"It Aint' Necessarily So"

‘ It ain’t necessarily so, it ain’t necessarily so. The things that you’re liable to read in the Bible, they ain’t necessarily so.’ (George and Ira Gershwin, “Porgy and Bess”, 1935)

Several  years ago I was asked to preach at a downtown church, on Pride Sunday. It was a congregation with many gay people, some of whom were my friends, and I was asked to address gay marriage.I started looking for something to address Biblical texts in their original context and happened upon a paper by Rev. Dr. Walter Wink, a well-known biblical scholar. (See link) His paper provided just what I needed – a kind of de-bunking of those texts which are consistently lifted out of context and then misinterpreted. 

So let’s go with Leviticus -  ‘a man shall not lie down with a man as with a woman’.  At the time this was written, it was believed that men carried all of the ‘seed of life’, and simply implanted that into a woman who then provided an incubating space for it to grow. Otherwise the woman’s role was nil. So relationships between women are not included in Leviticus at all.

Now, these were people who had left slavery and oppression for a new life in a new land, but they were a minority. They took the command to be fruitful and multiply seriously. For a man to waste the ‘seed of life’, either through a relationship with another man, or masturbation for example – was an abomination. Note that it wasn’t the relationship or the action which was abomination but the wasting of life. Women, and presumably eunuchs, didn’t count . Both were property. Neither had anything to do with procreation, hence not important.

Today, we know that women are as much a part of procreation as men.  However, marriage is not just about procreation – if it were we would be preventing anyone who cannot procreate from getting married. For me, the most important part of marriage is the expression of human love. Through the person of Jesus, who Christians claim to follow, the old understandings were removed, and a new ethic came into play – the ethic of love. When asked about the greatest commandment, Jesus used two things: the Sh’ma – “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul and all your might; and the second is love your neighbour as yourself. On this hang ALL of the law and ALL of the prophets.”

There is a misinterpretation going around which says that somehow pastors will be *forced* to perform same-gender marriages. Nothing could be further from the truth. Canada has recognised same-gender marriages since 2005 – and those clergy who disagree have not been affected in any way. The people who are affected are the people who are asking to be able to enter into committed loving and legal relationships. My marriage is not threatened; and if your marriage is so weak that you think it is threatened, then there is something already wrong within your own relationship. This ruling does one thing - it recognises love as the one ethic which permeates the entire Bible and the Christian faith – love, actually.

http://forusa.org/content/homosexuality-bible-walter-wink