It was brought to my attention recently -- because my
daughter posted a link on facebook -- that the Salvation Army does not include
gay people in their organization due to their interpretation of Romans 1:18-32,
which they believe states that homosexuals, particularly homosexual parents,
which I assume means gay people who adopt children, should be put to death.
This raises a couple of questions.
First, do we discard everything the Salvation Army does
because we don’t agree with them? I made
a joke on facebook about not buying my work jeans there anymore, but the truth
is I don’t shop at the Salvation Army. I
don’t find anything there. I shop at
Goodwill and commercial second hand stores.
But I do put change in the bell ringer pots, and I’ve done the Angel
Tree a couple of times. And if we all
stop doing that, then people who need our help, maybe to have a Christmas
dinner or Christmas presents under the tree or a warm coat, could go
without. And I remembered the passage
where a couple of the disciples tell Jesus that they saw a guy casting out
demons but not doing so in the name of Christ and they told him to knock it
off, and Jesus said No, don’t do that.
Let him be.
So, I decided that as long as the Salvation Army was doing
good things, and there wasn’t anyone else offering the same thing, it was okay
to drop change in the bell ringer pots.
And then I looked at Romans 1:18-32.
I am not going to type it out here, because it’s a rather
long passage, and that’s a lot of typing, and I wouldn’t want to infringe on
any translation copyrights, and some of it is not pertinent. But it is a rather inflammatory passage.
The first thing you have to do before looking at anything
that comes out of Paul’s letters is to remember who they were written to and
why. According to the notes in my Bible,
Romans was written to Christians living in a dangerous time, in a city that
didn’t particularly want them and had already demonstrated this through
violence. Paul was trying to convince
them to remain true to their Christian ideals while not drawing too much
attention to themselves.
I thought it was very interesting that they go all the way
back to verse 18 to start, because like all good Topic Sentences, verse 18 lets
us know who we are talking about. “For
the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness
of those who by their wickedness suppress the truth.” Verses 19 through 23 talk about those to
whom God was revealed but who chose to reject him. Verse 21 says “for though they knew God, they
did not honor him as God or give thanks to him but they became futile in their
thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened.” And then he talks about idol worship, and he
says that God gave up on these people and let them be as wicked as they wanted
and let all the bad things that their bad behavior created fall on them. That particular thought is repeated a few
times. God just let them fall into
degradation, because they chose to ignore him.
Homosexuality isn’t mentioned until verses 26 and 27. “For
this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for
unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with
women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and
received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.” (The notes in my Bible say that this isn’t
actually talking about homosexuality but about people whose sexual appetites
have gotten out of control.)
Then there are a whole list of people who are worthy of
death. Including gossips and rebellious
children. I am a terrible gossip. And I don’t know many children who would make
it past the age of fifteen, if we got rid of everyone who rebelled against
their parents. The list also includes
haughty people, and boastful people.
I looked at three different translations, King James, God’s
Word and Revised Standard Version, and none of them say the words “put to
death”. They say worthy of death and
deserve to die. But there is quite a
difference between those statements. Put
to death implies the act of killing.
We also need to remember that when Jesus talks about death
and dying, he was usually speaking of the spiritually dead. As in Let the Dead bury the dead.
So what I get out of this is that there were people who became
Christian, confessed to loving and knowing God, understood what it was all
about, but turned their backs on God to become idol worshippers and porn addicts
and evil nasty people, and God said if that’s how you want to be, okay, be that
way. I will let you sink into the muck
that you are making. And you deserve the
spiritual death you are experiencing.
That’s what I see.
Someone who wants to see God condemning a particular group of people
that they don’t care for or fear or who creep them out could possibly see something
else. If they shut one eye and turned
the page sideways. I have been listening
to sermons recently by a man who is really on about traditional churches who in
his view are misrepresenting the message of Christ, and he’s seeing the church
symbolized in every passage, every parable.
I don’t see it, but he’s looking for it, so he does.
We have the choice of how we decide to interpret the
Bible. We can look at verses with an
angry, militant view, and we will find what we want to find. We can be directed by our fear and our
anger. Or we can look at the verses with
love in our hearts.
The Kingdom of God is
among you. Luke 12:17
