Faith Questions (2004)
Rev. Mark Schaefer
Kay Spiritual Life Center
February 1, 2004
Job 21:1-16; Luke 2:41-52
These questions were submitted during the previous weeks by members of the community and were asked during worship as the sermon. The chaplain had to answer the questions, sight unseen.
1. What is Christian love and how does the Bible say we should love?
Christian love is not an emotion. I’ve said it before but it merits repeating. Christian love is not an emotion, it is a behavior; all true love is a behavior. If you’ve watched enough of these day-time television shows with these dysfunctional families and these dysfunctional couples, you know there’s something not enough with merely having the feeling of love. In fact, you’ll see a couple, a boy and a girl in which there’s some kind of abuse or violence or he’s cheating on her all the time, and when they ask her “Why do you stay with this guy?” she’ll say, “Because I know he loves me.” He may in fact have very strong feelings for her, but the behavior he’s exhibiting is not in that love because love is a way of relationship with another person.
When God loves us, He’s not merely fond of us, He’s entering into a relationship, willing to make Himself vulnerable, willing to put up with our rejection and rebellion and still be there for us, sacrificially loving us. That’s how we understand Christian love: selfless love toward others. It’s not the willingness to be a doormat for another person, it that we care about the other person not so that we get something out of it, not so that we stand to gain from being in the relationship. But because as Christians we try to exemplify the love God has for us, which is a love of selflessness, a love of fidelity.
Now how do we do that? The Bible tells us. Paul has a beautiful hymn “To Love,” which is actually the lectionary text for today, had we been using the lectionary test. Love is many things, it is patient and does not insist on its own way. It is not arrogant, nor boastful nor proud. It rejoices in truth, it does not rejoice in wrongdoing. It is all of those things that make for a right relationship with someone else. We know what that looks like, we just have a hard time doing it, which is probably evident in the fact that Christian love is harder than the kind of love they market on Valentine’s Day.
2. If the New Testament says you get into Heaven if you believe in God and Jesus, what about the Jews?
The New Testament in its most specific language talks about salvation coming from God through the Son and its most particular phrase in John says, “No one comes to the Father but through the Son”: a necessary precursor for salvation. The thing I would caution on this is two things: One, God makes covenants and does not break them, so as far as the Jews are concerned, we have to look at the words of Paul too, who reminds us, by asking himself the rhetorical question, “Has God forgotten his people?” In which he responds to his own question, “Surely not, God keeps faith forever.” In the end, Paul says, “all of Israel will be saved.”
The other thing to remember is that Salvation is not something we do. We want to think of it that way. We want to know what it is you and I can do, things that we believe will insure our salvation. And what that does, is it takes away Salvation from God, who is the source of salvation. It strips God of his freedom. We show up with a list and demand that we have done this thing. Ultimately, this is irrelevant.
As Christians, we understand that our salvation comes through Jesus Christ, but as Christians we also know we must face God with some measure of humility, an understanding that God is greater than we are and that God’s purposes can be mysterious to us. The simple answer is that we don’t know who God will save and who he won’t and that all we can do as Christians is trust in God’s grace and God’s mercy. And in the mean time, let’s not presume to know who’s in and who’s out. Let us act as brothers and sisters who all share in salvation. That is what we are called to do as Christians, not to gloat over our own salvation, but to show that love of God through Jesus Christ in our own communities toward all.
3. How do you reconcile the claims that Jesus was fully human and fully divine?
I can because we don’t actually claim that. We claim that Jesus was truly human and truly divine. I know that sounds like semantics, that sounds like I’m ducking the question, but I’m not. We understand the incarnation of Jesus Christ in a particular way. We understand that the Son of God, that is, the Son of the Trinity (Father, Son and Spirit) takes on our flesh. That which is in God’s own self, in God’s innermost being (which we understand as Christians as the Trinity), the Son of God becomes flesh–becomes one of us. When we claim Christ’s divinity, we mean nothing less than that. That to look upon Jesus is to look upon the Son, which is to look upon the Father. That we behold God when we look at Jesus Christ.
It is important not to lead people astray into thinking that because Jesus Christ was the Son made flesh that he did not feel pain, that he did not feel hunger, that he did not even know temptation. The Christian church has insisted from day one that Christ was fully human. That is, that Jesus takes on our humanity fully to the point of death. See, the crucifixion wouldn’t make any difference if he were some sort of immortal superman who only appears to be dead. The crucifixion and resurrection are powerful because Jesus is in fact dead, that the son of God actually died. As one theologian puts it: within God’s innermost self is in fact a death on Good Friday. That on Easter, we witness the resurrection of the human Jesus and the divine Son in the one person of Jesus Christ. That there is no distinction between the two, but that neither is his divinity or humanity compromised.
Now, I could give the standard Catholic answer: it’s a mystery. And, you know what, that’s a good answer. Because we don’t have enough mystery in our faith. We read the hymn about the source of faith learning that we sang early, and we’re all trying to figure things out. We need to leave a little room for things to be ambiguous in our lives. And this is one of those things that has been that way from the beginning.
It’s something the church has struggled with and at varying times in your life, you are going to identify more with the human Jesus and at times the divine Jesus. When you are suffering, and hurting and feeling the world is upon you, you want to know about the Jesus on the cross who cries out “My God My God why have you forsaken me?” That’s the human Jesus that you want to know. When you are feeling that the work of Christian faith is making a difference in the world, then the divine Jesus who looks toward the future and who calls us to walk with him on that path of victory and triumph is the Jesus we will be closer to. Part of the point of all this is that God is not separated from our existence. That the divine should dwell within our midst, that we should be able to experience and know the divine as easily as we experience and know one another.
4. What does the Bible say about homosexuality and would God be for the Defense of Marriage Amendment?
Would God be for it? I want to start with that one first because God is not a lobbyist. God does not weigh in on our legislative squabbles. I’m going to resist the temptation to say that God weighs in on this issue legislatively, because too often we have seen God co-opted for one point of view or another.
But “what does the Bible say about homosexuality?” is a matter of some controversy. Let me tell you what I think the Bible says about homosexuality. There are very explicit passages in the book of Leviticus that forbid one man laying with another man as with a woman. There are passages in some of Paul’s letters that speak about sexual perversion in language that suggest homosexuality, and there is language that talks about sodomites and catamites as this sort of obscure term describing the two partners within a homosexual act. Now, it’s fair to say that what you and I would know or would have encountered as homosexuality — two grown adults in a same-sex relationship — was unknown in the ancient world. The institution simply did not exist, the cultural construct did not exist. So we cannot say for certain what the Bible says about two men in Greenwich Village sharing an apartment. We don’t know.
But we do know that this was an issue for the Israelites and for the early church, and part of our understanding needs to look at “What do the texts say about it? What is the context behind this?” Now I’ve looked at this stuff, I’ve researched it, and I’ve looked it up, and I can tell you my interpretation but I’m not going to insist that this is the answer you should come to. In fact, this is a process that we should engage in and that we should discern. But I look at the provisions in Leviticus and where they are in Leviticus, and they are surrounded on either side by statutes and regulations that have to do with Priests: it’s called the holiness code. And we know that there were cults in ancient Canaan, there were religions of the Canaanites, that engaged not only in idolatrous practices, but in homosexuality as a part of worship. (Compared to that our service looks a little dull, I suppose. But I think we’re probably more comfortable with it that way.) But in the ancient world, sex often was a part of worship — as strange as that seems to us. It’s no stranger to think about slaughtering an animal in the temple. The ancient world was full of all kinds of rituals that we would find now horrid to do in a public sphere, especially invoking the divine. But in the Canaanite temples, there were male temple prostitutes who would have sex with the Canaanite priests as part of their rituals. Some believe that inclusion of this line about males lying with males in the middle of Leviticus has more to do with that than it has to do with men who are attracted to other men.
It’s one way of looking at it. Because there is no counterpart for women in Leviticus, and this is not a book that is scarce on detail. So there’s some question as to the location of it in the holiness code, the existence that we know of the Canaanite cult, and other things like this, that it may yet be another idolatrous practice that Israel is being warned about. The very fact that it is described as an abomination invokes language of idolatry. “Abomination” is only used in the context of idolatry. So that gives us some issues to look at when we look at the Old Testament text.
When we look at the New Testament text, we have to look in and find out what the word means. The word is not clearly defined, and there is great disagreement over the word—whether it means “homosexuality” or “sexual deviant,” it’s not clear. When Paul is talking about sodomites and catamites, he is likely talking about the institution that we would call “pederasty,” which is an older man and a younger boy and it was very common. It’s an institution that today would still give us pause, even those who would support homosexual rights would not look at a 14-year old boy and a 40-year old man as desirable. And it is possible that because of the balance of power and the tendency to be abusive, that might be what Paul is talking about. Frankly, we cannot know for certain, and that’s why this is a debate. That’s why people of goodwill disagree over it.
I want to be clear that this is my opinion and my interpretation, that I’m not going to stand here and say that people who believe that homosexuality is a sin are necessarily wicked hateful people. I believe that people who have that opinion are sincere. That the church needs to be in respectful dialogue about the issue. That we cannot afford to alienate anybody as we seek to understand what it means to be the body of Christ. We in this congregation are inclusive of persons who are gay and lesbian, and we are inclusive of those who have different attitudes toward homosexuality. So I believe that even in scripture there is room for an expanse of interpretations. I don’t believe it’s a settled question. But I understand people who have a sincere and strong faith that have used those texts as their bedrock. They’re coming from that perspective.
Are there any more questions from the floor? You want to know what the score of the game is? [At the time, the New England Patriots were tied with the Carolina Panthers 0-0]
If there are no other questions, let me just say that this is part of what Christian faith is. This is who we are as a people. We are not afraid to ask questions. And we’re not afraid to come up afterwards and say, “Mark, I completely disagree with what you just said.” Because I’m not claiming a voice of prophecy here, I’m just talking about my views and reflecting my own experience. We as a church exist not as individuals but as a community that has to listen to one another, that asks questions of one another, answers them, and seeks to discern together what they mean. So I encourage you, not only tonight but always, ask questions of yourself, of one another, of the church, of God, and by so doing we may yet find a faith that is on sure footing.
