The Controversial Jesus - Jesus and the Gay Community - Jon Tyson

**hey john tyson here**

Thanks so much for joining us for our controversial Jesus series. This series is a response to questions that were emailed in from our congregation about what it means to follow Jesus in a moment and place like ours. So I hope you go ahead and enjoy this talk. If we can answer any questions you have or serve you in any way, please reach out to us at hello@churchofthecity.com. You can follow along with this series on our podcast or this YouTube channel. Cheers.

Tonight's teaching text comes from First Corinthians 6, verses 9 through 11.

Or do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who have sex with men, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor slanderers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God. This is the word of the Lord.

[Applause]

There was a lawsuit that was filed by a man against a Christian publishing company for 70 million dollars. The lawsuit was filed because one Bible translation in their interpretation of same-sex relationships used the word homosexual. This man said that it caused 20 years of distress, psychological pain, and confusion, and he was seeking damages. Now the lawsuit was actually dismissed, but it makes a very legitimate point. It’s that when you talk about the Bible, when you talk about sexuality, when you talk about same-sex relationships, this may be the most controversial thing you can talk about. There has been so much hurt connected to this issue, so much pain.

And maybe you’re here tonight and you would describe yourself as gay, and maybe it took everything within your power to psych yourself up to come tonight because you’re just like, “What is going to happen? I really like this church; it’s been great so far—don’t screw it up.” Maybe you’ve been sitting here, and someone’s brought you along tonight, and you haven’t been in church for a long time. I want to apologize because this will be the longest sermon you will ever hear in a Christian church. Remember your laughter one hour and ten minutes from now.

I want you to imagine the kind of pain or the fear that is experienced by a typical gay person growing up, particularly in a religious home. What do you imagine being nine or ten years old and everybody around you beginning to talk about sex, beginning to talk about the opposite sex? You keep wondering, “When am I going to feel like that?” because you’re naturally more inclined or more drawn towards people of the same sex. And as it gets older, you start having this feeling like, “Actually, when’s this gonna go away? When do I start feeling about the opposite sex like all of my friends do?”

Maybe you don’t have the language yet, or maybe you do have the language and you have a profound sense of fear inside of you: “Am I gay? Is this happening to me?” Well, maybe you come from a faith background and you just say, “God, I am begging you every night. God, I am begging you, change me.” Every day you wake up and you’re like, “God, did you do it?” And it doesn’t happen.

Maybe you go through a psychological stage where you’re whipping yourself up. You’re like, “I’m just gonna like the opposite sex. I’m just gonna—I’m gonna make myself like them.” So you try it for a while and maybe you date a few people, but deep down in your heart nothing’s really changed. Then you finally go to church. And at church you hear words like abomination. You hear phrases bandied around in Christian humor, and you’re just like, “Here’s one thing I know—I will never tell anybody that I’m gay.”

But you can’t hold it down. Eventually it comes out, and you have to try and figure out how do I live my life forward being gay? So much hurt, and I want us tonight to be very, very thoughtful as we even talk about this. I have to give you a few introductory comments before we dive through these things tonight: this is a series called “Controversial Jesus,” and what I’m doing here is responding to questions that you, our congregation, have asked of me.

So if you were to say, “John, what’s the top 10 things you’d like to preach on in the middle of New York City?” believe it or not, this is not going to make it towards the top of my list. I also have to acknowledge that I’m teaching this in response to your questions in an attempt to pastor this church well. I know that I am a straight white man with kids, so that’s not lost on me. But I’m not preaching from authentic or personal experience today; I’m trying to serve you by responding to your question.

This was the number one question I was asked, and there were almost no other questions. I mean it was so dominant, and so I acknowledge that I’m probably not the ideal candidate to do it. I probably don’t have the experience that gives me the kind of authority that you wish I had connected to this.

I’m also saying that as I share the things tonight, this is not my final word ever on the topic of gay relationships. I think you’ll see I’m a very thoughtful pastor who’s worked hard to study the text and make sense of it. But I’m not coming down from the mountain with two tablets of my opinion here. I think I believe what I do for a reason and I’ll try and make that case to you, but I do hold this in a position of conviction but humility, as I wish we all would when we’re connecting to something like this.

Now a note about language: how you even talk about this particular topic can generate, just by the framing of it, a lot of tension. So let me give you a couple of options, some ways this is framed as the affirming/non-affirming discussion about this issue. But I don’t—I don’t like this language, and I’m not going to use it tonight because “affirming” seems to make people say, “Hey, I love everybody,” and “non-affirming” doesn’t quite describe how I would describe myself, which is there is so much I want to affirm about my gay friends.

Another language that people use, which is perhaps a little more bourgeois, is the classical and the revisionist position. Well I hold to the classical position; you’re a revisionist. Even the framing of that to me sounds a little condescending. Then you have these two terms, the historic and the progressive positions. These are the positions—these are the language that I’m going to use. I like this language. Here’s why: because if you were to read some of the books, many of which I’ll recommend at the end of this talk, you will see gay Christians identifying themselves as progressive evangelicals or progressive opinions on this.

I like the word “historic” because—and I’m not trying to load this phrase up—but for basically 1,960 years, all of the major Christian denominations—Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican—and almost every one of the 50,000 Protestant denominations has held to the same sexual ethic on this issue. This is actually and historically the position that has been held, so putting forth the term “historic” and “progressive” is, I feel, the most generous and clearest way that we can frame this discussion.

Continuing on with my preambles, I would also say that when you’re coming to an issue like this, I want you to ask yourself, just by way of introspection, what it is you believe about these things and why. So I’ve got three questions that I want you to just sort of ponder in your heart:

1. What is my definition of godly marriage and sexuality? What is that? Have you ever really thought about that? One of the things that shocked me the most in the gay marriage debate in our culture is I would ask people, “What is a marriage?” It was like I’d ask them, you know, basically the math problem on the wall from Good Will Hunting. It was like I’ve never—I’ve—we just hadn’t really thought about it.

2. How do I get this definition? How did you arrive at that definition?

3. How do the Scriptures support this definition?

Now that last question, “How do the Scriptures support this?” is obviously a little bit of a tell where I’m coming from. If you didn’t realize it tonight, you’re in a church, and I’m a Christian pastor, and I’m about—I’m about to make my way through the Bible. Now if you’re here tonight and you’re not a Christian, I really do commend you. It does take tremendous courage to come to a church. I remember that feeling very clearly of showing up and feeling somewhat, you know, intrepid and intimidated.

I want to just start by saying that I am aware that what I believe about Christianity, particularly regarding sexuality, sounds insane, period. I also want to say that even if you’re an affirming believer in committed same-sex monogamous relationships, that still sounds insane to our culture because the concept that you would commit to one person and form a covenant and then only love and sleep with them for the rest of your life in a culture like ours is insane. So you don’t have to tell me; I don’t need the feedback. I am aware, right here, I’m aware right now that in general this position is insane.

Now I want you to know that tonight’s talk is going to be in three parts. The first part is how do we get here culturally and historically? I want to put this in here because I think it’s very, very helpful to see how we’ve both been shaped. You are the victim of a culture war, and I want to show you the trajectory of that war.

Secondly, I want to talk about what the Bible actually says about same-sex relationships. I want to walk through five texts in the Bible and I ask you to be patient because some of this is technical. I know that you could not care less about forgotten and lost Greek words, but I just ask that on an issue that is as personal and serious as this, that every now and then we need to have a long sermon and we need to pay attention. This is important.

Then thirdly, I want to talk about how we show love and how we serve and minister to the gay community as Jesus himself would.

**Part one: How did we get where we are in our cultural moment?**

Well it is very, very safe to say—this is not conjecture—that we’ve arrived at our current position on sexuality in our culture through a violent, bloody, painful culture war. There have been major shifts and changes in the world at a dizzying rate of speed and many people have been challenged to stay up. They just literally cannot track the speed at which things are changing. When you’re in a culture war, one of the things that you look for is actual language and metaphors around war: how you treat the other, whether you villainize or humanize, whether you use war metaphors or relational metaphors.

One of the things that you’re going to see is that on both sides of this issue, there’s been war and there’s been villainization. I said last week, “Everything is about sex, except sex which is about power,” and tonight you will see how true that is.

So on one side of the culture war, I want to start tonight with people who view gay relationships primarily through the lens of injustice. For them, this is a justice-framed issue, and this falls in line with a long tradition of America’s promise of equality but failure in many ways to pay out and cash in on that reality. As a culture, we have valued individual rights and we’ve had a narrative that boasts of inclusion, but when it comes to this issue, many people say this has not been the case. This is primarily an issue of injustice and this really begins coming out of the sexual revolution and protests against Vietnam, with the Stonewall riots down in Greenwich Village. These are a six-day period of riots sparked by police action in the early morning of June 28, 1969 against the popular Greenwich Village gay bar, the Stonewall Inn.

It was considered a quote, “homosexual shot heard around the world” that transformed an American subculture. So if you’ve been down there and you’ve stood out in front of the Stonewall Inn, you have at least some sense of location and history for what I’m talking about. There was a movement—the culture just seemed ripe for the gay community to seize upon this language of rights and revolution and protest to take itself from the fringe of American moral life and to reposition itself at the center.

This was started and got a lot of traction through the Gay Liberation Front. The name gives a little bit away. In 1973, they declared a war with normalcy, and their primary goal was to secure recognition of the legitimacy of same-sex relationships and rights associated with those relationships. This went on for several years, but there was a ton of cultural pushback, and the Gay Liberation Front stayed primarily a front.

Now the AIDS epidemic began to wreak havoc, causing tremendous confusion and heartbreak for the gay community, and a lot of the efforts that were originally pushed towards cultural change shifted their perspective and attention to what’s caring for one another. People were dying at a heartbreaking and staggering rate; people didn’t know what to do. As they were wrestling and hashing out how to respond to the AIDS crisis, they realized that if they were going to see the kind of breakthroughs connected to medicine and funding for AIDS research, they would have to again put a front on to shift Americans' perception about gay relationships.

So in February 1998, a war conference of 175 leading gay activists representing organizations from across the land convened in Warrenton, Virginia, near Washington DC, to establish a four-point agenda for the gay rights movement in America.

Now after that meeting, Harvard-trained social scientists and gay activists Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen wrote a homosexual manifesto that promised to dismiss the movement's outworn techniques in favor of carefully calculated public relations propaganda laying the groundwork for the next stage of the gay revolution and its ultimate victory over bigotry.

Now this is written in a book called *After the Ball*. How many of you have read the book *After the Ball*? Okay, there’s one person here. I am consistently the only person I’ve met that’s read this book, and you—so thank you for that. Maybe because it’s $89.99 used on Amazon and you just can hardly get it, but it really is a fascinating book and to read it is basically to reverse-engineer how we got to our cultural moment. They had a three-pronged strategy to take on what they perceived as bigotry and resistance to gay relationships in America.

And here’s what it was: desensitize Americans to gay relationships, jam up all opposition, and convert popular opinion.

So desensitize—now I’m quoting from the book. Desensitize: “We want a continuous flood of gay-related advertising presented in the least offensive fashion possible. If straights can’t shut off the shower, they may at least eventually get used to being wet. The main thing is to talk about gayness until the issue becomes thoroughly tiresome; seek desensitization and nothing more. If you can get straights to think homosexuality is just another thing meriting no more than a shrug of the shoulders, then your battle for legal and social rights is virtually won.”

So the first wave was one of desensitizing the American public to the concept of gay relationships. The second strategy was that of jamming and blocking any dissent. This was an attempt using economic and advertising and political means to push back on and to attack people who were attacking the gay community. This was incredibly effective, and I don’t have time to go into it tonight, but one modern example that showed up was from *Rolling Stone* magazine.

[Next slide] This is an article: “Meet the mega donor behind the LGBTQ rights movement. He turned a $500 million fortune into the nation’s most powerful force for the gay community’s rights,” and he basically set his personal fortune to take on anybody who challenged the legitimacy and the rights of the gay community, particularly focused on legislation and popular opinion.

[Next slide] Here’s why he’s controversial: “We’re going into the hardest states in the country," he says, "and we’re going to punish the wicked.”

So his response is that anybody who doesn’t affirm same-sex relationships is wicked, and he’s allowing or aligning a half-billion fortune to punish those people.

Then the third strategy—by the way, I’m just trying to present this as like historical fact. I’m not trying to moralize this at all; I’m just—because you’ll see that I’m not trying to moralize this in a moment—and then the third strategy was to convert American opinion.

Now there’s an author named David Carter who wrote this book here—a fascinating book titled *Stonewall*. Now 14 years ago, there I am, and as I’m making these videos, we end up in New York City and Malcolm Gladwell’s book has come out called *The Tipping Point*. So I’m standing in front of the Stonewall Inn, and a gentleman walks by and says to me, “Hey, are you filming something about the Stonewall riots?” I said, “Oh actually, I am.” He said, “Hey, there’s a wonderful book written by a local man who was actually there, and you should check it out.” I said, “Oh, that’s wonderful.”

So we go over to Barnes & Noble and pick up the book, and while I’m holding the book, another guy walks past and says, “Oh, that book’s fantastic! A friend of mine wrote it! You know he was actually there when the riots happened.” I see you’ve got camera gear. “Would you like to interview him?” and I was like, “Okay, thank you very much.”

So 20 minutes later, I’m in this guy’s apartment in the Village talking to him about what he saw and what he learned, and I’ll never forget he said to me that after the riots, we basically organized around three main goals. Number one was to remove homosexuality as a disorder from the American Psychological Association. Goal number one: this is not a mental illness or a condition.

Number two, that we would have a legislative approach: we would strike down sodomy laws and establish legal protections for gay relationships.

Then he said the third one is an attack on the church to get homosexuality removed as being seen as sin. He said the first two are going remarkably well; the real challenge is the church.

I remember just listening to him saying that, and that’s fascinating—the level of lobbying, education, media, law, art, entertainment, money spent, behind-the-scenes interests to the conversion of the American opinion towards supporting same-sex relationships has been nothing short of extraordinary.

So here’s the quotes from the book again: “Conversion of the average American’s emotions, mind, and will will happen through a planned psychological attack in the form of propaganda fed to the nation by the media. The public should be persuaded that gays are victims of circumstance; they no more choose their sexual orientation than their height. For all practical purposes, gay should be considered to have been born gay, even though sexual orientation for most humans seems to be the product of a complex interaction between innate predispositions and environmental factors during childhood and early adolescence.”

To suggest in public that homosexuality might be chosen is to open the can of worms labeled moral choice and sin, which gives the religious right a stick to beat us with.

Then, first, when you get your foot in the door by being as similar as possible, then—and only then—when your one little difference in orientation is finally accepted can you start dragging in your other peculiarities one by one. You hammer in the wet, the wedge narrow at first, and as the saying goes, allow the camel’s nose beneath your tent and his whole body will soon follow.

So many people have studied this and concluded that this is the most successful cultural shift that's ever occurred in human history, and I think it’s absolutely true.

Now, like I said, I’m not trying to moralize this. For many people, this was the most important cause of their life. This was about injustice, but it has been incredibly effective. But when I start talking to some of my gay friends today, they say things like, “I’m getting a little worried about where this is headed because punishing the wicked doesn’t seem like the way to end the culture wars. It seems like we’re rearming for round two, three, four, five, six, and seven.”

Andrew Sullivan, who’s a very thoughtful gay man, wrote this article here, very interesting, called “The Gay Rights Movement is Undoing Its Best Work.” He basically makes the case that trying to punish the wicked will backfire and that the gay community have worked so hard to enjoy their current rights that they should enjoy them rather than having war-only metaphors.

So, and that’s one gay man’s opinion about how this has worked.

**The other side of this**, if this was about injustice, there was another side culturally that viewed this primarily through the lens of immorality. This is a conservative agenda based on an issue. This is the other side of the continuum, and the Moral Majority—someone like Jerry Falwell spoke up—and they just said this is about morality. Some of the issues which the Moral Majority campaigned included promotion of a traditional vision of family life, opposition to media outlets that claim to promote an anti-family agenda, opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, and strategic arms limitation talks; opposition to state recognition or acceptance of homosexual acts; prohibition of abortion even in cases involving incest, rape, or pregnancies where the life of the mother is at stake; support for Christian prayers in schools; marketing to Jews and other non-Christians for conversion to conservative Christianity.

So this was a strategy; this was a rallying cry; this was a force—this was the other side of the culture war. Here are some comments from the founder of the Moral Majority: “AIDS is not just God’s punishment for homosexuals; it’s God’s punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals.”

The idea that religion and politics don’t mix was invented by the devil to keep Christians from running their own country. Someone must not be afraid to say moral perversion is wrong, and if we do not act now, homosexuals will own America. If you and I do not speak up now, this homosexual steamroller will literally crush all decent men, women, and children who get in its way, and our nation will pay a terrible price. Tinky Winky is gay; Tinky Winky is gay. If you’re not a born-again Christian, you’re a failure as a human being.

Then the selection—or the major success culturally in terms of legislation—was the DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act, which basically at the federal level ensured that marriage would be only between a man and a woman. One Corinthians chapter 5 says it is not my job to judge those outside the church, but it’s my job to judge those inside the church. The thing that was so heartbreaking—by the way, next slide—they chose it was Bill Clinton who signed the Defense of Marriage Act: Bill Clinton on the Defense of Marriage.

[Music]

What this has led to is heartbreak. So a lot of people, if they are assessing the state of Christianity today in light of the culture war, next slide—we’re writing books like this, *UnChristian*.

In *UnChristian*, a survey done, it basically said that over 90% of people, the first thing they think of when they think of Christianity is anti-gay, and the second thing is too political. The church is the casualty to the people it’s trying to reach; it’s the victim of its own fight for the culture.

In other books like this—this is a follow-up book to this—this is *Good Faith: Being a Christian When Society Thinks You’re Irrelevant and Extreme*. And then this book here, written by Dave Kinnaman, *You Lost Me: Why Young Christians Are Leaving the Church*. They’re leaving the church because they’re exhausted, because they’re tired, because this felt like a failed project, as one of my friends who came out while being a part of our congregation said to me while we were having coffee and he was leaving our church, “Look man, I’m just exhausted. I don’t want to read any more of your books. I don’t want to talk about Hebrew language or the Holiness Code. I just want some people to accept me, and I’m exhausted.”

And he left. No capacity, no space, no heart—just felt overwhelmed and attacked like the church fought a war and I lost. Do you feel that?

What you think about these relationships has been deeply formed by our culture in both directions. If you’re violently opposed, if you’re a gay activist, much of what you believe has been informed by this culture war. And so we have to acknowledge that much of us are just walking around with gut instincts that have been formed, that haven’t been carefully thought about and haven’t been nuanced.

So that’s part one. Now we’re gonna move to part two. That was the introduction. Now we’re gonna move to part two. So you can imagine the tension then of wading into the actual biblical text and answering the question, “What does the Bible say then about same-sex relationships?”

How do you just push off the justice cries for a minute and how do you push off the immorality cries for a minute and have like a thoughtful walk through the Scriptures? Well, that’s what I want to try and do tonight.

Now, anybody who knows me knows that I have always held to the historic position that the church has held on same-sex relationships, but people have rarely said to me “Why?” You seem so kind and thoughtful. “Why?” Or if they’ve said, “Hey, I’d love to grab coffee. Could we just walk through those passages?” I think they like the idea of that until we start doing it, but it’s hard and it’s technical.

But what I want to do tonight is walk through five passages, and I want to give you my reasons as a pastor why I don’t find the progressive arguments compelling. Now at the end of this, I’ll give you a very, very fair curated list of affirming people who affirm these relationships, progressive positions, and then the historic position. You can read them back and forth.

I’ve got to warn you. This is what it’s going to feel like: “Oh my gosh, this is so true. Oh my gosh, this is so true. Oh my gosh, this is so true. Oh my gosh, this is—I’ve never seen that.”

At some point, the arguments begin to—you get clarity and you can sort of see it. So what I’m going to give you tonight, after reading a ton on both sides, I’m going to give you my settled clarity that I’ve worked hard to arrive on.

So I also want to say that, let’s just—can we skip that section on the place where we come from and jump into what the Bible actually says about gay relationships?

Now what I want you to see here is that this is what the Bible is inviting you into. It’s not inviting you to deal with the issue primarily of injustice or immorality; it’s an invitation from the God of the universe to be rescued and redeemed from broken sinful humanity into a glorious future in the kingdom of God.

It is fundamentally an invitation—an invitation to gay people; it’s an invitation to straight people; it’s an invitation to people somewhere on that continuum. It is primarily an invitation of a loving God rescuing the whole of his creation. So all of these verses have to be framed through that to begin with.

So I want to start with the Bible starts in the book of Genesis. This is our first passage together: Genesis chapter 2.

Let’s read this.

The Lord God said, “It is not good for man to be alone; I will make a helper suitable for him.” Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them, and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds in the sky, and all the wild animals. But for Adam, no suitable helper was found.

So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep, and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man’s ribs and then closed up the place with flesh. Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man and brought her to the man.

The man said, “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called ‘woman’ for she was taken out of man.” And that is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they will become one flesh. Adam and Eve were both naked, and they felt no shame.

Now this passage is a beautiful poetic account. Suspend your questions about science; read it for what it is: a beautiful poetic account of the creation of the world. It’s the creation of order; it’s the creation of beauty. There’s a vision of human flourishing; there’s rich human purpose. And it’s also an introduction to gender and sexuality amongst human beings.

Now the key question for us tonight is the phrase “a suitable helper.” What is meant by “there was no suitable helper found for Adam,” so God had to create one for him?

Well, the progressive opinion says this: what Adam needed was not necessarily a woman but a human. The emphasis is not necessarily on gender but it’s on kind. It was here that Adam needed humanity, not animal, and it was Eve’s humanity, not her gender, that made her a suitable companion for gay people. People of the opposite gender are not appropriate because they’re not attracted to them sexually or relationally.

So you can substitute a suitable helper as long as they’re human. That’s the key issue in this text. Now there’s more weight to this than you would know when you study this deeply in the Hebrew, but I don’t want to get to that tonight, because there are actually areas of overlap. So I want to pull out the points that I think bring contrast and clarity.

So let’s jump in. But is Eve’s humanness the only thing that qualifies her as a suitable helper? I think her female-ness actually played a role as well. The Hebrew word translated suitable by the NIV is “kenegdo,” and it is only used here in the Old Testament 280 and 220. Kenegdo is somewhat difficult to translate into English since it is a compound word made up of “key,” which means “as” or “like,” and “negdo,” which means “opposite,” “against,” or “in front of.” Together the word means something like “as opposite him” or “like against him.”

It’s a complex word that captures how it is that Eve can qualify as the perfect partner for Adam. So the first response to this is that God has actually made Eve, and one of the things that works in their relationship is not just that she is like Adam; it’s that she’s different as well.

Here’s the relevant point: if it were simply Eve’s humanist that made her a helper, then the word “key” like would have just been fine. The verse would then read, “I will make a helper like him.” But to make the point that Adam needed not just another human but a different sort of human—a female—God used the word “kenegdo.”

This would potentially convey both similarity (key) and dissimilarity (negdo). Eve is a human and not an animal, which is why she’s like Adam, but she’s also a female and not a male, which is why she’s different than Adam or opposite him. No longer are we just talking about Adam and Eve in Genesis 2:24 here, because the author of Genesis goes on and says for this reason then, because God made the male and female opposite but like, we’re talking about God’s basic design for marriage.

This is why this verse is so often quoted in the New Testament when the question comes up. So according to this passage, there seems to be three things necessary for a marriage according to Genesis 2:

- Both partners need to be human.

- Both partners have to come from different families.

- Both partners have to display sexual difference.

This is what the Hebrew is alluding to. Continuing on, it’s striking too that the sexual difference of men and women in Genesis 1 and 2 appears to reflect many other differing pairs embedded in creation. Notice that Genesis 1 ripples with a creative display of diversity that complements each other: God and creation, light and darkness, earth and sky, sun and moon, land and sea, humans and animals. At the pinnacle of God’s creation stands the masterpiece of male and female. God created mankind, male and female He created them.

Creation is not uniform but a beautiful display of differences interacting with each other. The coming together of male and female in marital and sexual union is the height of creation’s astonishing union of otherness. So what it does is situate the different male and female sexes in the larger creational design of God, bringing together otherness back into unity, and Adam and Eve’s sexual difference seems to be a beautiful and intentional necessity for marriage according to this passage.

Now at some point, you may respond with, “Yeah, but that’s not prescriptive, that’s descriptive.” Maybe we’ll see as we go along whether anybody else in the New Testament used this as a prescription for marriage. Now I want to skip over Sodom and Gomorrah because, honestly, I think it has nothing to do with this debate. I want to jump into Leviticus 18 and Leviticus chapter 20.

Now how many of you, other than Susie, love the book of Leviticus? I’m telling you, Spirit-filled Christians doing their through-the-Bible-in-a-year plan are like, “Holy Spirit!” when it comes to the book of Leviticus. So I’m sure you’re excited for me to give you a quick tour of these verses in Leviticus connected to this issue. Leviticus 18:22 says, “Do not have sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman; that’s detestable.” Leviticus 20:13 says, “If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their heads.”

Now the context of this passage: children of Israel are going to enter into the promised land. God wants them to have a different culture, a different ethical vision, and different practices that make them holy and set apart from the nations that God is driving out because of their debauched practices. The big idea in Leviticus is the word holy—the word holy or holiness occurs 87 times in Leviticus. Holiness is the book’s overarching theme.

If you didn’t pick up the whole of the system of Israel’s worship, assume the holiness of God as a starting place. You have holy people, the priests, with holy clothes in a holy land, at a holy place, using holy utensils and holy objects, celebrating holy days, living by holy law that there may be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. The second half of Leviticus from chapter 17 onward is sometimes called the Holiness Code after all of that introduction because it details how the Israelites will deliver as God’s holy people.

So Leviticus 19:2 gives the underlying command—the theme, the motivation of this: “You shall be holy, for either Lord your God am holy.” Now believe it or not, these verses have generated some level of controversy in recent years. So there are two main questions that you have to ask to get to the heart of this issue of same-sex relationships in the book of Leviticus, and here’s what they are: What is the issue that is being forbidden in this text? And is it still relevant for us today?

These are the two questions you have to answer on this issue. The progressive position says this, and I’m going to give three responses to the first part. Number one—and I'm not trying to say this; I want to say this carefully—but the argument in essence says this: the Old Testament passages don’t apply to us today because we’re in the new covenant.

Let me suggest a few reasons why I don’t find the progressive position to carry enough weight on this issue.

Number one: we don’t just throw the Old Testament out. This has not been the way that it’s been interpreted. There’s no indication in the New Testament that Leviticus should be treated as obscure, peripheral, or irrelevant. Jesus referred to Leviticus 19, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” more than any other verse in the Old Testament. The New Testament refers to it ten times. Both Peter and Paul quite Leviticus as a part of their summons to holiness, continuing the vision of holiness.

The authors of the New Testament did not hesitate to turn to Leviticus to find instruction and exhortation for godly living. Consistently, Paul does this in 1 Corinthians, and to establish the sinfulness of incest, he condemns incest by using the book of Leviticus in the New Testament.

The New Testament authors seem to find Leviticus’ moral obligations still binding on Christians, and the sexual ethic of the Old Testament still carried through to the New Testament. I’m going to give you an example. So when you look at this passage, Leviticus 18 and 20, it’s almost how it’s treated like a version of the Sermon on the Mount. By that I mean a block of teaching—you’ve got to read it in context.

So if we can go to this slide here, you see these are some of the things that are covered: incest, adultery, child sacrifice, bestiality, theft, lying, taking the Lord’s name in vain, oppressing your neighbor, cursing the death, showing partiality in a court of law, slander, hating your brother, making your daughter a prostitute, turning to witches or necromancers, and then there’s the exhortation: you should love your neighbor as yourself.

So I say all of this to say many of the prohibitions that we know are explicitly forbidden in the New Testament in the areas of sexuality come from this very passage, and we don’t throw them out because they’re found in the Holiness Code. Paul uses the term, and we’re going to get to this later when we look at First Corinthians 6 and First Timothy 1. Paul coins a phrase that basically takes these very readings about same-sex relationships in the book of Leviticus and applies them directly to same-sex relationships in the New Testament.

Christians have always said that when you read the Old Testament, you have to read it through a lens of the moral law, the ceremonial law, and the civil law. The ceremonial law, which is much of the temple and sacrificial system, has been fulfilled in Jesus—that’s no longer relevant to us. The civil law is not relevant to us because we’re not a theocracy, so the death penalty and those sorts of things don’t apply.

But the moral law of God is true for all people in all places at all times, and this is what carries through from the Old Testament to the New Testament, and this is what we see happening in this passage. So to be able to say these passages don’t apply because the Old Testament, I don’t think carries enough weight, particularly based on how New Testament authors use these very passages to determine their sexual ethic.

Secondly, the claim that this passage is opposing these relationships because they’re feminizing the passive partner in the sexual encounter, and the claim here is that there’s a low view of women, but I don’t think this works in light of Genesis chapter 1, which is what this verse seems to be alluding to as well.

Because if you read Genesis 1 in light of other ancient Near Eastern creation accounts, you would realize this is the only account where women are given the dignity of being image bearers of God and co-created as equals with men. So it seems strange to me that God holds women in such high regard, and then the next passage is saying if you become like a woman, that you’re committing some sort of cultural sin. I don’t think that carries enough weight.

And then lastly, the idea that this is coercive sex. The problem with this passage—and that I don’t think you can say that this is talking about homosexual behavior in the victimization category—is that in this account both people were to be put to death. The Mosaic law prescribed no punishment for a woman who was first forcibly seized by a man; the man was punished, but not the victim.

If this is a question of rape as in the hands of a master, a conquering army, or a violent mob, only the aggressor would be put to death. Leviticus is trying to do more than outlaw unwanted same-sex assault or behavior. When homosexuality is condemned amongst the Assyrians or the Hittites, it’s often been for a very specific sort of act, not the general term that’s used here.

And yet there’s no suggestion in Leviticus that we’re talking about this narrow kind of exploitative behavior. The phrase “as with a woman” is significant because, of course, to mind Genesis 2 where God made the first woman from the side of the man, and he lay with her as a unique compliment. So I don’t think that the feminization of the partner works, so when I look at this passage and I look at these claims, I don’t feel they carry enough weight to overturn the traditional teaching on this passage.

Now before we turn to the New Testament and we look at some very uncontroversial passages in Greek language, I do want to take a moment to talk about same-sex relationships in the Greco-Roman world and the Jewish and Christian understanding of what was happening at the time the New Testament was written. It’s very important because many of the claims based in the progressive position are this: they didn’t know about orientation, and they didn’t know about committed same-sex monogamous relationships.

So I want to acknowledge, yes, there was a diversity of all kinds of relationships when it came to sexuality around the time of the writing of the New Testament.

There were master-slave sexual relationships that were exploited; there was prostitution; there was gender confusion related sexual activity; there was pederasty, and there were committed stable loving long-term monogamous relationships. There was a reality in recognition of committed same-sex relationships.

So I’d like to give you some cultural examples. It is simply untrue to say that Paul would not know about enduring same-sex love. So if you want to get the big books out: C. A. Williams’ *Roman Homosexuality* from Oxford Press, K. J. Dover's *Greek Homosexuality* from Harvard University Press—they both make the claim, though they both would fall into the progressive category, they make the claim that there were enduring same-sex loving relationships at the time of the writing of the New Testament.

Several examples: Plutarch, who was a pagan moralist from the first and second century, in an extended treatment on love called *The Dialogue on Love* in Moralia, and it’s an extended discourse on love comparing homosexual love with heterosexual love. He ultimately lands on heterosexual marriage but talks about many in his day who thought that same-sex love was actually a beautiful thing.

He also, in this dialogue, makes a distinction between homosexual sex that’s just mere pleasure and base and unworthy and homosexual practice that is beautiful, courteous, and rooted in relationship. Plato's *Symposium* in his work called *Protagoras* mentions two men who are lovers; they will love us for more than ten years after they’ve both reached full adulthood.

Agathon was a famous Greek poet known for his physical beauty; he was also known for dressing like a woman and having a lifelong consensual love relationship with a man named Phaedrus. There’s a Greek philosopher, Parmenides, 65 years old who was in a same-sex relationship with Xenophon’s second-century A.D. novel.

Now we’re moving into cultural literature—named *An Ephesian Tale*—depicts a young man named Hypothesis who falls in love with another man of the same age named Hyperanthes. Hypothesis says, quote: “Our first steps in love making were kisses and caresses; while I shed floods of tears, we were both the same age. No one was suspicious for a long time; we were together passionately in love.”

There’s also evidence of gay marriages in antiquity. They didn’t have the full Roman legal status, so I’m not trying to say they’re an exact cultural equivalent of what we have today, but they were considered amongst themselves joined as spouses.

Consensual same-sex loving marriages can be found among women around the time of Paul. A second-century writer named Lambilicos talks about the marriage between two women named Berenice in Mesopotamia. Lucian of Samasata also mentions the marriage of two wealthy women named Magilla and Damanasa. The early Christian theologian Clement of Alexandria refers to women’s marriages, and Ptolemy of Alexandria, a famous second-century scholar of many trades, refers to women taking each other as lawful wives.

Two Jewish documents that were written shortly after the New Testament refer to women forbidding female marriages that were happening in their day. Several archaeological discoveries depict mutual love between women, including funeral relief that dates back to the time of Augustus, where two women are holding hands in a way that resembles quote, “the classical gesture of ancient Roman married couples.”

So Anti-whites says, “As a classicist, I have to say that when I read Plato’s *Symposium* or when I read the accounts from the early Roman Empire of the practice of homosexuality, and it seems to me that they knew just about as much about it as we do.”

In particular, a point which is often missed—they knew a great deal about what people would regard as longer-term reasonable stable relations between two people of the same gender. This is not a modern invention; it’s already there in Plato. The idea that in Paul’s day it was always a matter of exploitation of younger men by older men or whatever, of course there was plenty of that then as there is today, but it was by no means the only thing they knew about the whole range of options there.

I think we’ve been conned by Michael Foucault into thinking this is a new phenomenon. Paul certainly knew of enduring same-sex love, but it wasn’t called homosexuality as that was a term coined in the 19th century. But the term heterosexuality was also coined in the 19th century, and Paul probably had an awareness of that.

There’s also some sort of awareness of what we would call sexual orientation. Thomas K. Hubbard, who’s a classicist at the University of Texas in Austin, wrote a book, *Homosexuality in Greece and Rome: A Sourcebook of Basic Documents*, says this: “The coincidence of such severity on the part of moralistic writers with the flagrant and open display of every form of homosexual behavior by Nero and other practitioners indicates a culture in which attitudes about this issue increasingly defined one's ideological and moral position.”

In other words, in this era of the early imperial age of Rome, homosexuality may have ceased to be merely another practice of personal pleasure and began to be viewed as an essential and central category of personal identity, exclusive of and antithetical to heterosexual relations.

He points to a series of later texts from the second to the fourth centuries that reflect the perception that sexual orientation was something fixed and incurable. Now what I’m about to read is the accounts they use that talk about orientation—they are not scientific:

- A mix of male and female sperm elements at conception.

- A disease of the mind and soul that was influenced indirectly.

- Biological factors made hard to resist due to socialization.

- A biological factor analogous to a mutated gene.

- Sperm ducts leading to the anus that caused men to want to have sex with men, or the alignment of heavily constellations at birth that influenced your orientation.

So there was this understanding that there was a category of people who seemed to be involuntarily and permanently attracted to people of the opposite sex.

Now what’s interesting is that you have to take into account—this is my last boot on the culture surrounding the New Testament—that there was a total Jewish condemnation of same-sex relationships clearly articulated 500 years before and after the time of Jesus Christ. Now why this is interesting is the Jews, as a part of the diaspora, were situated in almost every place on the earth with a full awareness of culture, and it was consistent Jewish practice which informs people who are Jews like Paul and Jesus about their understanding of same-sex relationships.

So with that in mind, let’s jump into the New Testament. We’re just going to look at a couple of passages, particularly Romans chapter 1, and again trying to ask these core questions about what’s actually happening here and does this apply today.

Now the context of Romans 1—Romans 1 is a theological tour de force by the Apostle Paul. I mean this is a magisterial book, and it’s also kind of hard to read, but the context of Romans chapter 1 through 3 is important to understand because Paul is launching to an argument that sweeps from Romans 1:18 all the way to Romans 3:26—basically saying you’re all damned without Jesus.

Literally, the first part sums up the sins of the Gentiles, the second part accuses the Jews of being just as wicked, and the third part concludes that apart from Jesus Christ, Jew and Gentile are all shut up under sin. He then says what is worse is that we can’t save ourselves by any of our good works or by trying to obey the law religiously; we’re shut up under God’s wrath, and then the good news of the life-giving message of Jesus Christ comes as an atoning sacrifice for our sin. That’s the big picture of these passages.

Now in Romans chapter 1, there’s a series of exchanges where Paul’s trying to make the case to the Gentiles that they’re sinful. There’s one exchange of the creator for creation, there’s an exchange of God for the self, and there’s an exchange for that which is natural for that which is unnatural.

So let’s turn to that passage, Romans 1:24-27.

“Therefore, God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator, who is forever praised. Amen. Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way, the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.”

Now, two questions we have to ask in this passage:

1. What is the desire driving this kind of sex, and is it natural?

2. What is the nature of these kinds of same-sex relationships?

So here’s what the progressive position says—and I’ve got to tell you, I am sympathetic toward this.

Number one: this is not about committed monogamous same-sex relationships; this is about heterosexual excess. The language of passions and lusts seems to talk about people whose appetites were out of control and they were going outside of their normal heterosexual relationships in a lust-fueled desire for sexual exploration and pleasure.

And the second thing is that this kind of sex is exploitative sex—master-slave, prostitution, call boys—it’s a weird dynamic, it’s a coercive culture, and this doesn’t reflect committed loving same-sex relationships. Paul’s not critiquing same-sex love but the abuse of power and the commodification of people in sexuality.

And I think it is safe to say that many people I know who would describe themselves as gay and Christian would say, “When I read this passage, this is not me and this is not what I’m talking about,” and I think that’s true.

However, the historic position of the church makes the claim that though individual people participating in this practice may not be manifesting all of the characteristics of the practice, Paul is not arguing against the motive that you enter into it but the nature of it himself. The sin is against nature as seen in Genesis, not nature based on a person’s orientation or desire.

So Paul’s reference point about appropriate same-sex relations are found in Genesis 1 and 2. So Paul is filling his arguments in Romans 1 with allusions to the creation accounts in Genesis 1. Earlier, Paul says in verse 1 through 20 that God has revealed himself since the creation of the world.

In Romans 1:25, Paul refers to God as the Creator, which points the reader back to Genesis again. He alerts the reader into Genesis 1 and 2 and uses gender-specific terms to describe men and women—that is, males, “arsen,” and females, “theleia,” the same language that’s used in Romans 1:26-27 to the only other accounts found like that in Genesis.

In Romans 1:23, Paul says they exchange the glory of the immortal God for images, I can ask in the likeness of mortal mankind, and birds, and animals, and reptiles. In fact, this should be up on the screen, next slide here.

So I’ve tried to basically highlight and show you that what this passage is filled with is intertextual issues—sorry, echoes. So if you’re listening to this passage, you’re like, “This is reminding me of something,” particularly if you understand your language, you’re like, “Where have I read this before?” Oh! Paul is basically saying that when he’s talking about nature, he’s not talking about a person’s orientation; he’s talking about nature as God has defined and created it as the Creator, and it fills the languages with the Genesis accounts to make the point there.

So Genesis has much to say about the nature of male and female complementarity. In verse 25, 27 and 32 he talks about shame, the sentence of death, and believing a lie—all allusions to the fallen Genesis chapter 3. So he says, “This is how God made the world according to Genesis,” and you can see how the Roman culture is distorting this.

They are going against nature—not personal orientation, but nature that God the Creator has defined by male and female. So same-sex practice is rejected because it violates the divine design in creation according to Paul’s logic. Men and women who engage in same-sex behavior, even if they’re being true to their own feelings and desires, have suppressed God’s truth and the fittedness of male-female relations as God has designed them.

So this is not about a—this is not a rejection of coercive relationships, but a rejection of same-sex relationships. The emphasis on exchange makes clear that Paul is thinking of activity in general, not a bad or abusive kind of gay relationship.

So here’s why this is not about heterosexual lust: because in verse 27 that both parties were consumed with passion for one another. So this is not a power dynamic of one wanting it and one not wanting it. They’re consumed with passion for one another. A key point here that is very, very hard to interact with is that among male relationships, there were definitely accounts of power dynamics, control, and coercion, but there’s no such accounts with female relationships.

And so his critique is not these are a power dynamic; there is no power dynamic recorded in history with female same-sex relationships. The condemnation that Paul is talking about is the fact that they’re with the same sex, not the motivation that’s behind them.

Two commentators: “The honest interpreter should recognize how general Paul’s language is. He doesn’t describe homosexual prostitution, men having sex with boys, or reckless orgies, nor does he bemoan the passive partner in male-male sexual encounters, as many of his Greco-Roman contemporaries did. Paul doesn’t draw attention to violating the social picking order of the Roman class system as other authors did, and contrary to the opinion of modern scholars, Paul does not showcase a low view of women here. Rather, Paul uses basic terms and language of mutuality: male and female, natural and unnatural, one another—to describe consensual same-sex acts.”

Then an affirming writer says this: “According to one interpretation, Paul’s words were not directed at bona fide homosexuals in committed relationships.”

But such a reading, however well-intentioned, seems strained and unhistorical. Nowhere does Paul or any other Jewish writer of this period imply the least acceptance of same-sex relations under any circumstance.

Here’s the key: the idea that homosexuals might be redeemed by mutual devotion would have been wholly foreign to Paul or any other Jew or early Christian. Gender is the point, not orientation or exploitation or domination.

The use of “exchanging” the natural relationship as defined in Genesis between a man and a woman for unnatural same-sex according to Romans 1.

1 Corinthians 6 and 1 Timothy.

So this is an account we read. This is our teaching text: Do you not know that the wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Don’t be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who have sex with men, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor slanderers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. That’s what some of you were, but you were washed; you were sanctified; you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and by the Spirit of your God.

1 Timothy 1: “We know that the law is good if one uses it properly. We also know that the law is made not for the righteous but for the lawbreakers and rebels, the ungodly and sinful, the unholy and irreligious, for those who kill their fathers or mothers, for murderers, for the sexually immoral, for those practicing homosexuality, for slave traders and liars and perjurers, and for whatever else is contrary to the sound doctrine that conforms to the gospel concerning the glory of the blessed God which was entrusted to me.”

Now there’s so much happening in this passage. Paul is speaking to the Corinthian church primarily; we’re going to spend our time in 1 Corinthians, not 1 Timothy. He uses a challenging set of Greek words here. Now there’s not a lot of context about the words that he is using here.

There is a ton of conjecture about what is happening in this text. Here’s the two Greek words: “malakoi,” which means “soft” in essence; soft—that’s used in other parts of the gospel to refer to soft material—and “arsenokoitai,” which literally means in Greek “men who bed men” or “men who lie with other men.”

Now this passage has been infamously translated and caused tremendous psychological harm to people who are same-sex attracted. I’ll get some examples here. This is sort of like a little chart of how this is translated:

So “Malakoi” in 1 Corinthians 6:9: “men who practice homosexuality”; “anyone practicing homosexuality”; “effeminate”; “abusers of themselves with mankind”; “boy prostitutes”; “practicing homosexuals”; “effeminate homosexuals”; “men who have sex with men”; “homosexuals”; “sodomites”; “male prostitutes”; “those who practice homosexuality”; “male prostitutes”; “sodomites.”

You can see that this is very, very confusing because let me ask you the question: what is homosexuality? What is it? Is it an orientation? Is it a behavior? Is it a practice? Can you be homosexual in your orientation but not homosexual in your practice?

This is a word loaded with cultural meaning; this is a word that’s deeply misunderstood; this is a word that has caused a lot of pain and a lot of hurt, and I wish they didn’t use this term.

I think the NIV down here: “men who have sex with men” is the best translation of this, and many, many other scholars do too, because this is the most literal reading, because that puts the emphasis on behavior, not some sort of orientation. And it takes away the other categories and misunderstanding that exist in our culture connected to the word homosexuality.

Now in these passages, the progressive view basically makes this claim: the language is unclear and we can’t really know what it means. There are no examples of “arsenokoitai” in the surviving Greek literature prior to Paul’s use of the term in 1 Corinthians and 1 Timothy, so it’s hard to get a semantic range or understanding of the words surrounding it.

And the word is a compound of “man” (arsen) and “bed” (koitai). We get the term coitus and could literally be translated “betters of men” or “those who take males to bed.” So the language is unclear—what are we talking about here? We can’t compare this to how it’s used in a bunch of other literature.

And secondly, this is speaking exclusively about exploitive relationships—probably call boys and prostitution—and some scholars do agree that “malakoi” are call boys.

And this is the definition: malakoi are call boys who sell themselves to other men, and “arsenokoitai” are the men who hire them out—they’re the malakoi.

So the argument is that these two terms are referring to the male prostitute, the soft male prostitute, the receiving partner in male sexual relationships. And on the other side of this you’ve got the person who has called them in, so by very nature these terms are exploitive.

I’m going to be honest with you, there are definitely those kinds of relationships in Greco-Roman culture, but I really do not think that is what is happening. I do not think that is the best translation of this text.

The language may be unclear; there may not be a—it may be hard for us to exactly pinpoint and I don’t have time to go into how the—there’s an equivalent Hebrew term that was used related to this passage that Paul’s probably taking from the Hebrew and transporting it into Greek that has a lot of range around it. But it seems very, very clear and compelling that what Paul is doing is taking two words from Leviticus 18 and 20 and putting them together.

And he’s inventing a phrase from the Old Testament, referencing Leviticus, and using it in the New Testament to make the same case. I want to show you this; let’s go to this slide here.

So here’s what the relevant looks like in the Septuagint, which was the Greek translation of the Old Testament used by Jews in the first century. So look at Leviticus 18: “Do not lie with a male as you do with a woman.”

So you can see how far apart the Greek words are, but when you get to Leviticus 20, what is happening here? “Arsenkoitai” are “arsen” (man) and “koi” (to lie), you can see that they literally sit next to each other, and it’s as though Paul, a Torah-trained rabbi, is referencing the clearest commandment he could find in the Old Testament about what’s happening culturally.

And remember that we said this was not an exploitive—this wasn’t an idolatrous; this was a mutual condemnation that Paul’s addressing, and he says that was in the Old Testament, and it was forbidden then and now in the New Testament these same behaviors are here. And these aren’t appropriate for the people of God.

So to say that, like, these words, “What do these mean? We have no idea culturally,” it’s like, except when you read the Old Testament and then next to each other, and it seems absolutely obvious.

Can I just make a statement here? Have you ever read Shakespeare? Of course you have; it’s infused with biblical references, isn’t it? Now if Shakespeare, writing from a loosely biblical worldview, infused his literature, don’t you think that Paul had the rhetorical skill and the knowledge and the depth of Scripture as a trained rabbi, who probably memorized the whole Torah, in his thinking?

Oh, there it is! And just to put it in, many scholars think this is a weak argument to say we have no idea what these words mean whatsoever. They seem to come together—the understanding of “malakoi” and “arsenokoitai” as outlined above fits with the consensus of modern English translations, fits with the ethics of the Old Testament, fits with the training Paul would have received as a Jewish scholar, and most importantly, fits within the context of Paul’s argument.

It’s as if in 1 Corinthians 6, Paul is saying, “Don’t be deceived! The sexually immoral—oh, that’s—that’s everybody—will not inherit the kingdom of God!” And this includes those who have sex as a part of a pagan ritual, those who have sex with someone other than their spouse, men who played the passive role in homosexual activity, and in keeping with the general prohibition found in the Torah, any male who has sex with another male.

Now it was only about power relationships—that’s the argument that’s put forth. But again, I think these words are clear, and I don’t think that it’s about power relationships. If Paul wanted to shock people with this language, but if Paul wanted to make the case that it was only about exploiting, he had a whole language where he could have carefully articulated the exact kind of relationship he was condemning.

Let’s go to the next slide here: so to put this out, there were other Greek words that were widely used by Christians, Jews, pagans, and everyone else who knew Greek to refer to pederasty. So for instance, the Greek word was used--I’m not going to quote all these—was widely used to refer to the love of boys, a corrupter of boys, a seducer of boys.

Jewish authors especially used the two latter terms to condemn the practice. Another pair of Greek words we used to describe the older man and the boy lover.

So if he wanted to talk about exploiting, he had so many words he could have used, but he doesn’t use any of them. He takes a step back and he says, “I’m condemning these relationships,” or “I’m opposed to these relationships not because they’re about power, but because they’re outside of God’s creational intent.”

In essence, “malakoi” refers to men who thoroughly cross gender boundaries by receiving sex from other men, and “arsenokoitai” refers to men in many ways having sex with other males.

Now, I want to talk about Jesus, because Jesus—we are living in the way of Jesus for the renewal of the city—it’s about Jesus.

So let’s—I want us—I want to show you what Jesus does here with this passage. Now I acknowledge very, very freely that Matthew chapter 19 is not—the context of this passage is not if someone says, “Hey Jesus, I’ve got these two friends at work; they’ve been through Alpha; they’re followers of Jesus now, and they want to get married. What do you think of marriage?”

I’m aware the context of this passage is that Jesus has been questioned about the nature of divorce. However, what’s so fascinating is that Jesus uses the issue of divorce almost as a pulpit to begin to preach about what he thinks marriage should be, as defined and designed by the Creator.

So have a look at Matthew 19:3-12. Some Pharisees came to him to test him, and they asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?”

“Haven’t you read?” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator made them male and female and said, ‘For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they’re no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”

“Why then did Moses command that a man give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away?” Jesus replied, “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard, but it was not this way from the beginning.”

So what is Jesus doing in this passage? Jesus is talking about the beginning; he’s talking about the Creator; he’s talking about male and female. Jesus reiterates that whole claim of gender complementarity, divine design, and creation and uses a debate to close the loop that was hard-hearted in the Old Testament, not under the new covenant.

Then reaffirms the creational account—the same account that Paul uses in Romans chapter one, the same account that’s referenced in Leviticus 18 and 20.

It’s as though Jesus believes that what he taught or what the Scriptures teach in Genesis 1 and where we end in Revelation 21 are a consistent theme about complementary union picturing a story of restoration and recovery.

Jesus roots marriage and gender in creation. Jesus closes the loop from the Old Testament and resets it in creation.

So I want to get back to the three questions I asked at the start: What is your definition of marriage and sexuality? How do you get that definition? And how do the Scriptures support this definition?

I’ve actually spent a lot of time really trying to ask myself the question, “What is my definition of marriage and sexuality?” and how I get this and my definition of marriage and sexuality, according to the Scriptures, is that God creates one man, one woman, for a whole life union, and that’s his plan for marriage and sexuality.

And I get this definition from Genesis and from Moses under the Torah and from the inter-testamental record and from the book of Romans and from the epistles and from Jesus himself in the gospels. That’s how I think the Scriptures support this definition.

Now at this point, you’re probably saying things like, “Yeah, but what about…? What about…?”

So I’m not gonna do this at the seven o’clock, but I will do this at the five o'clock. I’m going to answer all the questions I got emailed in with one minute answers the best I can.

But what about: Are people born gay?

I’m going to read what the American Psychological Association says: “There’s no consensus among scientists about the exact reasons that an individual develops a heterosexual, bisexual, gay, or lesbian orientation. Although much research has examined the possible genetic, hormonal, developmental, social, and cultural influence on sexual orientation, no findings have emerged that permit scientists to conclude that sexual orientation is determined by any particular factor or factors. Many think that nature and nurture both play complex roles. Most people experience little or no sense of choice about their sexual orientation.”

I think that’s probably true. I don’t think people choose to be gay. I don’t—I think it just—I don’t know why it happens, and I don’t think people know why it happens.

Justin Lee, who has written a book called *Torn*, says, “Just because an attraction of drive is biological, though, doesn’t mean it’s okay to act on it. We have all inborn tendencies to sin in any number of ways. If gay people have same-sex attractions, it doesn’t mean it’s okay to act on them.

And if we all agree that gay sex is sinful, that wouldn’t necessarily mean that same-sex attractions aren’t in-born.”

Is it a sin? And does it have biological roots? Those are two completely separate questions.

Here’s my take: people are probably born gay; they’re probably born gay, and we should offer such tremendous compassion—tremendous compassion!—if that’s the case. For many people, this is an unwanted reality, and we should have such kindness, like we do for other people who are born with certain kinds of predispositions towards things.

We should offer such grace and such mercy and such kindness on this issue.

Number two, isn’t this like slavery and women that the church has gotten wrong in the past? Well, no. Sort of. Well, here’s what I mean: in the Bible, in the Bible, there’s mixed data on women. So you know that from the—so I’ve talked about Genesis 1. Adam and Eve have created equals; we’ve got examples of judges and prophetesses; we’ve got examples of teachers, apostolic church planters, leaders; Jesus cared for women consistently through the scripture; you have women involved in legitimate positions of leadership.

So yes, the church has done many dumb things, and in many cases has oppressed women, but it’s not because the Bible says you should; there’s mixed data and mixed opinion consistently.

The same thing with the issue of slavery: slavery is forbidden in some forms in the Old Testament and it’s affirmed in others. As I’ve taught on this issue before, it was a different kind of slavery, but you will see that they didn’t believe that that slavery was an institution designed by God to be defended and enshrined.

In fact, Paul says if you can get your freedom, get it. And the trajectory of the Scriptures from the Old Testament to the New Testament is like this.

On top of that, many of the great leaders in the abolitionist movement were Christians who did this because of the Christian faith. So it’s true that the church has had a bad take on this before, but it’s not because they were following the Bible on this issue.

But when you study the issue of same-sex relationships consistently through the Old Testament and the New Testament, there’s no trajectory like there is with women and like there is slavery; it’s a consistent position.

Can people change their orientation? Well, probably not. I don’t—I don’t know. I think that reparative therapy is probably terrible. I don’t see that helping people, and some of the horror stories I hear, I’m like that should be made illegal; it sounds in many ways like forms of child abuse, and it sounds terrible.

But on the other hand, I have friends who are part of this community who, preparing for this series, have said to me that God’s done a work in my heart where I feel an attraction to the opposite sex. I don’t know; I don’t want to doubt their experience either.

So I certainly know this: that nobody should ever try and force somebody to change their orientation through any form of coercion or shame.

Connected to that is, “Is a gay orientation sinful?”

I don’t think it is. The Scripture addresses multiple kinds of sin. James says there’s a desire that gives birth to sin, but the desire is not necessarily sin.

And when you follow the logic of his argument in the book of James, I think you’ll see clearly that it’s possible to have to act to have desires towards all sorts of things, but it doesn’t become sin until you act on it.

So I don’t think that having a same-sex orientation is sinful.

What about the church’s hypocrisy? We’ve got so many other issues: what about our issues of like gluttony and divorce and these sorts of things? Yes, the church is hypocritical and it’s horrible, and shame on us, and we should repent.

I think Jesus would be deeply disappointed. But because you’ve got some things wrong, you don’t then begin to lighten other issues.

If you have convictions on those issues, so that the call is repentance and integrity and a consistency. I just make you the promise as far as I can in the leadership of our church that whenever you read these issues about same-sex relationships, if there’s issues surrounding them, we’ll get in on it.

If there’s people of the same sex who are involved in appropriate sexual relationships, or they’re slandering, or they’re drunkards, or idol—we will try and have a consistent ethic on this, and we have a track record of doing this in our past; it’s not hard.

And everybody loves grace until they’re called on their stuff; doesn’t matter what your issue is. Can you be progressive in terms of political vision out there and hold to a classical vision inside the church? Of course you can.

But I just think that you need to have really thoughtfully considered your understanding of how the church interacts with the culture. Heather and I wrote a short book about this called a *Creative Minority* that may give you some guidelines towards that.

Can someone attend this church and be welcomed if they disagree with what you said tonight? Of course they can, and they do. But the

Jesus, and find life.

So, if you're gay and you came tonight and you've sat through all of this, there'll be a medal for you in the lobby afterwards. So thank you for that; I'm really glad you're here.

If you're gay and you want to know, is there a place where I can fit in with my sexuality in this community? There is. I'm glad you're here.

If you're gay and you came tonight and you've been hurt by the church, I'm sorry that that has happened to you. That is not our heart here. If you're gay, I hope this can be a place where you can live in the tension; we think we can. I hope you can.

But if you're gay and you have a progressive vision and you just need to be in a position where there's more affirmation, I understand that, and that will be sad, but you're welcome.

The message of 1 Corinthians 6 is this: “Do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Don't be deceived: neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor men who have sex with men nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers, nor really any of us whatsoever on our own will inherit the kingdom of God.” And that's what we were.

But you've been washed; you've been sanctified; you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God. Our invitation is into the family of God through the mercy of Jesus, the blood of Jesus Christ, and the power of the Holy Spirit.

My simple prayer is that we will embrace the controversy of Jesus, conviction and compassion, the Sermon on the Mount, scandalous reputation, and we'll find a way to do that in the middle of New York City.

So brothers and sisters, I call you to embrace the controversy of the person of Jesus Christ.

Let's pray.

Father, thank you, Lord. I thank you for these people. Lord, I just pray that you'll bless them, help them to process this, grant us your great mercy and your help.

Lord, and Father, I just pray for those who are here who would describe themselves as gay. I just want to pray, Lord, you just pour out your love, your compassion; draw them with your love, Lord God.

Father, we repent as a church if, even in joking, we have shown any sort of bigotry or discrimination or we've been inconsiderate. We ask you to forgive us, Lord God.

And we just pray, Holy Spirit, that you will wed the genius of the Sermon on the Mount and the scandalous ministry in our hearts, that we may have come like Him in New York. And it's in Jesus' name we pray.