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NEW TESTAMENT READING—1 Corinthians 13: 1-13
I would like to begin this morning with a thought experiment. I want you to imagine yourself as a participant in an exchange program. It’s kind of like a high school exchange program, except this one involves an exchange of people between two different universes. The other universe is a lot like ours. In fact, it is a parallel universe that would be completely like ours except there appears to be one key difference that generates and causes a whole bunch of other differences. Because this one difference is so significant, we might as well imagine that what we are talking about here would seem to entail a high degree of science fiction. The one crucial difference in this universe…drum roll please…is that the Bible…is never used to condemn homosexuality. Later we will talk about why our universe should be like this other universe, but for now, let’s just imagine what this fantastically different universe would be like.
The exchange program is between Christians from each universe. For the sake of simplicity, let’s call the Christians from the other universe heavenly Christians and the Christians from our universe earthly Christians. So imagine that you and your exchange group of earthly Christians arrive in the science fiction universe. You arrive in the midst of an election season that is just like ours. Similar to what we are experiencing now, marriage equality is a big issue. What is interesting is that because the Bible is never used to condemn homosexuality in this other universe the opposition to marriage equality doesn’t come from churches. It comes from a group known as the Traditionalists. The Traditionalists fear change and want to “do things the way they’ve always been done.” Some would dispute the claim that throughout history marriage has only been one way, but the Traditionalists don’t care if there have been “a few odd balls who have done things differently.”
Now, what really blows the minds of everyone in your exchange group is that in this science fiction universe the heavenly Christians are among the strongest champions of marriage equality. Of course, there are earthly Christians who are strong champions in our universe, but we have nowhere near as many as you find in the other universe. You wonder how this could ever be possible, but upon reflection, it’s not too surprising. The heavenly Christians have the same Bible that we have, and if there was one thing the founders of our faith were fanatical about, it’s love. They were so fanatical about love that in our scripture for today Paul tells us that it is the greatest component of the Christian life. Faith and hope are nice, but love is even better. This declaration comes after Paul has waxed at length with poetic flourish about the virtues of love. Paul tells us that love is what we ultimately want to have in our lives. One is nothing without love, and to make love all the more valuable, it is a timeless treasure. It never ends. After everything else has faded away, its shine never diminishes. Christians put love on such a high pedestal that John later tells us that God is love.
So in this science fiction universe, the heavenly Christians have this fanaticism about love that reflects the fanaticism of the early Christians. As such, they promote anything that makes love blossom and flourish. Few things do this as much as marriage. When it comes to love, marriage is like a sanctuary, laboratory, and incubator rolled into one. It’s like a sanctuary because it’s a place in which at its best we see and experience what unconditional love is all about. A lawyer might not experience a lot of unconditional love at work, but when she comes home, her marriage creates for her a sacred space and a refuge from the harshness of life. Marriage is like a laboratory because we don’t always enter adulthood knowing how to love. Marriage is the place where we figure things out and learn what it really means to put love into practice in caring for someone else. In a marriage, the lawyer might learn that a lawsuit and a well-argued case aren’t always the best way to handle a conflict. And finally, a marriage is an incubator because after we experience love and after we learn how to love, we are then ready to go out into the world and love. The lawyer, or example, might decide that her career would be more meaningful if she served clients she cared about and could provide quality legal help they might not get elsewhere. If you think about it, the ideal marriage is a good metaphor for what a church should be like: in church we experience love and we practice love before we then go out into the world to extend that love to others.
The heavenly Christians have realized how powerful an institution marriage is for experiencing and furthering love, so they do whatever they can to promote marriage. For them, it would be unthinkable that you would want to prohibit or discourage anyone from getting married. It’s for this reason that no other public policy issue has ever galvanized their support as much as marriage equality. For these Christians, marriage equality strengthens a tradition they cherish. It doesn’t redefine it. It doesn’t pervert it in any way. It simply increases the number of couples to whom marriage as a legal right is available. In this science fiction universe, it dawns on your exchange group how churches and marriage equality are a natural fit. In this other universe, what church wouldn’t want to support marriage equality? In fact, what church wouldn’t want to support it with as much passion and conviction as they can muster because, after all, it is so intimately connected to the core beliefs and practices of their faith?
Let’s further imagine that after we visit this science fiction universe a group of heavenly Christians comes to visit ours. Upon hearing about the arrival of these heavenly Christians, a group of earthly Christians comes to meet with them. They want to do a Bible study with the heavenly Christians. They want to help the heavenly Christians realize the error of their ways. They want the heavenly Christians to know what the Bible truly says, so that the heavenly Christians can enlighten the rest of their universe when they return.
One of these earthly Christians thrusts a Bible in front of the heavenly Christians and says, “Read Leviticus 18:6. ‘You shall not lie with a male as one lies with a female. It is an abomination.’ What more do you need to know?” The heavenly Christians turn and look at each other with perplexed, bewildered faces. One of them then steps forward and says, “I see that some of you have round haircuts and some of you have clothes with mixed fabrics. At lunch, I even saw a few of you eating sausage while others ate shrimp. These are all things that Leviticus prohibits. We don’t mind your not living according to these rules because we don’t either, but what I don’t understand is why you think some of the rules for male priests 3000 years ago should apply to everyone today while some of them should not?” Another heavenly Christian steps forward as well to speak. She says, “What I don’t understand is why this passage would be read as having anything to do with gay people. Back then they didn’t know what it was to be gay. Applying this statement to gays is like drawing a map of the world based on the views of people who lived before Columbus and Magellan.”
Now, the heavenly Christians are really worked up. They can’t understand why some earthly Christians would be so concerned with digging up ancient views of sex. They start talking among themselves about how the Levite priests had no intention of setting down sexual laws for all humanity for all eternity. What are these earthly Christians thinking? The heavenly Christians explain that the Levites came up with these codes, so that they could define themselves as being more holy than the priests of neighboring nations. Moreover, what they thought was holy often reflected cultural biases about the oppressed and marginalized. For example, if you were blind or disabled, you were automatically considered unclean. With regard to the passage quoted by the earthly Christian, one of the heavenly Christians thinks the whole matter is sexist. The Levites viewed women as inferior, so it was considered degrading and shameful for a man to play a sexual role associated with that of women. The heavenly Christians go on and on in this manner for sometime. Perhaps, the real difference between the heavenly Christians and some of the earthly Christians isn’t so much that the earthly Christians use the Bible to condemn homosexuality. It’s that the earthly Christians don’t take the time to understand the Bible in its original context.
As I think about these two parallel universes, the heavenly Christians represent to me Christianity as it should be. It’s Christianity with a de-weaponized Bible. It’s Christianity with a focus on what truly matters: love. I suppose there are a couple of ways we could look at the heavenly Christians. One is to say, “Wow, earthly Christians are a long ways from where we should be.” Christians are good at guilt, so it might be tempting to get stuck on this thought, but another way to think about it is to say, “We are alive now in a time when a great opportunity has presented itself to us. The marriage equality movement is our chance to stand on the side of love, and it may very well be the means by which our own faith is saved.” The marriage equality movement has forced Christianity to have a public discussion about the Bible, how its used and abused, how its understood and interpreted. We need this as Christians, and I believe we not only owe the marriage equality movement our support but also our gratitude. Amen.