St Paul and Sexuality - Part 2

So I finished part one of this series with this question: if Romans 1 is not about sex, why confuse the issue? Why did St Paul have to go there at all? And why does he pick on gay sex more than straight sex anyway?

In part one, we looked at the focus of Romans One being Idolatry not Immorality - that is, we did a re-think on what the Bible defines as sin. Both in the church and in the world, we get hung up on immorality - bad behaviour - and think of that as “Sin” with a capital S. But the Bible is much more concerned with our fundamental relationship (or lack of it) with God; the brokenness between us is Sin in the Scriptures, and that’s usually put down to us loving something else when we should be loving God.

These things aren’t unconnected, but if we’re going to use Biblical words in a Biblical way, we need to work a bit harder. If we’re going to throw random verses at people today in order to discriminate (for whatever reason) then we need to make sure we’re not just making the stuff up on the hoof.

I’m going to offer an analogy to try to help us out here. 

A Journey? 

Living in the 21st Century West, we are used to a secular society where moral ideas are more important than religious ones. The BBC is having a debate about its radio Thought For the Day slot because some people think that religion is more important than ever in a world where being religiously literate matters, and some feel that religion is a taint on society. It’s a good debate - and it’s a change, because twenty years ago, the former group would have been too small to make the debate work. That group are keen to make the debate matter too - because, they say, you can’t understand the ethics and behaviour of much of today’s world without understanding it’s faith.

Even so, ethics are often seen as a separate domain to faith. Sure, if you choose faith then that may lead to a certain ethic, a set of moral values (usually viewed as ‘conservative’ - especially in America or, ironically, the Middle East) but choosing not-faith doesn’t mean the absence of an ethical standard. It means a different journey. A different destination. There may well be lots of common factors; but there will also be clear points of distinction.

This world-view affects us when we read St Paul. We see he has a religious understanding that sets up his moral ethic. And as we look at that moral ethic, to be frank, he seems confused.

I mean - just examine his writing. One minute here, one minute there, he’s all over the place. If faith is his home and ethics is a destination it sets, we’re stuck on Eurostar, criss-crossing the Channel as Paul swaps between the England and France of Idolatry & Immorality from moment to moment: Verses 21-23 of Romans 1 are clearly about the home ground fundamental sin of idolatry – actually expressing it in terms of making idols. Then in verse 24, St Paul gets ahead of himself and sets off abroad talking about sexuality as immorality (God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another), before realising he’s not finished on the home turf of idolatry, which he does in verse 25(They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator). Having done that he can really let rip in verses 26-27 with a glorious ethical trip: because people have abandoned the worship of God, God has given them over to sexual perversion. That’s the big immorality sin. And it’s followed in verses 28ff with other social sins that also happen. To and fro he goes, journeying from here to there, confusing himself and us in the process. 

But…

What if that’s not happening? What if it’s not St Paul’s thinking that’s sloppy, but ours? What if his context, his world-view works differently?

What if St Paul is in fact living in an intellectual framework where worship and its opposite, idolatry, is the major issue, not the behaviour stuff we focus on? And what if the height of idolatry, given to him by the writers of the Old Testament, means that the practice of idolatry is simply described in terms that sound to us like immorality - making us feel like we’re on a journey when all the time we’ve already reached the destination? 

You see, we continually fail to grasp how big a deal idolatry is in the Scriptures. Wrong worship is the whole journey in itself. It doesn’t take us anywhere because it is already the alternative destination. It leads nowhere. When we have chosen it, we have arrived. Though everyone can tell our choice - 

How? 

Souvenirs 

Let’s start with the Old Testament.

Why are the Leviticus texts often used in sexuality debates there at all?  For the Hebrew people of God first occupying Canaan under Moses and Joshua things looked rather different: here’s the start of Leviticus 18:  

I am the Lord your God. You must not do as they do in Egypt, where you used to live, and you must not do as they do in the land of Canaan, where I am bringing you. Do not follow their practices. You must obey my laws and be careful to follow my decrees. I am the Lord your God.

I am the Lord your God. Worship me; stay with me; be faithful to me. Don’t worship the local deities - in whatever remarkable ways the natives get up to.

That wasn’t a general secularist moral plea or a narrow call for intolerance. Ancient Canaanite poems, the local love songs of the day, tell us that sexual excess happened in the context of religious practice. The purity of Hebrew religious practice (bluntly - no sex in church) was in sharp contrast to it. The Israelites weren’t just trying to be better than their neighbours, or stricter, or more straight-laced – that’s a modern and unspiritual society’s anachronistic reading of these texts. I sat with a head teacher from a school a few miles away from my home recently who was distressed that our diocese places terrific importance on the ‘ethos’ of church schools. She complained - “Don’t they realise we all want our children to be nice to each other!” Well, we do; but as I sat there, I rather felt that this was exactly why our church schools place such an importance on their ethos: precisely because our ethos is about so much more than “being nice”. 

The Old Testament people of God didn’t have a life where morality was often divorced from spirituality, as we experience in modern Britain. Rather God’s people were not to indulge in the excesses they found amongst the peoples they met on their journeys because those excesses were part of a worship life that was far from the God they were called to follow. Leviticus 18 begins with the statement “I am the Lord” repeated, and repeated again, and again. 

If you go on a journey of worship, your life will show where you have been. Right worship, wrong worship, you choose. And in doing so, you choose what souvenirs of the journey you bring home with you. People can tell where you’ve been by the T-shirts you wear. You bear the fruit of your choices.

How you worship shows who you worship. It’s who you worship that matters.

The descriptions of abandoning God and of various kinds of sexual excess in Romans 1 are all about how people worshipped... 

They’re about the 'how' of worship because that shows who and what you have chosen to put in God’s place. And who and what you have chosen to put in God’s place shapes who and what you are - and what you do. The fruit of your choices. The souvenirs of your life journey.

If you have chosen to worship God, who is faithful and true, you will lead a life of faithfulness and truth in all your relationships. If you choose to put pleasure or ‘the moment’ in that place then you will live out the implications of that worship choice. These days, we’re told “we are what we eat”: the Bible ups the stakes. “We become what we worship”. If you want different souvenirs, choose a different shop.

If just something of this is in St Paul’s mind then vv24-8 are not muddled verses, flicking between idolatry and immorality as Paul forgets himself and goes back and re-states his case, they belong just as they are. We become who we worship, and how we act in worship shapes all our lives, so choose carefully - except, the choice has been made, and it wasn’t careful. We shopped cheaply. Fallen humanity, says St Paul, exchanged the worship of God for the worship of idols – and in practice that worship involved sexual excess of all and every kind. And people became what they chose. 

Rotten fruit.

St Paul is very, very clear about this. Three times he writes: “God gave them over”: in verse 24 “in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity”; in verse 26 “to shameful lusts”; and in verse 28 “to a depraved mind”. God allowed us to behave like the false gods we worshipped. Truth gave way to a lie, worshipping the Creator was swapped for worshipping something created. And in those shameful revels, done in the name of religion, in the name of worship, we human beings kept debasing ourselves in a spirit of “anything goes”. That’s the spiritual story of the Scriptures; the actual history that St Paul saw was that this didn’t involve love, or faithfulness, or the mutual relationship of equals seeking to find a life partner – this was wantonness and orgy and promiscuity gone mad. In the name of religion, in the name of worship. Humanity forgetting itself. 

An agenda of life for everyone

It’s not a question of straight and gay - every excessive behaviour is condemned in these passages. It’s a question of who is God, and what is God like, and also - how does God’s agenda shape the lives of those who follow him. 

If you worship pleasure, who should trust you? Faithfulness is fleeting, at best a means to an end, no longer the certain bedrock of life.

Seeing how St Paul shapes his argument gives us a far better chance of understanding of who his targets are.

Is St Paul thinking of a tiny group of gay men in some seedy bar in ancient Rome as he writes of ‘shameful lusts’ and ‘indecent acts’ in Romans 1? No - St Paul is describing every Jew’s (at least of his period’s) caricature of the entire idolatrous Gentile world. It’s ancient Egypt, ancient Canaan, it’s Babylon, it’s Corinth, it’s certainly Rome. They’re all at it.

This is broken Gentile worship. This is the whole broken Gentile world. At the very least it is a polemic, hyperbolic version of it. So Romans 1 isn’t a passage that says, Now about those gay people, this is what you should think.

But it does say, Now about those folk that abandon themselves to putting anything and everything other than God first in their lives, and specifically about those Gentiles who have never belonged to God’s people, this is what you should think: 

They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Although they know God's righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.

This is the world St Paul attacks. This is his target. This is the broad brush that paints the town red, and which covers all the pride of the Gentiles in unwashable shame. It’s not about sex. 

So it’s St Paul against the World then?

It’s not about sex.

And - equally - it’s not about sects. Having set up such an extreme view of the rest of the world, of course, Paul quickly slams down any Jewish pride or feeling of one-upmanship over their Gentile neighbours at the start of Romans 2:

You (Jews), therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else, for at whatever point you judge the other, you are condemning yourself, because you who pass judgment do the same things.  

He goes on to drive this home – the Jews are just as guilty, with all their Law and temple and sacrifices of idolatry as these Gentile dogs, as guilty of immorality, as guilty of unrighteousness – 

For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (Romans 3.23). That’s the point. There isn’t one prime, major, over-arching moral sin because there is one prime, major, over-arching spiritual sin. Everyone is as guilty as everyone else. St Paul starts with stunning images of excess and the loss of humanity, in order to show that true sin, that broken relationship from God, the absence of ‘righteousness’, that choice to worship someone or something other than the Creator means we all lose our humanity. We are all in this together.

And for all, a gift…

St Paul picks on gay sex more than straight sex? On the evidence of Romans 1 he barely gives it the time of day. And if he does - it’s because he calls on everyone who gives their hearts to someone or something other than God to realise what that choice has done. And to realise there is more, far more, open to us by God’s great love and kindness. 

To divorce a specific sexual act from Biblical setting and then make blind moral judgements that have no reference to the original context is to cherry-pick Scripture and should be looked at with great scepticism by any serious disciple. Romans 1 is not there simply to answer our contemporary questions of straight and gay, of equal marriage or how a church reacts to two Christian folk of the same gender who love each other and want to devote their lives to one another. It certainly isn’t there to justify those who want to create schism in the church.

The application of this text to all contemporary homosexual relationships is poor exegesis. But it gets us no nearer to seeing - as I contended last time - that we might view St Paul as the gay person’s greatest friend. 

How might we get there?

That’s for next time…