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 hello church of the city.com and 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 and the lawsuit was filed because one bible translation in their interpretation of same-sex relationships used the word homosexual and this man said that it caused 20 years of distress psychological pain and confusion and he was seeking damages now the 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 and maybe you've been maybe you've been sitting here and someone's brought you along tonight and you haven't been in church for a long time and 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 and 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 and when do i start feeling about the opposite sex like all of my friends do and 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 and every day you wake up and you're like god did you do it and it doesn't happen and so maybe you go through a psychological stage you're whipping yourself up where you're like i'm just gonna like the opposite sex i'm just gonna i'm gonna make myself like them and so you try it for a while and maybe you date a few people but deep down in your heart nothing's really changed and then you finally go to church and at church you hear words like abomination you hear phrases banted 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 and 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 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 we dive through these things tonight that 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 so 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 was 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 that i probably don't have the experience that gives me the kind of authority that you wish i had connected to this and i'm also saying as i as i share the things tonight that this is not my final word ever on the topic of gay relationships i think you'll see i'm a very thoughtful uh 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 but 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-affirmant 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 um bourgeois it's at the classical and the revisionist position well i hold to the classical position you're a revisionist and even the framing of that to me sounds a little condescending and 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 and 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 uh introspection what 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 number one 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 and it was like i'd ask them you know basically the math problem on the wall from goodwill hunting it was like i've never i've we just hadn't really thought about it number two how do i get this definition how do you get it how did you arrive at that definition number three 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 uh to come to a church i remember that feeling very clearly of showing up and feeling somewhat you know intrepid and intimidated and i want to just start by saying that i am aware that i believe about christianity particularly regarding sexuality sounds insane period and i also want to say that even if you're an affir if you're an affirming believer in committed same-sex monogamous relationships that 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 house 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 and 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 cultural 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 and i know that you could not care less about forgotten and lost greek words but i just asked 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 and 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 so part number one how did we get where we are in our cultural moment well it is 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 has been major shifts and changes in the world at a dizzying rate of speed and many people challenge to stay up they just literally cannot track the speed at which things are changing and 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 and 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 where i want to start tonight is 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 and 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 in riots down in greenwich village these are a six day period of riot sparked by police action in the early morning of june 28 1969 against the popular greenwich village gay bar the stonewallian considered a homosexual then 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 the front of the stonewool 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 name gives a little bit away in 1973 where 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 and 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 and so 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 financing funding for aids research that 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 right movement in america now after that meeting harvard trained social scientists and gay activist marshall kirk and hunter mazdan wrote a homosexual manifesto that promised to dismiss the movement's outworn techniques in favor of carefully calculated public relations propaganda laying groundwork for the next stage of 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 to like 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 desensitized 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 straight 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 descent and 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 this was uh 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 to 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 but the next slide here this is 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 and then the third strategy by the way i'm just trying to present this as as like historical fact rather i'm not trying to moralize this at all i'm just cause 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 fascinating book with stonewall now 14 years ago there i am and as i'm as i'm making these videos we end up in new york city and malcolm gladwell's book has come out um called the tipping point and 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 um the stonewalling riots and i said oh actually i am they said hey there's a wonderful book written by a local man who was actually there and um you should check it out says 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 and then he said the third one is an attack on the church to get homosexuality removed as being seen as sin and he said the first two are going remarkably well the real challenge is the church and i remember just listening to him saying that that's fascinating the level of lobbying education media law art entertainment money spent uh behind the scene 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 that no more 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 the homosexuality might be chosen is to open the can of worms labelled moral choice and sin which gives a 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 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 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 cultural wars it seems like we're rearming for round two three four five six and seven so 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 that's one gay man's opinion about how this has worked second part of this 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 a claim 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 and pregnancies where the life of the mother is at stake support for christian prayers and 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's 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 and then the selection or the major the major success culturally in terms of legislation was the doma the defense of marriage act which basically 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 and 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 and in unchristian uh survey done uh 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 to reach it's the victim of its own fight for the culture and other books like this this is a follow-up book to this this is the 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 relationships has been deeply formed by our culture in both directions if you're violently opposed if you're an uh 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 christ 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 i anybody who knows me knows that i have always held to the historic uh 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 and 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 position and then the historic person 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 and then 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 um let's just can we just skip that section on the 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 it's invitation to gay people it's an invitation to straight people it's an invitation of 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 man 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 poetry is breaking out this is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh she should 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'll become one flesh adam and eze 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's actually an 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 field femaleness actually played a role as well the hebrew word translated suitable by the niv is connect though and it is only used here in the old testament 280 and 220. connectors are somewhat difficult to translate into english since it is a compound word made up of key which means as or like and negan 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 so he goes on so here's the relevant point if it were simply eve's humanist that made her a helper then the word k like would have been just 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 kineto this would potentially convey both similarity key and dissimilarity naked 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 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 and 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 and 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 and 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 2013 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 wholly 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's two main questions that you have to ask to get to the heart of this issue 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 now 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 is this has not been the way that it's been interpreted there's no indication in the new testament leviticus should be treated as obscure peripheral or irrelevant jesus referred to leviticus 19 love your neighbors yourself more than any other verse in the old testament the new testament refers to it 10 times both peter and paul quite a leviticus is a part of their summons to holiness continuing vision of holiness the horse of the new testament 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 one 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's 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 of the mountain 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 six and one timothy one 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 are 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 and if this is a question of of uh rape as in the hands of a master or 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 then 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 away 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 uh around the time of the writing of the new testament there was master slave sexual relationships that were exploited there was prostitution there was gender confusion related sexual activity there was pederasty and there was 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 ca williams roman homosexuality from oxford press kj dover greek homosexuality from harvard university press they both make the claim though they are both would fall into the progressive category they make the claim that there was 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 of 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 and 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 symposium in his work called protagoras mentions two men who are lovers they will love us for more than 10 years after they've both reached full adulthood agathom 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 passanius there's a greek philosopher paramedics 65 years old who was in a same-sex relationship with xenon 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 and 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 berenic in mesopotamia lucian of samasada also mentions the marriage of two wealthy women named magilla and damanasa the early christian theologian clement of alexandria refers to women women marriage and patolomy 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 when forbid 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 mikhail for cohen are thinking this is a new phenomenon paul certainly knew of injuring 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 university of texas in austin wrote a book homosexuality and group in rome a source book of basic documents says this the coincidence of such severity of 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 homosexuality in this era of the early imperial age of rome may have ceased to be merely another practice of personal pleasure began to be viewed as an essential and central category of personal identity exclusive of an antithetical two heterosexual relations he points out he points to a series of later texts from the second of 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 number one a mix of male and female sperm elements at conception a disease of the mind and soul that was influenced indirectly biological 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 permanently attracted to people of the opposite sex now what's interesting that you have to take into account this is my last boot on the uh the culture surrounding the new testament is 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 sweep from sweeps 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 complete 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 one 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 as 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's 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 for their error now two questions we have to ask in this passage number one what is the desire driving this kind of sex and is it natural and secondly 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 towards 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 that this kind of sex is exploitive 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 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 arson and females the leia 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 mulder mankind and birds and animals and reptiles in fact this should be up on the screen next 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 it 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 suppress 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 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 consume with passion for one another a key point here that is very very hard to interact with is that this amongst male relationships there was definitely accounts of power dynamics control and coercion but there's no such accounts with female relationships and this is a passage where paul connects not just male relationships but female same-sex relationships as well 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 and then an affirming writer says this according to one interpretation paul's words were not directed at bona fide homosexuals and 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 is exchanging the natural relationship as defined in genesis between a man and a woman for unnatural same-sex according to romans 1. one corinthians 6 and first 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 and you were justified in the name of the lord jesus christ and by the spirit of your god one 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 law breakers 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 one corinthians not first timothy and 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 and there is a ton of conjecture about what is happening in this text here's the two greek words malachoi which means soft in essence soft that's used in other parts of the gospel to research to refer to soft material and as nikoi thai 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 um this is sort of like a little chart of how this is translated so malachor asked in a quarter in first 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 and 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 cannot really know what it means there are no examples of arsenal koi tai in the surviving greek literature prior to paul's use of the term in one corinthians and one 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 arsene 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 malachoi are called boys and this is the definition malachoi are called boys who sell themselves to other men and arsenal coitais are the men who hire them out they're the malikoi 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 the person who has called them in so by very nature these terms are exploitive i'm going to be honest with you there's 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 is it may be unclear there may not be a a one 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 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 inventing a phrase from the old testament referencing leviticus and using in the new testament to make the same case i want to show you this let's go to this side 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. matter asks us you love that you shall not lie with the male as you do with a woman so you can see how far apart the greek words are but when you get to liberty because 20 what is happening here asanos quettan arsenal you can see that they literally sit next to each other and it's though paul referencing as a torah trained rabbi 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 and 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 malachor and asthma as outlined above fits with the consensus of modern english translations fits with the ethics of old testament fits with the training paul would have received the 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 oh that's that's everybody will not inherit the kingdom of god and this includes those who have sex is 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 but it was only about power relationships that's the argument that's put forth but i again 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 exporting for language chips 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 life 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 jewish authors especially use the two ladder terms to condemn the practice another pair of greek words we use 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 malachor refers to men who thoroughly cr who cross gender boundaries by receiving sex from other men and arsenal courtois refers to many ways of sex with other males now 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 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 it's the context of this passage is not if someone says hey jesus uh 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 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 commanded a man give his wife a certificate of divorce and sent her away jesus replied moment 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 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 and 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 and creation jesus closes the loop from the old testament and resets it in creation jesus would have had a torah shaped reality so i want to do a quick recap genesis 2 gives an account where it says not just that adam needed another human but adam needed someone who was human but different than him that's what was suitable leviticus makes the case that god wanted a holy people and therefore their relationships would match the teaching and authority that were laid out in creation romans in making a case about people's rebellion against god uses as an example how people exchange god's natural creation order with an unnatural design according to genesis one in one corinthians one and in first in one corinthians six in first timothy paul uses greek language taken and applied from the torah phrase that he has coined together referencing what god's intent is and in matthew 19 jesus resets this 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 what about 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 in one minute answers the best i can but what about are people born gay i'm going to read what the american psychological 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 same-sex attractions weren't born that wouldn't necessarily 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 or 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 care 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 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 it's 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 sounds terrible but on the other hand i have friends who are part of this community who are preparing for this series have said to me that god's done a work in my heart where i feel an attraction of the opposite sex i don't know i don't want to doubt their experience either so i certainly know this is that nobody should ever try and force somebody to change their orientation through any form of coercion or shame connected to that 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 their 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 get 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 reason i think it's important to have this conversation there's a website called church clarity they'll probably find this sermon online somehow that basically said it's unfair to have gay people come to your church and not know where you stand because they build deep relationships where they feel like they're going to be completely affirmed and then it feels like a bait and sweats so i say to people people know where i've stood on this issue this is probably my clearest teaching on it at church of the city but people know that i genuinely love them and i can disagree with someone i'm not going to change my mind i've tried to present a persuasive and compelling case why but people are welcome if they disagree it's not fair to force singleness on people you know what this is the best point this is the heaviest and hardest point so i did do a talk on singleness two weeks ago and much of what i would say about that is put on there but i want to say that we have to create ways for single people to thrive and to flourish it cannot be like oh yeah we did a talk on that once it's got to be like oh we build a culture on that all the time and i want to say this i mean the church has failed the gay community in terms of welcoming them in creating space to be known to be loved to participate shame on the church if it's easier to have a sexual hookup from an app than it is to find community in the church shame on us so we we have to be proactive we have to create space we have to love and this will be costly but we have to do it and here's the last question i got what if the lesbian couple walks in with kids what will your church say well i'm going to be really honest here i it's so great to have you welcome to the controversial jesus series [Laughter] look there's two things i want to say number one look this is an absolute mess and to be completely honest with you i haven't thought my ethical vision of all of these things that we've never faced in the history of the church all the way down i haven't fully hashed out my understanding of biotechnology sexuality and machine i'm i'm still working on these things and i want to be able to say i think you'll like what we do here in fact there's quite a few people who disagree with my position on this issue but say if i go to a church that all the bout is affirming like i just don't get fed the bible and i would rather sit here and participate in the life of the spirit even though there's disagreement then go somewhere else will they affirm everything i believe but it's shallow and there's no weight there that's them not me i'm not making that that claim but it may be true that it's like honestly i wish that we were perfectly designed as a congregation to welcome and build a ministry for absolutely everybody but we just may not be able to there are other churches that may have thought this out more deeply or worked on it better and as much as agrees my heart i'm just trying to be honest every church cannot solve every problem in the history of the world and it's just really messy now as we are really moving into a full-length university lecture here i'm closing next slide yeah but you're biased i don't believe you i don't believe you man you've got an agenda as we all do and i'll say here's what i want to do i want to try and facilitate your own personal study next slide this is my sincerest pairing of resources to help you understand both sides on this issue okay so this is a very popular book god and the gay christian matthew vines i went and heard him speak and talked to him here in new york a long time ago i would read this book next then i would read this book people to be loved by preston sprinkle these are trying to do the same thing walk through the texts so one gives a progressive view and one gives a historic view these are great paired together from the bird and the branch with a latte next slide here what does the bible really teach you about homosexuality kevin de young this is a mercifully short book but i gotta tell you i don't like i don't like the tone in this book it's pastorally just it just doesn't sit right but the scholarship is exceptional i'd like to pair this next with this book here unclobber rethinking our misuse of the bible and homosexuality this has a lovely tone but i don't think the scholarship's as good but they're doing the same thing these pair nicely over a flat white next slide here if you want to read a personal account personal accounts of people who are gay articulating their journey and their theology justin lee's book torn is a beautifully written stirring moving narrative of his search to come to truth on this next slide wesley hill's washed in waiting reflections on christianity faithfulness and homosexuality another book you will be tossed around emotionally reading these books just so you know now many of you were like dude i'm not going to read is there like a book they're like they debate each other yes there's this book here homosexuality the bible and the church two views people who are both held to the historic position and the progressive position many people say this is the best book written on this and if you read this you will get a kind of clarity and empathy where you really see where people are coming from and this is a book that i think is worthy of your consideration okay part three loving the gay community i want you to see the genius of what jesus does because it's really about discipleship and following jesus jesus in matthew 5 and 7 teaches the sermon on the mount in the sermon on the mount jesus elevates sexual holiness and sexual standards this is the cut off your hand passage this is that if you look at a person with lustful intent you've done the deed this is jesus christ on a hill saying this is life in the kingdom of god and then you would expect when jesus does his ministry then to get off the hill and act like a pharisee holding up his message and then jesus does something that just doesn't seem to go with his teachings jesus then begins with next encounter finding a roman centurion and healing his servant then jesus goes and lets sinful women touch him wash his feet with perfume and then jesus goes to zacchaeus and says i'm coming to your house to say notice jesus doesn't say hey zacchaeus i just want you to know did you read the sermon on the mount are you aware of my position on taxation he just says i'm coming to your house today man i've got good news for you so i don't know how jesus does this jesus taught the highest standards of sexual ethics you will read in the bible yet sinners loved jesus he taught this but had a reputation of being a friend of sinners a glutton a drunkard and a friend of tax collectors jesus had some kind of staggering genius to have conviction and compassion in a way that's never been matched in history and he says i want to disciple you in this i want to disciple you in this so to me next slide here this is what jesus offers an invitation but next slide here this is what jesus really offers an invitation to him that's an invitation to restoration that's what our message is our message is not primarily justice and it's not primarily morality our message is come to 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 and my sexuality out in this community there is i'm glad you're here if you're again 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 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 greeting or drunkards nor slanderers nor really any of us whatsoever on our own will inherit the kingdom of god and that's 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 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 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

Channel: Church of the City New York

Views: 32,694

Rating: 4.6214509 out of 5

Keywords: God, Christianity, Jesus, Church, Church of the City New York, Jon Tyson, Controversial Jesus

Id: QqF0MwqjuBU

Length: 87min 27sec (5247 seconds)

Published: Tue May 01 2018