the present. It is a Biblical notion. It was a standard retained without drastic changes throughout the Biblical period and far beyond. Naturally, there are a couple of texts which speak of marriage in a different light, but this was the prevailing understanding of marriage. Abraham had both a wife and a concubine. Jacob had two wives, each of whom gave him a servant through whom they claimed heirs who would be born to him. David had numerous wives and concubines. While Jesus seems to have declared monogamy as God’s ideal, he did not address that point directly and clearly. There is very little in Scripture on which to build that case. That does not really bother us, however, since our society has concluded that polygamy and bigamy are illegal. Being Biblical on that account does not matter to us very much.

Being a wife was a superior position to that of a concubine, which was superior to that of a slave. Regardless, a wife held a social position inferior to that of her husband and even her son. Paul understood marriage as an unequal relationship between men and women, even while he called in Ephesians for mutual submission among husbands, wives, children, slaves, and masters. Jesus elevated the status of women in his dealings with them, but those actions also underscored how different women were considered in Jesus’ day, how women have continued to be considered in the centuries since. He allowed the woman at the well in Sychar to become his emissary to the townspeople, completing the role his male disciples had failed to carry out. He told Mary and Martha to move past social limitations on who might sit at Jesus’ feet. He elevated women, but we have mostly ignored the implications of those words and actions, even when they are Biblical. We have moved toward recognizing equality for women as Jesus seems to have dealt with women in his day, but not all of our society has made those adjustments.

In our North American social context, women were not allowed to vote until 1920, a mere hundred years ago. Mary Kay Ash had trouble buying a car half a century ago, though she had cash in her pocket to pay for it. The dealership wanted a man to affirm the transaction. All in all, women still struggle to be accepted on equal terms with men in today’s society. On the other hand, we are a long way from what marriage was even 200 years ago. Meanwhile, the distance we have traveled towards gender equality is a huge shift from the world of gender relations in the First Century and throughout what we find reflected in the Hebrew Scriptures. While Jesus elevated the status of women and charged them with the gospel of the resurrection, we don’t find the Bible making very direct statements declaring women equal to men.

There are voices still upset over how society has allowed women a place in the political sphere. Some claim it to be unbiblical for women to preach, teach boys, and assume roles outside the family. The Bible paves the way for these changes in our social structure, but we know them to require nuanced readings of Scripture. In the same way, we do not give much credit to those voices claiming that slavery is a good thing, even though the Bible does not outright demand an end to slavery. Instead, we find that other issues raised repeatedly in the Bible must be given priority over practices that do not rise to the demands of God’s love and acceptance of all persons.

The Bible is just not as clear as we would like it to be on certain topics. It is plenty clear on the larger issues. It just does not tackle every concept we would like it to address head-on. We want to hear Jesus tell us how we should deal with issues of our day that simply did not exist in the First Century. We want a proscribed list of actions, policies, and understandings to avoid along with a list of all we should accomplish. Life is just not simple enough for that kind of solution. The Bible is silent on structures for church governance. It is silent on forms of government. It is silent on corporate board structures, vaccines, stock markets, prisons, petrochemicals, drug trials, and global trade. It does address questions of how we relate to one another in love, grace, acceptance, forgiveness, and unity. So many other issues that have arisen over the centuries since Jesus lived have to be boiled down to those concepts Jesus did address. Then we have to apply those principles to our current issues.

It should be little wonder that homosexuality, as we are coming to understand it, is vastly different from anything known and dealt with in the Scriptures. Even so, we have difficulty relating what we know to texts from some two millennia ago. We have trouble distinguishing current concepts from issues addressed in ancient texts, in great part because our categories of thought are so vastly different from what shows up in Scripture.

My first exposure to the concept of homosexuality was a well-meaning, but poorly considered warning to beware of men wanting to take me into a bathroom and molest me. I was a Fourth Grade student coming into the US public school system for the first time, and my father felt a need to warn me that I might encounter adults with deviant behaviors who might attempt to abuse me. He called them homosexuals. Forty years later, it is easier to see that he was referring to pedophilia, not homosexuality. His background, however, did not allow for such a distinction, even though it might appear obvious today in some circles. In many parts of the world, people still struggle to make that distinction. It is still an issue when we turn to Scripture.

Genesis 19 is the text from which we get the term Sodomy. We generally categorize that as a sexual act. Genesis does not support such a reading. What was going on in Sodom was a desire to rape, mistreat, torture, and kill outsiders as an expression of dominance. Today we distinguish between sexual advances and the sexual abuse of those in positions of lesser power. A hundred years ago, our society made no such distinction. In the age of the #MeToo movement, we have become much more aware of how so many of our received attitudes surrounding sexuality are tied to concepts of a predatory nature. Less than a century ago, we simply blamed the victims of sexual violence without giving it a second thought. Today, we at least give it a second thought.

When we turn to the Biblical texts that mention any kind of sexual encounter between persons of the same gender, we quickly turn to the term homosexuality. A much greater portion of passages dealing with sexuality is linked to sexual violence than we would like to believe. David’s encounter with Bathsheba should be considered rape. She was the wife of an immigrant and had no say in light of the king’s sexual advances. By the same token, the men of Sodom were not interested in homosexual sex. They were interested in rape, the abuse of others to gratify their desire for feeling powerful in the abasement of others.

Saint Augustine wrote in his Confessions, that before conversion to Christianity he had a wife, a concubine, a female slave, and a couple of boys he used for his sexual gratification. That is not a description of homosexuality. It includes what is properly called pederasty. It is the description of known practices among the Greek and Roman world by which rich and powerful men exercised the wielding of their power over those society deemed inferior. They did this with the women in their lives as well as with men and boys. This seems to be what Paul refers to in his letters to believers in Rome and Corinth. It is a very different notion from what we understand today as homosexuality. It is sexual exploitation and abuse.

Pederasty, using boys and young men for sexual gratification, celebrated social distinctions through power differentials in sexual encounters. It was rape akin to what we often encounter today in sex trafficking, sexual abuse, sexual exploitation, and the like. It is akin to what occurred on slave plantations in the US, Brazil, and the fiefdoms of Europe. It is what continues to pervade so much of the world today where women, men, and children are exploited, abused, and treated as property.

This makes our discussion of homosexuality today a very different discussion than what we find in Scripture. Sexual encounters in the Bible never reflected the coming together of equals for mutual benefit, mutual gratification, and from equality of rights and privilege. Sexual acts were always between unequal persons. When we talk about sexuality and homosexuality today, we are looking at very different categories than what we find in Scriptures from thousands of years ago.

In the past two thousand years since the Bible was written, our understanding of marriage has changed. Our understanding of gender equality has changed. Our understanding of sexuality has changed. Our notions regarding women’s rights within sexual encounters have changed. Our notions regarding the role of sexual encounters have changed.

Marriage at one time was primarily about protecting questions of inheritance and determining bloodlines. Men held all the power in marital relationships. Men had concubines and slaves for sexual gratification. They had wives to define their heirs. Adultery was in large part a crime regarding questions of paternity and inheritance. That is in large measure why King David could no longer allow his wives and concubines to be part of his household once his Absalom had taken them one by one to rape. From that moment, his bloodline through them was soiled and left in doubt.

Unfortunately, we still read the Bible without sufficient appreciation of just how radically different our culture and society are from those in which it was written. When we try to make a one-to-one correspondence between terms from ancient Hebrew or Greek and our 21st Century North American use of the English language, we are bound to miss a few things. The languages and cultures that gave us the Bible reflected realities and concepts that are very different from our own.

Some want to keep things simple and point to terms translated in some of our texts as homosexual. That term was never used in our Bibles until 1946 with the Revised Standard Version. Prior to that translation choice, we used terms like pederasty. When we look at phrases like “a man lying with a man as with a woman,” the context still speaks of the unequal relationship between men and women that was the standard even within the bonds of marriage. After all, it was only within the last few decades that the law in the US even allowed for the notion of rape within marriage to be considered a crime. The assumption was that wives were duty bound to submit sexually to a husband’s will for his gratification, regardless of her desires. All of that background is part of the context implicit in the phrase we so glibly skip past without a second thought.

Is there room here for people to disagree? Certainly, there is. Too much of this line of interpretation is an exercise in reading the cultural, historical, and textual context of words, phrases, and passages. My journey in reading and interpreting these issues is still an ongoing process. I am still making new connections, grasping nuances that are new to me, and struggling to process the complexities of life in light of the Scriptures.

The point I hope I have made is that Biblical interpretation is a complex issue. It is fraught with the difficulties we face in recognizing how different our cultural, social, and linguistic contexts are from those of the Biblical writers. They wrote for the people of their day. They wrote to address the issues God was leading them to respond to. They did not speak English and did not see the world through the eyes of someone born in the US in the Twentieth Century.

We are going to disagree on different issues. We are still enjoined by Christ to live in unity. We are going to develop our thinking in different stages and along different timelines. If unity depends on sharing the same set of answers, we are lost. If unity depends on being at the same place in our faith journeys with God, we will never grow in Christ.

Paul talked about pressing on to gain Christ and be found in Christ. He talked about developing in his faith. Development and growth require the flexibility to accept that we are not all at the same place in our faith development. It requires knowing that we today are neither where or who we were a decade ago.

I trust that those who listen to me preach might learn something new from me every once in a while. I trust that I will continue learning something new, as well. I do not preach the same way I did thirty years ago. Be glad about that. I have studied and learned much in the decades since I started in ministry. I honestly cannot tell you how much I have changed, as I am often unaware of many steps in that process. What I do know is that the same God who called me to ministry at age 13 is still developing me. God used me as a teenager, as a young adult, and continues to use me today. I have been changing all along that journey, and God is not yet finished with my transformation. I am still not perfect.

The UMC is struggling through a special moment of transformation. We are not who we were fifty-two years ago when we were formed upon the merger of a couple of strands of Methodism. We are not who we were when the Book of Discipline first added language restricting homosexuality in 1972. We are not who we will be at the close of our General Conference in May of this year.

Change, growth, and transformation are difficult for us all. We do not know what the future holds. We do know it will look different from what we know to be our current reality. Proposals will be brought to the General Conference to vote on. We may end up back at square one with nothing decided about the current conflict over how we respond to homosexuality and the people within and outside our church who find themselves to be something other than heterosexual normative.

There are those pushing for separation. Some on either side of the aisle want to see new denominations formed for their subset of the United Methodist Church. Others are holding out for unity while we continue debating the issues. Others are hoping we can find a way to remain in fellowship despite our differences. Some do not see how a Christian can fully affirm one who claims to be homosexual. Others want to affirm individuals without offering them full participation as clergy or allowing them marriage within the UMC.

We are at an impasse for some parties. A decision will be made in May, and then annual conferences and congregations will determine how they will respond to that decision. If there is a split in the church, it will not be a simple process for those splitting off nor for many remaining within. Some churches will want to remain in the UMC while their clergy will desire to leave. Some churches will want to leave while their clergy remain. Some members will disagree with the decisions and will of their congregations. Some congregations, clergy, and parishioners will disagree with decisions made by their annual conferences.

No proposal has been presented, accepted, or passed by the General Conference at this point. Until it is clear what the General Conference decides, we simply do not know what decisions lay ahead for the UMC’s annual conferences, churches, clergy, and laity. What we do know is that Christ Jesus calls us to see one another as fellow servants of God and members all of the universal church, the body of Christ. What we do know is that we are charged to love one another, even when we disagree on issues we hold near and dear. What we do know is that whatever decision is made will affect people we should love and will be difficult for some, if not many.

As we look ahead to General Conference, we should be carefully praying that wise leaders will vote not to promote agendas designed to gain power but to promote God’s agenda of love, grace, forgiveness, reconciliation, unity, and peace. Methodists have split before over issues like slavery. Some of us have also come back together in seeking reconciliation. Reconciliation is difficult. Grace is hard. Forgiveness is no easy task for those who feel they have been harmed. We, however, have been entrusted with the ministry of reconciliation. It is our charge to work toward that end whenever it is possible.

At the end of the day, as Christians, we are servants of Christ Jesus. The soldiers in the ranks do not have to agree with one another on everything. They are called to find their unity in following the direction of the one to whom they have sworn allegiance.

There are a lot of things on which we will disagree. There should be very few things that would cause us to break ranks in our service to Christ Jesus. If we take Jesus’ words to heart, there should be none at all.

— ©Copyright 2020, Christopher B. Harbin

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