ELCA debate

As some of you may have heard, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is about to release its study from its task force on human sexuality- or rather, its task force debating the issue of homosexuality in its church and how the ELCA ought to respond to gay marriage and the ordination of us gay folk. Interestingly, I found an article written by a member of the ELCA and found it very insightful. The author of the article is David Weiss (you can read more about him and the various responses to the study at www.goodsoil.org) .

For more than a year now, as we've tried to "journey together faithfully," we Lutherans have had our heads buried in Scripture. Some of us are convinced that the Bible unequivocally condemns homosexual activity. Others of us are convinced that context renders these biblical condemnations less than absolute - or altogether irrelevant today. And plenty of us remain somewhere in the middle, uncertain as to what exactly the Bible says - or means - regarding same-sex relationships.

Well, it's time to close our Bibles for a few months. We won't find the answer we're looking for there - at least not in the places we've been looking.

In fact, we haven't even asked the right question yet. Supposedly we've been studying whether to offer blessings to same-sex couples and whether to ordain persons in committed relationships. But in reality the study materials haven't really focused on those questions. Instead they've mired us in a quite different question: whether homosexuality, either in orientation or expression (and it's just plain arrogant when straight people assume a distinction between the two) is sinful.

But this has never been the right question. The church has only ever blessed a heterosexual marriages between sinners. The church has only ever ordained pastors who have also been sinners. And don't talk about "willful, ongoing" sin as the crucial distinction. We bless marriages between persons quite willfully devoted to conspicuous consumption. We don't hesitate to ordain people who smoke - even while wearing their collar, even around children. So the "sin" question misses the point. And while I personally do not think homosexuality is sinful, I recognize that this argument isn't going to be settled anytime soon.

Moreover, even the questions about blessing and ordination are misguided. They're so specific that they keep us from seeing the question that would offer us a way forward. The real question is this: How should we as a church respond when persons come to us seeking full participation in our church - as they are, without becoming like us? Especially when they are persons whom the Bible has seemed to suggest have no part among God's people unless they become like us? That's the situation we face. And that's the situation faced by the early church when the Gentiles sought full participation without the precondition of first becoming Jewish in diet and circumcision.

There are texts in Acts 10, 11, and 15 that tell us how the early church responded to that situation, but the Sexuality Task Force chose not to put those texts before us in the Journey Together Faithfully study materials. They chose not to offer us the one biblical model for constructively engaging our situation. No wonder we got nowhere. In contrast, the early church did not rush back to the Torah to see whether Gentiles needed to be circumcised in order to join the church. If they had, they would've gotten mired in the same dilemma we are, asking whether what the Torah seemed to say about Gentiles 'back then' still applied in the first century. And while there were some who wanted to do that, the church dared to try a different approach.

Though not without some fierce squabbling, the church ultimately decided to listen to the lives of the Gentiles who sought to join them. They simply listened to the stories of God's activity in their lives. Then the church asked, is it possible that God's Spirit is already active in the lives of these people in ways we would never have guessed? Is it possible that God is surprising us even now?