Rightly Loving the Word of Truth:

Interpretation is basic to any communication. You have to make decisions regarding how I am using the words you read. Even simple things like, “The car is red.” Is the car completely red? Does it have a red paint job? Is the engine red, the windows, the tires? We hear the words and make quick associations to how we have heard the words used in other contexts. If someone tells you I have red hair, you will make allowances for it being anywhere among a range of color with some orange orange tint, possibly interspersed with white or gray. I’ve been called a red-head all my life, but my hair has never actually been red. We interpret the term differently in regard to a car than in regard to hair or a rose.

As the United Methodist Church has taken a step towards the affirmation of the LGBTQ+ community, it is not from ignoring the Bible in any sense. Rather, this inclusion and affirmation comes from what we call the Wesleyan Quadrilateral. Along with our reading of Scripture, we apply reason, look to tradition, and inquire as to how our interpretation becomes expressed in the experience of people. Does my reading of the Scripture make logical sense? How has the church interpreted or expressed these concepts throughout history, especially in the primitive church? How does my interpretation impact the lives of real people?

Jesus summarized God’s commands as love. In order for something to be against God’s will, it must be unloving. Jesus did away with rules over religious purity, as they did not follow this rule of love. Jesus overruled prohibitions against contact with Samaritans, foreigners, sinners, and others marginalized from society, as they countered God’s love for all persons. He called all of us God’s beloved. He understood that legalism and reading commandments in their strictest manner often harmed people. He loved them, instead, and even called them to follow him.

Which is more loving? Is it telling people they must repent and become as we are, or is it being the friend of “those sinners” and demonstrating their welcome and acceptance? When we focus on messages of guilt, shame, and condemnation, does that bring love into being? Does it give birth to love where there was none before? According to the many stories I continue to hear, being kicked out of one’s home, church, community, job, school, clubs, etc. is the primary result of those messages of condemnation, guilt, and shame. Those messages have given rise to the increase in suicide rates among teenagers. They have sparked hate crimes against the LGBTQ+ community around us. They have caused pain and harm.

If I am to live a life of Scriptural holiness, as John Wesley called it, you should be able to see a growth of love, care, mercy, and grace within me and extending to the larger community around me. This is the United Methodist way of looking at issues, reading Scripture, and carving a path forward amid the turmoil of a society, culture, and environment of opposition.

Love is the lens we bring to the Scriptures. It is our starting point. It is our deepest understanding of what Jesus taught and the life to which he called us. If my interpretation is wrong, and yet my life produces love for my neighbor and in my neighbor, I am following Jesus’ example and teaching. According to his summary of all God’s commandments, loving my neighbor is always the correct response.

In that light, I return to read the Scriptures. I find those prohibitions in Leviticus to fail the test of communicating love. They were, after all, restrictions regarding ritual purity, the same ritual purity Jesus brushed aside. The violent attitude and actions of Sodom toward outsiders was obviously harmful and unloving. Their lack of generosity and hospitality was obviously unloving. Placing themselves as superior to outsiders was obviously unloving. Paul’s words often interpreted in terms of homosexual relations were understood throughout church history to refer to sexual predation, which is obviously unloving.

Being homosexual, being transgender, being left-handed, being amelanistic, poor, a stranger, an immigrant, impaired, ill, neuro-divergent, or not fitting some of the other boxes society wants to push us into has nothing to do with one’s sin. The only sin there is that ostracizing or marginalizing people, making them more vulnerable to abuse. Who one is and what has happened to one does not, indeed cannot, be sin, for it is not their unloving action or inaction.

One’s sexual orientation is not a choice. One’s gender identity is not a choice. If either were a choice, we would not encounter people who don’t fit our boxes for gender or sexual orientation. We put way too much social pressure on people to conform to even imagine these things as choices. Love, however, is a choice. Affirmation is a choice. How we read a text is a choice. Recognizing that we might have been wrong is choice as well as a practice of humility.

Are our interpretations doing harm? Is the focus of our theological practice doing harm? Can the world around us see the love of God in us and recognize it for love? Those are the questions United Methodism would pose. Those questions make a real difference both in how we read the Scriptures, as well as in how we apply them to our lives.

Lifting a few verses out of context is not rightly handling Scripture. Handling it appropriately requires more of us. It requires that we become more loving. It requires that God loving all of creation results in a greater expression of love in us and flowing to others. Anything less tends to be reading my own prejudices into Scripture, casting what makes me uncomfortable as necessarily unworthy of love, mercy, compassion, and grace. Meanwhile, love places everyone on the same playing field, where grace covers one and all without distinction. It overlooks the white hairs, and is unconcerned that not a single hair is actually red. Love just claims them all. Love bestows a name that was never warranted, never justified, never worthy of application and applies it to all.



— ©Copyright 2024, Christopher B. Harbin 



http://www.sermonsearch.com/contributors/104427/

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