This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2007 Daniel Harper.
Readings
The first reading is from the book The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul, by Wayne Meeks:
“Since we do not meet ordinary early Christians as individuals, we must seek to recognize them through the [collective groups] to which they belonged and to glimpse their lives through the typical occasions mirrored in the [Biblical] texts. It is in the hope of accomplishing this that a number of historians have recently undertaken to describe the first Christian groups….
“To write social history, it is necessary to pay more attention than has become customary to the ordinary patterns of life in the immediate environment within which the Christian movement was born…. [T]to the limit that the sources and our abilities permit, we must try to discern the texture of life in particular times and particular places….”
[Meeks, p. 2]
The second reading is from the Christian scriptures, the book known as Matthew:
“When the Pharisees heard that [Jesus] had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. ‘Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?’ He said to him, ‘ “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself”. ‘ ”
[Matthew 22.34-39]
Sermon
Paul of Tarsus is one of my least favorite characters in the Bible. Paul appears to be in favor of slavery, and opposed to those who would put an end to slavery. Paul appears to be a sexist jerk who believes that women are inferior to men. Paul is often quoted by fundamentalist Christians who hate homosexuality. As I say, Paul is perhaps my least favorite character in the Bible.
Knowing this prejudice of mine, I decided to preach a series of sermons on Paul, of which this is the first. I wanted to find out if Paul’s opinions and pronouncements really are as bad as I think they are. I wanted to find out if I’m treating him unfairly, to find out if I’m prejudiced against him. I wanted to take some time to look at Paul to see if he is as bad as I feared; if he is as bad as I feared, to honestly state that; and if he possesses redeeming features, to honestly state what redeeming features he might possess.
In the process of preparing these sermons, I discovered that I had been trying to understand Paul as if he were alive and preaching here and now, in the United States in the 21st century. That’s what most of us do. We have all learned that the Christian scriptures, the New Testament, is an important book in our Western culture; we are told that it is a book that is still relevant to us here and now; and we have learned that we are just as capable of understanding and interpreting the Bible as any preacher or priest or scholar or self-proclaimed prophet. These notions taken together tend to make us believe that the Christian scriptures were written specifically for our times, and that they provide answers for today’s problems.
Yet while it is true that there is that which is permanent and universal in every worthy work of literature; while it is true that the Christian scriptures can inspire us and cause us to think deeply about current moral and ethical issues; nevertheless, the Christian scriptures were written nearly two thousand years ago by people who lived in a vastly different culture, within a vastly different society. So in reading the Christian scriptures, we must be careful to sort out the universal and permanent truths from those truths which may have been useful two thousand years ago, but which no longer remain useful to us today.
Paul’s writings on slavery constitute the most obvious example of views which may have been useful two thousand years ago, but which are no longer useful. Paul wrote several of the books of the Christian scriptures, and he never states that slavery is wrong. Indeed, before slavery was made illegal in the United States, white American slaveholders both in the South and here in the North used Paul’s words as justification that it was morally acceptable to own slaves. In the last century, we Americans finally came to realize that slavery is morally wrong; we finally came to know that slavery is (there is no other word for it) sinful; and therefore we now know that Paul was utterly wrong when he said that slavery was morally acceptable. Knowing that, we are free to look at everything Paul says in the Bible, and question whether or not it is still true for us today.
It’s pretty clear that Paul is wrong about slavery. But I have discovered that on the interrelated issues of gender and sexuality, Paul is not quite the hate-filled Puritan that I had thought. Are women as good as men in Paul’s view? Does Paul forbid homosexuality? Let’s ask these questions, remembering that society in Paul’s day was very different than our own society. Paul lived under the rule of the Roman Empire, and the Roman Empire had very different laws regarding marriage than we do; and Roman culture had very different ideas about sexuality than we do. Not only that, but we have to remember that Paul was born a Jew, and that in his day the Jesus movement was closely allied with Judaism; indeed, some scholars will say that in Paul’s day Christianity was nothing more than a sect of Judaism. The Jews living under Roman rule had their own notions of marriage, and still different notions of sexuality — notions that sometimes parallel our own present-day notions, and sometimes seem completely alien to our present-day notions.
Let me give you some specific examples of what I mean. And I’ll begin with what Paul says about homosexuality, since one of the biggest conflicts in American religion today has to do with the place of gays and lesbians in religion.
Now modern-day fundamentalists tell us that Paul said that homosexuality is a sin. However, fundamentalists often misunderstand what Paul was saying, because they seem to assume that life in the Roman Empire was exactly the same as life here and now. So when they read Paul’s letter to the Romans, where Paul says —
“For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.” [Romans 1.26-27]
— when the fundamentalists read this passage, they immediately interpret it to mean that Paul said that homosexuality is sinful. They’re assuming that the Roman world, Paul’s world, was exactly the same as our world. But the ancient Roman world really didn’t have a concept of homosexuality the way we do. Paul wrote in ancient Greek, and ancient Greek does not have a single word for homosexuality that corresponds exactly to our present-day word. And even in English translation, you don’t find the word “homosexuality”; you don’t find the word “gay” or “lesbian.” So at the most literal level, it seems to me that this passage has nothing to do with homosexuality as we know it today:– the only way you can make this passage say something about homosexuality is if you put it there out of your own value system.
Going beyond the most literal level, we can ask: What do we know about sex and homosexuality in the Roman Empire of Paul’s time? In their recent book In Search of Paul, John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan Reed ask this question, and they come up with an interesting answer. In their view, sexual intercourse in the Roman Empire was often about older, wealthy men having power over women and teenaged boys. In depictions of the sexual act Roman art, women are often shown as being passive under, subordinate to, or controlled by men; whereas men are shown as being in a position of power over women. When Roman art shows two men engaging in a sexual act, what is usually shown is a teenaged or pre-pubescent boy being passive under, subordinate to, or controlled by an older man. In short, Roman art often shows sex as an act whereby older, wealthy men have power over women and boys.
Crossan and Reed show that this attitude was pervasive in the Roman Empire. However, the smaller Jewish culture of which Paul was a part had different understandings of sex. Crossan and Reed claim that Jews of the time understood sexual intercourse mostly as a way to make babies. Thus it seems to me that when Paul complains about “unnatural acts,” he might well be speaking as a Jew who is appalled by Roman sexual practices, between opposite sex couples and between same sex couples.
Consider, too, that Paul acknowledges Jesus as he religious leader. Now Jesus said (quote): ” ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ ” I take the first of these commandments to mean that we are all of equal worth in the sight of God; and I take the second of these to mean that our relations with one another should be relations based on love, not on control or subordination. Therefore, any sexual act that is not based on love, that requires subordination or control, would be “unnatural.” Or we could say with equal truth that a person who degrades the humanity of someone else with a sexual act, that person is doing something that is not based on love and therefore goes against Jesus’s two greatest commandments. Perhaps when Paul objected to “unnatural acts,” he really was objecting to relationships where one partner degrades or dominates the other.
If this is true, then it seems to me that Paul is passing along a permanent and universal truth:– sex and sexuality should not be coercive. Sex and sexuality should not require that one person has to have power over another person, or degrade another person, or control another person. Rather, sex and sexuality should be expressions of love — expressions of both erotic love and non-erotic love — that allow for equality between two persons.
You may object to this, and say: Isn’t it true that Paul was a sexist pig, who thought women should be subordinate to men? If you’ve ever spent any time talking with fundamentalists, you will quickly find out that most of them believe this. And indeed, some of the writings that have been attributed to Paul say precisely this. One such passage appears in Paul’s first letter to the Christian community at Corinth:
“For a man ought not to have his head veiled, since he is the image and reflection of God; but woman is the reflection of man. Indeed, man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for the sake of woman, but woman for the sake of man..” [1 Cor. 11.7-9]
Women were created for the sake of men — on the face of it, it seems pretty clear that Paul is telling us that he believes women are not as good as men.
But while fundamentalists surely believe this, we religious liberals might not want to jump to their conclusions before we think for ourselves. We religious liberals know that English translations of the Bible are full of mistakes; furthermore, we know that the people who translated the Bible into English sometimes wind up pushing their own theological beliefs. Going back further in time, we know that parts of the Bible come from oral tradition and so represent poetic truths more than accurate historical facts; furthermore, we know that later editors and copyists inserted words and phrases into existing Biblical texts, and that they even made up entire books of the Bible, just so they could push their own theological beliefs.
Knowing all this, we should listen carefully when Biblical scholars propose alternate interpretations of the Christian scriptures based on textual and other evidence. Back in 1975, scholar Elaine Pagels wrote a book asserting that many of the anti-woman passages that we find in Paul were actually inserted by later editors (who had their own anti-woman theology to promote). Pagels believes the evidence shows that both women and men took on significant leadership roles within the early Christian communities, and that women had a surprising degree of equality, given the general subordination of women in the wider Roman Empire. Thus it could well be that Paul himself was not a sexist, that he believed in the equality of women and lived out that belief in the early Christian communities. Not that Paul was some kind of early advocate for women’s rights, but perhaps, as is so often the case, the fundamentalists and the orthodox Christians hijacked Paul’s words to push their own theology.
Yet it does seem pretty sure that Paul objects to “fornication,” that is, having sexual relations outside a socially sanctioned relationship. This hits home for me, because for the past eighteen years my partner and I have lived together, yet for lots of reasons (including feminist critiques of the institution of marriage), we have never married.
But even here, I think we can find some common sense in what Paul says, if we will look at his social situation. Here, I draw on my extensive knowledge of what it’s like to be a part of a small religious community. Because we must remember that those early Christian communities were small. The early Christian communities met in one another’s houses. They had fewer people present at a worship service than we do — say, between twenty and forty people who showed up regularly. And many of the members of one of those early Christian communities would be related, or they would be a part of an extended family and associated servants and slaves living in the same household. These Christian communities that Paul knew, and that he wrote for, were small and very intimate.
From my own experiences in several small churches, I can tell you that Paul’s advice makes a good deal of sense. If you’re a part of a church where there’s less than two hundred people showing up each week, my advice to you echoes Paul’s advice: don’t sleep around with members of that church. I can support this advice with a simple observation: in a church with less than two hundred people, when a couple breaks up, one member of that couple is probably going to have to leave that church. In all my years of working in small churches, I can think of only one exception to this rule: a couple who had a very amicable divorce, and who had custody of their children on alternate weekends; on the weekend when a parent had custody of the children, he or she got to go to church while the other parent stayed home. But the rest of the time, when a couple in a small church breaks up, one member of that couple will leave the church.
Thus, in a small church like ours, Paul’s injunction against fornication, against sleeping around, proves to be good sound advice. If you’re in a church with two hundred people, it will be different. But when you’re in a small church, if you sleep around with other members of the church, everyone will know, and it could get messy. Paul speaks with a moral certainty I still don’t trust; but as a matter of common sense, I find I agree with him.
I started out believing that Paul was the kind of sexual puritan I can’t stand. But it may be I was misinterpreting Paul as badly as the fundamentalists do:– they assume that everything he says is right; I assumed that most of what he says is wrong; both of us assumed that Paul’s social context was exactly the same as ours. We forget that Paul lived in a different world from ours.
Once we sort this out, some of what Paul says has the ring of permanent religious truth. Every religious teacher passes on some teachings which are of utmost importance to his or her immediate followers; but which are of no possible use to succeeding generations. And every great religious teacher passes on at least some teachings which are eternally true, which partake of the wisdom of the ages. The fundamentalists go to one extreme, and say that everything that Paul says is of utmost importance to us today; some folks go to the other extreme, and dismiss Paul as someone of no possible relevance to us today.
But there is a third way: to tease out that which is of permanent importance, from that which is not. May this third way be the way of those of us who call ourselves religious liberals.