Episcopalians Focus on Church Inclusion of Gays, Lesbians

In the arsenal of those who fight the culture war over human sexuality, the Bible can be the ultimate weapon.

Want the last word on family values? “Read the Scriptures,” inquirers are told. Want to know what God thinks of homosexuality? “It’s in the Bible.”

For the most part it has been Christian social conservatives and biblical literalists who have cited chapter and verse in an attempt to prove that God hates homosexuality.

Increasingly, however, Christian liberals have been turning to the Scriptures to make their own case--and nowhere is that more apparent than at a four-day national conference underway in Pasadena.

Called “Beyond Inclusion: Celebrating Gay and Lesbian Commitments and Ministries in the Episcopal Church,” the conference is an effort to marshal spiritual and political resources that organizers hope will lead to the 2.5-million member Episcopal Church approving new ceremonies for the blessing of same-gender unions.

The conference runs through Sunday at All Saints Episcopal Church and includes about 300 participants from across the United States. Among the group is retired Bishop Walter Righter, who last year faced heresy charges for ordaining a non-celibate gay man in New Jersey. A church court later dismissed the charges, saying there was no explicit church law banning such ordinations.

Some participants, like the Rev. J. Edwin Bacon, rector of All Saints, said that until the issue of blessing lifelong commitments between people of the same sex is settled, it will be difficult for the Episcopal Church to come to grips with an equally controversial issue--the ordination of non-celibate gay men and lesbians to the priesthood.

The Pasadena conference is yet another attempt by American Christendom to wrestle with issues of homosexuality. Recently, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) declared that its ministers must either be married or celibate--a vote intended to bar gays and lesbians from ordination.

Last year, the United Methodist Church’s Council of Bishops reaffirmed the church’s traditional position that homosexual sex is “incompatible with Christian teaching.” But that move came after 15 liberal Methodist bishops, including the Rev. Roy I. Sano, bishop of the California Pacific Conference based in Pasadena, urged the church to allow the ordination of “practicing homosexuals.”

In the United Church of Christ, which is more decentralized, the national body known as the General Synod urged regional associations not to deny ordination solely because a candidate is gay or lesbian. But the synod left unsaid whether such candidates should remain celibate.

In all the varying and often contradictory decisions reached by these and other denominations, the Bible has played a pivotal role in the controversy.

Opponents, among them members of liberal denominations like the Episcopal Church as well as fundamentalists, insist that there can be no doubt where God stands after reading any of several Bible verses, among them:

* Genesis 1 and 2. The creation story, conservatives say, was about Adam and Eve, “not Adam and Steve.”

* Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13. They declare “you shall not lie with a male as with a woman.” Such an act, among other nonsexual taboos described in the book’s so-called holiness code, is characterized as “an abomination.”

* Romans 1:26-27. In passages, the Apostle Paul includes a list of “shameful acts” that seems at first reading to be homosexual and lesbian sexual acts.

With growing boldness, however, other biblical scholars have come out with counter arguments, contending that the Bible cannot be easily imposed as a perfectly fitting template on contemporary culture norms.

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Among the more prominent tomes are “The Good Book: Reading the Bible With Mind and Heart” by Harvard University preacher Peter J. Gomes. And when it comes to blessing same-gender unions, many see the late John Boswell’s book, “Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe,” as documenting that the early church blessed such unions. But Boswell’s assertion remains controversial.

In one humorous passage, Gomes, a Baptist and a homosexual, attempts to demonstrate how ridiculous he thinks biblical literalists can be. Gomes noted that in Matthew 8:12 it says that the wicked will be cast into the outer darkness where “men will weep and gnash their teeth.”

“A toothless reprobate,” Gomes wrote, “asked his hellfire-preaching pastor what would happen to those who had no teeth to gnash: ‘Teeth will be provided,’ was his answer.”

Said Gomes, “The language of the Bible is meant always to point us to a truth beyond the text, a meaning that transcends the particular and imperfectly understood context of the original writers, and our own prejudices and parochialisms that we bring to the text.”

In remarks prepared for delivery Friday night at the conference, the Rev. Louis William Countryman warned against reading present-day cultural assumptions into biblical texts.

“Again and again, the enemies of openness and of Gospel welcome have claimed the Scriptures as their chief bulwark against change,” said Countryman, a New Testament professor at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, an Episcopal seminary in Berkeley. “It is the very nature of religion that it tends, over time, to become a kind of chaplaincy to the establishment.”

He said the culture in which the Scriptures were written had a different idea of the family than the modern American nuclear family with a father, mother and biological children.

In biblical times, he said, the basic social structure was a “household,” which included slaves and “assorted hangers-on.” In the case of the Hebrew Bible and legal pronouncements in the Torah, he said, this gap is widened further by the assumption that such households were polygamous.

“Even the incest regulations make sense only if viewed in those terms,” he said. “The person who created anxiety about incest was not the older male relative, as in our world, but the younger one, who might become interested in the young wives of his father, uncles or brothers.”

Like Gomes, Countryman said that the Bible must be read with a kind of humility and openness to “conversion” by the spirit of God and, for Christians, an openness to what they see as the spirit of Christ. For early Christians, he said, their encounter with God was not Scripture, but Jesus.

“It is time for us to reclaim the Bible for what it is meant to be--not a lawbook to reinforce whatever the status quo happens to hold dear, but a vehicle of the good news,” Countryman said.

Another speaker at the conference is the Rev. Malcolm Boyd, 73, who in 1976 was among the first Episcopal priests to disclose his homosexuality.

“I’m sick of the religious inquisitors who quote Scripture even while they light the ‘faggots’ to burn, turn the screw of the rack to draw more blood and screams, and hammer nails into countless bodies on numberless crosses in order to murder the human spirit,” Boyd said in an interview.

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Participants said the conference represents a national gathering of Christians who want to be able to articulate a biblical basis for inclusiveness, although they know homosexuality will remain a painful and divisive issue in the larger Christian community.

It is time, said Bacon, for the church to move toward an affirmation and celebration of human sexuality in all its diversity. He hopes others both inside and outside the Episcopal Church will listen.

“The church by maintaining its exclusionary practices has sent a very wounding message and a message of injustice, particularly to those who are gay and lesbian,” Bacon said. “For the Episcopal Church to say the church worldwide is not monochromatic when it comes to that kind of injustice is a word of compassion, inclusion and wholeness to a significant portion of the population.”